"This was actually a complete surprise to me," said EFF staff technologist Seth Schoen.

Schoen said copiers represent a major privacy loophole.

"Potentially all of that information is available to anyone who by chance buys the machine or wants to go looking for it. So that sounds like a pretty large scale problem to me," he said.

Hofmann is a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a public interest group focused on privacy issues. The Foundation sued the CIA, Justice and Defense Departments after reading reports that the CIA is monitoring social-media sites like Twitter. Hofmann says her group wants to find out if there are any rules in place. She says social networking is like a new frontier.

"Things have changed slightly — for the worse," said Rebecca Jeschke from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has listed seven Western companies responsible for selling censorship and surveillance technology to the Chinese.

The EFF compiled its "corporations of interest" list from published data on companies that have sold surveillance tools to the Chinese. In strongly worded language, the EFF's Danny O'Brien said the named companies are "fostering repression in China" because the Chinese use the technology for "rampant censorship, invasive data collection and intimidation."

"It sounds very dangerous," says Lee Tien, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, referring to the police-only Web interface. "Let's assume you set this sort of thing up. What does that mean in terms of what the law enforcement officer be able to do? Would they be able to fish through transactional information for anyone? I don't understand how you create a system like this without it."

Warning of an FCC power grab, the digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation says the commission lacks authority to impose regulations.

At a meeting last week in Mozilla's headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., a few dozen attendees including representatives from the Federal Trade Commission began to sketch out how a standard for privacy icons would work. "They were thinking that you might have several icons in the address bar for each site," said Seth Schoen, staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "Maybe they would be showing things that were good about that site's privacy practices, and maybe they would be showing things that were bad about that site's privacy practices."

"Of course, they would never charge a guy from Channel 4 news, but they arrested this guy," said Attorney Jennifer Granick, the Civil Liberties Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "Certainly under federal law, you are allowed to make recordings of things that happen in public places. The intent of the [two-party] law is meant to protect private communication,but not to insulate public occurrences from being recorded. Can you imagine if a news reporter was not allowed to record a fire?"

The first panel opened with a discussion of the little-known topic of Flash cookies, a type of software deposited on computers to gather information. It runs through Adobe's Flash multimedia player and isn't deleted when a user clears the standard cookies through their Internet browser.

The technology "clearly circumvents the intentions" of users, said Peter Eckersley, staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has created an on-line tool that details the wealth of information a Web browser reveals, which can pose privacy concerns when used to profile users.

The EFF's Panopticlick tool takes just a few seconds to pluck out information that a Web browser divulges when visiting a Web site, such as a user's operating system, version numbers for plug-ins, system fonts and even screen size, color and depth.