A California man was sentenced to eight years in prison for identity theft after federal police GPS-tracked his phone and discovered a hard drive with over 300,000 victim profiles during a raid of his home.

Robert Delgado, 40, who lived in a Los Angeles suburb called Monterey Park, pleaded guilty earlier this year to conspiracy to commit bank fraud and was sentenced on Monday. At the time of his arrest in March 2011, Delgado had already been on parole for identity theft.

Court documents show Delgado was accused of obtaining credit card numbers, forging credit cards and government-issued ID … Read more

A new report from Google shows a rise in government requests for user account data and content removal, including a request by one unnamed law enforcement agency to remove YouTube videos of police brutality--which the company refused.

The latest Google Transparency Report, released today, also shows historic traffic patterns on Google services via graphs with spikes and drops indicating outages that, in some cases, indicate attempts by governments to block access to Google or the Internet. For instance, all Google servers were inaccessible in Libya during the first six months of this year, as was YouTube in China.

But the … Read more

WASHINGTON--For a few hours on Capitol Hill yesterday evening, it was October 1986 again, complete with legwarmers, an Apple IIc, pop rocks, Duran Duran, and cell phones the size of a cat.

The companies sponsoring this night of nostalgia include Google and Facebook, which are hoping to visibly highlight how out-of-date a law enacted 25 years ago today has become in an age of cloud computing, gigabit networks, and terabyte storage.

The law in question is the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act, a statute written in the pre-Internet era of telephone modems and the black-and-white Macintosh Plus. A coalition of … Read more

WASHINGTON--A Federal Trade Commission official says that industry hasn't yet done enough to implement Do Not Track and that legislation to mandate it may still be necessary.

"I don't think we're quite there yet," Julie Brill, a Democratic FTC commissioner, said this week at a conference organized by the Online Trust Alliance.

As interest-based advertising, sometimes called behavioral advertising, has spread, so has interest in some form of Do Not Track mechanism inspired by the federal Do Not Call Registry. Developers have added tools to Chrome, Firefox, and Safari to implement different versions of Do … Read more

Even potential data security breaches must be disclosed by U.S. companies in some circumstances, the Securities and Exchange Commission said today.

The move by the SEC is likely to shed more light on how publicly-traded companies are grappling with cybersecurity problems -- especially because the agency's ruling says that disclosure is needed when "the risk of potential incidents" becomes significant enough to impact the bottom line.

In a statement, the SEC indicated it would like to see:

• Discussion of aspects of the registrant's business or operations that give rise to material cybersecurity risks and the … Read more

You know you're one of them. Please, just admit it.

You see someone famous kissing someone who is not their spouse in Starbucks, and your first instinct is to whip out your cell phone and shoot the video in an act of star-flagellation. You see someone take a pratfall or merely pick their nose with their thumb, and you're all over them with video evidence. How else can you yuck up life with your friends?

I am delighted, therefore, to bring you (semi-)scientific proof that you are one of 50 percent of the American population: the Cell Phone Video Spy club.

Research carried out (in secret, no doubt) by Harris Interactive shows that you Cell Phone Smileys would think nothing of filming the most embarrassing, the most excruciating and, of course, the most sexy life episodes. … Read more

The U.S. Department of Justice has expanded its investigation of WikiLeaks-related accounts to encompass Google and Internet provider Sonic.net.

Both companies received secret court orders directing them to turn over information from the e-mail account of Jacob Appelbaum, a hacker and human rights activist who has been affiliated with WikiLeaks, The Wall Street Journal reported today.

CNET has learned that the secret court order is what's called a 2703(d) order. It's not as privacy-protective as a traditional search warrant, and some courts have ruled that such orders are unconstitutional when used to read a suspect'… Read more

An internal U.S. Department of Homeland Security document indicates that a controversial program designed to predict whether a person will commit a crime is already being tested on some members of the public voluntarily, CNET has learned.

If this sounds a bit like the Tom Cruise movie called "Minority Report," or the CBS drama "Person of Interest," it is. But where "Minority Report" author Philip K. Dick enlisted psychics to predict crimes, DHS is betting on algorithms: it's building a "prototype screening facility" that it hopes will use factors such … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Peter Thiel believes technology will make the world a much better place. He's simply frustrated at how long it's taking.

The billionaire entrepreneur is best known for co-founding PayPal, and, more recently, for his very early investment in Facebook. He founded Clarium Capital Management, a hedge fund, created the philanthropic Thiel Foundation, and co-produced the irreverent 2005 comedy Thank You for Smoking.

In May, the Thiel Foundation announced the first 24 recipients of a fellowship that awards $100,000 each to youth under 20 years old--essentially encouraging them to drop out of college to become entrepreneurs. The … Read more