surveillance

Senior Obama administration officials have secretly authorized the interception of communications carried on portions of networks operated by AT&T and other Internet service providers, a practice that might otherwise be illegal under federal wiretapping laws.

The secret legal authorization from the Justice Department originally applied to a cybersecurity pilot project in which the military monitored defense contractors' Internet links. Since then, however, the program has been expanded by President Obama to cover all critical infrastructure sectors including energy, healthcare, and finance starting June 12.

"The Justice Department is helping private companies evade federal wiretap laws," said … Read more

It's becoming difficult to defend taste, decency, and style in a world that is rapidly being overtaken by those who believe technology is all.

I understand that many who believe they are ahead of their time are terribly excited about wearing their somewhat less than stylish Google Glass all over the planet.

I also understand that there are certain places -- bars and strip clubs, for example -- that have already expressed their desire to eject anyone wearing Google's famed, Internet-connected tools.

Not every eventuality has, however, been considered. Which is why I was grateful -- in a painful way -- to the resurrected ValleyWag for this morning noticing that famed tech personality Robert Scoble is boasting of wearing his Google Glass in the toilet.… Read more

After the Boston Marathon bombings, police in the city made a plea for people with cell phone video and pictures to turn over their footage, adding to the hours of surveillance video from nearby businesses. But what would normally take investigators hundreds of hours to review can now take minutes or even seconds, thanks to technology like facial recognition. The software, which can help pick a person out of crowd, looks for differentiating features -- from the shape of a mouth to the ridge on a nose to the distance between a pair of eyes.

3VR in San Francisco has … Read more

The FBI has undertaken what is law enforcement's highest-profile effort at crowdsourcing to date: asking for help identifying two suspects linked to this week's Boston Marathon bombing.

"Someone out there knows these individuals," Richard DesLauriers, the special agent in charge of the FBI's Boston field office, told reporters this afternoon. He asked the media and the public for help in "identifying and locating these individuals."

The photos published on the FBI's Web site show two men, one wearing a black baseball cap and carrying a backpack, and the other wearing a white baseball cap, around the scene of the blasts. … Read more

The Internal Revenue Service doesn't believe it needs a search warrant to read your e-mail.

Newly disclosed documents prepared by IRS lawyers say that Americans enjoy "generally no privacy" in their e-mail, Facebook chats, Twitter direct messages, and similar online communications -- meaning that they can be perused without obtaining a search warrant signed by a judge.

That places the IRS at odds with a growing sentiment among many judges and legislators who believe that Americans' e-mail messages should be protected from warrantless search and seizure. They say e-mail should be protected by the same Fourth Amendment … Read more

The Federal Bureau of Investigation's secretive "Stingray" surveillance technology that allows police to surreptitiously track the locations of cell phones and other mobile devices will itself go on trial in an Arizona courtroom tomorrow afternoon.

Attorneys representing the U.S. Department of Justice are expected to defend warrantless use of stingray devices, which trick mobile devices into connecting to them by impersonating legitimate cell towers. Prosecutors yesterday filed court documents saying stingrays were used in investigations in Arizona and Wisconsin going back to 2008.

In the legal skirmishing leading up to tomorrow's three-hour hearing, federal attorneys … Read more

National governments are increasingly purchasing surveillance devices manufactured by a small number of corporate suppliers and using them to control dissidents, spy on journalists, and violate human rights, the advocacy group Reporters Without Borders warns in a new report released this afternoon.

The group's 2013 report for the first time names five private-sector companies "Corporate Enemies of the Internet" for their choice to become "digital mercenaries" and sell surveillance and censorship technology to authoritarian regimes.

"If these companies decided to sell to authoritarian regimes, they must have known that their products could be used … Read more

In a narrow, 5-4 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a lawsuit challenging a secretive National Security Agency surveillance program.

A majority of the justices ruled (PDF) that the lawsuit, brought by human rights advocates and journalists who believed their electronic communications sent abroad would be intercepted, was "too speculative" to proceed based on fears of "hypothetical future harm."

The plaintiffs, which included Amnesty International and The Nation magazine, had argued that the 2008 amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act -- giving the government virtually unregulated authority to perform bulk surveillance on the international … Read more

Microsoft needs to open up about the trustworthiness of its Skype software for confidential conversations, according to an open letter to the company posted today.

The letter, from an array of privacy advocates, Internet activists, journalists, and others, calls on Microsoft to provide public documentation about the security and privacy practices around Skype, which facilitates video and voice communications over the Internet. Microsoft completed its $8.5 billion acquisition of Skype in October 2011.

The authors of the letter say they're worried in particular about the access that governments have to both Skype conversations themselves and to the user … Read more