The FBI has long been searching for a way to bypass the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution which they have claimed makes their job difficult, increasingly so in the information age. Previously the FBI just broke the law and hoped it would not get caught, now the agency wants a patina of legality to [...]

All your tweets are belong to us. Under a program initiated by Twitter and the Library Of Congress 170 Billion Tweets have been archived: The Library of Congress announced Friday that it is just weeks away from completing its archive of all public tweets from Twitter’s launch in 2006 through 2010, but there are technology [...]

The sorry affair of David Petraeus and a cast of thousands of emails, Tampa-area socialites, and jokes about the book title “All In” really showed the power of the FBI as part of the architecture of the government surveillance state, able to snoop on almost every private email communication of every citizen, often without a [...]

A federal judge blocked a provision of the STOCK Act, the law passed earlier this year cracking down on insider trading. While the law originally pertained solely to members of Congress and their staffs, House Republicans extended that to members of the executive branch. Judge Alexander Williams gave a preliminary injunction to block enforcement of [...]

The Senate, unable to come up with a schedule for amendments, blocked the cybersecurity bill today in an outcome that, despite being a result of Republican obstruction, satisfied Internet activists who had been urging a no vote. You can see from the roll call that this was generally a partisan vote. The backstory is that [...]

The Senate easily advanced a motion to proceed on their version of a cybersecurity bill yesterday, by an 84-11 vote. Clearly this bill, a separate version of which has already passed the House, has a broad degree of support. As if on cue yesterday, the head of the National Security Agency Keith Alexander, warned about [...]

I mentioned earlier that the White House weighed in on CISPA, the cybersecurity bill working its way through Congress. Previously they had been generally supportive of it, at least from the words of counter-terrorism czar John Brennan. But now, a spokeswoman for the National Security Council has criticized the bill. CISPA would encourage companies to [...]

Over the past couple weeks, another grassroots protest has emerged against legislation that would affect the Internet. It’s at a lower level than the SOPA/PIPA protests so far, but the activism against CISPA, which is considered cybersecurity legislation, is following the same trajectory. Many experts have described the threats from CISPA, particularly to the privacy [...]

Over the Thanksgiving break, a relative of mine showed me his Android phone, and a new app that had recently popped up on it without his consent. He could not get it to go away, and according to him it was some kind of tracking facilitator. I forgot about this until I read Al Franken’s [...]

The press is seemingly relishing the attacks on Wikileaks, for publishing information that major news organizations publish every day. I’ve seen plenty of headlines similar to “the noose is tightening around Julian Assange.” As you may know, the US domain host EveryDNS dropped Wikileaks, claiming that their other websites were threatened because of multiple denial [...]

The head of the Transportation Security Administration acknowledged in a Congressional hearing today that the new pat-downs being used by TSA personnel were “more invasive” than previous procedures. Numerous Americans have complained about the pat-downs, which border on sexual assault, inducing shame and humiliation in the traveler. Later in the hearing, TSA Administrator John Pistole [...]