GOV

With an eye toward revolutionizing how defense systems and vehicles are made, the Pentagon has tapped a team of Bay Area-based scientists, engineers and hackers to create a program that will enlist California high school students to build robots, drones and other low- and medium-tech gadgets.

The Defense Department's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, has awarded $2 million of a $10 million program to two outfits that have joined forces to develop a pilot project in 10 schools.

Hackers associated with the activist group Anonymous took down the U.S. government's anti-scam website OnGuardOnline.gov this week as part of a protest against U.S. efforts to stop illegal online piracy of movies and music.

The OnGuardOnline.gov site was hacked on Tuesday, January 24, and was taken offline until it was secure, the Federal Trade Commission said. The FTC builds the website with content from law enforcement, military, consumer and other U.S. agencies, it said on Thursday.

The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is planning to develop an application that can track the public's postings to Facebook, Twitter and other social networks, in order to aid how it predicts and reacts to criminal behaviour, including public disorder and terrorism.

An FBI request for information document has been published, asking potential contractors to contact the bureau by 10 February. The FBI wants respondents to the document to outline how they would build such a system and how much it would potentially cost.

The European Parliament's website fell under a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDOS) on Thursday in what the organization classified as retaliation for the shutdown of the Megaupload file-sharing site and an anti-counterfeiting trade agreement.

The Parliament issued a statement saying it had acted to reduce the impact of the attacks, but the site was still down as of mid-afternoon Thursday.

European Union Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding has proposed a sweeping reform of the EU's data protection rules, claiming that the proposed rules will both cost less for governments and corporations to administer and simultaneously strengthen online privacy rights.

Over the last week, Anonymous has launched unprecedented string of attacks on government and business sites around the world, as the anger of the hive that a year ago turned on Egypt’s Mubarak regime turned on governments around the world.

International action to snuff out cybercrime is desperately needed, officials and business leaders said here, warning that criminals move at Internet speed while countries drag their feet.

Many hackers are no longer just mischievous individuals. Instead well-funded organisations do it for profit, along with spies and terrorists, but many governments are struggling to fight it.

Deluged by cyberattacks they've mostly hidden from the public, companies in Silicon Valley and elsewhere are being prodded by federal regulators to finally fess up to this fast-growing threat to their businesses and their customers.

The Department of Justice (DoJ) has charged John Kiriakou, a former CIA officer, with leaking classified information to journalists.

Kiriakou, who worked for the CIA from 1990 to 2004, was charged with disclosing classified information, including the name of a covert CIA officer and information revealing the role of another CIA employee in classified activities, the DoJ said in a statement.

Megaupload.com founder Kim Dotcom is awaiting extradition to the US after the country requested New Zealand authorities detain him, pending a formal extradition request.

Dotcom, a dual citizen of Germany and Finland who changed his name from Schmitz, was detained on charges of copyright infringement conspiracy, according to Bloomberg.