Law and Order

Police in the Chiba Prefectural zone of Japan have arrested nine people suspected of making nearly $4m by distributing malware that harvested mobile user's contact information and using it for a fake dating website.

The arrests came after a joint operation between the police and Symantec, and the security company reports that the possible ringleader of the group is Masaaki Kagawa, president of IT firm Koei Planning and a semi-professional poker player who has netted over $1.5m in winnings from tournament play over in the last six years.

 Four men from Russia and another from the Ukraine have been charged by the US Justice Department in a massive hacking case, which is being called by one of the attorneys involved as "the largest ever hacking and data scheme breach in the United States."

The National Security Agency (NSA) needs no new court rulings or eavesdropping tools to see how angry Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) is about its conduct and oversight.

In a 45-minute speech at the Center for American Progress, the senator denounced the combination of an "always expanding, omnipresent surveillance state" and a covert corpus of law that hardly restraints it.

A secret court, based in a small, soundproof, and secured room in the E. Barrett Prettyman United States Courthouse in Washington, D.C., meets regularly to decide on new and renew existing federal surveillance orders.

The defense attorney for a South Carolina man facing drug charges is now denying that his client is the Casey Jones who had bitcoins seized by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) three months ago.

A Southern California woman who mocked American authorities via Twitter—after having fled the country—was finally arraigned on Monday in a San Diego courtroom.

Wanda Lee Ann Podgurski, 60, was arrested in Rosarito, Mexico on July 4, 2013. This was a month after she tweeted “Catch me if you can,” seemingly directed at San Diego District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis, apparently the only person Podgurski followed on Twitter at the time.

A group of well-known security researchers on Monday asked an appeals court to overturn the sentence of a hacker who was jailed in March for taking advantage of an AT&T website flaw to expose iPad users' data.

A federal judge today rejected the assertion from President Barack Obama’s administration that the state secrets defense barred a lawsuit alleging the government is illegally siphoning Americans’ communications to the National Security Agency.

U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White in San Francisco, however, did not give the Electronic Frontier Foundation the green light to sue the government in a long-running case that dates to 2008, with trips to the appellate courts in between.

A Perth teenager who allegedly listed a new gaming console prototype on eBay before it was released has made a brief appearance in court.

The self professed "hacker", who was 17 at the time of the alleged crimes, faced the Perth Children's Court on Friday morning.

In more than a dozen classified rulings, the nation’s surveillance court has created a secret body of law giving the National Security Agency the power to amass vast collections of data on Americans while pursuing not only terrorism suspects, but also people possibly involved in nuclear proliferation, espionage and cyberattacks, officials say.