Privacy

Activist group Anonymous, or persons using its insignia and name, claim to have taken down the website of the US schools that have made it compulsory for students to wear RFID tags.

Andrea Hernandez, a sophomore student at the John Jay High School's Science and Engineering Academy in San Antonio, last week refused to wear the tags, arguing her rights to privacy and freedom of expression, along with her religious beliefs, meant she did not want to wear the tracking devices.

A hacker that goes by the name of Hannibal, previously known for leaking the Facebook accounts of one million Arabs, claims to have published the details of one million Americans in response to Anonymous’ OpIsrael.

“Lately, Anonymous Group attacked for no reason Israeli websites and stuff. Do you want to play with me, Anonymous Group? Do you have forgotten that Israel stands alongside the world’s best hacker – Hannibal??? Who the hell you think you are?” he said in a statement obtained by CWN.

A plan by a San Antonio school district to continuously monitor its students using RFID has run into legal problems after one of them took a stand against being forced to use the tracking technology.

A hacker charged with federal crimes for obtaining the personal data of more than 100,000 iPad owners from AT&T’s website was found guilty on Tuesday.

Andrew Auernheimer, 26, of Fayetteville, Arkansas, was found guilty in federal court in New Jersey of one count of identity fraud and one count of conspiracy to access a computer without authorization.

A Senate proposal touted as protecting Americans' e-mail privacy has been quietly rewritten, giving government agencies more surveillance power than they possess under current law.

CNET has learned that Patrick Leahy, the influential Democratic chairman of the Senate Judiciary committee, has dramatically reshaped his legislation in response to law enforcement concerns. A vote on his bill, which now authorizes warrantless access to Americans' e-mail, is scheduled for next week.

Women suing an employer for sexual harassment will have to provide a court official with their social media and e-mail passwords. The novel procedure was announced by a Colorado federal magistrate judge earlier this month. Wendy Cabrera is the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit against the Honeybaked Ham Company. She and about 20 other women charge that company manager James Jackman "frequently" groped women under his supervision and made sexual requests of them. The woman say the corporate office failed to take action to stop his behavior after it was reported.

Over the past few days I’ve been using a interesting shell client Twitter program called AnonTwi. It’s an open source that in simple terms encrypts (using AES and SHA1 encryption) your Twitter and identi.ca public and private messages hiding your computer’s IP address. It connects with Twitters API using SSL, which means ISPs are unable to eavesdrop your keywords.

The public prosecutor in Hamburg has decided not to start a criminal investigation into the way Googles' Street View cars gathered data from unencrypted Wi-Fi networks in Germany, the lawyer who requested the inquiry said Thursday.

15 Google Streetview and Earth mysteries

The U.S. government -- and likely your own government, for that matter -- is either watching your online activity every minute of the day through automated methods and non-human eavesdropping techniques, or has the ability to dip in as and when it deems necessary -- sometimes with a warrant, sometimes without.

Gen. David Petraeus, the former head of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, resigned over the weekend after he was found to have engaged in an extra-marital affair. What caught Petraeus out was, of all things, his usage of Google's online email service, Gmail.

Adobe said Wednesday it is investigating the release of 230 names, email addresses and encrypted passwords claimed to have been stolen from a company database.

The information was released on Tuesday on Pastebin by a self-proclaimed Egyptian hacker named "ViruS_HimA." The hacker, who claimed the database accessed holds more than 150,000 records, posted links to several websites hosting a text file with 230 records.