US

This morning Google sent the following letter to the offices of the Attorney General and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Dear Attorney General Holder and Director Mueller

Google has worked tremendously hard over the past fifteen years to earn our users’ trust. For example, we offer encryption across our services; we have hired some of the best security engineers in the world; and we have consistently pushed back on overly broad government requests for our users’ data.

There is indeed a growing library about Wikileaks, as a quick search on google/Amazon will tell you (which, you all know, mines your shopping data and patterns to recommend books and other products to you) http://www.amazon.com/Growing-Library-WikiLeaks-Books/lm/R1633HKPBAQHPP. I digress.

Police in California have admitted they are baffled by a series of car thefts where robbers use a small hand-held electronic device to unlock supposedly secure car-locking systems.

"This is bad in the sense we're stumped," Long Beach deputy police chief David Hendricks told NBC. "We are stumped and we don't know what this technology is."

Over the past year, reports have circulated of widespread cyberattacks, based in China, against American corporate, media, and infrastructure targets. Now it’s being learned that cyberespionage efforts extended to the 2008 US presidential election, and appear to have been backed by the Chinese government, according to former Obama national intelligence chief Dennis Blair.

On Wednesday, The Guardian published a secret order issued by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court allowing the National Security Agency (NSA) to demand vast swaths of metadata from Verizon. The order, which specifies that Verizon hand over the information on an “ongoing, daily basis,” encompasses the phone records pertaining to all of Verizon's American customers, whether the communications are between US-based callers, or between a US caller and an international caller.

President Barack Obama will tell Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping that he must deal with cyber spying and hacking of US targets that originate inside his country when they meet for talks this week.

Recent official and commercial reports and studies alleging flagrant and sometimes state-sponsored theft of US military and commercial secrets have put cyber security at the top of the agenda of the talks on Friday and Saturday.

Hackers have accessed design plans for more than two dozen U.S. weapons systems, according to a confidential report by the Pentagon's Defense Science Board (DSB) that was leaked to The Washington Post.

US mobile carrier Clearwire is getting ready to draw-down the Huawei kit in its network, in an apparent response to the never-ending story that the vendor is a threat to US national security.

While not a body blow to the Chinese vendor, since it's won less than five per cent of Clearwire's LTE build, it will drop yet more fuel onto the FUD-fire that continues to surround the vendor.

The U.S. government should bar foreign companies that repeatedly steal or use stolen U.S. intellectual property from selling their products in the country, a new report recommended.

About US$300 billion worth of intellectual property is stolen from the U.S. every year, with 50 to 80 percent of the theft coming from China, according to the report, released Wednesday by the Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property, a bipartisan group of former government officials and business representatives.

It seems that the French backed Junta which took control of the English colony of Virginia is desperate to populate its Big Brother databases on its citizens using its award winning "no taxation without representation" laws.

A healthcare provider has sued the Internal Revenue Service and 15 of its agents, claiming that they seized 60 million medical records from 10 million Americans under the pretext of investigating one of its employees.