Late Friday, a few short paragraphs of text were leaked that revealed something of the terms on fair use being negotiated in secret by the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The TPP is a treaty currently being negotiated by nine Pacific Rim countries seeking to establish a new free-trade agreement on many issues, including intellectual property. The next negotiating round is set for early September in Leesburg, Virginia.
As the U.S. Senate races toward its August recess, lawmakers are filing tons of amendments to the Cybersecurity Act, a number of them designed to add privacy protections.
The amendments are an effort to meet the wishes of pro-business Republicans and pro-privacy Democrats and to reach a compromise that can be enacted into law. Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nevada) is pushing to get cybersecurity legislation voted on this week before the Senate breaks for recess in August.
The U.S. government has a plan to put the skills of the best hackers in the world to work fighting terrorism and designing security systems for government agencies. John Arquilla, an adviser to U.S. President Barack Obama’s and the man who coined the term “cyberwarfare” told the UK’s Guardian newspaper that the U.S. Defense Department plans to hire about 100 hackers, primarily Russians for the initiative.
The U.S. Congress may need to pass legislation that limits the way government agencies and private companies use facial recognition technology to identify people, a U.S. senator said Wednesday.
The growing use of facial recognition technology raises serious privacy and civil liberties concerns, said Senator Al Franken, a Minnesota Democrat and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee's privacy subcommittee. Franken, during a subcommittee hearing, called on the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation and Facebook to change the way they use facial recognition technology.
The United States government has told a Virginia judge that a long list of American connections makes Megaupload subject to US criminal law. The Friday court filing was a response to the company's argument that its lack of a US mailing address makes it immune to criminal prosecution in the United States.
Megaupload points to federal law requiring that notice of a corporate indictment be served on an officer of the corporation and sent to the corporation's last known US address. It has argued that since it doesn't have a US address, it cannot be indicted.
The world has known for 18 months that a grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia has been exploring the potential to indict anyone associated with the secret-spilling group WikiLeaks. But as with all things WikiLeaks-related, the truth gets more interesting when documents start to emerge.
Governments should spend more time and effort educating citizens and other countries on existing online threats and forge partnerships with private sector organizations rather than militarize the cyber arena.
Even though he has been busy accusing Vice President Joe Biden of orchestrating the raid on his home (a charge since denied), having pool parties, and producing ridiculous rap videos, Kim Dotcom now says he’s ready to come to the United States, rather than be extradited, as a way of speeding up the entire judicial process in his international copyright case.
An inquiry by Congressional Representative Edward Markey (D-Mass) has revealed that the number of requests wireless carriers receive from US law enforcement for information about their customers has increased steadily, but just how often the police use mobile phones to track individuals' whereabouts remains unclear.
The Australian Computer Emergency Response Team (AusCERT) has conceded losing a DVD containing the usernames and passwords of subscribers to the Federal Government's Stay Smart Online Alert Service in the mail.
AusCERT sent the disc — containing usernames, email addresses, passwords and recovery phrases — through Australia Post on April 11 but it was never received as intended by the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy.
