Threat Level

The President Barack Obama administration has “chilled the flow of information on issues of great public interest,” according to a Thursday report that amounts to an indictment of the president’s campaign pledge of a more open government.

Forget about context-aware smartphone performance optimization. And this goes beyond surveillance of communications metadata. When a phone becomes a powerful body activity tracker, it’s a whole different story…

The 29-year-old man accused of masterminding the notorious Silk Road drug forum will soon be on his way to New York.

The commercial-drone scene in the United States is operating in a so-called grey area, with some companies shuttering because of Federal Aviation Administration cease-and-desist orders. Others, however, are performing their aerial filming, and crop and real estate surveying businesses underground …

The Supreme Court declined Monday to weigh into the legal thicket of when an online threat becomes worthy of prosecution, a decision leaving conflicting federal appellate court views on the topic.

Since I started working with Snowden’s documents, I have been using a number of tools to try to stay secure from the NSA. I recommended using an air gap, which physically isolates a computer from the internet. They might be …

The 29-year-old man accused of masterminding the notorious Silk Road drug forum appeared in court minutes ago for a planned bail hearing, but his lawyer asked for a continuance until next week to give him more time to prepare.

The U.S. government in July obtained a search warrant demanding that Edward Snowden’s e-mail provider, Lavabit, turn over the private SSL keys that protected all web traffic to the site, according to to newly unsealed documents. The July 16 order …

The FBI has arrested the San Francisco man they say ran Silk Road, the notorious underground digital bazaar that allowed traffickers to anonymously peddle heroin, cocaine and nearly anything else illegal.

It began as an ordinary purse snatching. The court wrangling that followed set the binding precedent for what we now call metadata surveillance. In particular, it’s the keystone of the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of U.S. telephone data, in …

When on June 9 Edward Snowden stood up in Hong Kong and revealed himself to the world as an NSA whistleblower, the Justice Department wasted little time in targeting his email provider. A new appeals court filing today shows the …

A smart young dropout is welcomed into a promising career in the top secret world of U.S. defense contracting, but he’s quickly shocked to discover the deception practiced by America’s intelligence agencies at the highest levels. Disillusioned and outraged, he …

The NSA has released some details of 12 incidents in which analysts used their access to America’s high-tech surveillance infrastructure to spy on girlfriends, boyfriends, and random people they met in social settings. It’s a fascinating look at what happens …

A federal judge today found that Google may have breached federal and California wiretapping laws for machine-scanning Gmail messages as part of its business model to create user profiles and provide targeted advertising.

Google is asking a federal appeals court to reconsider a recent ruling finding Google potentially liable for wiretapping when it secretly intercepted data on open Wi-Fi routers. The search giant said the Sept. 10 decision by the 9th U.S. Circuit …

How two Microsoft employees uncovered a suspicious flaw in a federally approved algorithm that some say is an NSA backdoor.

Just a few days after Apple unveiled its new iPhone with a fingerprint ID scanner, German researchers say they’ve cracked the scanner using a fake rubber print.

Did you know that, for grade-schoolers at least, cribbing from a classmate on a test or cheating on a homework assignment isn’t as bad as copying copyrighted works from the internet? That’s one of the messages of a new grade-school …

Amidst all of the confusion and concern over an encryption algorithm that may contain an NSA backdoor, RSA Security released an advisory to developer customers today noting that the algorithm is the default algorithm in one of its toolkits and …

The Motion Picture Association of America took another swipe at Google today, releasing a report that states the obvious: Google’s search engine leads to pirate sites. None of this is likely news to anyone. But the MPAA’s report comes as …