Tech Law

Despite pending appeals, on Friday Twitter handed over an Occupy Wall Street protester's tweets to a New York criminal court judge. The capitulation comes after months of attempts by the social networking company to fight a subpoena from prosecutors by claiming that micro-blog posts were private con...

Law enforcement agencies may be able to freely track cellphone users without first getting a probable-cause warrant thanks to a ruling handed down by the United States Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Jose on Tuesday. The 2-1 ruling in the case of convicted drug trafficker and money launderer M...

German data protection regulators reopened an investigation into Facebook's facial recognition technology Wednesday, claiming the social network failed to comply with official requests to alter its policies to match European regulations. The Hamburg Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of In...

The makers of a video surveillance program developed by former United States Central Intelligence Agency staffers attempted to sell their system to several big-name tech firms, according to leaked memos. One of several internal emails written by executives at intelligence firm Stratfor has been pub...

Facebook filed a friend-of-the-court brief this week arguing that clicking on a "Like" button is akin to making a statement and therefore is protected speech. The case, being heard in the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, stems from a 2009 incident in which a deputy sheriff, Daniel Ray Carte...

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Tuesday overturned a ruling by a lower court judge who had awarded $40,800 in damages and $2.5 million in attorney fees to the now-defunct Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation. This is the latest chapter in what has been a five-year challenge to the Bush administra...

The Federal Trade Commission announced Wednesday that it was considering new rules to protect children's privacy online. Regulators called for tougher privacy protections to make it harder for advertisers and social networks to collect information about children without permission from the parents.

Google has not deleted the sensitive data it collected from private wireless networks in 2010, according to a recent report. Earlier, the company had promised regulators it would dispose of the information. The search engine giant originally collected the data while it was mapping areas for its Stre...

A senate committee met on Wednesday to discuss the promise and pitfalls of facial recognition technology. Led by its chair, U.S. Sen. Al Franken, the committee questioned privacy advocates as well as representatives of the FBI, the FTC and Facebook, about how the technology is being used and what pr...

Twitter indicated Thursday that it will appeal a decision by New York County Criminal Court Judge Matthew Sciarrino Jr. that the microblogging site must hand over a user's posts. The case stems from an investigation by the Manhattan District Attorney regarding the Occupy Wall Street protests in 2011...

A joint effort by antimalware company FireEye, law enforcement authorities and other antispam activists has taken down Grum, believed to be the world's third-largest botnet, accounting for nearly 20 percent of worldwide spam. After three days of work, all of Grum's known command and control servers ...

A congressional inquiry conducted at the behest of Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., found that law enforcement agencies made 1.3 million requests to cellphone carriers in 2011. They sought such information as individuals' text messages, their locations, and even lists of phone numbers they called when i...

New Zealand police used invalid warrants to search and seize property from the mansion of Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom, a high court judge in that country has reportedly ruled. The papers that authorities used were general warrants and fell well short of describing the offenses alleged, High Court ...

The United States is battling over proposed United Nations regulations that could place new burdens and restrictions on Internet companies and users. The trouble is rooted in the decision of the UN's International Telecommunication Union to overhaul International Telecommunication Regulations th...

Google and Apple are bent on a mission to provide the world -- or at least users of their respective technologies -- with digital images of every place on this planet. Using their systems is the only way many people can see for themselves what everyday life is like in faraway places. However, as the...

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