Law

A California man was sentenced to eight years in prison for identity theft after federal police GPS-tracked his phone and discovered a hard drive with over 300,000 victim profiles during a raid of his home.

Robert Delgado, 40, who lived in a Los Angeles suburb called Monterey Park, pleaded guilty earlier this year to conspiracy to commit bank fraud and was sentenced on Monday. At the time of his arrest in March 2011, Delgado had already been on parole for identity theft.

Court documents show Delgado was accused of obtaining credit card numbers, forging credit cards and government-issued ID … Read more

A few days ago, a conservative attorney named Leo Donofrio noticed something extremely odd about the U.S. Supreme Court opinions published on the Web site of Justia.com, a legal information startup.

The opinions weren't accurate. Donofrio, of East Brunswick, N.J., discovered that citations to a 1875 case defining a "natural-born citizen"--a phrase that has special resonance in discussions about President Obama's eligibility for the office--had been quietly removed before the 2008 elections.

Donofrio, who in 2009 tried to convince the Supreme Court that President-elect Obama was ineligible for office, quickly published his … Read more

WASHINGTON--For a few hours on Capitol Hill yesterday evening, it was October 1986 again, complete with legwarmers, an Apple IIc, pop rocks, Duran Duran, and cell phones the size of a cat.

The companies sponsoring this night of nostalgia include Google and Facebook, which are hoping to visibly highlight how out-of-date a law enacted 25 years ago today has become in an age of cloud computing, gigabit networks, and terabyte storage.

The law in question is the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act, a statute written in the pre-Internet era of telephone modems and the black-and-white Macintosh Plus. A coalition of … Read more

WASHINGTON, DC--A Federal Communications Commission official defended his agency's controversial proposal to require broadband providers to report glitches, arguing that it would help with cybersecurity and network reliability.

"We don't get any data at all on some of the most pressing problems," Jeffery Goldthorp, the FCC's associate bureau chief for cybersecurity and homeland security, said yesterday at the Online Trust Alliance's conference here yesterday.

In May, the FCC announced that it wanted more data from broadband providers, saying it "would enable the FCC to track and analyze information on outages affecting 911 service … Read more

Even potential data security breaches must be disclosed by U.S. companies in some circumstances, the Securities and Exchange Commission said today.

The move by the SEC is likely to shed more light on how publicly-traded companies are grappling with cybersecurity problems -- especially because the agency's ruling says that disclosure is needed when "the risk of potential incidents" becomes significant enough to impact the bottom line.

In a statement, the SEC indicated it would like to see:

• Discussion of aspects of the registrant's business or operations that give rise to material cybersecurity risks and the … Read more

The U.S. Department of Justice has expanded its investigation of WikiLeaks-related accounts to encompass Google and Internet provider Sonic.net.

Both companies received secret court orders directing them to turn over information from the e-mail account of Jacob Appelbaum, a hacker and human rights activist who has been affiliated with WikiLeaks, The Wall Street Journal reported today.

CNET has learned that the secret court order is what's called a 2703(d) order. It's not as privacy-protective as a traditional search warrant, and some courts have ruled that such orders are unconstitutional when used to read a suspect'… Read more

An internal U.S. Department of Homeland Security document indicates that a controversial program designed to predict whether a person will commit a crime is already being tested on some members of the public voluntarily, CNET has learned.

If this sounds a bit like the Tom Cruise movie called "Minority Report," or the CBS drama "Person of Interest," it is. But where "Minority Report" author Philip K. Dick enlisted psychics to predict crimes, DHS is betting on algorithms: it's building a "prototype screening facility" that it hopes will use factors such … Read more

Sergio Calderon, the 22-year-old San Francisco man who accused Apple employees of impersonating police officers while searching his house for an unreleased iPhone, has hired a lawyer.

David Monroe, an attorney in San Francisco, told CNET this evening that he is considering filing a lawsuit against Apple, but, for now, is still investigating what happened.

Based on what he's learned so far, Monroe said, the actions of Apple security personnel and San Francisco police are "outrageous." Apple declined to comment for this article.

CNET reported on August 31 that Apple had enlisted San Francisco police for help … Read more

When police in the District of Columbia decided to use an automobile GPS bug to surreptitiously track the movements of Antoine Jones, a suspected cocaine dealer, they set in motion a legal challenge that will end before the U.S. Supreme Court.

The court's fall term, which begins today, includes a review of Jones' attempt to overturn his conviction. His attorneys argue that such precise turn-by-turn tracking requires a search warrant signed by a judge--a step that D.C. police chose not to take.

It's one of a handful of technology cases that, in addition to a high-profile … Read more