Lawmakers in New York State are proposing a new legislation that involves the Web, and no, it’s not SOPA-esque or another CISPA-like spy-bill. Politicians in the Empire State want to outlaw anonymous speech on the Internet. Republican Assemblyman Jim Conte says that the legislation he co-sponsors, Bill no. S06779, would cut down on “mean-spirited and baseless political attacks” and “turns... 

Phone calls to Prague? Emails to Ecuador? The United States government can currently sift through any international communication that crosses outside of American territory, but all that might soon change. The US Supreme Court decided on Monday this week that they will consider a case that challenges the powers for the federal government established in the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, a legislation... 

The US Congress has passed a bill which approves government’s deployment of up to 30,000 spy drones in the country’s airspace by 2020, raising serious concerns about the ensuing privacy infringement. The bill, which facilitates the government use of unmanned spy planes in US airspace, requires the Federal Aviation Administration to rush a plan to get as many drones in the air as possible within... 

An Australian technologist has caused a global stir after discovering Facebook tracks the websites its users visit even when they are logged out of the social networking site. Separately, Facebook’s new Timeline feature, launched last week, has been inadvertently accessed by users early, revealing a feature that allows people to see who removed them from their friends’ lists. Facebook’s... 

Click on the image to enlarge it It’s not just the iPhone 4 that records your movements, but all iPhones updated to iOS 4+. Two security researchers in the UK have uncovered a disturbing truth. It appears iPhone 4’s everywhere have been tracking their users movements with startling accuracy (unbeknownst to the users) and what is more, the ease at which this information can be deciphered... 

The Obama administration is urging Congress not to adopt legislation that would impose constitutional safeguards on Americans’ e-mail stored in the cloud. As the law stands now, the authorities may obtain cloud e-mail without a warrant if it is older than 180 days, thanks to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act adopted in 1986. At that time, e-mail left on a third-party server for six months... 

As Congress seeks to renew the Patriot Act, new information exposes egregious FBI violations. Last week, Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-VT, introduced legislation to extend the Patriot Act past its February 28 expiration date to December 2013. Though the extension once again saves some of the most nefarious, First-Amendment trampling provisions of the act — roving wiretaps, secret... 

A WSJ Investigation finds that iPhone and Android apps are breaching the privacy of smartphone users. Check this list of iPhone and Android apps which are watching you. Few devices know more personal details about people than the smartphones in their pockets: phone numbers, current location, often the owner’s real name—even a unique ID number that can never be changed or turned off. These... 

Officers will start random bag inspections on the sprawling Washington subway system, the Washington Metro Transit Police said on Thursday, a week after a man was arrested for making bomb threats to the rail system. Metrorail police officers plan to randomly select bags before passengers enter subway stations and they will swab them or have an explosives-sniffing dog check the bags, according to the... 

There’s been no shortage of outrage over the TSA’s “naked” body scanners, which have been compared to virtual strip searches. For those of you who want to protect your private parts from being ogled by TSA employees, crowdsourced online retail site Betabrand is now offering a scanner-proof undergarment, aptly called “Privates”. The brainchild of Stephen Russell, the founder and chairman... 

Yasir Afifi, a 20-year-old computer salesman and community college student, took his car in for an oil change earlier this month and his mechanic spotted an odd wire hanging from the undercarriage. The wire was attached to a strange magnetic device that puzzled Afifi and the mechanic. They freed it from the car and posted images of it online, asking for help in identifying it. Two days later, FBI... 

Though the administration is also on the verge of getting broad powers to destroy the entire Internet on national security grounds, President Obama is also seeking Congressional approval for a bill that would grant him virtually limitless power to wiretap online communications as well. The bill would require every single online service with even a peripheral capability of allowing for communication... 

Eyes everywhere: One of Google's Street View cars, which have collected snippets of people's online activities Google was rapped by the privacy watchdog yesterday after it admitted spying on the internet habits of Britons ‘by mistake’. In an astonishing invasion of privacy, Google’s Street View cars – which have roamed the UK in the last two years taking pictures of... 

ACTA Mafia Click here to download the full ACTA agreement PDF file. The leaked ACTA agreement! Soon to be copy pasted into a law near you. “It provides for criminalization of copyright infringement, granting law enforcement the powers to perform criminal investigation, arrests and pursue criminal citations or prosecution of suspects who MAY have infringed on copyright” There is a section... 

The European Court of Justice has told Sweden that it must implement a 2006 measure requiring telecom operators to store information about their customers’ phone calls and emails. The European Union directive, known as the Data Retention Directive, was approved by Brussels in March 2006, but Sweden has yet to implement the measure more than three years after its passage. The Swedish government conceded...