Items tagged with Department of Justice
Most people are very familiar with Google’s various services, especially their popular search engine. However, is Google using its ubiquity to intentionally hamper their competition? It was recently reported that the United States Department of Justice and a group of state attorneys general are likely planning to sue Google for violating antitrust laws. According to The Wall Street Journal, the Department of Justice (DOJ) is currently drafting a lawsuit and will likely file it this summer. Some state attorneys general plan to follow the DOJ’s lead this autumn. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton recently remarked, “We hope to have the investigation wrapped up by fall. If we determine...
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The US Justice Department has filed a series of indictments against Huawei, China's largest telecommunications company, and its US affiliate. Huawei stands accused of several crimes, including a conspiracy to steal trade secrets from T-Mobile, more than half dozen counts of wire fraud, and obstruction of justice. US security and intelligence agencies have long warned against doing business with Huawei over concerns that it is spying for the Chinese government. Today's charges, however, are not directly related to those previous warnings. Instead, the Department of Justice says Huawei conspired to steal intellectual property from T-Mobile, and could end up paying millions of dollars if found guilty....
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Hitting a jackpot on a slot machine is usually a cause for celebration, at least for the person receiving the windfall of cash. Jackpotting an ATM, however, is highly illegal and can land a person in prison. Case in point, the United States Department of Justice announced it has arrested and charged two men, Alex Alberto Fajin-Diaz and Argenys Rodriguez, with bank fraud stemming from an alleged ATM jackpotting scheme. In case you have never heard of the term, jackpotting an ATM involves using malware and a direct physical connection to extract large amounts of cash very quickly, usually draining the ATM of every bill inside. The practice of jackpotting has been prevalent at banking institutions...
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Thanks in part to Microsoft, the Department of Justice has issued a new policy that limits how and when prosecutors may use gag orders to prevent technology firms from informing customers government agencies are access their cloud data, including emails. The new policy requires that secrecy orders "have an appropriate factual basis" and last long enough to "satisfy the government's request" rather than indefinitely. The decision to implement the new policy is a result of a lawsuit filed by Microsoft against the DoJ in April 2016. In its lawsuit, Microsoft brought up the fact that the US government legally silenced the company 2,576 times in 18 months, effectively preventing it from speaking with...
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As we grow increasingly dependent on various online services that contain information about our personal lives, the need for privacy is paramount. This has major tech companies at odds with the U.S. government, the latter of which would like unfettered access to all things digital. Rather than give in, Microsoft is fighting back by filing a lawsuit against the Department of Justice over a law that allows its to request customer emails without their knowledge.Microsoft is fighting for customers' right to know when a government agency obtains a warrant to read their emails. As it currently stands, the DoJ can lean on the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (EPCA), which allows courts to order...
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For the time being, Apple no longer has to defend its position in court refusing to assist the FBI with breaking into the iPhone 5c model that belonged to one of the terrorists in the San Bernardino shooting. That's because the Justice Department asked that the case be dropped today, saying it was able to break into the iPhone and retrieve the data it was after without Apple's assistance. The filing derails what would have been an historic ruling over whether or not the U.S. government can force companies like Apple to defeat their own security measures in certain situations. Apple chose to fight an initial court order to assist the FBI do exactly that, arguing that building what it considers...
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Comcast has spent the past year extolling the benefits of its proposed merger with Time Warner Cable, but many in the tech industry and plenty of customers aren’t so certain that a merger is the right way to go. As we’ve seen time and time again, Comcast’s customer service is often atrocious and Time Warner Cable isn’t much better. Both companies have been slow to innovate when it comes to offering customers new services and faster Internet speeds and when they do, it’s only because newer competition — like Google — forced their hand. It is now looking like the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) is the latest to jump on the anti-Comcast bandwagon, and with good reason. According to a new Bloomberg...
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Phew, we can all breathe a sigh a relief that the scooping up of our sensitive mobile phone data -- things like text messages, call records, browsing history, pictures, contact, and more -- is completely legal, or so the government says. Doesn't that make you make feel much better about the U.S. Marshal Service's use of spy planes to harvest cellphone information on a mass scale? No? Well perhaps you'll rest easier at night knowing that the Department of Justice insists that the Marshal Service doesn't maintain a database of cellphone data belonging to everyday, law abiding citizens as part of a program that it won't even acknowledge exists. Surely that should give you warm fuzzies, right? Still...
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The Department of Justice's U.S. Marshals Service division has reportedly been employing fake cellphone towers on planes in an effort to stay one step ahead of criminals such as drug dealers and terrorist organizations operating in the United States. Unfortunately for law abiding citizens and privacy advocates at large, the fake cell signals don't just zero in on the criminal that's being sought by law enforcement officials, at least not at first, and instead gathers data from up to tens of thousands of people during each flight. These spy planes are equipped with so-called "dirtboxes," which are named after the initials of the Boeing Co. subsidiary that produces them (Digital Recovery Technology...
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Four members belonging to an international computer hacking ring have been indicted. The Justice Department released a press release that revealed the members were charged with breaking into the computer networks of tech companies and even the U.S. Army. The estimated value of the theft of intellectual property is said to be over $100 million. “As the indictment charges, the members of this international hacking ring stole trade secret data used in high-tech American products, ranging from software that trains U.S. soldiers to fly Apache helicopters to Xbox games that entertain millions around the world,” said Assistant Attorney General Caldwell. The four men were identified as Nathan...
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Sir Walter Scott warned long about about weaving a tangled web through deception, but apparently the Department of Justice (DoJ) and National Security Agency (NSA) aren't fans of old poetry. If they were, they'd drop the secrecy behind the PRISM program that whistleblower Edward Snowden blew wide open earlier this year. The truth eventually comes out anyway, as it did with Google's reluctant participation in PRISM. Google wants to offer its users transparency about what's going on, but its hands are tied after the DoJ won a court ruling to keep the search giant from talking about federal demands for using data. Doing so would be a threat to national security, the DoJ argued. Image Source: Flickr...
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When the Department of Justice and Microsoft hammered out the terms of their agreement in 2001, one of the strictures was that the software giant would be subject to official DOJ oversight for a period of five years. In 2006, the DoJ opted to extend the term another five years, but the government body won't be doing the same thing again. On May 12, Microsoft will no longer be subject to special federal oversight. Analysts anticipate we'll see Microsoft making some bolder moves as a result, though no one anticipates a return to the old days. Rob Enderle, principle analyst at Enderle Group, told reports that "Any type of consent decree like the one that was over IBM and the one that is over Microsoft...
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Bad boys, bad boys, whatcha you gonna do? Whatcha gonna do when the U.S. Department of Justice slaps you silly for conspiring to fix prices of LCD panels on a global scale? So maybe the actual theme song goes a little differently than that, but we have an answer to the question nonetheless. When the DoJ lobs a legal backhand your way for bending the public over and kicking them in the wallet, you're going to serve time in jail. That's the self-imposed plight Wen-Hung "Amigo" Huang, a former executive from Chi Mei Optoelectronics Corporation, finds himself in after pleading guilty to conspiracy to fix LCD prices. "Under his plea agreement which is subject to court approval, Huang, who was charged...
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SEATTLE, Dec 1 (Reuters) - The U.S. Department of Justice has issued subpoenas to Nvidia Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. as part of a probe into potential antitrust violations involving graphics chips, helping to send shares in the companies lower. Nvidia, the largest independent maker of graphics chips for computers and other devices, said on Friday that no specific allegations had been made against the company and that it plans to cooperate with the investigation. AMD, the No. 2 maker of computer processors, said late on Thursday that it had been subpoenaed. AMD entered the graphics business in October after acquiring Canadian firm ATI Technologies for $5.4 billion. Read more here......
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