Privacy Inc.

Editor's note: This story was updated many times as the story evolved Friday. Please see updates below and click here for a more recent story on the situation.

Egypt has gone offline.

In a stunning development unprecedented in the modern history of the Internet, a country of more than 80 million people has found itself almost entirely disconnected from the rest of the world.

The near-disconnection--at least one Internet provider is still online--comes after days of street protests demanding an end to nearly three decades of autocratic rule by President Hosni Mubarak. Those followed this month's revolution in … Read more

A new pilot project from Microsoft and IBM offers a high-tech twist on this bit of common sense: allowing you to divulge less information about yourself protects your privacy.

Their joint effort is built on the observation that, in many cases, there's no need for someone verifying your credentials to know everything about you. A bouncer at a nightclub needs to know that you're 21, not your name or home address. A county database may only require proof that you're a local resident, not your phone number or e-mail address.

Microsoft and IBM's solution is called … Read more

Federal law needs to be updated to halt the common police practice of tracking the whereabouts of Americans' mobile devices without a search warrant, a Democratic senator said today.

Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, said it was time for Congress to put an end to this privacy-intrusive practice, which the Obama Justice Department has sought to defend in court.

In an luncheon speech at the libertarian Cato Institute in Washington, D.C., Wyden said his staff was drafting legislation to restore "the balance necessary to protect individual rights" by requiring police to obtain a search warrant signed by … Read more

Members of Congress chided the U.S. Department of Justice today for suggesting a new law requiring Internet companies to keep records of user activity, but not disclosing details on how it should be crafted to aid criminal investigations.

At a House of Representatives hearing, as CNET was the first to report, the Justice Department endorsed the concept of forcing Internet companies to collect and store data about their customers that they would not normally retain. This echoes the Bush administration's position under Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

But Jason Weinstein, deputy assistant attorney general for the criminal division, irked … Read more

Criminal investigations "are being frustrated" because no law currently exists to force Internet providers to keep track of what their customers are doing, the U.S. Department of Justice will announce tomorrow.

CNET obtained a copy of the department's position on mandatory data retention--saying Congress should strike a "more appropriate balance" between privacy and police concerns--that will be announced at a House of Representatives hearing tomorrow.

"Data retention is fundamental to the department's work in investigating and prosecuting almost every type of crime," Jason Weinstein, deputy assistant attorney general for the criminal … Read more

The House Republicans' first major technology initiative is about to be unveiled: a push to force Internet companies to keep track of what their users are doing.

A House panel chaired by Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin is scheduled to hold a hearing tomorrow morning to discuss forcing Internet providers, and perhaps Web companies as well, to store records of their users' activities for later review by police.

One focus will be on reviving a dormant proposal for data retention that would require companies to store Internet Protocol (IP) addresses for two years, CNET has learned.

Tomorrow's data … Read more

A controversial bill handing President Obama power over privately owned computer systems during a "national cyberemergency," and prohibiting any review by the court system, will return this year.

Internet companies should not be alarmed by the legislation, first introduced last summer by Sens. Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine), a Senate aide said last week. Lieberman, an independent who caucuses with Democrats, is chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

"We're not trying to mandate any requirements for the entire Internet, the entire Internet backbone," said Brandon Milhorn, Republican staff director … Read more

WASHINGTON--A prominent Republican politician today laid out a new conservative manifesto: How not to regulate the Internet.

"We must defend against Washington's instinct to hyper-regulate all that is new and imperfectly understood," Rep. Marsha Blackburn said at the State of the Net conference here this morning.

The Tennessee representative, vice chairman of a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee and a member of the House panel with jurisdiction over Internet regulation, said one of the new Republican majority's priorities would be repealing Net neutrality rules. Last month, the Federal Communications Commission voted along party lines to approve … Read more

An influential group of European politicians is protesting the U.S. government's attempt to pry WikiLeaks-related information out of Twitter, saying that EU privacy rules may have been violated.

The parliamentary maneuver expected tomorrow comes as London-based lawyers for WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange warned that their client could face illegal rendition to the United States, execution, or indefinite detention "at Guantanamo Bay or elsewhere," and a U.K. judge set a two-day extradition hearing to start on February.

Tomorrow's parliamentary protest, calling on the EU to "ask the U.S. authorities for clarifications on the … Read more