Law

In a bizarre twist to the controversy enveloping the whistleblower site WikiLeaks, media reports out of Sweden first had WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange being hit with a rape charge--and then had Swedish prosecutors backtracking from those initial reports.

Initially, the Swedish newspaper Expressen reported that it had received confirmation late Friday of the rape complaint from the Stockholm prosecutor's office. The international press quickly picked up on the allegation.

But Saturday morning, CNN reported an about-face. Updating its story, under the headline "Is Assange the target of a U.S. smear campaign?" CNN cites Chief Prosecutor Eva … Read more

Six U.S. senators delivered a sharp rebuke to the U.S. Marshals Service on Thursday, saying that they were "disturbed" to learn that thousands of images produced by full-body scanners at security checkpoints were surreptitiously recorded.

The bipartisan group of senators demanded a detailed explanation from the Marshals Service, which installed the millimeter wave system at the security checkpoint of at a Florida courthouse. (See CNET's earlier article about the Marshals Service admitting the recording took place.)

A letter the politicians sent to Marshals Service director John Clark asks him to "identify any other locations … Read more

We're pleased to announce that CNET will broadcast a special live interview on Wednesday of Chris Kelly, Facebook's first chief privacy officer and previously a California attorney general candidate.

Tune in online at 9 a.m. PT (noon ET) on Wednesday, when I'll be interviewing Kelly about privacy, identity, and security. Both of us will be in CBS Interactive's San Francisco headquarters, and the video will be shown at the PrivacyIdentityInnovation conference in Seattle, aka pii2010.

Here's the place to find our live video feed, which will start a few minutes after 9 a.m. … Read more

The U.S. State Department has denied asking other countries to open criminal investigations into Wikileaks co-founder Julian Assange.

"We have not approached any country to encourage them to do anything," Philip Crowley, assistant secretary of state, told CNET. The main Wikileaks.org Web site is located in Sweden.

Crowley acknowledged that U.S. officials have "had conversations with a variety of countries" about Wikileaks, but said those discussions were limited to expressing "concerns that we've had."

That conflicts with a report earlier this week on TheDailyBeast.com, which said the Obama administration … Read more

In the last week or so, descriptions of a secretive group called Project Vigilant have ranged between dubbing it a hoax and proclaiming it to be the next big threat to Internet privacy.

Neither is quite accurate.

Highlighting Project Vigilant's role in outing an alleged Wikileaks source, a Salon.com column warned that the organization's members have "extensive, sophisticated expertise in compiling highly invasive data about individuals' Internet activities." It's been labeled a "shadowy spy group" that's "building dossiers" for the feds.

To security maven Richard Bejtlich, however, Project Vigilant … Read more

A former top U.S. Justice Department prosecutor helped to turn over an alleged Wikileaks source to the FBI and Army intelligence, CNET has learned.

Mark Rasch, previously the head of the Justice Department's computer crime unit who is now in private practice in the Washington, D.C. area, said during a telephone interview that he identified investigators who would want to know that an U.S. Army intelligence analyst in Kuwait may have handed over sensitive documents to the world's most famous document-leaking Web site.

Bradley Manning was charged last month with leaking sensitive information and illegally … Read more

For the last few years, federal agencies have defended body scanning by insisting that all images will be discarded as soon as they're viewed. The Transportation Security Administration claimed last summer, for instance, that "scanned images cannot be stored or recorded."

Now it turns out that some police agencies are storing the controversial images after all. The U.S. Marshals Service admitted this week that it had surreptitiously saved tens of thousands of images recorded with a millimeter wave system at the security checkpoint of a single Florida courthouse.

This follows an earlier disclosure (PDF) by the … Read more

A Republican congressman who's a member of the House Intelligence Committee lashed out at Wikileaks this week, saying the Web site's alleged source should be executed for treason.

Rep. Mike Rogers of Michigan told a local radio station on Monday (MP3 audio) that he believes that Bradley Manning, the Army intelligence specialist who is suspected of being a source for the document-sharing Web site, should be charged with treason.

When the WHMI interviewer suggested that treason in war is a capital crime, Rogers replied: "Yes, and I would have absolutely, I would support it 100 percent. He … Read more

A week after Wikileaks' 100-megabyte disclosure of Afghan war files appeared, anger in U.S. political circles continues to grow, with some commentators calling for the U.S. government to find a way to pull the plug on the group's Web site.

On Fox News Sunday, conservative commentator Liz Cheney said that Wikileaks co-founder Julian Assange clearly has "blood on his hands" and that Wikileaks.org should be taken offline.

"I would really like to see President Obama move to ask the government of Iceland to shut that Web site down," Cheney said. "I'… Read more