Politics

The scandal surrounding Rupert Murdoch's News of the World is growing, with new allegations that his papers bribed police to use cell phone-tracking technology to find the exact whereabouts of news subjects, as well as to obtain information about the royal family, and also targeted former Prime Minister Gordon Brown, according to reports.

Two former News of the World journalists said the practice of using the illicit cell phone tracking was known as "pinging" in the newsroom, according to The New York Times. The technology, for which one reporter said the News of the World paid nearly $… Read more

Controversial legislation to require Internet providers to store logs about their customers for 18 months has run into an unexpected obstacle: a former supporter.

"This bill needs a lot of fixing up," Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner, a Wisconsin Republican and previous chairman of the House Judiciary committee, said at a hearing today. "It's not ready for prime time."

The bill in question is H.R. 1981, which says Internet providers must store for "at least 18 months the temporarily assigned network addresses the service assigns to each account," unless it's a wireless provider … Read more

Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt will testify before a U.S. Senate hearing on antitrust that could be held as soon as this month.

The agreement, which Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Google confirmed this afternoon, caps a few weeks of public wrangling over who the company would provide to be grilled at a public event that's unlikely to be sympathetic to the Mountain View, Calif.-based company.

In late June, a U.S. Senate panel probing antitrust and Internet search topics publicly threatened to subpoena Schmidt or Google CEO Larry Page. Google had been reluctant to provide either … Read more

A federal judge will hear arguments today in a lawsuit challenging the Obama administration's claim that it can search travelers' laptops, cell phones, and other electronic devices at the border and seize them indefinitely.

Civil liberties groups filed the suit in September, which challenges the Department of Homeland Security's policies on constitutional grounds and asks a federal district court in New York City to bar the agency from continuing its current practices.

In August 2009, Homeland Security announced that it would continue a Bush administration policy that allows laptops and electronic gear to be seized and held indefinitely … Read more

Editor's note: Please see update note at the end of this post, which includes a statement from Visa saying it has not reinstated DataCell.

WikiLeaks' financial blockade appears to have been lifted, at least temporarily.

Visa and MasterCard, which cut off payments to the secret-sharing site in December after it published hundreds of thousands of secret U.S. government documents, may have reversed course. CNET was the first to report that MasterCard pulled the plug.

Iceland-based DataCell, which handles WikiLeaks payments, said today that it is now able to process Visa and MasterCard payments again. "Today we have … Read more

New chat logs provide a detailed look at what may have motivated hacker-turned-Army enlistee Bradley Manning to allegedly turn over hundreds of thousands of sensitive documents to WikiLeaks.

The logs, released by New York magazine, show that Manning was becoming frustrated with the military's daily regimens and came to treasure his weekends off, especially the time he could spend with then-boyfriend Tyler Watkins. He maintained a sense of humor, though, and believed the Army was a "diverse place" where even a self-described "gay, libertarian, atheist, computer nerd" like himself could find a home.

The online … Read more

President Obama will host a Webcast at the White House at 11 a.m. PT (2 p.m. ET) today to answer questions submitted via Twitter. We're covering it live.

The White House and Twitter are billing the event as a "town hall," but it's not exactly going to be an exercise in open-microphone democracy. Instead, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey will select a handful of questions submitted through the #AskObama hashtag.

Among the #AskObama questions: immigration, taxes, gigabit Internet speeds, and whether it's possible to win re-election if the unemployment rate is 9 percent or … Read more

President Obama will host a live Webcast at the White House next week to answer questions submitted via Twitter.

The White House and Twitter are billing the July 6 event as a "town hall," but it's not exactly going to be an exercise in open-microphone democracy. Instead, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey will select a handful of questions submitted through the #AskObama hashtag.

Among the #AskObama questions so far, topics include: immigration, taxes, gigabit Internet speeds, and whether it's possible to win reelection if the unemployment rate is 9 percent or above next fall.

Obama's appearance … Read more

commentary WASHINGTON--It was inevitable that Google, one of the world's largest technology companies, would find itself in the crosshairs of the Washington antitrust establishment. But what is, or should be, a little surprising is how enthusiastic the establishment became about pulling the trigger.

Take an event I moderated last week in the U.S. Capitol building organized by the free-market group TechFreedom, a nonpartisan think tank.

In theory, members of Congress and their staff carefully craft public policies that encourage the development of new technologies and benefit the entire nation. But the reality of the questions asked was less … Read more