Scripps News reporters discovered 170,000 Lifeline phone customer records online that contained everything needed for identity theft. They asked for an interview with the COO of TerraCom and YourTel, which are the telcos who look after Lifeline, and were threatened with violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

Lifeline is a government programme offering affordable phone service for low-income citizens. Last year the FCC insisted that Lifeline phone collecting more sensitive information from citizens. They are not supposed to retain copies of the sensitive information.

Scripps News "Googled" the phone companies TerraCom and YourTel America to discover 170,000 files online, all of which contained sensitive information that would make identity theft a breeze for thieves.

The Scripps reporters videotaped the process showing how they found the documents. Attorney Jonathon Lee, acting for both telecoms outfits, threatened the hacks with violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA).

Lee wrote a letter telling Scripps that the "intrusions and downloading" of sensitive records were associated with Scripps IP addresses. He warned that "the 'Scripps Hackers' have engaged in numerous violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act by gaining unauthorised access into confidential computer files maintained for the Companies by Vcare, and by digitally transferring the information in these folders to Scripps.

The rest of the letter slammed the "Scripps Hackers" for the cost of breach notifications, demanded Scripps hand over all evidence as well as the identity and intentions of the hackers, and threatening a law suit.

TerraCom posted a security breach notice that states, "As far as we can tell, the vast majority of applicant data files were accessed by the Scripps Howard News Service, and we are sorry that personal data of Lifeline applicants was accessed by the News Service and possibly by other unauthorised persons."

However the move appears to be a cover for the fact that both companies are in hot water with the FCC. The watchdog said that it is investigating and could fine them both up to $1.5 million for a single violation of privacy.

Scripps added that the Indiana attorney general's office has launched an investigation into the release of TerraCom applicants' personal data. The Texas attorney general's office also is scrutinising the practices of TerraCom and YourTel.

But what is interesting is how a corporation can use the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act to try and cover up security cock-ups. This case was public, and Scripps did not back down, but how many other companies have managed to cover up their computer flaws with a scary letter to the editor from m'learned friend? 

Julian Assange is wanted for questioning over allegations of sexual assault in Sweden. He believes it is part of a ploy that would ultimately see him extradited to the United States, where he could be detained.

Assange, who is essentially on house arrest in London's Ecuadorian embassy, talked about  the messages on a Spanish TV programme, Salvados, on Sunday.

He and his team have been applying for information from GCHQ, the British intelligence and espionage agency, and while denied access to classified documents, some instant messages about Assange were unclassified. The agency is exempt from Freedom of Information requests, however, there are provisions in the data protection act that allow people to retrieve personal information held on them.

Assange mentioned a message from September last year. Reading to the interviewer, Assange claimed it said: "They are trying to arrest him on suspicion of XYZ, it is definitely a fit-up, their timings are too convenient right after Cablegate".

Cablegate refers to Wikileaks' enormous dumping of diplomatic cables, which embarrassed the United States in particular and made Assange himself a target for the political establishment. Senior heads of state have since labelled him a terrorist and even called for his death. 

Assange claimed during that interview that none of the data Wikileaks released over the last six years has caused harm to a single person around the world. The weight behind the messages is up in the air - it is not known whether the conversations were a casual exchange or indicative of a wider feeling in the agency. GCHQ said in a statement the messages were purely personal, and are not representative of it as an organisation.

A second conversation called Assange "highly optimistic" and a "fool" for expecting chargse against him to be dropped.

"He reckons he will stay in the Ecuadorian embassy for six to 12 months when the charges against him will be dropped, but that is not really how it works now is it?" the messages read. "He's a fool, a highly optimistic fool".

GCHQ confirmed to the Guardian that the agency responded to a request. "The disclosed material includes personal comments between some members of staff and do not reflect GCHQ's policies or views in any way," it said.

A healthcare provider has sued the Internal Revenue Service and 15 of its agents, claiming that they seized 60 million medical records from 10 million Americans under the pretext of investigating one of its employees.

The Washington Times has not found out the name of the insurance company but the Courthouse News Service said the suit claims the agency violated the Fourth Amendment.

It all started in 2011, when agents executed a search warrant for financial data on one employee and that led to the seizure of the personal data of 10 million. Among the 10 million people whose sickness records were half-inched include a few state judges, so we expect that a few are going to be miffed.

In fact, the original search warrant did not specify that the IRS could take medical information, they just took it anyway. It was not as if they took the data by mistake either. The company's IT staff warned the IRS about the potential to violate medical privacy laws before agents executed the warrant.

Their response to the warning was that they would 'rip' the servers containing the medical data out of the building if IT personnel would not voluntarily hand them over.

IRS agents seized workers' phones and telephone data which were more violations of the warrant.

As a result of the warrant, the IRS knows details of patients' treatment plans and therapies of up to one in 25 Americans, UPI said.

If the case proves true, then it means that the US government is using bogus search warrants to collect whatever data it can on its citizens under the cover of rows over guns, gay marriage and umbrellas.

Looks like that revolution is working out for them. In the meantime you might want to adjust your tinfoil hat. 

According to the Guardian, Ryan Ackroyd, Ryan Cleary, Jake Davis and Mustafa al-Bassam had been charged with attacks on the Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA), Sony, Nintendo, 20th Century Fox and governments and police forces in a 50-day spree in the summer of 2011.

Davis was sentenced to two years in a young offender's institution. Al-Bassam received a 20-month sentence, suspended for two years and 300 hours unpaid work. Ackroyd was given a 30-month sentence.

Cleary also pleaded guilty to possession of child abuse images following a second arrest on 4 October, 2012. He will be sentenced separately.

LulzSec put a fake front page on The Sun's website claiming News International chief executive Rupert Murdoch had died. It also leaked details of 500,000 Sun readers. Ackroyd was known as 'Kayla', while Davis was the main spokesperson known as 'Topiary'.

Ackroyd was arrested in September 2011, while Davis was charged with unauthorised computer access and conspiracy to carry out a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack in August 2011. ASl-Bassam was not named until he pleaded guilty, due to his age.

The ringleaders were outted to the FBI by LulzSec leader Sabu, who was revealed to have been working as an informant for the bureau in March 2012.

Ryan Cleary was arrested in June 2011, while he was not a member of LulzSec he owned a botnet of 100,000 PCs used by the group. He was sentenced to 32 months in jail.

Judge Deborah Taylor said that the name LulzSec encapsulates their desires to cause embarrassment and disruption, while keeping their own identities hidden.

She said that the accused each played a role during a seven-month online campaign, "using your technical abilities to cause catastrophic losses for amusement".

One thing that the LulzSec hackers are probably relieved about is the fact that they were not arrested in the US - where they probably would have been lucky to have been out of prison in this lifetime. 

Heise Security noted that messages sent in chat can result in an unannounced visit to Redmond.

After a Skype chat with colleagues, he noticed some unusual network traffic. His server pointed to a possible relay attack.

Heise conducted an experiment. It sent two test HTTPS URLs, one containing login information and one pointing to a private cloud-based file-sharing service. A few hours after their Skype messages, they observed the following in the server log:

65.52.100.214 - - [30/Apr/2013:19:28:32 +0200]
"HEAD /.../login.html?user=tbtest&password=geheim HTTP/1.1"

The IP address, 65.52.100.214, is controlled by Microsoft. This seems to imply that someone at Skype is following links from its customers and trawling through everything they write.

After the test, Heise also had the strange server conversation with Vole's servers.

When Heise asked Microsoft about it, redmond said that they were testing hyperlinks to see if they're safe - in other words, routine malware screening.

Skype referred Heise to a passage from its data protection policy which said that Skype may use automated scanning within Instant Messages and SMS to "(a) identify suspected spam and/or (b) identify URLs that have been previously flagged as spam, fraud, or phishing links."

Heise Security said that Microsoft/Skype would not have to look at the contents of a given page to determine whether it's a phishing site or spam.

This is not the first time that someone has questioned Microsoft's ownership of Skype. The Electronic Frontier Foundation and Reporters Without Borders fear that Skype could be forced to bend to daft US snooping laws as a result of the take over.

Heise claims that this URL method shows that anyone who uses Skype must agree that Microsoft can use all data transmitted.

The company did not say why the Vole would work in this way, nor could it prove that any data was stored. 

Skype was once reknowned for its encryption but privacy minded users sought alternatives, such as the open source Jitsi. 

Matthew Trevor Flannery, 24, from the Central Coast, has been charged with gaining unauthorised access to, and altering, restricted data on Narrabri Shire Council's website.

Sydney's Central Local Court was told that Flannery uploaded a file which disrupted the site's function.

Flannery, who used the online handle Aush0k, did not enter a plea to three separate charges of unauthorised access to and modification of computer data.

According to the Australian, if the charges are proven he could face 12 years in jail.

The case was adjourned to Woy Woy Local Court on August 6, with Flannery's bail continued until that date.

His main claim to fame is that he said he was a leader of LulzSec, an offshoot of the Anonymous hacking collective.

LulzSec claimed credit for a series of attacks in 2011, including against America's CIA and the UK's Sun newspaper.

At the time of the Narrabri attack, he was working in Sydney as an overnight IT help desk assistant, employed by Content Security in North Ryde to provide advice to a US client.

The council he hacked was more than 520km away, in the heart of the state's cotton farming community. In fact the only reason it is famous is that the town of Wee Waa hosted the global album launch of French electro pop act Daft Punk in May. 

"I initially mistook its noisy buzzing for a weed-whacker," the resident said. "After several minutes, I looked out my third story window to see a drone hovering a few feet away".

Her husband approached the man, but he insisted it was perfectly legal to fly an aerial drone over her garden. The pilot was using a drone equipped with a camera and wearing glasses, which transmit the images he was observing using the UAV, and claimed to be doing research.

"We are extremely concerned," the resident said, "as he could very easily be a criminal who plans to break into our house or a peeping tom". She called the police but they did not pursue the pilot after he left, and is wondering if there had been any other sightings of the pilot around the Capitol Hill area.

The mysterious drone operator may be perfectly right. Legislation on new technologies can often take some time to catch up with the technologies themselves, and it's perfectly possible he was technically operating within the law.

As the Atlantic notes, talking to a Harvard public policy expert, there would be multiple questions to determine the legality of the drone - like what type of drone it was, and how it was flown. It could have been flown in accordance with FAA regulations. And, crucially, what exactly was being photographed, and if that was in line with the First Amendment.

This case hammers home the immediate extent of privacy violations made possible by camera-equipped UAVs, but many more Americans are worried that drones operated by the state could be even more intrusive.

In a recent radio interview, New York's Mayor Bloomberg alluded to approaching a new age with even less personal privacy where drone use is just an every day reality for surveillance organisations. "We're going into a different world, uncharted... you can't keep the tide from coming in," Bloomberg said. 

So while consumer creeps may use legal loopholes to conduct their "research" over your back garden - the State itself expects to have a full fleet of UAVs, some with facial recognition, and up to 10,000 commercial drones over US skies by 2020, as the FAA predicted earlier this year. 

Of course, drones will also commonly have less menacing uses - like efficient search and rescue in remote areas, for example. 

According to the Big Story, the Justice Department obtained outgoing calls for the work and personal phone numbers of individual reporters, for general AP office numbers in New York, Washington and Hartford and for the main number for the AP in the House of Representatives press gallery.

Needless to say, AP is furious as it amounted to the government finding out who was talking on 20 separate telephone lines assigned to AP and its journalists in April and May of 2012.

More than 100 journalists work in the offices where phone records were targeted.

In a letter of protest sent to Attorney General Eric Holder, AP President and Chief Executive Officer Gary Pruitt said the government sought and obtained information far beyond anything that could be justified by any specific investigation. He demanded the return of the phone records and destruction of all copies.

He pointed out that there could be no possible justification for such an overbroad collection of the telephone communications of the Associated Press and its reporters.

The move puts matters of communications with confidential sources at risk. Lots of people talk to the media on the basis that they will not be identified. Journalists are supposed to be prepared to go to jail to protect these sources. However if the government is monitoring the phone calls of hacks then there is no confidentiality.

The government would not say why it wanted the records. Officials have previously said it wanted to know who may have provided information contained in a May 7, 2012, AP story about a foiled terror plot. That story disclosed details of a CIA operation in Yemen that stopped an al-Qaeda plot in the spring of 2012 to detonate a bomb on an airplane bound for the United States.

CIA director John Brennan noted that the FBI had asked him about whether he was AP's source for the story, which he denied.

So far the Justice Department has offered no explanation for the seizure, but one of the hallmarks of the Obama administration is its paranoid investigations into classified information ending up in the media. Obama has demanded that six people suspected of providing classified information were arrested.

The message of this spying is that US reporters are not permitted to find out what the government is doing, which will play nicely into the hands of tin-foil hat wearers.

However the White House has said that other than press reports it had no knowledge of Justice Department attempts to seek AP phone records as the department makes these sorts of snooping decisions on its own.

Rules published by the Justice Department require that subpoenas of records of news organisations must be personally approved by the attorney general.

The American Civil Liberties Union said the use of subpoenas for a broad swathe of records has a chilling effect both on journalists and whistleblowers who want to reveal government wrongdoing. 

The copyright troll Prenda was about to face the music when its antics were ruled illegal by Californian judge Otis Wright. Wright demanded that a copy of his ruling be submitted in every other case involving Prenda.

According to TechDirt, Prenda lawyers operating in the Northern District of Georgia refused to do so. In the end the defendant, Rajesh Patel, and his lawyer, Blair Chintella, submitted judge Wright's ruling themselves to the court in the case.

Prenda's local counsel in Georgia, Jacques Nazaire, attempted to counter this with one of the most ridiculous filings seen by legal experts.

It argues that the court should not allow Judge Wright's order to be entered into the docket because California recognises gay marriage and Georgia doesn't.

The reasoning is this. The ruling was made by a Californian judge and everyone knows they are all suspect because they allow gay marriage. This court is in Georgia where men are men and all sleep with women. Therefore Prenda has the right to screw over anyone it thinks illegally downloaded a movie using whatever dodgy tactics it likes. QED your honour.

Just to make sure that the Georgia judge throws out the ruling, Prenda points out that California has different immigration rules.

What Prenda appears to be hoping, in its appeal to knee jerk right wing reactionary politics, is that the Georgia judge will froth at the mouth and ignore the fact that the Californian ruling is not precedential. It is a flat out misconduct case against Prenda including potential racketeering and tax evasion claims. 

The robbers hacked into credit card processing firms and withdrawing money from ATMs in 27 countries.

Inspector Knacker of the Yard has fingered the collar of eight men of allegedly forming the New York-based cell of the organisation. Seven are in custody, but the eighth, allegedly a leader of the cell, was reported to have been murdered in the Dominican Republic last month.

Prosecutors say that the ringleaders are believed to be outside the United States but prosecutors told Reuters that the investigation is continuing.

However it looks like the crooks managed to do some serious damage, quite quickly. For example in one of the attacks, in just over 10 hours, $40 million was raided from ATMs in 24 countries involving 36,000 transactions.

US Attorney for the Eastern District of New York Loretta Lynch told assorted hacks that in  place of guns and masks, the cybercrime organization used laptops and the internet. The organisation worked its way from the computer systems of international corporations to the streets of New York City.

It shows how cybercrime poses a major threat to the world banks and how increasingly tech savy criminal gangs have become.

The gang broke into the computers of two credit card processors, one in India in December 2012 and the other in the United States this February.

They increased the available balance and withdrawal limits on prepaid MasterCard debit cards issued by Bank of Muscat of Oman, and National Bank of Ras Al Khaimah PSC (RAKBANK) of the United Arab Emirates.

They then distributed counterfeit debit cards to "cashers" around the world, enabling them to siphon millions of dollars from ATMs in a matter of hours.

Mastercard has said it had cooperated with law enforcement in the investigation but pointed out that its systems were not involved or compromised in the attacks.

The Bank of Muscat revealed that it would take an impairment charge of $39 million because it had been defrauded overseas by 12 prepaid debit cards used for travel..

It is believed that the gang targeted Middle Eastern banks because they tend to allow customers to put much larger sums on cards and do not monitor them as closely as banks in other regions.

It was only a matter of time before the Arab banks were seen as a soft target for cyber criminals, but the attack mirrored a similar case in 2009 that targeted the prepaid debit-card unit of Royal Bank of Scotland, which lost more than $9 million in less than 12 hours.

The seven arrested are: Jael Mejia Collado, Joan Luis Minier Lara, Evan Jose Peña, Jose Familia Reyes, Elvis Rafael Rodriguez, Emir Yasser Yeje and Chung Yu-Holguin who goes by the handle of "Chino El Abusador".

The defendant who reportedly had been killed was Alberto Yusi Lajud-Peña, also known as "Prime" and "Albertico".