Author: David Kravets

About an hour after the White House said President Barack Obama had signed legislation ending the National Security Agency’s bulk telephone collection program, the Justice Department told a secret court that the controversial spy program Edward Snowden disclosed could continue under the law.

That’s according to a Justice Department memo (PDF)—released Monday—to the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA Court), which has authorized the snooping program 49 times in six-month intervals.

WikiLeaks is now paying for news—in this instance leaks concerning the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade accord that the United States, Canada, Japan, and Mexico—about a dozen countries in all—have been secretly negotiating for years.

The report said:

Encryption and anonymity, and the security concepts behind them, provide the privacy and security necessary for the exercise of the right to freedom of opinion and expression in the digital age. Such security may be essential for the exercise of other rights, including economic rights, privacy, due process, freedom of peaceful assembly and association, and the right to life and bodily integrity.

This isn’t the first time the UN weighed in on the digital age. In 2011, it declared Internet access a human right.

Technology giants like Apple, Google, and Microsoft urged President Barack Obama on Tuesday to refrain from supporting any US policy that would require the tech sector to install backdoors into their products so the authorities can access encrypted data.

(This story was updated with Selerity’s explanation about how it obtained Twitter’s financials.)

Traders who were shorting Twitter stock ahead of its earnings announcement Tuesday made a giant windfall. Twitter’s shares tumbled 18 percent, and about $5 billion in market cap instantly vanished. Investors were spooked by the $162 million first-quarter loss because the earnings statement was published online about 45 minutes ahead of schedule thanks to a Web-crawling bot that discovered the financials buried deep in Twitter’s investor relations page.

On June 1 the legal authority enabling the National Security Agency’s bulk telephone metadata collection program expires. The expiration date of Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act comes two years after NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed the spying to the Guardian.

Ahead of the deadline, three key bills have emerged. They can best be described as the good, the bad, and the ugly. 

One proposal scuttles the bulk metadata program altogether. Another bill tinkers with the snooping. Yet another allows it to continue unabated though 2020.

RadioShack is trying to auction off its customer data on some 117 million customers as part of its court-supervised bankruptcy.

The data in question, according to a legal challenge (PDF) launched by Texas regulators on Friday and joined by the state of Tennessee on Monday, includes “consumer names, phone numbers, mailing addresses, e-mail addresses, and, where allowed, activity data.”

The states say the sale breaches the 94-year-old chain’s promises to its in-store and online customers that it would not sell their personal identifying information (PII) data.

Apple, Google, Adobe, and Intel made headlines three weeks ago when they agreed to a combined $415 million settlement for thousands of Silicon Valley workers who claimed in a lawsuit that their wages were not as high as they should have been because of illegal non-compete agreements between the tech giants. Citing evidence from that litigation, Google shareholders filed suit Monday against Google’s board of directors, claiming that the no-poaching “handshake” agreements alleged among the companies also depressed Google’s stock.

The West Palm Beach Pension Fund claims that the anti-competitive practice burned shareholders because it made it harder for talented workers to change companies, according to the suit (PDF) filed in San Jose federal court.

“Google has lost out on many of the best and brightest high-tech employees, thereby resulting in lost opportunities for innovation in a company that is wholly dependent on such innovation,” the suit said. It continued:

Mikka Phillips

Lincoln Police Department

A Nebraska woman phoned in a bomb threat to Time Warner Cable’s customer service center while complaining that the cable guy didn’t show up, police said Wednesday.

Time Warner’s office in Lincoln was evacuated Tuesday as authorities launched a 20-minute search for a bomb, police said. No explosive devices were found.

Lincoln Police Department arrested 23-year-old Mikka Phillips.

The artist behind the comic Questionable Content has fallen in the crosshairs—or should we say “the horsehairs”— of retail behemoth Walmart. The mega-retailer is demanding that Jeph Jacques “discontinue any and all use” of the walmart.horse domain, which renders at a tumblr and displays a horse in front of a Walmart store.

Here’s a snippet from Walmart’s cease-and-desist letter Sunday:

Your use of a Domain Name that incorporates the famous Walmart mark constitutes trademark infringement and dilution of Walmart’’s trademark rights and unfair competition. Your use of our mark in the Domain Name is diluting use because it weakens the ability of the Walmart mark and domain name to identify a single source, namely Walmart. Further, your registration and use of the Domain Name misleads consumers into believing that some association exists between Walmart and you, which tarnishes the goodwill and reputation of Walmart’s products, services, and trademarks.

The 34-year-old Massachusetts cartoonist said in an e-mail to Ars that the site is satire at its finest.