Author: David Kravets

A helicopter mechanic who popped off about his Middle East job on Facebook while at home in the US got more than an upbraiding from his bosses when he returned to his gig in the United Arab Emirates.

He was met in Abu Dhabi with an arrest, 10 days in jail, and a March 17 trial date—with a potential five years in prison if convicted. Thirty-year-old Ryan Pate of Belleair Bluffs, Florida, is accused of slandering his employer, which is illegal in the Emirates.

“I just couldn’t register it in my head because as an American growing up in the United States, the First Amendment right is just ingrained in my brain,” he told The Associated Press on Wednesday. “I never even entertained the fact that I would wind up in prison out here for something I put on Facebook in the United States.”

On Monday, the Supreme Court refused to grant a terror defendant access to secret court documents that paved the way for the monitoring of his electronic communications.

Without comment, the high court let stand a lower court opinion denying the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court records connected to the phone and Internet monitoring of Adel Daoud. The 21-year-old denies he pressed the trigger of what he thought was a real bomb outside a Chicago bar as part of an FBI sting operation. His lawyers said the records were necessary to mount a defense during the defendant’s upcoming federal terror trial.

“Without access to FISA materials, it is virtually impossible for defendants to challenge the lawfulness of the government’s surveillance of them,” according to the Daoud petition the justices rejected reviewing Monday.

Google is regularly bombarded with notices to remove links to infringing content from its search results—nearly 34 million last month alone.

The search giant also routinely gets hit with bogus notices, too, and Google often denies them. It’s all part of the copyright Whac-a-Mole game courtesy of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). For the most part, the DMCA requires Internet companies like Google to remove links to infringing content at a rightsholder’s request or face legal liability.

At Ars, we don’t normally report on ridiculous claims for a variety of reasons, not least of which is that they are so common that they’re not usually newsworthy. That said, it’s worth pointing out some of the more recent bizarre ones—those coming from German-based Total Wipes Music Group. The company told Ars on Monday that it didn’t mean to bombard Google with the bogus notices; rather, a faulty “script” was to blame.

Anybody who has watched a crime drama knows the trick. The cops need someone’s DNA, but they don’t have a warrant, so they invite the suspect to the station house, knowing some of the perp’s genetic material will likely be left behind. Bingo, crime solved. Next case.

A human sheds as much as 100 pounds of DNA-containing material in a lifetime and about 30,000 skin cells an hour. But who owns that DNA is the latest modern-day privacy issue before the US Supreme Court. At its core, the issue focuses on whether we must live in a hermetically sealed bubble to avoid potentially having our genetic traits catalogued and analyzed by the government.

The Supreme Court’s justices will meet privately on February 27 to consider putting a case with this science-fiction-like question on their docket. The dispute blends science, technology, genetic privacy, and a real-world, unspeakable crime against a woman.

The co-creator of the $40 Blackshades Remote Access Tool (RAT) pleaded guilty Wednesday to a federal charge of distributing malware that federal authorities said infected half a million computers globally.

At his scheduled May sentencing hearing in New York Federal court, Alex Yücel, 24, faces a maximum seven-year prison term (PDF). He is the fourth US defendant connected to the scheme whose victims include Miss Teen USA, who was the target of a high-profile peeping Tom attack that secretly snapped nude images while she was dressing in her bedroom.

According to federal prosecutors, who explained RATing:

The Obama administration is opening the door for US military drone makers to sell their unmanned killing machines overseas.

“The new export policy is part of a broader United States UAS [unmanned aircraft system] policy review which includes plans to work with other countries to shape international standards for the sale, transfer, and subsequent use of military UAS,” the State Department said in a statement.

The decision, controversial in that drones lower the bar for using lethal force and often kill unintended targets, is expected to be a financial bonanza of sorts for the US defense industry, especially in California. Global governments were already expected to spend some $91 billion over the next decade on the technology.

Twitter reported that requests to reveal user data have skyrocketed 40 percent since July, with the majority of demands coming from the US government. Overall, the demands affected 128 percent more account holders during the second half of 2014, according to Twitter’s latest transparency report.

According to Jeremy Kessel, a Twitter senior manager:

We saw an overall increase of 40 percent in government requests for Twitter user account information since our last report. While requests have increased in many countries, Russia, Turkey, and the United States stand out from the rest. In Russia, we went from having never received a request to receiving more than 100 requests for account information during this reporting period. We did not provide information in response to any of those requests. Requests from Turkey increased over 150 percent. Again, we did not provide information in response to any of those requests. Meanwhile, we saw a 29 percent increase in requests from the United States, while our compliance rate increased 8 percent.

Twitter’s figures are in line with a global trend in which governments are demanding more information from tech companies, from AOL to Yahoo. In March, for example, Google reported that requests for user data increased 120 percent over four years.