Legal

The U.S. Department of Justice confirmed Tuesday that it is considering requests from Google, Facebook, and Microsoft that would let them clear their names after allegations they opened their networks to government spies, although U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has not yet issued a decision on the matter.

In response to queries from CNET, the Justice Department said late this afternoon: "The department has received the letter from the chief legal officer at Google. We are in the process of reviewing their request."

David Drummond, Google's chief legal officer, sent an open letter to Holder … Read more

Eight U.S. senators today seized on leaks from the National Security Agency to call for an end to a "secret law" that governs how intelligence agencies electronically spy on Americans.

Secret laws may seem like Kafkaesque jurisprudence borrowed from Soviet Russia, but last week's leak of a secret court order revealed the Obama administration has a secret interpretation of the Patriot Act that allows it to vacuum up logs of all domestic phone calls on a daily basis.

"It is impossible for the American people to have an informed public debate about laws that are … Read more

Google today asked the U.S. government to lift a legal gag order and let it clear up speculation and erroneous reports about what information it's forced to turn over to the feds.

In an open letter to Attorney General Eric Holder and FBI Director Robert Mueller asking for "transparency," the Mountain View, Calif.-based company is effectively applying an unusual amount of public pressure to the Obama administration. President Obama has claimed to have "the most transparent administration in history," though critics have argued otherwise.

Google, Apple, Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook, and other Internet companies … Read more

Edward Snowden, the 29-year old government contractor who took credit for disclosing a top-secret National Security Agency document, has become the target of condemnation by U.S. politicians and a leak investigation by federal police.

A day after The Guardian published a video featuring Snowden being interviewed in a Hong Kong hotel room and alleging NSA illegalities, the former Booz Allen Hamilton employee has emerged as probably an even more polarizing figure than Bradley Manning.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, head of the Senate Intelligence committee, said Monday that Snowden was guilty of "an act of treason." A Fox News … Read more

Update, June 8 at 2:45 p.m. PT: In response to outcry over PRISM, the U.S. director of national intelligence has released some details. Among other things, he says the government "does not unilaterally obtain information from the servers of U.S. electronic communication service providers" and that PRISM-related activities are conducted "under court supervision." More here.

The National Security Agency has not obtained direct access to the systems of Apple, Google, Facebook, and other major Internet companies, CNET has learned.

Recent reports in The Washington Post and The Guardian claimed a classified program … Read more

Google CEO Larry Page has flatly denied involvement in a secret spy program operated by the National Security Agency, calling into question recent news reports that alleged the company gave spooks a backdoor into its servers.

Page said in a statement on the company's official blog today, which we're reproducing in full:

You may be aware of press reports alleging that Internet companies have joined a secret U.S. government program called PRISM to give the National Security Agency direct access to our servers. As Google's CEO and Chief Legal Officer, we wanted you to have the … Read more

President Obama offered a lawyerly defense of the National Security Agency this morning that can be summarized in two words: Trust us.

"The people involved in America's national security they take this work very seriously," he said. "The last thing they'd be doing is taking programs like this to listen to people's phone calls."

The president, whose administration has been buffeted by a series of disclosures in the last two days about warrantless NSA surveillance, was supposed to be speaking to reporters in the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose, Calif., about health care. … Read more

The Electronic Privacy Information Center Friday asked Congress to begin a series of oversight hearings on whether the National Security Agency's telephone surveillance scheme was legal.

A letter (PDF) from the group says a secret court "went beyond its legal authority when it sanctioned a program of domestic surveillance unrelated to the collection of foreign intelligence."

The disclosure of the court order, which The Guardian newspaper did late Wednesday, has roiled Washington, D.C. officialdom -- but most of the debate has centered on the political fallout, not whether the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court order was legal … Read more

It's been more than 24 hours since the enterprising Glenn Greenwald revealed that the National Security Agency has been gathering the phone records of millions of Verizon customers. The idea is to match calls against a larger database of numbers used by suspected jihadists. After turning up relevant calling patterns, the NSA could then uncover the identities of the callers. But the Verizon-NSA story was not a one-off.

The news was followed by another revelation about the NSA on Thursday -- this one disclosing that the agency has been accessing confidential user data held … Read more