administrator

Court allows warrantless cell location tracking

The FBI and other police agencies don't need a search warrant to track the locations of Americans' cell phones, a federal appeals court ruled on Tuesday in a precedent-setting decision.

In the first decision of its kind, a Philadelphia appeals court agreed with the Obama administration that no search warrant--signed by a judge based on a belief that there was probable cause to suspect criminal activity--was necessary for police to obtain logs showing where a cell phone user had traveled.

A three-judge panel of the Third Circuit said (PDF) tracking cell phones "does not require the traditional probable-cause … Read more

Intel CEO: U.S. faces looming tech decline

ASPEN, Colo.--Intel Chief Executive Officer Paul Otellini offered a depressing set of observations about the economy and the Obama administration Monday evening, coupled with a dark commentary on the future of the technology industry if nothing changes.

Otellini's remarks during dinner at the Technology Policy Institute's Aspen Forum here amounted to a warning to the administration officials and assorted Capitol Hill aides in the audience: unless government policies are altered, he predicted, "the next big thing will not be invented here. Jobs will not be created here."

The U.S. legal environment has become so … Read more

Senators rebuke Marshals Service on full-body scans

Six U.S. senators delivered a sharp rebuke to the U.S. Marshals Service on Thursday, saying that they were "disturbed" to learn that thousands of images produced by full-body scanners at security checkpoints were surreptitiously recorded.

The bipartisan group of senators demanded a detailed explanation from the Marshals Service, which installed the millimeter wave system at the security checkpoint of at a Florida courthouse. (See CNET's earlier article about the Marshals Service admitting the recording took place.)

A letter the politicians sent to Marshals Service director John Clark asks him to "identify any other locations … Read more

U.S. denies asking other nations to attack Wikileaks

The U.S. State Department has denied asking other countries to open criminal investigations into Wikileaks co-founder Julian Assange.

"We have not approached any country to encourage them to do anything," Philip Crowley, assistant secretary of state, told CNET. The main Wikileaks.org Web site is located in Sweden.

Crowley acknowledged that U.S. officials have "had conversations with a variety of countries" about Wikileaks, but said those discussions were limited to expressing "concerns that we've had."

That conflicts with a report earlier this week on TheDailyBeast.com, which said the Obama administration … Read more

Feds admit storing checkpoint body scan images

For the last few years, federal agencies have defended body scanning by insisting that all images will be discarded as soon as they're viewed. The Transportation Security Administration claimed last summer, for instance, that "scanned images cannot be stored or recorded."

Now it turns out that some police agencies are storing the controversial images after all. The U.S. Marshals Service admitted this week that it had surreptitiously saved tens of thousands of images recorded with a millimeter wave system at the security checkpoint of a single Florida courthouse.

This follows an earlier disclosure (PDF) by the … Read more

Wikileaks' war files disclosure roils Washington

During the last 24 hours or so, official Washington has erupted with volcanic denunciations of Wikileaks, the document-sharing group that released about 75,000 military reports regarding the war in Afghanistan on Sunday.

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs called it "alarming" to find so many "top secret documents" publicly available on the Web. (See transcript.)

National security adviser James Jones "strongly" condemned the release in a statement that was reprinted on the U.S. Embassy Web sites for Afghanistan and Turkey.

Over at the Pentagon, spokesman Col. Dave Lapan said it could take weeks … Read more

GOP senators move to block FCC on Net neutrality

Seven Republican senators have announced a plan to curb the Obama administration's push to impose controversial Net neutrality regulations on the Internet.

On Wednesday, Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina and six other GOP senators introduced legislation (PDF) that would dramatically limit the Federal Communications Commission's ability to regulate broadband providers.

"The FCC's rush to takeover the Internet is just the latest example of the need for fundamental reform to protect consumers," DeMint said in a statement. Without this legislation, DeMint said, the FCC will "impose unnecessary, antiquated regulations on the Internet."

The … Read more

Lieberman defends emergency Net authority plan

Sen. Joseph Lieberman on Tuesday defended his proposal to grant the president far-reaching emergency powers to seize control of or shut down portions of the Internet.

It's vital that the president can "say to an electric company or to say to Verizon, in the national interest, 'There's an attack about to come, and I hereby order you to put a patch on this, or put your network down on this part, or stop accepting any incoming from country A,'" said Lieberman, an independent from Connecticut who caucuses with Democrats.

Lieberman's bill, introduced last week, could … Read more

Tackling missing administrative privileges for all admin accounts

In OS X the first user is by default an administrator account so administrative functions can be run, and adding new administrators is usually as easy as authenticating and checking the appropriate box for the respective user in the Accounts system preferences. We were recently contacted by a reader who found that her system was no longer able to create new administrator accounts and all the previous administrators were now listed as standard users, leaving the root account as the only way to administer the system.… Read more