dangerroom

The booking video is an exhibit in miniature of the qualities that made Swartz such an effective activist, and makes his loss such an enduring shame.

The Heartbleed bug is unusually worrisome because it could possibly be used by the NSA or other spy agencies to steal your usernames and passwords — for sensitive services like banking, ecommerce, and web-based email — as well as the private keys that vulnerable web sites use to encrypt your traffic to them.

Gogo, the inflight Wi-Fi provider, is used by millions of airline passengers each year to stay connected while flying the friendly skies. But if you think the long arm of government surveillance doesn't have a vertical reach, think again.

Barrett Brown, whose case became a cause célèbre after he was charged with crimes related to the Stratfor hack, has agreed to a plea deal with prosecutors, according to court filings.

The biggest internet wiretapping program outside the NSA may be headed to the Supreme Court.

The attorney for alleged Silk Road ringleader Ross Ulbricht is asking a federal judge to throw out most of the charges against his client, arguing that the case contains "fatal flaws" and must be dismissed.

The explosion of personal information online is giving rise to new mysteries, new unknowns.

On Monday, two banks suing Target for their losses also included Trustwave in their suit, the security firm that certified last September that Target's networks and data-handling tactics were in tip-top security shape -- just two months before crooks made mincemeat of that assertion. Will the lawsuit finally expose the problems with card data security audits?

The NSA’s global spy operation may seem unstoppable, but there’s at least one target that has proven to be a formidable obstacle: the Chinese communications technology firm Huawei, whose growth could threaten the agency’s much-publicized digital spying powers.

A federal judge has refused to dismiss a recorded confession and computer evidence collected in the case of Mathew Keys, a former Reuters employee accused of conspiring with members of Anonymous to hack his former employer.

One of President Barack Obama’s biggest legacies will be his healthcare plan. Another, thanks to the Edward Snowden leaks, is domestic spying. But Obama has another legacy, one not so obvious, and which won't be felt until years after he's left office. The history e-books will remember the 44th president for setting off a chain of reforms that made predatory patent lawsuits a virtual memory. Obama is the patent-troll slayer.

Spy tools, whether designed by intelligence agencies, cyber crooks or internet creeps, can turn your camera on without illuminating the indicator light. Online tutorials even instruct neophyte hackers on how to hijack your webcam. Fortunately, WIRED is here with a solution.

The NSA doesn’t just hack foreign computers. It also piggybacks on the work of professional for-profit hackers, taking over entire networks of already-hacked machines and using them for their own purposes.

It's refreshing to hear Dianne Feinstein express outrage over warrantless and illegal government spying, But sadly to say, there’s some dark humor of sorts here, too. Feinstein is perhaps the biggest congressional cheerleader of domestic surveillance, including the telephone snooping program in which all metadata from calls to and from the United States is forwarded to the National Security Agency without probable cause warrants.

Last week, it occurred to me that I might start monitoring the local Wi-Fi environment to determine how often the Apple Bus really comes by. My wife guessed 10 times a day. I’d have said 20. After a week of reverse-wardriving, it appears the Apple Bus passes my house an average of 36 times a day, and is uncannily punctual, especially in the a.m., when the first bus reliably pops up on my Wi-Fi radar between 6:23:33 and 6:23:56 every morning.

With lawmakers slow to pass legislation curbing NSA surveillance, it's up to the technology community to step in and devise solutions that will better protect online communications from snoops, said Edward Snowden, speaking today from Moscow at the South by Southwest conference in Austin.

Matt Gunn, an independent model aircraft or drone operator in Cleveland, says the recent court ruling barring the Federal Aviation Administration from enforcing rules prohibiting the commercial use of drones amounts to “mud being flung in their face.� Gunn is among more than a dozen small-scale drone operators whom the FAA ordered to cease-and-desist their commercial work with unmanned vehicles, orders nullified Thursday.

Federal prosecutors in Texas have moved to drop all but one of the 13 charges against internet agitator, Barrett Brown, a self-identified former spokesman for Anonymous.

A non-disclosure agreement that police departments around the country have been signing for years with the maker of a cell-phone spy tool explicitly prohibits the law enforcement agencies from telling anyone, including other government bodies, about their use of the secretive equipment, according to one of the agreements obtained by an Arizona reporter.

The President Barack Obama administration accused Sprint today of overcharging the government more than $21 million in wiretapping expenses.

Police in Florida used a controversial cellphone tracking gadget without telling a judge because they felt bound by a non-disclosure agreement with the manufacturer of the device, according to newly obtained court evidence.

Google-owned YouTube is urging a federal appeals court to allow it to re-post an inflammatory trailer from its popular video-sharing site, arguing that the media giant and the public “will suffer irreparable harm to their First Amendment and other constitutional freedoms."

The President Barack Obama administration has received 28 proposals from corporations with ideas for managing the NSA’s massive database of U.S. phone call metadata. But don’t expect to see the proposals any time soon. The government says it won’t release a word.

In an atmosphere of distrust and anger, the CEO of security giant RSA took the stage this morning to address recent controversies around his company's work with the NSA, and its years-long support of an algorithm suspected of containing an NSA backdoor.

Like everything else on the iPhone, the critical crypto flaw announced in iOS 7 yesterday turns out to be a study in simplicity and elegant design: a single spurious "goto" in one part of Apple's authentication code that accidentally bypasses the rest of it.

AT&T; released its first "Transparency Report" this week concerning U.S. government surveillance of its customers. But to those familiar with the leaks from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, Ma Bell’s numbers come up short by more than 80 million spied-upon customers. All of which means that AT&T;’s first foray into Transparency Land is laughable at best and frightening at worst. Surprisingly, though, it’s not AT&T;’s fault. Here's why.

Following the leaks of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the U.S. government has released a treasure trove of classified documents in a bid to quell public dissent. But answers to key questions about NSA surveillance have been blacked out from these thousands of pages of once-secret documents, as shown in this WIRED photo gallery.

Communications, navigation, battlefield logistics, precision munitions—all of these depend on complete and unfettered access to the spectrum, territory that must be vigilantly defended from enemy combatants. Yet despite the importance of this crucial resource, America’s grip on the spectrum has never been more tenuous.

Far more than a translation of its English counterpart, Arabic Wikipedia has 690,000 registered users who’ve authored more than 240,000 articles. Many of the articles reflect a Middle Eastern worldview entirely different from the Western one, and their writers navigate acute religious and political sensitivities.

A clearly frustrated U.S. intelligence chief complained today that America's adversaries are changing the way they communicate electronically in the wake of the leaks by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Security scanners used by airports around the country to detect weapons and other banned items in carryon luggage can be manipulated to conceal items from screeners, according to two researchers who examined the system.

After seven years of litigation, two trips to a federal appeals court and $3.8 million worth of lawyer time, the public has finally learned why a wheelchair-bound Stanford University scholar was cuffed, detained and denied a flight from San Francisco to Hawaii: FBI human error. F

Researchers have uncovered a sophisticated cyber spying operation that has been alive since at least 2007 and uses techniques and code that surpass any nation-state spyware previously spotted in the wild.

In legal circles, the biggest "off the board" bet going is whether the Supreme Court this term will decide the constitutionality of the NSA’s bulk telephone metadata program, and resolve the issue once and for all. Virtually every expert agrees that won't happen. But don't tell that to conservative activist lawyer Larry Klayman, who last December won the first major courtroom victory against the NSA's program.

The government contested a former Stanford University student's assertion that she was wrongly placed on a no-fly list for seven years in court despite knowing an FBI official put her on the list by mistake because he checked the "wrong boxes" on a form, a federal judge said today.

Ross Ulbricht, the alleged founder and owner of the underground drug emporium Silk Road, has been indicted in New York.

Four tech giants embroiled in the government's secret PRISM collection program reported today that they had received classified national security demands for the contents of at least 59,000 user accounts during the first half of 2013.

Why the appellate court challenge pitting encrypted email provider Lavabit against the Justice Department is so important? It’s the only publicly documented case where a district judge has ordered an internet company to hand over its SSL key to the U.S. government — in this case, the FBI.

The founder of digital currency Liberty Reserve says he was indicted and arrested last year after refusing to hand over the source code for his system to the FBI.

A U.S. terrorism defendant who was formally notified that he was spied on by the NSA filed a challenge to the constitutionality of the surveillance today, in a case likely to be litigated all the way to the Supreme Court.