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A former Justice Department lawyer is facing legal ethics charges for exposing the President George W. Bush-era surveillance tactics—a leak that earned The New York Times a Pulitzer and opened the debate about warrantless surveillance that continues today.

The lawyer, Thomas Tamm, now a Maryland state public defender, is accused of breaching Washington ethics rules for going to The New York Times instead of his superiors about his concerns about what was described as "the program."

Tamm was a member of the Justice Department's Office of Intelligence Policy and Review and, among other things, was charged with requesting electronic surveillance warrants from the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

A Redflex camera as seen in Modesto, California. (credit: Cyrus Farivar)

On Tuesday, a federal jury in Chicago found a former city transportation official guilty on all 20 counts of mail and wire fraud, bribery, extortion, conspiracy, and tax evasion charges.

John Bills, who was the managing deputy commissioner at the Department of Transportation, helped steer a lucrative city contract to Redflex, the embattled Australian red-light camera vendor. He faces decades in prison but won't be sentenced until May 2016.

After Bills urged his colleagues to approve the deal, the city hired Redflex to provide automated enforcement cameras, known formally as its Digital Automated Red Light Enforcement Program (DARLEP), from October 2003 until February 2013. That contract abruptly ended after Bills was shown to have accepted a hotel room that Redflex paid for—but city officials believe that the corruption ran far deeper. In October 2013, Chicago selected Xerox ACS to replace Redflex as its new red-light camera operator. Since then, Redflex has suffered financially, dubbing North America a "low/no-growth market.”

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Uber announced today that it will monitor some of its drivers' behavior for things like excessive speeding or distracted driving. Starting with a trial in Houston, the program will use Uber drivers' own smartphones to provide data to the company.

The company will use a phone's gyroscopes, accelerometers, and GPS to record whether drivers break speed limits or play with their phone while the vehicle is in motion. But in this trial, Uber will only access that data if a customer has a complaint about driving standards.

Always-on monitoring of driving standards may come later, according to Uber Chief Security Officer Joe Sullivan. For now, the initiative is about being able to fact-check complaints and keep the company's rating system on the rails.

George Thompson settles a federal civil rights lawsuit for $72,500 after being arrested for filming the police. (credit: YouTube)

A Massachusetts man charged with wiretapping in 2014 for filming a local police officer with his iPhone is settling a federal civil rights lawsuit for $72,500.

According to court documents, a Fall River man named George Thompson saw a police officer outside his house cursing into his mobile phone while working traffic detail. The lawsuit said that Thompson began filming the officer, Thomas Barboza, with his mobile phone. The officer eventually pushed Thompson, 53, to the ground and handcuffed him, according to the lawsuit (PDF). Thompson spent a night in jail.

The arresting officer received a one-day suspension for conduct unbecoming of an officer—that is speaking profanities in public. The Fall River police erased the footage from the phone by typing in wrong passwords at least 10 times, which prompted the iPhone to restore to factory settings. That erasure was among the reasons the authorities dropped the wiretapping charges against Thompson, as the alleged evidence had been destroyed.

Leo Perrero has sued his former employer, The Walt Disney Company. He says the company gave him 90 days to train his replacement, who had an H-1B visa. (credit: WWSB)

Two former IT workers at Disney have sued, saying that Disney broke the law when it hired cheaper foreign replacements, then fired its current IT department. Disney IT employees were told they would be kept on for 90 days in order to train their replacements, who were H-1B visa holders, according to the complaints. The workers were told "if they did not stay and train they would not get a bonus and severance, which most employees reluctantly accepted."

Both lawsuits are proposed class-actions, filed in federal court in Florida. The suit filed by Dena Moore (PDF) names Disney and labor contractor Cognizant Technology Solutions, while a complaint filed by Leo Perrero (PDF) names Disney and HCL, another labor contractor.

They make a novel claim, saying that Disney violated the anti-racketeering RICO statute by engaging in a "conspiracy to displace US workers." The plaintiffs allege that Disney and the contractors weren't truthful when they filled out immigration documents, thus violating a section of the RICO law that bars "fraud and misuse of visas, passports, and other documents."

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Congressional oversight leaders are requiring most federal agencies to audit their networks to see if they use Juniper-manufactured firewalls that for four years contained an unauthorized backdoor for eavesdropping on encrypted communications.

Members of the House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform gave the agencies until February 4 to produce documents showing whether they use Juniper's NetScreen line of firewall appliances. The committee is also requiring agency heads who used the vulnerable devices to show how they learned of the eavesdropping threat and whether they fixed it prior to the release of last month's patch. That update removed the unauthorized code from ScreenOS, the operating system that manages NetScreen firewalls.

The Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is the chief oversight body for the US House of Representatives, with broad authority to investigate most matters pertaining to federal agencies. Committee members informed agency heads of the eavesdropping-related investigation involving Juniper hardware in letters dated late last week.