Author: Cyrus Farivar

El Paso, Texas border crossing as seen in 2009. (credit: Robin Kanouse)

Customs and Border Protection (CBP) will now have to pay “Jane Doe,” a New Mexico woman, $475,000 to settle a lawsuit filed in December 2013. In the suit, Jane Doe alleged that she was detained at the US-Mexico border then subjected to an illegal cavity search by nearby hospital personnel. Authorities believed she had drugs on her person, but they found nothing after six hours of intimate searches.

This case is separate from, but has remarkable similarities to, a pending case that was filed last month in Arizona by another woman, Ashley Cervantes.

Doe’s attorneys are spread across two activist organizations, the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas and the ACLU of New Mexico. The team previously won a $1.1M settlement on her behalf to settle related claims filed against the University Medical Center of El Paso. Under the terms of the new settlement with the feds, the two ACLU organizations will send advisory letters to hospitals from San Diego to Houston, notifying them of their rights and responsibilities. In addition, hundreds of CBP agents will have to undergo retraining.

This is the July 2015 "Flying Gun" video. (credit: Hogwit)

A federal judge in Connecticut has ruled against a young drone operator and his father. They will now have to turn over a slew of documents and materials as part of a Federal Aviation Administration investigation.

The two men and their legal team argued that the FAA lacks authority to regulate drones, but the FAA clearly disagrees with this assessment.

As Ars reported previously, the case dates back to July 2015. The pilot, Austin Haughwout, posted a video of his drone rigged up with a handgun. By early November 2015, the Federal Aviation Administration sent the two Haughwouts an administrative subpoena seeking a substantial amount of records, including purchase records and an accounting of what monies, if any, were gained from the "Flying Gun" YouTube video.

(credit: KickassTorrents)

Federal authorities announced Wednesday the arrest of the alleged mastermind of KickassTorrents (KAT), the world’s largest BitTorrent distribution site. As of this writing, the site is still up.

Prosecutors have formally charged Artem Vaulin, 30, of Ukraine, with one count of conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement, one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering, and two counts of criminal copyright infringement.

Like The Pirate Bay, KAT does not host individual infringing files, but rather provides links to .torrent and .magnet files so that users can download unauthorized copies of TV shows, movies and more from various BitTorrent users.

(credit: Andrew Cunningham)

For the third time in less than a year, a Brazilian judge has ordered (Google Translate) messaging app WhatsApp to be blocked by the country’s five major mobile phone companies.

According to Reuters, Judge Daniela Barbosa Assunção de Souza in the state of Rio de Janeiro did not give a reason for the blockade due to legal secrecy in an ongoing case and said it "will only be lifted once Facebook surrenders data."

It is likely that Brazilian investigators have been frustrated by end-to-end encrypted messages on the Facebook-owned app.

(credit: demonsparkx)

A Fresno-area man who initially made a baffling attempt to explain to law enforcement how his laser pointer repeatedly hit a California Highway Patrol aircraft multiple times—"It just shot upward from my pocket and hit the plane"—has now been sentenced to six months in prison. He pleaded guilty to endangering an aircraft with his laser earlier this year.

"I keep thinking this offense was committed by a 12-year-old. But it was not," US District Judge Lawrence J. O’Neill told defendant Jeremy Scott Danielson during the Monday sentencing hearing, according to a statement sent to Ars. "You could have brought the CHP plane down by blinding the pilot. You jeopardized their eyes and their safety."

Despite the judge's claim, a plane has never been brought down due to a laser strike. However, for more than a decade, federal authorities have been concerned that terrorists or other ne'er-do-wells might try to. Under the Obama administration, federal penalties for laser strikes have been strengthened.

(credit: Brian Wibbenmeyer)

A former executive for the St. Louis Cardinals baseball team, Christopher Correa, was sentenced Monday to 46 months in prison. In 2013, he successfully guessed a password to access an online database for confidential data held by another baseball team, the Houston Astros.

Correa pleaded guilty earlier this year to five counts under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, a notorious 1980s-era hacking statute.

“You have made it harder for them to live their lives,” US District Judge Lynn N. Hughes said during the court hearing, referred to the necessity of tighter security around all of Major League Baseball.

An Illinois man has sued Snapchat for alleged violations of a state law that requires users to expressly consent to instances in which their biometric information is used.

This is the second time a plaintiff has brought such a case under the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA). Last year, a Chicago man sued Facebook on similar claims.

The proposed class-action lawsuit, known as Jose Martinez v. Snapchat, was originally filed in May 2016 in a Los Angeles County court but was transferred to federal court on Thursday at Snapchat’s behest.

Rep. Jackie Speier (D-San Francisco) formally introduced a new bill in Congress on Thursday that would seek to make involuntary, or “revenge” pornography, a federal crime, punishable with a maximum penalty of five years in prison.

The bill, which is known as the Intimate Privacy Protection Act of 2016, states:

Whoever knowingly uses the mail, any interactive computer service or electronic communication service or electronic communication system of interstate commerce, or any other facility of interstate or foreign commerce to distribute a visual depiction of a person who is identifiable from the image itself or information displayed in connection with the image and who is engaging in sexually explicit conduct, or of the naked genitals or post-pubescent female nipple of a person, with reckless disregard for the person’s lack of consent to the distribution, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 5 years, or both.

Until now, there has been no such federal bill introduced—but 34 states, including California, have already created similar legislation.

In a case closely watched by much of the tech industry, an appellate court has ruled in favor of Microsoft, finding that the company does not have to turn over the contents of an Outlook.com user’s inbox to American investigators because that user’s data is held abroad, in Ireland.

In a 43-page decision handed down on Thursday, the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the lower court’s ruling, finding that the Stored Communications Act, which allows domestically held data to be handed over to the government, does not apply outside the United States.

In December 2013, authorities obtained an SCA warrant, which was signed by a judge, as part of a drug investigation and served it upon Microsoft. When the company refused to comply, a lower court held the company in contempt. Microsoft challenged that, too, and the 2nd Circuit has vacated the contempt of court order, writing:

A federal judge has recently allowed an ongoing libel lawsuit filed against a popular online forum to go forward.

Bleeping Computer, the website, has characterized the lawsuit as "frivolous," and has asked its readers to help defend its "freedom of speech."

The case revolves around numerous posts on the site concerning Enigma Software Group, which makes an anti-virus software known as SpyHunter.