The Obama administration this week found itself in the middle of a raging controversy after The Guardian broke a story about a massive phone data collection effort by the National Security Agency (NSA). Here's the lowdown on what's going on.
The FBI and the National Security Agency are tapping directly into servers at Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Skype and other major Internet companies to keep track of the communications and interactions of known and suspected foreign terrorists, the Washington Post reported.
Although U.S. government officials said the NSA's efforts to secretly collect phone records of millions of Verizon customers is nothing new, reports about its size confirmed long-standing fears among privacy and civil rights advocates.
Maine is a step closer to becoming the first state in the nation with a law that would require police to obtain a court-issued search warrant in order to obtain a person's cell-phone location data.
Texas is poised to become the first state in the U.S. to require law enforcement officers to get a search warrant based on probable cause before they access any electronic communications and customer data stored by a third-party service provider.
A federal judge in Wisconsin has ordered a suspect in a child porn investigation to either provide prosecutors with the passwords to several encrypted storage devices of his that are thought to contain incriminating evidence or to provide them with a decrypted copy of the contents of the drives.
Despite the growing threat of state-sponsored cyberattacks launched from China and other countries, U.S companies should not be allowed fight back on their own, security experts say.
Harvard College Dean Evelynn Hammonds, who last month acknowledged authorizing a secret search of email belonging to several residential deans at the school, will step down from her position July 1.
St. Louis-based grocery chain Schnuck Markets has claimed that a potential class action lawsuit filed against it in an Illinois state court over a recent data breach really belongs in federal court because of the case's scope and damages involved
U.S. companies should be allowed to take aggressive countermeasures against hackers seeking to steal their intellectual property, contends the private Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property.
China's remarkable success in infiltrating U.S. government, military and corporate networks in recent years shouldn't be seen as a sign that the country is gaining on the U.S. lead in cybertechnology, security experts say. They're just very persistent and very good at remaining undetected for long periods of time.
The battle to find a balance between privacy concerns and the beneficial use of drones for commercial and law enforcement purposes is in sharp focus in a bill that's winding its way through the Texas legislature.
Several users of devices running Google's Android operating system have filed an amended version of an earlier lawsuit accusing the company of illegally collecting, and allowing others to collect, extensive amounts of mobile user data without proper notice or consent.
New social media privacy laws that have been enacted in several states around the country, or are in the works, present something of a mixed bag for businesses.
A California state court has dismissed a closely watched lawsuit charging that Delta Air Lines failed to comply with state privacy laws for mobile applications