Ken Garen, CPA, Co-Founder and President, UBCC

Federal appeals court weakens lawsuit against NSA’s bulk phone data collection By Ellen Nakashima August 28 at 1:14 PM An appeals court in the District of Columbia dealt a setback Friday to an activist’s lawsuit against the government over the legality of the National Security Agency’s call records program, ruling that the plaintiff has not proved his standing to sue. A three-judge panel for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled that public interest lawyer Larry Klayman, the founder of Freedom Watch, has not proved his own phone records were collected by the NSA – and so has not met a condition of bringing the lawsuit. It sent the case back to a lower court for further deliberation on the issue. The panel’s ruling also reverses a ban on the NSA’s collection that had been imposed -and temporarily stayed-by a District Court judge in December 2013. But the ruling, which is strictly procedural, does not address the constitutionality or legali...

Police secretly track cellphones to solve routine crimes By Brad Heath, USA TODAY 7:51 a.m. EDT August 24, 2015 BALTIMORE — The crime itself was ordinary: Someone smashed the back window of a parked car one evening and ran off with a cellphone. What was unusual was how the police hunted the thief. Detectives did it by secretly using one of the government’s most powerful phone surveillance tools — capable of intercepting data from hundreds of people’s cellphones at a time — to track the phone, and with it their suspect, to the doorway of a public housing complex. They used it to search for a car thief, too. And a woman who made a string of harassing phone calls. In one case after another, USA TODAY found police in Baltimore and other cities used the phone tracker, commonly known as a stingray, to locate the perpetrators of routine street crimes and frequently concealed that fact from the suspects, their lawyers and even judges. In the process, they quietly transformed a f...

Aug 27, 11:11 AM EDT AP SUES OVER ACCESS TO FBI RECORDS INVOLVING FAKE NEWS STORY BY MICHAEL BIESECKER ASSOCIATED PRESS WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Associated Press sued the U.S. Department of Justice Thursday over the FBI's failure to provide public records related to the creation of a fake news story used to plant surveillance software on a suspect's computer. AP joined with the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press to file the lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. At issue is a 2014 Freedom of Information request seeking documents related to the FBI's decision to send a web link to the fake article to a 15-year-old boy suspected of making bomb threats to a high school near Olympia, Washington. The link enabled the FBI to infect the suspect's computer with software that revealed its location and Internet address. AP strongly objected to the ruse, which was uncovered last year in documents obtained through a separate FOIA...

TV networks face shaky future in changing media landscape By Matthew Garrahan August 27, 2015 1:37 pm Sharply falling stock markets have brought company valuations under renewed scrutiny but, for media groups, the China-induced panic is merely a sequel to an already painful re-evaluation by investors. Media shares first went into freefall at the beginning of August, when companies on both sides of the Atlantic suffered steep declines. Viacom, Discovery Communications, ITV and Time Warner were among those hit: in one day of trading, $37bn was wiped from the market value of the biggest media businesses. Television continues to be a highly profitable, cash-generative industry, but viewing habits are changing. New, digital services such as Netflix, Amazon and Hulu are luring talent — and viewers — from traditional broadcast and cable TV networks. Now, the hottest new programmes are as likely to be shown first on digital streaming services as they are on TV. Price is anot...

Google rejects European Commission’s ‘incorrect’ antitrust charges Christian Oliver in Brussels August 27, 2015 4:30 pm Google has rejected a European Commission proposal to change the way it ranks and displays search results, setting the stage for a protracted legal battle with Brussels in one of the most sensitive competition cases of the internet era. The US technology group filed its formal response on Thursday to EU charges issued in April which said it abused its position of dominance in web search to promote its own retail services unfairly. Google argued the case against it was baseless. In a blogpost, Kent Walker, its senior vice-president, said the preliminary conclusions in the EU’s statement of objections were “wrong as a matter of fact, law and economics”. “The response we filed today shows why we believe those allegations are incorrect,” he went on. Google’s unequivocal response throws down the gauntlet to the commission, which hopes to use the reta...

Boundaries shift in the U.S. on what cellphone use is rude - survey By Ian Simpson | Reuters – 14 hours ago WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Do you text or otherwise engage with a small screen during a social gathering? A U.S. survey suggests you are not alone, even if you are annoyed when other people do exactly the same thing. The Pew Research Center survey on shifts in what is acceptable in an always-wired world found 82 percent of American adults say that using cellphones hurt conversation in social gatherings. But even more people - 89 percent - say they used their phones during their most recent get-together, including for texting, talking and for a photo. Lee Rainie, Pew's director of Internet, science and technology research, said the survey underscored big issues about how technology is disrupting longstanding rules on human interaction. "We're in the middle of this enormous social transformation where the rules of the road aren't clear and so they...

China censoring Black Monday on country’s biggest search engine, Baidu, stopping citizens looking for information about financial chaos Users looking for an explanation of why their stocks are in freefall met by a message saying that ‘Due to related rules & policy, some search results won't be shown’ By ANDREW GRIFFIN Monday 24 August 2015 China has been accused of censoring reports about the financial chaos in the country, stopping its citizens from looking for reports about what’s going on. China’s “Black Monday” has sent share prices around the world into freefall, and has led to renewed worries about a slowdown in growth in the country. But its citizens don’t seem to be able to find out why. Baidu, the country’s biggest search engine, is censoring results related to the chaos, according to George Chen, managing editor of the international edition of the South China Morning Post. When searching for the Chinese characters that translate to stock disaster,...