A law enforcement official with knowledge of the case says the FBI has opened a criminal investigation into a Pennsylvania school district accused of activating webcams inside students’ homes without their knowledge.
The cameras came with the Apple computers that the school district had distributed to all of its 1,800 students.
The official, speaking to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity, says the FBI will explore whether Lower Merion School District officials broke any federal wiretap or computer intrusion laws.
Lower Merion officials say they remotely activated webcams 42 times to find …

MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) ? The Minneapolis Police Department is again defending itself against accusations that an officer went too far during an arrest.
Video given to WCCO-TV late Monday night shows a man with his hands on a squad car when an officer uses a Taser on his neck.
Attorney Albert Goins is suing the City of Minneapolis on behalf of his client, Rolando Ruiz. They’re asking for $75,000 and that the officer involved be reprimanded.
The video given to WCCO starts only seconds before the Taser is used on Ruiz, not what led …

Police are gathering the personal details of thousands of activists who attend political meetings and protests, and storing their data on a network of nationwide intelligence databases.
The hidden apparatus has been constructed to monitor “domestic extremists”, the Guardian can reveal in the first of a three-day series into the policing of protests. Detailed information about the political activities of campaigners is being stored on a number of overlapping IT systems, even if they have not committed a crime.
Senior officers say domestic extremism, a term coined by police that has no …

A masters student researching terrorist tactics who was arrested and detained for six days after his university informed police about al-Qaida-related material he downloaded has spoken of the “psychological torture” he endured in custody.
Despite his Nottingham University supervisors insisting the materials were directly relevant to his research, Rizwaan Sabir, 22, was held for nearly a week under the Terrorism Act, accused of downloading the materials for illegal use. The student had obtained a copy of the al-Qaida training manual from a US government website for his research into terrorist tactics.
The …

The American Civil Liberties Union is attempting to discover the degree to which Constitutional protections are being violated by a US government policy allowing border officials to search the laptops and other electronic devices of travelers even in the absence of any reason for suspicion.
Last July, Customs and Border Protection — which is part of the Department of Homeland Security — issued a policy (pdf) allowing it to conduct suspicionless border searches of “documents, books, pamphlets, and other printed material, as well as computers, disks, hard drives, and other electronic …