Law enforcement officials have identified the criminal behind "more than 20 bomb or shooting threats to schools and other places," reports CNN.

It was an 11-year-old boy: Investigators tracked the calls to a home in Henrico County, Virginia, just outside Richmond. Local deputies searched the home this month, and the 11-year-old boy who lived there admitted to placing the Florida swatting calls, as well as a threat made to the Maryland State House, authorities said. Investigators later determined that the boy also made swatting calls in Nebraska, Kansas, Alabama, Tennessee and Alaska. The boy faces 29 felony counts and 14 misdemeanors, officials said. He's being held in a Virginia juvenile detention facility while Florida officials arrange for his extradition...

A 13-year-old boy was arrested in Florida in May, several days after the initial call, for making a copycat threat to Buddy Taylor Middle School, official said.

On Wednesday, Judge Nina Morrison ruled that cellphone searches at the border are "nonroutine" and require probable cause and a warrant, likening them to more invasive searches due to their heavy privacy impact. As reported by Reason, this decision closes the loophole in the Fourth Amendment's protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, which Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents have exploited. Courts have previously ruled that the government has the right to conduct routine warrantless searches for contraband at the border. From the report: Although the interests of stopping contraband are "undoubtedly served when the government searches the luggage or pockets of a person crossing the border carrying objects that can only be introduced to this country by being physically moved across its borders, the extent to which those interests are served when the government searches data stored on a person's cell phone is far less clear," the judge declared. Morrison noted that "reviewing the information in a person's cell phone is the best approximation government officials have for mindreading," so searching through cellphone data has an even heavier privacy impact than rummaging through physical possessions. Therefore, the court ruled, a cellphone search at the border requires both probable cause and a warrant. Morrison did not distinguish between scanning a phone's contents with special software and manually flipping through it.

And in a victory for journalists, the judge specifically acknowledged the First Amendment implications of cellphone searches too. She cited reporting by The Intercept and VICE about CPB searching journalists' cellphones "based on these journalists' ongoing coverage of politically sensitive issues" and warned that those phone searches could put confidential sources at risk. Wednesday's ruling adds to a stream of cases restricting the feds' ability to search travelers' electronics. The 4th and 9th Circuits, which cover the mid-Atlantic and Western states, have ruled that border police need at least "reasonable suspicion" of a crime to search cellphones. Last year, a judge in the Southern District of New York also ruled (PDF) that the government "may not copy and search an American citizen's cell phone at the border without a warrant absent exigent circumstances."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Federal Communications Commission today voted to lower price caps on prison phone calls and closed a loophole that allowed prison telecoms to charge high rates for intrastate calls. Today's vote will cut the price of interstate calls in half and set price caps on intrastate calls for the first time. The FCC said it "voted to end exorbitant phone and video call rates that have burdened incarcerated people and their families for decades. Under the new rules, the cost of a 15-minute phone call will drop to $0.90 from as much as $11.35 in large jails and, in small jails, to $1.35 from $12.10."

The new rules are expected to take effect in January 2025 for all prisons and for jails with at least 1,000 incarcerated people. The rate caps would take effect in smaller jails in April 2025. Worth Rises, a nonprofit group advocating for prison reform, said it "estimates that the new rules will impact 83 percent of incarcerated people (about 1.4 million) and save impacted families at least $500 million annually." The nonprofit Prison Policy Institute said that prison phone companies charge ancillary fees for things "like making a deposit to fund an account." The ban on those fees "also effectively blocks a practice that we have been campaigning against for years: companies charging fees to consumers who choose to make single calls rather than fund a calling account, and deliberately steering new consumers to this higher-cost option in order to increase fee revenue," the group said.

The ancillary fee ban is a "technical-sounding change," but will help "eliminate some of the industry's dirtiest tricks that shortchange both the families and the facilities," the group said.

A judge in the UK High Court has directed prosecutors to consider bringing criminal charges against computer scientist Craig Wright, after ruling that he lied "extensively and repeatedly" and committed forgery "on a grand scale" in service of his quest to prove he is Satoshi Nakamoto, creator of bitcoin. From a report: In a judgment published Tuesday, Justice James Mellor outlined various injunctions to be imposed upon Wright, after finding in May that he had "engaged in the deliberate production of false documents to support false claims [to be Satoshi] and use the Courts as a vehicle for fraud."

By order of the judge, Wright will be prevented from claiming publicly that he is Satoshi and from bringing or threatening legal action in any jurisdiction on that basis. He will be required to pin a notice to the front page of his personal website and X feed detailing the findings against him. The matter, Mellor writes, will also be referred to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), the body responsible for prosecuting criminal cases in the UK, "for consideration of whether a prosecution should be commenced against Dr Wright." It will be up to the CPS to decide whether the available evidence is sufficient to bring charges against Wright "for his wholescale perjury and forgery of documents" and "whether a warrant for his arrest should be issued."

AT&T paid more than $300,000 to a member of the team that stole call records for tens of millions of customers, reports Wired — "to delete the data and provide a video demonstrating proof of deletion." The hacker, who is part of the notorious ShinyHunters hacking group that has stolen data from a number of victims through unsecured Snowflake cloud storage accounts, tells WIRED that AT&T paid the ransom in May. He provided the address for the cryptocurrency wallet that sent the currency to him, as well as the address that received it. WIRED confirmed, through an online blockchain tracking tool, that a payment transaction occurred on May 17 in the amount of 5.7 bitcoin... The hacker initially demanded $1 million from AT&T but ultimately agreed to a third of that. WIRED viewed the video that the hacker says he provided to AT&T as proof to the telecom that he had deleted its stolen data from his computer...

AT&T is one of more than 150 companies that are believed to have had data stolen from poorly secured Snowflake accounts during a hacking spree that unfolded throughout April and May. It's been previously reported that the accounts were not secured with multi-factor authentication, so after the hackers obtained usernames and passwords for the accounts, and in some cases authorization tokens, they were able to access the storage accounts of companies and siphon their data. Ticketmaster, the banking firm Santander, LendingTree, and Advance Auto Parts were all among the victims publicly identified to date...

The timeline suggests that if [John] Binns is responsible for the AT&T breach, he allegedly did it when he was likely already aware that he was under indictment for the T-Mobile hack and could face arrest for it.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: A court in south-west Spain has sentenced 15 schoolchildren to a year's probation for creating and spreading AI-generated images of their female peers in a case that prompted a debate on the harmful and abusive uses of deepfake technology. Police began investigating the matter last year after parents in the Extremaduran town of Almendralejo reported that faked naked pictures of their daughters were being circulated on WhatsApp groups. The mother of one of the victims said the dissemination of the pictures on WhatsApp had been going on since July.

"Many girls were completely terrified and had tremendous anxiety attacks because they were suffering this in silence," she told Reuters at the time. "They felt bad and were afraid to tell and be blamed for it." On Tuesday, a youth court in the city of Badajoz said it had convicted the minors of 20 counts of creating child abuse images and 20 counts of offenses against their victims' moral integrity. Each of the defendants was handed a year's probation and ordered to attend classes on gender and equality awareness, and on the "responsible use of technology." [...] Police identified several teenagers aged between 13 and 15 as being responsible for generating and sharing the images. Under Spanish law minors under 14 cannot be charged but their cases are sent to child protection services, which can force them to take part in rehabilitation courses. Further reading: First-Known TikTok Mob Attack Led By Middle Schoolers Tormenting Teachers

Australia's government cybersecurity agency on Tuesday accused a China-backed hacker group of stealing passwords and usernames from two unnamed Australian networks in 2022, adding that the group remained a threat. From a report: A joint report led by the Australian Cyber Security Centre said the hackers, named APT40, had conducted malicious cyber operations for China's Ministry of State Security, the main agency overlooking foreign intelligence. "The activity and techniques overlap with the groups tracked as Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) 40," said the report, which included inputs from lead cyber security agencies for the United States, Britain, Canada, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea and Germany. U.S. and British officials in March had accused Beijing of a sweeping cyberespionage campaign that allegedly hit millions of people including lawmakers, academics and journalists, and companies including defense contractors. They said China-backed "APT31" was responsible for the network intrusion.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: As deep-pocketed companies like Amazon, Google and Walmart invest in and experiment with drone delivery, a phenomenon reflective of this modern era has emerged. Drones, carrying snacks and other sundries, are being shot out of the sky. Incidents are still rare. However, a recent arrest in Florida, in which a man allegedly shot down a Walmart drone, raises questions of what the legal ramifications are and whether those consequences could escalate if these events become more common. [...] While consumer drones have been proliferating for well over a decade, the question of legal ramifications hasn't been wholly clear. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) gave us a partial answer following a 2016 drone shooting in Arkansas. At the time, the FAA pointed interested parties to 18 U.S.C. 32. The law, titled "Aircraft Sabotage," is focused on the wanton destruction of "any aircraft in the special aircraft jurisdiction of the United States or any civil aircraft used, operated or employed in interstate, overseas, or foreign air commerce."

At first glance, the law appears primarily focused on manned aircraft, including a provision that "makes it a Federal offense to commit an act of violence against any person on the aircraft, not simply crew members, if the act is likely to endanger the safety of the aircraft." In responding to the Arkansas drone shooting, however, the FAA asserts that such protections can be interpreted to also include UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles). The language does, indeed, appear broad enough to cover drones. That means, in turn, that the penalties are potentially as stiff. The subject was revived after a 2020 incident in Minnesota. In that case, the suspect was hit with felony charges relating to criminal damage and discharging a weapon within city limits. Those would likely also be the charges in most scenarios involving property, rather than bodily damage, drone or not. Even with these examples, there is not a rigid rule that predicts if or when prosecutors might also introduce a federal charge like 18 U.S.C. 32.

As the legal blog Above the Law notes, in most cases, the federal government has deferred to state law for enforcement. Meanwhile, in most cases where 18 U.S.C. 32 has been applied, if a human crew/passengers are involved, there could be other potential charges like murder. It certainly can be argued that shooting a large piece of hardware out of the sky in a heavily populated area invites its own potential for bodily harm, though it may not be prosecuted in the same manner. As drone delivery increases in the U.S., however, we may soon have an answer to the role federal legislation like 18 U.S.C. 32 will play in UAV shootings. Adding that into the picture brings penalties, including fines and up to 20 years in prison, potentially compounding those consequences. What is clear, though, is that the consequences can be severe, whether it is invoked.

Andy Maxwell reports via TorrentFreak: On November 4, 2022, the United States Department of Justice and the FBI began seizing Z-Library's domains as part of a major operation to shut down the infamous 'shadow library' platform. A criminal investigation had identified two Russian nationals, Anton Napolsky and Valeriia Ermakova, as the alleged operators of the site. On October 21, 2022, at the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York, Judge Sanket J. Bulsara ordered their arrest. They were detained in Argentina on November 3, 2022. After arriving at the Ambrosio Taravella International Airport, the unsuspecting couple cleared customs and hired a car from a popular rental company. The United States Embassy informed local authorities that the pair were subject to an Interpol Red Notice.

At what point the Russians' phones were tapped is unclear but, under the authority of a Federal Court arrest warrant, Argentinian law enforcement began tracking the couple's movements as they traveled south in their rented Toyota Corolla. [...] [F]ollowing a visit to El Calafate, the pair were arrested by airport security police as they arrived in Rio Gallegos, Santa Cruz. They were later transferred to Cordoba. In January 2023, Judge Miguel Hugo Vaca Narvaja authorized the Russians to be detained under house arrest. Approval from Cordoba prosecutor Maximiliano Hairabedian, who was responsible for the request to extradite Napolsky and Ermakova to the United States, was not obtained. With a federal indictment, alleging criminal copyright infringement, wire fraud, and money laundering offenses, waiting for them in the United States, the priority for Napolsky and Ermakova would soon be their fight against extradition. [...]

Patronato del Liberado (Patronage of the Liberated) is responsible for assisting people who have previously been detained by the authorities with family and social reintegration. It's also tasked with monitoring compliance of those on probation or subject to house arrest. According to unnamed 'judicial sources' cited by La Voz, which receives full credit for a remarkable scoop, when the group conducted a regular visit in May, to verify that Napolsky and Ermakova were in compliance with the rules set by the state, there was no trace of them. Patronato del Liberado raised the alarm and Judge Sanchez Freytes was immediately notified. Counsel for the defense during the extradition hearings said that he hadn't been able to contact the Russians either. The Judge ordered an international arrest warrant although there appeared to be at least some hope the pair hadn't left the country. However, that was many weeks ago and with no obvious news suggesting their recapture, the pair could be anywhere by now.

An anonymous reader shared this report from Business Insider: It's a political tale as old as time: put up a campaign poster in your yard, and thieves come to snatch it. But according to The Wall Street Journal, those fed up with front lawn looting are embracing a modern solution. Apple's geo-tracking AirTag devices are helping owners find their signs — and sometimes, even the people who stole them.

The practice has already led to charges. In one example cited by the outlet, Florida politician John Dittmore decided to hide the coin-sized gadget on one of his posters after waking up to a number of thefts in May... [Two teenagers were charged with criminal mischief and the theft of nine signs.]

In other cited cases, stolen signs don't end up with teens, but in the homes of electoral opponents. After Chris Torre became the victim of poster snatching, AirTags led him to the residence of Renee Rountree, the Journal said. Both were running for a seat on the Isle of Wight County Board of Supervisors in Virginia. Her son-in-law was charged with a misdemeanor for stealing the property, while Rountree faced a misdemeanor for receiving stolen goods. In a December trial, she noted plans to return the signs. Rountree has since been ordered to 250 hours of community service.

"I would like to think that this will have a huge deterrent effect," the trial's judge said in the court's transcript, quoted by WSJ.

Top Eurocops are appealing for help from lawmakers to undermine a privacy-enhancing technology (PET) they say is hampering criminal investigations -- and it's not end-to-end encryption this time. Not exactly. From a report: Europol published a position paper today highlighting its concerns around SMS home routing -- the technology that allows telcos to continue offering their services when customers visit another country. Most modern mobile phone users are tied to a network with roaming arrangements in other countries. EE customers in the UK will connect to either Telefonica or Xfera when they land in Spain, or T-Mobile in Croatia, for example.

While this usually provides a fairly smooth service for most roamers, Europol is now saying something needs to be done about the PETs that are often enabled in these home routing setups. According to the cops, they pointed out that when roaming, a suspect in a criminal case who's using a SIM from another country will have all of their mobile communications processed through their home network. If a crime is committed by a Brit in Germany, for example, then German police couldn't issue a request for unencrypted data as they could with a domestic operator such as Deutsche Telekom.

"A federal grand jury has indicted an embattled Alzheimer's researcher for allegedly falsifying data to fraudulently obtain $16 million in federal research funding from the National Institutes of Health for the development of a controversial Alzheimer's drug and diagnostic test," writes Beth Mole via Ars Technica. "Wang is charged with one count of major fraud against the United States, two counts of wire fraud, and one count of false statements. If convicted, he faces a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison for the major fraud charge, 20 years in prison for each count of wire fraud, and five years in prison for the count of false statements [...]." From the report: Hoau-Yan Wang, 67, a medical professor at the City University of New York, was a paid collaborator with the Austin, Texas-based pharmaceutical company Cassava Sciences. Wang's research and publications provided scientific underpinnings for Cassava's Alzheimer's treatment, Simufilam, which is now in Phase III trials. Simufilam is a small-molecule drug that Cassava claims can restore the structure and function of a scaffolding protein in the brain of people with Alzheimer's, leading to slowed cognitive decline. But outside researchers have long expressed doubts and concerns about the research.

In 2023, Science magazine obtained a 50-page report from an internal investigation at CUNY that looked into 31 misconduct allegations made against Wang in 2021. According to the report, the investigating committee "found evidence highly suggestive of deliberate scientific misconduct by Wang for 14 of the 31 allegations," the report states. The allegations largely centered around doctored and fabricated images from Western blotting, an analytical technique used to separate and detect proteins. However, the committee couldn't conclusively prove the images were falsified "due to the failure of Dr. Wang to provide underlying, original data or research records and the low quality of the published images that had to be examined in their place." In all, the investigation "revealed long-standing and egregious misconduct in data management and record keeping by Dr. Wang," and concluded that "the integrity of Dr. Wang's work remains highly questionable." The committee also concluded that Cassava's lead scientist on its Alzheimer's disease program, Lindsay Burns, who was a frequent co-author with Wang, also likely bears some responsibility for the misconduct.

In March 2022, five of Wang's articles published in the journal PLOS One were retracted over integrity concerns with images in the papers. Other papers by Wang have also been retracted or had statements of concern attached to them. Further, in September 2022, the Food and Drug Administration conducted an inspection of the analytical work and techniques used by Wang to analyze blood and cerebrospinal fluid from patients in a simufilam trial. The investigation found a slew of egregious problems, which were laid out in a "damning" report (PDF) obtained by Science. In the indictment last week (PDF), federal authorities were explicit about the allegations, claiming that Wang falsified the results of his scientific research to NIH "by, among other things, manipulating data and images of Western blots to artificially add bands [which represent proteins], subtract bands, and change their relative thickness and/or darkness, and then drawing conclusions" based on those false results.

An anonymous reader quotes an op-ed written by Kenneth Roth, former executive director of Human Rights Watch (1993-2022) and a visiting professor at Princeton's School of Public and International Affairs: Julian Assange's lengthy detention has finally ended, but the danger that his prosecution poses to the rights of journalists remains. As is widely known, the U.S. government's pursuit of Assange under the Espionage Act threatens to criminalize common journalistic practices. Sadly, Assange's guilty plea and release from custody have done nothing to ease that threat. That Assange was indicted under the Espionage Act, a U.S. law designed to punish spies and traitors, should not be considered the normal course of business. Barack Obama's justice department never charged Assange because it couldn't distinguish what he had done from ordinary journalism. The espionage charges were filed by the justice department of Donald Trump. Joe Biden could have reverted to the Obama position and withdrawn the charges but never did.

The 18-count indictment filed under Trump accused Assange of having solicited secret U.S. government information and encouraged Chelsea Manning to provide it. Manning committed a crime when she delivered that information because she was a government employee who had pledged to safeguard confidential information on pain of punishment. But Assange's alleged solicitation of that information, and the steps he was said to have taken to ensure that it could be transferred anonymously, are common procedure for many journalists who report on national security issues. If these practices were to be criminalized, our ability to monitor government conduct would be seriously compromised. To make matters worse, someone accused under the Espionage Act is not allowed to argue to a jury that disclosures were made in the public interest. The unauthorized disclosure of secret information deemed prejudicial to national security is sufficient for conviction regardless of motive.

To justify Espionage Act charges, the Trump-era prosecutors stressed that Assange was accused of not only soliciting and receiving secret government information but also agreeing to help crack a password that would provide access to U.S. government files. That is not ordinary journalistic behavior. An Espionage Act prosecution for computer hacking is very different from a prosecution for merely soliciting and receiving secret information. Even if it would not withdraw the Trump-era charges, Biden's justice department could have limited the harm to journalistic freedom by ensuring that the alleged computer hacking was at the center of Assange's guilty plea. In fact, it was nowhere to be found. The terms for the proceeding were outlined in a 23-page "plea agreement" filed with the U.S. District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands, where Assange appeared by consent. Assange agreed to plead guilty to a single charge of violating the Espionage Act, but under U.S. law, it is not enough to plead in the abstract. A suspect must concede facts that would constitute an offense. "One effect of the guilty plea is that there will be no legal challenge to the prosecution, and hence no judicial decision on whether this use of the Espionage Act violates the freedom of the media as protected by the first amendment of the U.S. constitution," notes Roth. "That means that just as prosecutors overreached in the case of Assange, they could do so again."

"[M]edia protections are not limited to journalists who are deemed responsible. Nor do we want governments to make judgments about which journalists deserve First Amendment safeguards. That would quickly compromise media freedom for all journalists."

Roth concludes: "Imperfect journalist that he was, Assange should never have been prosecuted under the Espionage Act. It is unfortunate that the Biden administration didn't take available steps to mitigate that harm."

It's been adapted into a graphic novel, a videogame, a radio play, and an opera, according to Wikipedia — which also describes years of trying to adapt Neuromancer into a movie. "The landmark 1984 cyberpunk novel has been on Hollywood's wishlist for decades," writes Gizmodo, "with multiple filmmakers attempting to bring it to the big screen." (Back in 2010, Slashdot's CmdrTaco even posted an update with the headline "Neuromancer Movie In Your Future?" with a 2011 story promising the movie deal was "moving forward....")

But now Deadline reports it's becoming a 10-episode series on Apple TV+ (co-produced by Apple Studios) starring Callum Turner and Brianna Middleton: Created for television by Graham Roland and JD Dillard, Neuromancer follows a damaged, top-rung super-hacker named Case (Turner) who is thrust into a web of digital espionage and high stakes crime with his partner Molly (Middleton), a razor-girl assassin with mirrored eyes, aiming to pull a heist on a corporate dynasty with untold secrets.
More from Gizmodo: "We're incredibly excited to be bringing this iconic property to Apple TV+," Roland and Dillard said in a statement. "Since we became friends nearly 10 years ago, we've looked for something to team up on, so this collaboration marks a dream come true. Neuromancer has inspired so much of the science fiction that's come after it and we're looking forward to bringing television audiences into Gibson's definitive 'cyberpunk' world."
The novel launched Gibson's "Sprawl" trilogy of novels (building on the dystopia in his 1982 short story "Burning Chrome"), also resurrecting the "Molly Millions" character from Johnny Mnemonic — an even earlier short story from 1981...

According to Interpol, nearly 4,000 people around the world have been arrested for a variety of online crimes, with $257 million in assets seized. The Record reports: The operation, dubbed First Light, was conducted by police officers from 61 countries and targeted phishing, investment fraud, fake online shopping sites, romance scams, and impersonation scams, according to a statement by Interpol. In addition to arresting thousands of potential cybercriminals, the police also identified over 14,600 other possible suspects across all continents.

During the searches, law enforcement seized suspects' real estate, high-end vehicles, expensive jewelry, and many other high-value items and collections. They also froze 6,745 bank accounts used for transferring money obtained through illegal operations. In one case, the police intercepted $331,000 gleaned from a business email compromise fraud involving a Spanish victim who unknowingly transferred money to someone in Hong Kong. In another case, authorities in Australia successfully recovered $3.7 million on behalf of an impersonation scam victim after the funds were fraudulently transferred to bank accounts in Malaysia and Hong Kong.

The criminal networks identified during the operation were spread around the globe. In Namibia, for example, the police rescued 88 local youths who were forced into conducting scams as part of a sophisticated international crime network, according to Interpol. Law enforcement from Singapore, Hong Kong, and China prevented an attempted tech support scam, saving a 70-year-old victim from losing $281,200 worth of savings.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: An online gaming dispute made its way to the real world when a New Jersey man flew to Florida to attack another player with a hammer, authorities said. Edward Kang, 20, is charged with attempted second-degree murder and armed burglary with a mask, according to Nassau County court records. He was arrested early Sunday morning. Kang and the victim, another young man around the same age as Kang, had never met in real life, but they both played ArcheAge, a medieval fantasy massively multiplayer online role-playing game. The game's publisher announced in April that it would be shutting down servers in Europe and North America on June 27, citing a declining number of active players.

Kang flew from Newark, New Jersey, to Jacksonville, Florida, last Thursday after telling his mother that he was going to visit a friend that he had met while playing a video game, officials said. Officials didn't say how Kang learned where the victim lives. Upon arrival, Kang took an Uber to a hotel in Fernandina Beach, about 35 miles north of Jacksonville, and then bought a hammer at a local hardware store, deputies said. Kang went to the victim's Fernandina Beach home, which was unlocked, around 2 a.m. Sunday, authorities said. The victim was walking out of his bedroom when he was confronted by Kang, who hit him on the head with the hammer, officials said. The two struggled as the victim called for help. His stepfather responded and helped to restrain Kang until police arrived. The victim suffered several head wounds that were not considered life-threatening, officials said. Online court records didn't list an attorney for Kang. He was being held without bond.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has agreed to a plea deal with the U.S. Justice Department over his alleged role in one of the largest U.S. government breaches of classified material. As a result, he will avoid imprisonment in the United States. CNN reports: Under the terms of the new agreement (PDF), Justice Department prosecutors will seek a 62-month sentence -- which is equal to the amount of time Assange has served in a high-security prison in London while he fought extradition to the US. The plea deal would credit that time served, allowing Assange to immediately return to Australia, his native country. The plea deal must still be approved by a federal judge.

Assange had faced 18 counts from a 2019 indictment for his alleged role in the breach that carried a max of up to 175 years in prison, though he was unlikely to be sentenced to that time in full. Assange was being pursued by US authorities for publishing confidential military records supplied by former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning in 2010 and 2011. US officials alleged that Assange goaded Manning into obtaining thousands of pages of unfiltered US diplomatic cables that potentially endangered confidential sources, Iraq war-related significant activity reports and information related to Guantanamo Bay detainees.

Automated license plate readers "pose risks to public safety," argues the EFF, "that may outweigh the crimes they are attempting to address in the first place." When law enforcement uses automated license plate readers (ALPRs) to document the comings and goings of every driver on the road, regardless of a nexus to a crime, it results in gargantuan databases of sensitive information, and few agencies are equipped, staffed, or trained to harden their systems against quickly evolving cybersecurity threats. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), a component of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, released an advisory last week that should be a wake up call to the thousands of local government agencies around the country that use ALPRs to surveil the travel patterns of their residents by scanning their license plates and "fingerprinting" their vehicles. The bulletin outlines seven vulnerabilities in Motorola Solutions' Vigilant ALPRs, including missing encryption and insufficiently protected credentials...

Unlike location data a person shares with, say, GPS-based navigation app Waze, ALPRs collect and store this information without consent and there is very little a person can do to have this information purged from these systems... Because drivers don't have control over ALPR data, the onus for protecting the data lies with the police and sheriffs who operate the surveillance and the vendors that provide the technology. It's a general tenet of cybersecurity that you should not collect and retain more personal data than you are capable of protecting. Perhaps ironically, a Motorola Solutions cybersecurity specialist wrote an article in Police Chief magazine this month that public safety agencies "are often challenged when it comes to recruiting and retaining experienced cybersecurity personnel," even though "the potential for harm from external factors is substantial." That partially explains why, more than 125 law enforcement agencies reported a data breach or cyberattacks between 2012 and 2020, according to research by former EFF intern Madison Vialpando. The Motorola Solutions article claims that ransomware attacks "targeting U.S. public safety organizations increased by 142 percent" in 2023.

Yet, the temptation to "collect it all" continues to overshadow the responsibility to "protect it all." What makes the latest CISA disclosure even more outrageous is it is at least the third time in the last decade that major security vulnerabilities have been found in ALPRs... If there's one positive thing we can say about the latest Vigilant vulnerability disclosures, it's that for once a government agency identified and reported the vulnerabilities before they could do damage... The Michigan Cyber Command center found a total of seven vulnerabilities in Vigilant devices; two of which were medium severity and 5 of which were high severity vulnerabilities...

But a data breach isn't the only way that ALPR data can be leaked or abused. In 2022, an officer in the Kechi (Kansas) Police Department accessed ALPR data shared with his department by the Wichita Police Department to stalk his wife.
The article concludes that public safety agencies should "collect only the data they need for actual criminal investigations.

"They must never store more data than they adequately protect within their limited resources-or they must keep the public safe from data breaches by not collecting the data at all."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Fortune: Ellen Bagley was delighted when she made her first sale on a popular second-hand clothing app, but just a few minutes later, the thrill turned to shock as the 20-year-old from Linkoping in Sweden discovered she'd been robbed. Everything seemed normal when Bagley received a direct message on the platform, which asked her to verify personal details to complete the deal. She clicked the link, which fired up BankID -- the ubiquitous digital authorization system used by nearly all Swedish adults.After receiving a couple of error messages, she started thinking something was wrong, but it was already too late. Over 10,000 Swedish kronor ($1,000) had been siphoned from her account and the thieves disappeared into the digital shadows. "The fraudsters are so skilled at making things look legitimate," said Bagley, who was born after BankID was created. "It's not easy" to identify scams. Although financial crime has garnered fewer headlines than a surge in gang-related gun violence, it's become a growing risk for the country. Beyond its borders, Sweden is an important test case on fighting cashless crime because it's gone further on ditching paper money than almost any other country in Europe.

Online fraud and digital crime in Sweden have surged, with criminals taking 1.2 billion kronor in 2023 through scams like the one Bagley fell for, doubling from 2021. Law-enforcement agencies estimate that the size of Sweden's criminal economy could amount to as high as 2.5% of the country's gross domestic product. To counter the digital crime spree, Swedish authorities have put pressure on banks to tighten security measures and make it harder on tech-savvy criminals, but it's a delicate balancing act. Going too far could slow down the economy, while doing too little erodes trust and damages legitimate businesses in the process.Using complex webs of fake companies and forging documents to gain access to Sweden's welfare system, sophisticated fraudsters have made Sweden a "Silicon Valley for criminal entrepreneurship," said Daniel Larson, a senior economic crime prosecutor. While the shock of armed violence has grabbed public attention -- the nation's gun-homicide rate tripled between 2012 and 2022 -- economic crime underlies gang activity and needs to be tackled as aggressively, he added. "That has been a strategic mistake," Larson said. "This profit-generating crime is what's fueling organized crime and, in some cases, leads to these conflicts."

Sweden's switch to electronic cash started after a surge of armed robberies in the 1990s, and by 2022, only 8% of Swedes said they had used cash for their latest purchase, according to a central bank survey. Along with neighboring Norway, Sweden has Europe's lowest number of ATMs per capita, according to the IMF. The prevalence of BankID play a role in Sweden's vulnerability. The system works like an online signature. If used, it's considered a done deal and the transaction gets executed immediately. It was designed by Sweden's banks to make electronic payments even quicker and easier than handing over a stack of bills. Since it's original rollout in 2001, it's become part of the everyday Swedish life. On average, the service -- which requires a six-digit code, a fingerprint or a face scan for authentication -- is used more than twice a day by every adult Swede and is involved in everything from filing tax returns to paying for bus tickets.Originally intended as a product by banks for their customers, its use exploded in 2005 after Sweden's tax agency adopted the technology as an identification for tax returns, giving it the government's official seal of approval. The launch of BankID on mobile phones in 2010 increased usage even further, along with public perception that associated cash with criminality.The country's central bank has acknowledged that some of those connotations may have gone too far. "We have to be very clear that there are still honest people using cash," Riksbank Governor Erik Thedeen told Bloomberg.

Thousands of people catching trains in the United Kingdom likely had their faces scanned by Amazon software as part of widespread artificial intelligence trials, new documents reveal. Wired: The image recognition system was used to predict travelers' age, gender, and potential emotions -- with the suggestion that the data could be used in advertising systems in the future. During the past two years, eight train stations around the UK -- including large stations such as London's Euston and Waterloo, Manchester Piccadilly, and other smaller stations -- have tested AI surveillance technology with CCTV cameras with the aim of alerting staff to safety incidents and potentially reducing certain types of crime.

The extensive trials, overseen by rail infrastructure body Network Rail, have used object recognition -- a type of machine learning that can identify items in videofeeds -- to detect people trespassing on tracks, monitor and predict platform overcrowding, identify antisocial behavior ("running, shouting, skateboarding, smoking"), and spot potential bike thieves. Separate trials have used wireless sensors to detect slippery floors, full bins, and drains that may overflow. The scope of the AI trials, elements of which have previously been reported, was revealed in a cache of documents obtained in response to a freedom of information request by civil liberties group Big Brother Watch. "The rollout and normalization of AI surveillance in these public spaces, without much consultation and conversation, is quite a concerning step," says Jake Hurfurt, the head of research and investigations at the group.