ChatGPT under scrutiny as Florida investigates campus shooting

Chatbots don't kill people. But they can help others do so. On April 9, Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier announced that his office is investigating OpenAI over the role ChatGPT might have played in a deadly shooting at Florida State University, saying: "Subpoenas are coming." The campus...

FBI: Spike in Hacked Police Emails, Fake Subpoenas

The Federal Bureau of Investigation FBI is urging police departments and governments worldwide to beef up security around their email systems, citing a recent increase in cybercriminal services that use hacked police email accounts to send unauthorized subpoenas and customer data requests to...

Carnegie Mellon Says It Was Subpoenaed-And Not Paid-For Research On Breaking Tor

Carnegie Mellon University today implied in a statement that it was served with a subpoena to hand over research related to unmasking the identity of users on the Tor network, and that it was not paid $1 million by the FBI for doing so, as alleged by the Tor Project. The statement, released short...

Snapchat Publishes First Transparency Report

Snapchat has released its first transparency report, covering a four-month period from November through February, and the data shows that the company didn’t receive any National Security Letters and got fewer than 400 total requests for data from the United States government. Snapchat, a Californ...

Government Requests for Facebook User Data Increasing

Facebook’s latest transparency report shows that U.S law enforcement agencies issued a greater number of total requests for user data related to criminal investigations in the first six months of 2014 than they have over any previous such period. This report, per Justice Department reporting...

Dropbox Reports 80 Percent of Subpoenas Contain Gag Request

Most U.S. government subpoenas for data on Dropbox users are accompanied with a request not to inform the user in question. Dropbox legal counsel Bart Volkmer said those gag orders are repelled unless there is a valid court order. The revelation accompanied the release of the cloud storage...

Time Warner Cable Publishes First Transparency Report

Time Warner Cable has joined a half-dozen telecommunications and technology companies that, in the past six months, have published their first transparency report on government and law enforcement requests for user data and content. Since the Edward Snowden leaks began last June, transparency...

Comcast Transparency Report

Another day, another transparency report from a company trying to put some distance between itself and the United States’ broad surveillance apparatus. Today’s report comes from Comcast, the largest Internet service provider in the U.S., who “takes customer privacy very seriously, and holds it in...

Dropbox Publishes 2013 Transparency Report

Dropbox yesterday released a new set of principles that explain how it deals with government requests for customer data. The principles were a companion to its 2013 Transparency Report, which for the first time included National Security Letter requests made to the file hosting service. “We belie...

Verizon Releases First Transparency Report, Says Government Requests INcreasing

After months of public calls from privacy advocates and security experts, Verizon on Wednesday released its first transparency report, revealing that it received more than 164,000 subpoenas and between 1,000 and 2,000 National Security Letters in 2013. The report, which covers Verizon’s landline,...

Law Enforcement Requests Report: No Skype Data Turned Over

Microsoft’s report on compliance with law enforcement requests for data demonstrates a status quo for the software giant from the last reporting period. While the number of requests from law enforcement dropped worldwide in the first six months of 2013, Microsoft complied with 79 percent of...