Techno-politics

The social network Snapchat has hired lobbyists in Washington for the first time. Snapchat, which allows users to send photos and videos that disappear after a certain amount of time, has signed up with the powerhouse K Street firm Heather Podesta + Partners, according to a lobbying disclosure form filed Jan. 1. The lobbying firm Continue Reading →

More than 2.1 million people have enrolled in private health insurance plans through new federal and state websites since they were launched in October as part of President Barack Obama’s healthcare overhaul, U.S. officials said on Tuesday. While short of the 3.3 million enrollees that the Obama administration was hoping for by now, the number Continue Reading →

The government’s right to search travelers’ electronic devices at the border was upheld in a ruling released by a federal judge on Tuesday, which dismissed a lawsuit challenging this policy. In his opinion, Judge Edward R. Korman of the Federal District Court for the Eastern District of New York found that the plaintiffs did not Continue Reading →

The new drones are coming, and thanks to an FAA announcement on Monday morning, we now know exactly where they’ll be. After a 10-month study of possible sites, the FAA has announced six sites where researchers will have license to test the next generation of possible drones. It’s part of the FAA’s ongoing roadmap for Continue Reading →

Vermont and Massachusetts are taking steps to get their money back from CGI Federal, the government contractor that built the health insurance marketplaces in those states as well as the federal marketplace Healthcare.gov. State officials say CGI Federal delivered the websites late and with defects, reports the Boston Globe. The state marketplace, Vermont Health Connect, Continue Reading →

As a key part of a campaign to embed encryption software that it could crack into widely used computer products, the U.S. National Security Agency arranged a secret $10 million contract with RSA, one of the most influential firms in the computer security industry, Reuters has learned. Documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden Continue Reading →

The giants of the tech industry are uniting to wage a campaign for sweeping reforms to the National Security Agency. Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple, LinkedIn and AOL are setting aside their business rivalries to demand that Congress and President Obama scale back the government’s voracious surveillance. “[T]his summer’s revelations highlighted the urgent need Continue Reading →

The troubled mobile phone maker BlackBerry still has at least one very loyal customer: U.S. President Barack Obama. At a meeting with youth on Wednesday to promote his landmark healthcare law, Obama said he is not allowed to have Apple’s smart phone, the iPhone, for “security reasons,” though he still uses Apple’s tablet computer, the Continue Reading →

A federal court in California has again dismissed a class action lawsuit brought by Google users who claimed the search giant broke the law when it combined the privacy policies of Gmail, YouTube and a variety of other services. In a decision published Tuesday in San Jose, US Magistrate Judge Paul Grewal used frank language Continue Reading →

The National Security Agency is gathering nearly 5 billion records a day on the whereabouts of cellphones around the world, according to top-secret documents and interviews with U.S. intelligence officials, enabling the agency to track the movements of individuals — and map their relationships — in ways that would have been previously unimaginable. The records Continue Reading →