Dear Apple, Google, Microsoft, AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, Verizon, app makers, Congress and President Obama (or current resident):

Enough! We, the smartphone-using people of the United States, are being taken advantage of, stolen from and blackmailed. It’s got to stop.

The smartphones we carry have four ways to know where we are: GPS, Wi-Fi proximity, cell-tower triangulation and user check-in via services like FourSquare.

This “location data” — information that the phone gathers about where the phone is at any given time — has monetary value, as well as priceless social value.

In other words, there’s money to be made from knowledge about where each of us is at any given moment. A lot of money. That data can be converted into contextual advertising revenue, used to create compelling new services or improve the value of existing products.

As a society, we have not fully vetted this issue. The question over who owns this data has not been resolved.

In the absence of this conversation, various companies have rushed into the void to stake their claims. Each of them asserts the right to capture, transmit, own, use, manipulate, sell or otherwise monetize what is not rightly theirs: my location, and the location of every smartphone user.

Apple has been storing general location data in an unencrypted file on iPhones. The company said the long-term storage of that data was a mistake that it has now fixed. Apple also said it plans to use phone location data to build a traffic service. By pooling information about the speed of drivers, the system the company envisions could detect traffic jams.    [FULL  STORY]

Neither agency would disclose further details about the arrests. But they did not relate to “any known immediate threat to the public or active plot against the United States,” said Rebekah Carmichael, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney’s office in Newark, New Jersey.

The airport was not at risk, the FBI said.    more …

ABC-TV News
June 5, 2010
By JOEL SIEGEL and JOHN QUINONES

Joran van der Sloot, the lone suspect in the disappearance of Alabama teen Natalee Holloway in Aruba , faces an “extremely rude awakening” in Peru, where he has just been jailed as a suspect in the murder of a young Peruvian woman, a top international lawyer said today.
The 22-year-old once again is suspected of murder.

“The conditions of incarceration at best will be overcrowded and uncomfortable, and more likely can be described as deplorable and intolerable,” said Philadelphia-based defense attorney Theodore Simon, whose clients have included Ira Einhorn, who was extyradited from France to face murder charges; Alain Robert , the “French Spiderman” known for climbing skyscrapers; fight promoter Don King and Robert Durst, the heir to the New York real estate fortune.

“The most basic requirements will be in question — and the basic services,” he said. “So I think it’s going to be an incredible shock to his system, the circumstances of his incarceration.”    more …

msnbc.com
By Michael Inbar
TODAYshow.com contributor
updated 3:18 p.m. ET, Mon., May 24, 2010

The doctor who suggested a possible link between childhood vaccines and autism stands by his theory and said on Monday that he will continue his research despite having his medical license revoked Monday.

In a TODAY exclusive, Dr. Andrew Wakefield, the most famous face behind the movement of those who believe autism is linked to the vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella (MMR), remains convinced that he is on the right side of the facts, and says he will not be silenced — even after England’s General Medical Council yanked his license to practice medicine.

“This is a little bump on the road, and that’s how it should be perceived,” Wakefield told Matt Lauer live on TODAY Monday. “It’s a bump on a very bumpy road, but it’s a bump. What it does not detract from is the fact that there are millions of children out there suffering, and the fact that the vaccines cause autism.”
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The MMR vaccine has been in use since 1971 and has been administered to some 500 million people in 60 countries, including the U.S. Wakefield ignited a firestorm of controversy surrounding MMR when, in 1998, he published a study in the medical journal The Lancet claiming he unearthed eight cases of families reporting autism symptoms appearing within days of their children receiving the inoculation.    more …

ABC News
Jan. 2, 2010

Martha Jean Lambert vanished near her St. Augustine home on Nov. 27, 1985. Her mother, Margaret Pichon, says she remains convinced that the 12-year-old girl was kidnapped.

However, the St. Johns County Sheriff’s Office said Friday that Pichon’s son David Lambert has confessed to accidentally killing his sister in an argument.

Sgt. Chuck Mulligan said Lambert told police that he panicked and buried the girl in a shallow grave. Lambert was 15 at the time.

The State Attorney’s Office decided not charge Lambert with manslaughter after prosecutors considered his age at the time, the statute of limitations manslaughter charges had in 1985 and “other mitigating circumstances,” Mulligan said.

Investigators had considered Lambert a suspect, but they had no evidence nor a confession until sheriff’s detectives Sean Tice and Howard Cole III reopened the case in June.     more …

“We believe this provision is constitutionally flawed,” South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster and the 12 other attorneys general wrote in the letter to be sent Wednesday night to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

“As chief legal officers of our states we are contemplating a legal challenge to this provision and we ask you to take action to render this challenge unnecessary by striking that provision,” they wrote.

In a rare Christmas Eve vote, Senate Democrats pushed sweeping health care legislation to the brink of Senate passage, crushing a year-end Republican filibuster against President Obama’s call to remake the nation’s health care system. The 60-39 vote marked the third time in as many days Democrats posted a supermajority needed to advance the legislation.

Last week, McMaster said he was leading several other attorneys general in an inquiry into the constitutionality of the estimated $100 million deal he has dubbed the “Cornhusker Kickback.”    more …

One former Goldman salesman wrote a novel about the crisis. A Deutsche Bank trader passed out T-shirts for investors hoping to profit on a housing bust.

Mr. Egol, a Princeton graduate, had risen to prominence inside the bank by creating mortgage-related securities, named Abacus, that were at first intended to protect Goldman from investment losses if the housing market collapsed. As the market soured, Goldman created even more of these securities, enabling it to pocket huge profits.  Goldman’s own clients who bought them, however, were less fortunate.

Pension funds and insurance companies lost billions of dollars on securities that they believed were solid investments, according to former Goldman employees with direct knowledge of the deals who asked not to be identified because they have confidentiality agreements with the firm.    more …

msnbc.com
December 22, 2009

WAUKESHA, Wis. – A Wisconsin teenager who blackmailed dozens of fellow high school students into sex acts by using photos and videos obtained in a Facebook scam faces up to 50 years in prison after pleading no contest to two felonies Tuesday.

Anthony R. Stancl, 19, of New Berlin, had faced 12 charges that carried a maximum penalty of nearly 300 years.

He pleaded no contest to repeated sexual assault of the same child and third-degree sexual assault. In exchange, prosecutors dismissed charges that included second-degree sexual assault, child enticement and possession of child pornography.     more …

Chester Johnson said his son made the drawing on Dec. 2 after his second-grade teacher in Taunton, Mass., asked children to sketch something that reminded them of the holiday. The assignment came just days after the family had visited the holiday lights display at the National Shrine of Our Lady of La Salette in Attleboro, Mass., where Johnson said his son seemed taken with the religious statues he saw there — especially a depiction of Jesus’ crucifixion.

“That’s what he drew,” Johnson said. “He liked that. That drew his eye.”

Johnson, who works at the school as a janitor on a per diem basis, said administrators were concerned the boy drew Xs for Jesus’ eyes, and particularly worried when his son said he’d drawn himself on the cross after officials pressed him about who he’d drawn.

Johnson said his son might have been worried about getting in trouble if he said he drew Jesus. “If he said it was him, it was more like a cartoon,” Johnson said.

Superintendent Julie Hackett said she could not discuss an individual student and did not address the drawing specifically or the teacher’s reaction to it, but did say the school has safety protocols in place that were followed.    more …

Washington Post
December 15, 2009
By Robert Barnes

The Supreme Court will decide whether employees have a reasonable expectation of privacy for the text messages they send on devices owned by their employers.

The case the court accepted Monday involves public employees, but a broadly written decision could hold a blueprint for private-workplace rules in a world in which communication via computers, e-mail and text messages plays a very large role.

A federal appeals court in California decided that a police officer in the city of Ontario had a right to privacy regarding the texts he sent on his department-issued pager, even though his chief discovered that some of them were sexually explicit messages to his girlfriend. That court said the chief’s decision to read the messages without a suspicion of wrongdoing on the part of the officer violated Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches.    more …