Brendan Sasso

The Obama Administration's decision to bring criminal charges against members of the Chinese military is already showing signs of straining the US relationship with China.

Shortly after the Justice Department accused five Chinese officers of hacking US companies, China announced that it is withdrawing from a joint cybersecurity working group.

The US and China launched the working group to try to reach agreements over the use of cyber espionage. Qin Gang, a spokesman for the Chinese government, said China will announce more retaliations "as the situation evolves."

According to the indictments, the five men were members of a hacking group that stole trade secrets from major US companies including Westinghouse, United States Steel, and Alcoa.

Mozilla is urging the Federal Communications Commission to enact new rules to bar Internet service providers from charging websites for faster service.

In a filing with the FCC, the nonprofit foundation that makes the Firefox Web browser outlined a new legal path to enact tough network-neutrality regulations. Chris Riley, a senior policy engineer for Mozilla, said the group's proposal is "grounded in a modern understanding of technology and markets" and would "help ensure that the Internet continues to be an innovative and open platform."

The filing introduces a new angle to the debate over regulation of Internet access, but it's unclear how interested the FCC will be in Mozilla's proposal. The FCC would classify Internet access as a Title II telecommunications service but only for the relationship between websites and ISPs, not the relationship between consumers and ISPs, the group said. T

he proposal would allow the FCC to bar ISPs from charging websites for fast lanes while still using the current light regulatory regime for other Internet issues that affect consumers, the group said. Mozilla argued that its proposal is not "reclassification" because the FCC has never explicitly defined the relationship between ISPs and Web companies.

"With our proposal, the FCC would be able to shift its attention away from authority questions once and for all, and focus instead on adopting clear rules prohibiting blocking and discrimination online," Riley wrote.

Sen Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) urged the Federal Communications Commission to enact strong network neutrality rules to ensure that all websites receive equal service.

"Reports that the FCC may gut net neutrality are disturbing, and would be just one more way the playing field is tilted for the rich and powerful who have already made it," she wrote. "Our regulators already have all the tools they need to protect a free and open Internet -- where a handful of companies cannot block or filter or charge access fees for what we do online. They should stand up and use them."

Bolstering the nation’s defenses against hackers has been one of the Obama Administration’s top goals.

Officials have warned for years that a sophisticated cyberattack could cripple critical infrastructure or allow thieves to make off with the financial information of millions of Americans.

President Barack Obama pushed Congress to enact cybersecurity legislation, and when it didn’t, he issued his own executive order in 2013. But critics argue that the National Security Agency has actually undermined cybersecurity and made the United States more vulnerable to hackers.

At its core, the problem is the NSA’s dual mission. On one hand, the agency is tasked with securing US networks and information. On the other hand, the agency must gather intelligence on foreign threats to national security.

Collecting intelligence often means hacking encrypted communications. So in many ways, strong Internet security actually makes the NSA’s job harder. “This is an administration that is a vigorous defender of surveillance,” said Christopher Soghoian, the head technologist for the American Civil Liberties Union. “Surveillance at the scale they want requires insecurity.”

Consumer-advocacy groups and liberal lawmakers are going ballistic over news that the Federal Communications Commission plans to advance watered-down network neutrality rules.

The new regulations would allow Internet service providers to charge websites for special "fast lanes" in at least some cases. But the truth is that the FCC is boxed into a corner without many good options. Commission officials argue the stronger rules that advocates want probably wouldn't survive in court.

Consumer groups have a simple solution for the FCC's dilemma: reclassify broadband providers as common carriers. That move would likely allow the FCC to just reinstate the old rules and ban websites from paying for faster service. But reclassification has much bigger implications than just net neutrality.

The FCC would be applying a massive regulatory regime currently used for phone companies on broadband providers. It's debatable whether it's a politically viable option. Congressional Republicans and business groups would launch an all-out war, warning the FCC could kill the Internet economy.

Reclassification could derail the other items on Chairman Wheeler's agenda, such as an auction of airwave licenses, a network technology transition, and the president's proposal to improve Internet access in schools. But consumer groups argue that protecting an open Internet is worth the fight.

For some period of time, Google knew about a critical flaw in Internet security and didn't alert anyone in the government.

Neel Mehta, a Google engineer, first discovered "Heartbleed" -- a bug that undermines the widely used encryption technology OpenSSL -- sometime in March. A team at the Finnish security firm Codenomicon discovered the flaw around the same time. Google was able to patch most of its services -- such as email, search, and YouTube -- before the companies publicized the bug on April 7.

Google is getting nervous. On the one hand, the Internet behemoth wants the public to know it’s outraged by US surveillance programs and is aggressively lobbying for new rules to keep its customers’ data safe from the government’s prying eyes. But as public attention turns to data privacy, Google, Facebook, Yahoo, and other tech giants want to be sure that their own data-gathering practices don’t get lumped in with the federal spying programs that are the target of popular ire.

At the top of their worry list: The White House is holding the two up side-by-side. In President Barack Obama’s speech in January outlining National Security Agency reforms, he also ordered a John Podesta-led review of “big data,” the collection and storage of massive amounts of personal information -- including by private companies. The implicit message from the White House is that while the public has raised legitimate privacy concerns about NSA spying, similar data-mining practices by private companies shouldn’t escape scrutiny.

So when White House officials invited outside input from the public on the “big data” review, the tech world’s loudest voices were more than happy to offer an earful. The companies’ oft-repeated message to the administration: Don’t conflate your spying practices with our data-privacy plans.

The Federal Trade Commission has the power to sue companies that fail to protect their customers' data, a federal court in New Jersey said.

The ruling shoots down a challenge from Wyndham Hotels, which argued that the FTC overstepped its authority with a 2012 lawsuit against the global hotel chain. The decision by US District Court Judge Esther Salas is a major win for the agency. If the court had sided with Wyndham, it would have stripped the federal government of oversight of data security practices just as hackers begin to pull off more and more high-profile attacks.

Judge Salas said her decision "does not give the FTC a blank check to sustain a lawsuit against every business that has been hacked," but that she must follow the "binding and persuasive precedent" to uphold the agency's authority. The FTC is currently investigating Target over the massive hack that exposed information on 40 million credit cards.

One of the top supporters of the National Security Agency is now calling for an end to the agency's controversial practice of collecting data on millions of US phone calls.

Under the proposal from Rep Dutch Ruppersberger (D-MD), the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, the phone companies, not the NSA, would hold the phone data. NSA analysts could access the records only if they first obtain an order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

His proposal would not impose any mandate on the phone companies to maintain the data -- an idea that would face fierce resistance from civil-liberties groups and the phone companies themselves. Rep Ruppersberger argued that a new data-retention mandate is unnecessary because the Federal Communications Commission already requires phone companies to maintain their records for 18 months in case there are disputes over billing.