Dustin Volz

The Federal Bureau of Investigation did not exhaust possible solutions to unlock an iPhone connected to a gunman involved in a late-2015 shooting spree before seeking a court order to compel Apple to help access the device, a US Justice Department internal watchdog said. The conclusion may pose challenges for the Trump Administration in possible future litigation to force companies to help crack into encrypted devices.

Supreme Court justices wrestled with Microsoft’s dispute with the US Justice Department over whether prosecutors can force technology companies to hand over data stored overseas, with some signaling support for the government and others urging Congress to pass a law to resolve the issue. Microsoft argues that laws have not caught up to modern computing infrastructure and it should not hand over data stored internationally. The Justice Department argues that refusing to turn over easily accessible data impedes criminal investigations.

The House Judiciary Committee asked the Trump Administration to disclose an estimate of the number of Americans whose digital communications are incidentally collected under foreign surveillance programs. Such an estimate is "crucial as we contemplate reauthorization," of parts of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that are due to expire at the end of 2017, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) and Ranking Member John Conyers (D-MI) wrote in a letter addressed to Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats. The request comes as some Republican lawmakers, many of whom have stridently defended US surveillance programs in the past, express sudden interest in considering additional privacy safeguards to how US spy agencies collect and share intelligence that contains information about Americans.

Nearly 80 rights groups accused Facebook of "racially biased censorship" and failing to be more transparent about its removal policies and cooperation with law enforcement, adding to criticism the company has faced in recent months over its management of content on its network of 1.8 billion users. The sharp rebuke, sent in response to a December letter from Facebook Senior Vice President Joel Kaplan, reflected increasing impatience among advocacy groups that say Facebook has inadequately addressed their concerns despite repeated promises of action from senior executives.

Instead, the groups wrote, Kaplan's response "merely explains current, publicly available Facebook policies and fails to address the modest solutions to racially biased censorship we presented in earlier letters and meetings." SumOfUs, Center for Media Justice and the American Civil Liberties Union were among the signatories. In his letter, Kaplan acknowledged Facebook's community operations team "sometimes get things wrong" but said the company was committed to correcting mistakes and working with outside partners.

A last-ditch effort in the Senate to block or delay rule changes that would expand the US government's hacking powers failed Nov 30, despite concerns the changes would jeopardize the privacy rights of innocent Americans and risk possible abuse by the incoming administration of President-elect Donald Trump.

Sen Ron Wyden (D-OR) attempted three times to delay the changes, which will take effect Dec 1 and allow US judges will be able to issue search warrants that give the FBI the authority to remotely access computers in any jurisdiction, potentially even overseas. His efforts were blocked by Sen John Cornyn (R-TX), the Senate's second-ranking Republican. The changes will allow judges to issue warrants in cases when a suspect uses anonymizing technology to conceal the location of his or her computer or for an investigation into a network of hacked or infected computers, such as a botnet. In a speech from the Senate floor, Sen Wyden said that the changes to Rule 41 of the federal rules of criminal procedure amounted to "one of the biggest mistakes in surveillance policy in years."

A widely expected legal challenge has been filed by an Irish privacy advocacy group to an European Union-US commercial data transfer pact underpinning billions of dollars of trade in digital services just two months after it came into force. The EU-US Privacy Shield was agreed earlier in 2016 after the European Union's highest court struck down the previous Safe Harbour agreement over the transfer of Europeans' personal data to the United States, on concerns about intrusive US surveillance. The new agreement gives businesses moving personal data across the Atlantic - from human resources information to people's browsing histories to hotel bookings - an easy way to do so without falling foul of tough EU data transferral rules.

Digital Rights Ireland has challenged the adoption of the Privacy Shield pact by the EU executive in front of the second-highest EU court because it does not contain adequate privacy protections, apparently.

Nov's Senate election in Wisconsin could gain Silicon Valley a key ally in Washington in the high-tech industry's battle against the US government's growing appetite for more access to private data. Democrat Russ Feingold, 63, the only lawmaker to vote against the USA Patriot Act in 2001, leads incumbent Sen Ron Johnson (R-WI) in the state in opinion polls ahead of the Nov. 8 election.

Sen Johnson, 61, rode a wave of support from conservative Tea Party activists to victory six years ago, sweeping Feingold out of office. But polls in 2016 have consistently shown Feingold ahead, although recent surveys show a tighter race. Privacy advocates and former Feingold staffers said they expected Feingold, if returned to office, to be sympathetic to the privacy concerns of technology companies and civil liberties groups on issues such as encryption and domestic spying, at a time when many lawmakers are being pressured to confront security threats from Islamic State and other militant groups.

The FBI is investigating a cyberattack against another US Democratic Party group, which may be related to an earlier hack against the Democratic National Committee, apparently. The previously unreported incident at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, or DCCC, and its potential ties to Russian hackers are likely to heighten accusations, so far unproven, that Moscow is trying to meddle in the US presidential election campaign to help Republican nominee Donald Trump.

The Kremlin denied involvement in the DCCC cyber-attack. Hacking of the party's e-mails caused discord among Democrats at the party's convention in Philadelphia (PA) to nominate Hillary Clinton as its presidential candidate. The newly disclosed breach at the DCCC may have been intended to gather information about donors, rather than to steal money, apparently. It was not clear what data was exposed, although donors typically submit a variety of personal information including names, e-mail addresses and credit card details when making a contribution. It was also unclear if stolen information was used to hack into other systems. The DCCC raises money for Democrats running for seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. The intrusion at the group could have begun as recently as June.

You may be dead, but the United States government won't take you off its terrorist roster.

That's according to newly leaked internal guidelines from 2013 that reveal intimate details regarding the government's process for determining whether an individual should be designated as a possible terrorist suspect. So broad are their criteria that an individual is able to be placed onto a watch list -- and kept there -- even if he or she is acquitted of a terrorism-related crime.

Additionally, the guidelines note that a deceased person's name may stay on the list because such an identity could be used as an alias by a suspected terrorist.

Just when the National Security Agency looked as though it had finally scored a victory for its maligned surveillance programs, Edward Snowden again crashed the party.

The newest leak, reported by The Washington Post, claims that the vast majority of accounts scooped up in a foreign-intelligence program are not those of actual overseas targets but ordinary Internet users whose communications with those targets are incidentally collected. While revealing on its face, Snowden's latest revelation also arrived just days after the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, an independent watchdog agency, deemed spying under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act legal and effective.

Whether intentional or not, the timely Post article -- the culmination of a four-month investigation of 160,000 email and instant-message conversations -- serves in part as a rebuke to the privacy board's conclusions, civil-liberties groups say, and calls into question the completeness of its review, which stands in stark contrast to the board's critical review of the spying on domestic phone records under Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act.

"There definitely seem to be discrepancies" between the reports, said Liza Goitein, codirector of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. "It appears that, in the Snowden documents [American] information is collected deliberately in far broader circumstances than what the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board discussed."