#BREAKING #NEWS #FBI Says No Warrant Needed to Spy on CELL PHONES

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by David Kravets - Jan 5 2015, 1:25pm CST

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Tim Parkinson

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is taking the position that court warrants are not required when deploying cell-site simulators in public places. Nicknamed "stingrays," the devices are decoy cell towers that capture locations and identities of mobile phone users and can intercept calls and texts.

The FBI made its position known during private briefings with staff members of Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa). In response, the two lawmakers wrote Attorney General Eric Holder and Homeland Security chief Jeh Johnson, maintaining they were "concerned about whether the FBI and other law enforcement agencies have adequately considered the privacy interests" of Americans.

According to the letter, which was released last week:

For example, we understand that the FBI’s new policy requires FBI agents to obtain a search warrant whenever a cell-site simulator is used as part of a FBI investigation or operation, unless one of several exceptions apply, including (among others): (1) cases that pose an imminent danger to public safety, (2) cases that involve a fugitive, or (3) cases in which the technology is used in public places or other locations at which the FBI deems there is no reasonable expectation of privacy.

http://goo.gl/IlSwqz

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Is Google As Good As It Gets?

Analysts say the search engine may be weak in mobile–and that's a big deal.

Marlisse Silver Sweeney, Law Technology News

April 18, 2014    |0 Comments

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Hold onto your Boolean operators—it’s a big claim. A recent article by Jim Edwards in Business Insider explored whether the Internet search engine provider Google Inc. is really as good as it gets.

“Search, as a business, is becoming a lot more complicated, with a lot more players, and a lot more stuff to be searched,” he said. Edwards explained that social media, along with music and apps have confused the once-simple search principles of going onto the site and typing what you want into a box on the screen. “We may be entering an era in which keyword-matching and link-ranking aren’t good enough anymore,” he said.

Edwards said it may actually be startups who are posed to takeover where the behemoth fails. He said it “isn’t about your mom sitting with her laptop typing 'new shoes' into a text box. It’s about her daughter, who wants her phone to automatically surface relevant new material even before she asks for it.” Oh Siri?

Read more: http://www.lawtechnologynews.com/id=1397829864056/Is-Google-As-Good-As-It-Gets%3F#ixzz2zLZW53m2

Google Wants To Build The Ultimate Personal Assistant

Posted 21 hours ago by Frederic Lardinois (@fredericl)

Google Search is changing rapidly. Given the company’s love of small, rapid-fire updates, its sometimes hard to keep track of where the company is going, but earlier this month, at the LeWeb conference in Paris, Google Engineering Director Scott Huffman presented a pretty compelling overview of the direction Google is taking in search.

Here’s the gist of it: Google knows our expectations of what a search engine should be able to do is quickly changing. The old “ten blue links” search results page is quickly going away for something far smarter that, according to Huffman, will resemble a personal assistant more than the search tool Google that launched over fifteen years ago. Indeed, that’s what Huffman considers Google’s goal: creating the ultimate personal assistant. The next generation of search, he said, is all about making “all your tasks as you go through the day simpler and quicker.”

http://techcrunch.com/2013/12/25/google-wants-to-build-the-ultimate-personal-assistant/?utm_campaign=sfgplus&%3Fncid=sfgplus