jfruh writes: The FCC’s Lifeline program subsidizes phone service for very poor Americans; it gained notoriety under the label “Obamaphone, ” even though the program started under Reagan and was extended to cell phones under Clinton. Now the FCC is proposing that the program, which is funded by a fee on telecom providers, be extended to broadband, on the logic that high-speed internet is as necessary today as telephone service was a generation ago. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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FCC Proposes To Extend So-Called "Obamaphone" Program To Broadband
Lashdots writes: A lawyers’ group has called for greater oversight of a government program that gives state and federal law enforcement officials access to metadata from private communications for criminal investigations and national security purposes. But it’s not digital: this warrantless surveillance is conducted on regular mail. “The mail cover has been in use, in some form, since the 1800s, ” Chief Postal Inspector Guy J. Cottrell told Congress in November. The program targets a range of criminal activity including fraud, pornography, and terrorism, but, he said, “today, the most common use of this tool is related to investigations to rid the mail of illegal drugs and illegal drug proceeds.” Recent revelations that the U.S. Postal Service photographs the front and back of all mail sent through the U.S., ostensibly for sorting purposes, has, Fast Company reports, brought new scrutiny—and new legal responses—to this obscure program. Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
Two former federal agents have been charged for stealing money while working on the investigation into the Silk Road, the infamous online drug marketplace that was seized in 2013. Read more… 
An anonymous reader writes: During the past two days, popular code hosting site GitHub has been under a DDoS attack, which has led to intermittent service interruptions. As blogger Anthr@X reports from traceroute lists, the attack originated from MITM-modified JavaScript files for the Chinese company Baidu’s user tracking code, changing the unencrypted content as it passed through the great firewall of China to request the URLs github.com/greatfire/ and github.com/cn-nytimes/. The Chinese government’s dislike of widespread VPN usage may have caused it to arrange the attack, where only people accessing Baidu’s services from outside the firewall would contribute to the DDoS. This wouldn’t have been the first time China arranged this kind of “protest.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.