The US Supreme Court is rejecting an appeal from a Yemeni man who has been held without charges at the US Navy's base in Cuba for more than 17 years. One justice says "it is past time" to examine the indefinite detention of foreigners at the Guantanamo Bay base. Detainee Moath Hamza Ahmed al-Alwi says he has been effectively consigned to life in prison after his capture in Pakistan and transfer to Guantanamo in January 2002. He says the high court needs to decide whether the 2001 congressional authorization to fight al-Qaeda and the Taliban following the September 11 attacks permits his ongoing detention.
Internet entrepreneur Kim Dotcom and three of his former colleagues on Monday took their fight against being extradited to the US to New Zealand's top court. The Supreme Court began hearing arguments in the seven-year-old case after Dotcom and the others lost several previous court rulings. What's going on with this case? While WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is fighting extradition to the US in British courts, Dotcom and his colleagues are facing life in prison for copyright violations. US authorities in 2012 shut down Dotcom's file-sharing website Megaupload and filed charges of conspiracy, racketeering and money laundering against Dotcom and his colleagues. The FBI claims Dotcom's site earned millions of dollars by facilitating illegal file-sharing. Megaupload was once one of the internet's most popular sites. US prosecutors say it raked in at least $175 million, mainly from people using it to illegally download songs, television shows and movies. What's going on here?
One of the key fears that critics of mass surveillance and the proliferation of facial recognition technology have warned about has been realized with new reporting Monday that a "malicious cyber attack" has resulted in photos of airport passengers and other personal data harvested by US Customs and Border Patrol being stolen by unknown actors. How dangerous of a problem is this? How concerned should you be?
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