Andrew Blake

Social media surveillance at center of Fresno anti-crime tool

California police are using high-tech surveillance software to quickly determine a person's threat level based off of public records and social media posts before an officer is ever dispatched to a crime scene.

January 12, 2016

Guantanamo Bay detainees dwindle to 103 with fourth transfer since start of the year

The Pentagon has repatriated a Guantanamo Bay detainee to Saudi Arabia, lowering the number of prisoners held at the facility to 103 as President Obama prepares to push for further transfers during his final year in office.

January 11, 2016

Chris Correa, ex-Cardinals exec, pleads guilty to hacking Astros database

Former St. Louis Cardinals scouting director Chris Correa pleaded guilty on Friday to five counts of computer hacking and admitted he repeatedly accessed another professional baseball team's proprietary database without authorization.

January 11, 2016

Jenchesky Santiago, ex-P.G. County cop, gets 5 years for pointing gun at man

A former Prince George's County, Maryland, police officer, was sentenced to five years in prison without parole Friday after being caught on camera holding a gun to the head of a Bowie man who had been trying to enter his own home.

January 11, 2016

Chuck Schumer: NRA hypocritical to oppose Obama’s gun plan

Sen. Charles Schumer, New York Democrat, said the National Rifle Association "should put its money where its mouth is" and support President Obama's effort to enforce gun control laws.

January 11, 2016

Coca-Cola apologizes for including Crimea as part of Russia

Coca-Cola has apologized to Ukraine after the soft-drink giant shared a map on social media that showed Crimea as part of Russia, seemingly accepting Moscow's 2014 annexation of the peninsula which has largely gone unrecognized in the West.

January 8, 2016

White House, Silicon Valley executives meet to tackle online terrorism

Silicon Valley executives are slated to meet with senior Obama administration officials on Friday to discuss social media and its role in spreading the ideologies of terror groups such as the Islamic State.

January 8, 2016

NSA ‘confident’ in intel-gathering authorities despite reforms

The National Security Agency's top lawyer said Thursday that he's "confident" of the agency's current intelligence-gathering capabilities despite concerns that recent reforms may have hindered its ability to gather evidence against terror suspects.

January 8, 2016

Motorhead to livestream frontman Lemmy’s funeral on Saturday

Funeral services for Ian Kilmister, the British rock star better known as Motorhead frontman Lemmy, will be broadcast live Saturday on YouTube, the band announced.

January 8, 2016

Pentagon to award ‘R’ pin to ‘remote’ troops, including drone pilots

Drone operators and so-called "cyber warriors" who wage the Pentagon's online offenses remotely will not be eligible to receive a specialized service medal, but they will get a pin for their work, the Department of Defense has decided.

January 7, 2016

U.S. officials look toward Russia while investigating cyberattack on Ukraine’s power grid - report

Intelligence officials in Washington have reportedly begun investigating claims that Russian hackers launched a cyberattack last month that targeted the electrical grid in neighboring Ukraine.

January 6, 2016

Deniss Calovskis, Latvian programmer, gets suspended sentence for role in creating ‘Gozi’ virus

A federal judge in Manhattan has handed down a suspended prison sentence to a Latvian computer program who faced nearly 70 years behind bars at one point for his role in creating the Gozi virus, a powerful computer worm that infected more than one million machines around the globe including ones used by NASA.

January 6, 2016

Police charge boy, 9, with making terror threat to N.Y. middle school

A 9-year-old boy from upstate New York has been charged with making a terrorist threat after he allegedly warned of violence in a phone call to his school over winter break.

January 6, 2016

FBI accused of hacking more than 1,000 computers during child porn probe

The FBI secretly took control of a child porn website early last year and began infecting visitors with malware to identify roughly 1,300 individuals who had allegedly logged-on using software designed to browse the Internet anonymously, a new report has revealed.

January 6, 2016

Drone owner files federal lawsuit after neighbor downs aircraft with a shotgun

A Kentucky man who had his $1,500 hobbyist drone shot out of the sky last year by an agitated neighbor has filed a federal lawsuit in hope of having the courts define the rights of aircraft operators versus property owners with respect to unmanned aerial vehicles.

January 6, 2016

U.K. paves the way for police drones

Police in the U.K. have agreed to begin using unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, for certain law enforcement operations, including burglaries, seizes, protests, search-and-rescue missions and other "high risk" incidents.

January 6, 2016

Ray Kelly’s emails deleted despite court order in lawsuit involving former NYPD commissioner

Attorneys for New York City told a federal judge that they can't produce all of the former top cop Ray Kelly's emails for federal prosecutors because an unknown number of them were inadvertently deleted when he retired in 2013.

January 5, 2016

Researchers reveal flaw affecting Comcast’s Xfinity Home Security system

Burglars can bypass home security systems sold by telecom titan Comcast by easily and affordably jamming the radio signals used to send messages between motion sensors, researchers revealed publicly this week.

January 5, 2016

Utah weighs gun-safety class for middle school students

Gun-safety courses could be offered to students as young as 13 in Utah if a state senator succeeds in adding a voluntary course to next year's curriculum.

January 5, 2016

Hawaii becomes first state to raise legal smoking age to 21

The last state to join the union has become the first to raise the legal smoking age to 21. As of Jan. 1, state law in effect across Hawaii prohibits anyone under the age of 21 from purchasing cigarettes, including both the traditional type and the increasingly ubiquitous e-cig.

January 5, 2016