Sam Bankman-Fried will be released on a $250 million bond package while he awaits trial on fraud charges related to the collapse of the FTX crypto exchange, a federal magistrate judge said on Thursday. From a report: Prosecutors have accused him of stealing billions of dollars in FTX customer funds to plug losses at his hedge fund, Alameda Research. Nicolas Roos, a prosecutor, told U.S. Magistrate Judge Gabriel Gorenstein that the bail package included home detention and location monitoring. Bankman-Fried will also have to surrender his passport. Bankman-Fried's defense counsel said he agreed with these conditions.

FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried will soon be in U.S. custody to face criminal charges connected to the collapse of the crypto exchange, after a judge here approved his transfer from a local jail where he has been held. From a report: Mr. Bankman-Fried agreed not to contest his extradition, and in court Wednesday his lawyer read an affidavit in which the former executive waived his right to extradition proceedings and said he had "a desire to make the relevant customers whole." When asked by Magistrate Judge Shaka Serville if the affidavit was his and represented his wishes, Mr. Bankman-Fried said, "Yes, I do wish to waive my right to formal extradition proceedings." He also told the judge he was healthy and doing well.

His lawyer, Jerone Roberts, said his client's reasons were clear. "It has always been his desire to put customers right," he said. Mr. Roberts said Mr. Bankman-Fried "is anxious to leave" and asked that he be transported to the U.S. on Wednesday. The former FTX chief executive has been in a jail in the Bahamas since his arrest last week on charges he stole billions of dollars from customers while misleading lenders and investors. Federal prosecutors in the U.S. attorney's office for the Southern District of New York have charged Mr. Bankman-Fried, 30 years old, with eight criminal counts, including fraud, conspiracy and money-laundering offenses. Alternative, non-paywalled source: The Block.

Karl Sebastian Greenwood, co-founder of sham "Bitcoin-killer" OneCoin, pleaded guilty in Manhattan federal court to charges of conspiring to defraud investors and to launder money. "Greenwood was arrested in Thailand in July 2018 and subsequently extradited to the US," reports The Register. "OneCoin's other co-founder, 'Cryptoqueen' Ruja Ignatova (Dr. Ruja Ignatova -- she has a law degree), remains a fugitive on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list and on Europol's Most Wanted list." From the report: "As a founder and leader of OneCoin, Karl Sebastian Greenwood operated one of the largest international fraud schemes ever perpetrated," said US Attorney Damian Williams in a statement. "Greenwood and his co-conspirators, including fugitive Ruja Ignatova, conned unsuspecting victims out of billions of dollars, claiming that OneCoin would be the 'Bitcoin killer.' In fact, OneCoins were entirely worthless." The US has charged at least nine individuals across four related cases, including Greenwood and Ignatova, with fraud charges related to OneCoin. Authorities in China have prosecuted 98 people accused of trying to sell OneCoin. Police in India arrested 18 for pitching the Ponzi scheme.

According to the Justice Department, Greenwood and Ignatova founded OneCoin in Sofia, Bulgaria, in 2014. Until 2017 or so, they're said to have marketed OneCoin as a cryptocurrency to investors. The OneCoin exchange was shut down in January 2017, but trades evidently continued among affiliated individuals for some time. The OneCoin.eu website remained online until 2019. In fact, OneCoin was a multi-level marketing (MLM) pyramid scheme in which network members received commissions when they managed to recruit people to buy OneCoin. The firm's own promotional materials claim more than three million people invested. And between Q4 2014 and Q4 2016, company records claim OneCoin generated more than $4.3 billion in revenue and $2.9 billion in purported profits. At the top of the MLM pyramid, Greenwood is said to have earned $21 million per month. Greenwood and others claimed that OneCoin was mined using computing power like BitCoin and recorded on a blockchain. But it wasn't. As Ignatova allegedly put it in an email to Greenwood, "We are not mining actually -- but telling people shit."

OneCoin's value, according to the Feds, was simply set by those managing the company -- they manipulated the OneCoin exchange to simulate trading volatility but the price of OneCoin always closed higher than it opened. In an August 1, 2015 email, Ignatova allegedly told Greenwood that one of the goals for the OneCoin trade exchange was "always close on a high price end of day open day with high price, build confidence -- better manipulation so they are happy." According to the Justice Department, the value assigned to OneCoin grew steadily from $0.53 to approximately $31.80 per coin and never declined.

Facebook parent Meta does not expect to seal its acquisition deal with Within Unlimited, maker of the popular fitness app "Supernatural", before Jan. 31, according to a court filing from Tuesday. From a report: Meta has agreed to push back the closing by one month or until the first day after the court rules on U.S. Federal Trade Commission's (FTC) preliminary injunction trial, according to the filing with the United States District Court for the Northern District Of California. In August, Meta had agreed not to close the deal until 11:59 p.m. on Dec. 31. The FTC had filed a lawsuit seeking to stop the deal in July, calling Facebook a "global technology behemoth," noting its ownership of popular apps including Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp, and said its "campaign to conquer VR (virtual reality)" began in 2014 when it acquired Oculus, a VR headset manufacturer.

Sam Bankman-Fried has now decided to agree to be extradited to the United States to face fraud charges, two of his lawyers said on Monday, just hours after one of them told a Bahamas judge the FTX founder wanted to see the U.S. indictment against him before consenting. Reuters reports: On Monday afternoon, Jerone Roberts, Bankman-Fried's criminal defense lawyer in The Bahamas, told media outlets including the New York Times that his client had agreed to be voluntarily extradited and that he hoped Bankman-Fried would be back in court later this week. "We as counsel will prepare the necessary documents to trigger the court," the Times quoted Roberts as saying. "Mr. Bankman-Fried wishes to put the customers right, and that is what has driven his decision."

Earlier in the day, Roberts said during a court hearing in Nassau that his client had seen an affidavit laying out the charges against him over FTX's dramatic collapse, but had not yet read the indictment filed last week in Manhattan federal court. After the hearing, Bankman-Fried was remanded back to the custody of the Bahamas' Department of Corrections. He departed the courthouse in a black van marked "Corrections," carrying a manila folder containing papers, a Reuters witness said.

Epic Games has agreed to pay $520 million to resolve Federal Trade Commission allegations that the "Fortnite" videogame developer violated online privacy protections for children and tricked players into making unintended purchases. From a report: The FTC said the agreement consisted of two record-breaking settlements that resolve a pair of civil complaints it was filing against Epic. One, filed in federal court, alleged the company violated the federal Children's Online Privacy Protection Act by collecting personal information from "Fortnite" players under the age of 13 without notifying their parents or obtaining verifiable parental consent.

That lawsuit also accused the company of illegally enabling real-time voice and text chat communications for children and teens in the game by default. Further, the FTC said Epic put those users at risk by connecting them with strangers, and as a result, some were "bullied, threatened, harassed and exposed to dangerous and psychologically traumatizing issues such as suicide." Epic will pay a $275 million civil penalty for the alleged COPPA violations, the FTC said, the largest assessed in the commission's enforcement of the privacy law. Epic didn't admit or deny the FTC's allegations as part of the settlements. The commission also said the company agreed to pay $245 million in consumer refunds to resolve the second complaint, which was filed in administrative court. It is the FTC's largest settlement that bars the use of so-called dark patterns, tactics that trap customers into paying for goods and services and create obstacles to canceling. The agency alleged that Epic deployed a variety of tactics to drive unintended purchases of virtual perks such as outfits and dance moves in "Fortnite," including the use of counterintuitive, inconsistent and confusing button configurations. "These tactics led to hundreds of millions of dollars in unauthorized charges for consumers," it said.

Slashdot reader lowvisioncomputing shares a story from the CBC about an elaborate heist discovered "when the chief administrative officer of a southwestern Manitoba rural municipality [population: 3,300] noticed the series of unusual cash withdrawals from its bank account...." It began with a job advertisement. A seemingly legitimate company, with a professional website and a Nova Scotia address, claimed it was looking for cash processors. The contract was for one month. Employees could work from home.

They were told they would receive payments to their credit cards, which they would be expected to move to their bank accounts. They would then withdraw the payments, convert them into bitcoin, and send that to another account.... The majority of the 18 people hired were young and lived in various communities across the country.... Anyone who did an internet search for the company would find a professional website, with information matching what was provided in the employment agreement.

In early December 2019, the cybercriminals sent a phishing email to multiple people at the municipal office of WestLake-Gladsone, a municipality about 150 kilometres west of Winnipeg, on the southwestern shore of Lake Manitoba. At least one person clicked on the link, which allowed the hackers to get into the municipality's computers and bank accounts. But weeks went by and nothing happened, so the municipality didn't report it to the police. It was only after the money disappeared that the municipality discovered the two incidents were connected, said Kate Halashewski, who at the time was the assistant chief administrative officer for the Municipality of WestLake-Gladstone....

Court documents say that on Dec. 19, 2019, a person logged into the municipality's bank account and changed the password, along with the personal verification questions. Over the next 17 days, the cyberattackers added the 18 "employees" hired as payees and began systematically making withdrawals, transferring the money to the employees' credit cards. Dozens of withdrawals were made, totalling $472,377, according to court documents — a considerable amount for a municipality with an entire annual budget of $7 million.

Those withdrawals weren't discovered until Jan. 6, when Halashewski saw 48 bank transfers — each less than $10,000 — going to unfamiliar accounts.... Once they'd completed the initial transfers and conversion, the bitcoin was then sent to the private account of the scammers — who cybersecurity experts say likely aren't in Canada....

The municipality finally announced it had lost nearly half a million dollars in an Oct. 12, 2020, news release.... No arrests have been made in connection with the WestLake-Gladstone cyberattack and RCMP say it is no longer under active investigation.

Long-time Slashdot reader wattersa is a lawyer in Redwood City, California, "and a Slashdot reader since 1998.

"I recently concluded a three-year missing person investigation that unfortunately turned into an overseas homicide in Taiwan. I was authorized by my client to publish the case study on my website, which is based on our recent court filings..." And yes, he writes that the case was solved with a subpoena to Google: I filed that case in late 2019 and then used the subpoena power to try to solve the disappearance, which seemed appropriate. We solved the case in late 2020 due to a fake "proof of life" email that the suspect sent from the victim's email account, which he sent from a hotel where he testified he was staying alone on the night of the disappearance — after (according to him) dropping off the victim at the local train station. The victim could not have sent the email from the other side of Taiwan, which is where the email indicated it was from.... The suspect in my case is a Tony Stark-level supergenius with a Ph.D. and dozens of patents, who works at a prominent engineering company in California. He is currently wanted in Taiwan.

The case was solved with a subpoena to Google for the login/logout history of the victim's Gmail account and the originating IP address of the proof of life email. Although Google does not include the originating IP address in the email headers, it turns out that they retain the IP address for some unknown length of time and we were able to get it. When it became clear that this case was a homicide, co-counsel and I dismissed the conservatorship case and filed a wrongful death case against the suspect in 2021.

We continue to gather information through subpoenas, depositions, and interviews, all of which show that the victim died in a 10-hour window on November 29, 2019. The wrongful death case goes to trial in late 2023 in Santa Clara County. This is a rare case in which the family can afford an expensive, lengthy, attorney-led private investigation.
The original submission includes additional details about a rarely used statute in California that allows conservatorship of a missing person's estate — and apparently grants subpoena power. And it was in response to such a subpoena that Google produced the originating IP address of that crucial proof of life email.

"This obscure statute in the Probate Code was instrumental in solving the case because we didn't have to wait for law enforcement to take action, and we were able to aggressively pursue our own leads. This gave the family a sense of agency and closure, as well as the obvious benefit of solving the disappearance. Also, Taiwan law enforcement could not do subpoenas from Taiwan, so we ended up contributing to their investigation to some extent as well."

Until 2020 Neustar was the domain name registry "for a number of top-level domains," according to its page on Wikipedia, "including .biz, .us (on behalf of United States Department of Commerce), .co, .nyc (on behalf of the city of New York), and .in.

But now U.S. Senator Ron Wyden has asked America's Federal Trade Commission to investigate whether Neustar violated the privacy rights of millions, reports the Washington Post, "when it sold records of where they went online to the federal government."

America's Department of Defense funded a research team at Georgia Tech who purchased Neustar's data starting in 2016, notes a letter from Senator Wyden. Wyden has obtained emails between those researchers and "both the FBI and the Department of Justice, indicating that government officials asked the researchers to run specific queries and that the researchers wrote affidavits and reports for the government describing their findings."

But in addition, Wyden now cites a Department of Justice statement (entered an unrelated court case) which he says makes a concerning assertion: that Neustar executive Rodney Joffe, "who led the company's efforts to sell data to Georgia Tech, was also involved in the sale of DNS data directly to the U.S. government. The court documents say: Rodney Joffe and certain companies with which he was affiliated, including officers and employees of those companies, have provided assistance to and received payment from multiple agencies of the United States government. This has included assistance to the United States intelligence community and law enforcement agencies on cyber security matters. Certain of those companies have maintained contracts with the United States government resulting in payment by the United States of tens of millions of dollars for the provision of, among other things, Domain Name System ('DNS') data. These contracts included classified contracts that required company personnel to maintain security clearances.
From The Washington Post: The stipulation naming entrepreneur Rodney Joffe was the clearest confirmation to date of web histories being sold directly to federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies, instead of through information brokers exempt from restrictions on what telephone companies and websites can share with the government.
Wyden adds: The data that Neustar sold to Georgia Tech may have also included data collected from consumers who were explicitly promised that their data would not be sold to third parties. Between 2018 and 2020, Neustar acquired a competing recursive DNS service, which had previously been operated by Verisign. That service had been advertised to the public by Verisign with unqualified promises that "your public DNS data will not be sold to third parties."

When the product changed hands, users of Verisign's service were seamlessly transitioned to DNS servers that Neustar controlled. This meant that Neustar now received information about the websites accessed by these former Verisign-users, even though neither Verisign nor Neustar provided those users with meaningful, effective notice that the change of ownership had taken place, or that Neustar did not intend to honor the privacy promises that Verisign had previously made to those users. It is unclear if the data Neustar sold to Georgia Tech included data from users who had been promised by Verisign that their data would not be sold.

This is because both Neustar and Verisign have refused to answer questions from my office necessary to determine this important detail.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: Residents of The Dalles, Oregon, are learning how much of their water Google's data centers have been using to cool the computers inside the cavernous buildings -- information that previously was deemed a trade secret. A lawsuit by the city on behalf of Google -- against Oregon's biggest newspaper, The Oregonian/OregonLive -- that sought to keep the water-use information confidential was dropped, the newspaper reported Thursday. City officials abandoned the 13-month legal fight and committed to release the company's water consumption in future years.

In an email, Google confirmed Thursday that its water use numbers would no longer be a trade secret. "It is one example of the importance of transparency, which we are aiming to increase ... which includes site-level water usage numbers for all our U.S. data center sites, including The Dalles," Google spokesperson Devon Smiley said. Google says (PDF) its data centers in the Oregon town consumed 274.5 million gallons (1 billion liters) of water last year. In a Nov. 21 blog posting, Google said that all of its global data centers consumed approximately 4.3 billion gallons (16.3 billion liters) of water in 2021, which it said is comparable to the water needed to irrigate and maintain 29 golf courses in the southwest U.S. each year. The Dalles Mayor Richard Mays said Google had previously insisted its water usage was a trade secret because the company was concerned about competitors knowing how it cools its servers, but then changed its position and agreed to release the water records. "That's why we backed off (the lawsuit)," Mays told The Oregonian/OregonLive.

The Oregonian/OregonLive, which had requested Google's records last year, said the case represents a major test of Oregon public records law. "This seemed to be a perfect example of a clash of two important storylines, both the expansion of big businesses and the public resource that they need to use," Therese Bottomly, editor of The Oregonian/OregonLive, was quoted as saying.

A raft of lawsuits from the games industry seeks to crack down on cheating in some popular online games, arguing that making cheats for games and even using them might be illegal. From a report: Cheating is a scourge of many online games, inspiring increasingly bold legal counteroffensives by some of the companies who make them. Those lawsuits are largely aimed against makers of cheat software, but they don't let players who use the cheats fully off the hook.Cheat-makers "induce and enable individual Destiny 2 players to create an unauthorized and infringing derivative work each time they deploy the cheat software," states one lawsuit from Sony-owned Bungie Studios that's still winding its way through the courts.

The kinds of cheats in play aren't the ones old-school gamers might have applied by inputting a developer-programmed invincibility code. Rather, they involve premium cheats that let players see through walls to get an advantage in multiplayer combat games such as Destiny 2 or Call of Duty. Game companies, many of which are banning tens and hundreds of thousands of accounts, say cheating scares off honest players and is costly to fight. Bungie estimated in one suit that it spends "roughly $1,250,000 per year on its anti-cheating measures," not including legal costs.

Trade groups that represent Meta and Alphabet's Google said they asked the US Supreme Court to overturn a Texas law that would sharply restrict the editorial discretion of social media companies. From a report: The appeal by NetChoice and the Computer & Communications Industry Association contends the Texas law violates the First Amendment by forcing social media companies to disseminate what they see as harmful speech and putting platforms at risk of being overrun by spam and bullying. The law "would wreak havoc by requiring transformational change to websites' operations," the groups argued. The New Orleans-based 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the law in September but left the measure on hold to allow time for an appeal to the Supreme Court.

The Texas law bars social media platforms with more than 50 million users from discriminating on the basis of viewpoint. Texas Governor Greg Abbott and other Republicans say the law is needed to protect conservative voices from being silenced. The appeal adds a new layer to a Supreme Court term that could reshape the legal rules for online content. The justices are already considering opening social media companies to lawsuits over the targeted recommendations they make to users.

Federal prosecutors have charged six people for allegedly operating websites that launched millions of powerful distributed denial-of-service attacks on a wide array of victims on behalf of millions of paying customers. From a report: The sites promoted themselves as booter or stressor services designed to test the bandwidth and performance of customers' networks. Prosecutors said in court papers that the services were used to direct massive amounts of junk traffic at third-party websites and Internet connections customers wanted to take down or seriously constrain. Victims included educational institutions, government agencies, gaming platforms, and millions of individuals. Besides charging six defendants, prosecutors also seized 48 Internet domains associated with the services.

"These booter services allow anyone to launch cyberattacks that harm individual victims and compromise everyone's ability to access the Internet," Martin Estrada, US attorney for the Central District of California, said in a statement. "This week's sweeping law enforcement activity is a major step in our ongoing efforts to eradicate criminal conduct that threatens the Internet's infrastructure and our ability to function in a digital world." The services offered user interfaces that were essentially the same except for cosmetic differences. The screenshot below shows the web panel offered by orphicsecurityteam.com as of February 28. It allowed users to enter an IP address of a target, the network port, and the specific type of attack they wanted. The panel allowed users to pick various methods to amplify their attacks. Amplification involved bouncing a relatively small amount of specially crafted data at a third-party server in a way that caused the server to pummel the intended victim with payloads that were as much as 10,000 times bigger.

The US seized dozens of internet domains and charged six people in a sting intended to bring down a network of cyberattack-for-hire services, the Department of Justice announced on Wednesday. Bloomberg reports: In all, the US obtained a court order to seize 48 websites, and six people were criminally charged in relation to the takedowns, according to federal prosecutors. The FBI was in the process of seizing the websites, officials said Wednesday. The websites were used to launch, or attempt to launch, millions of so-called DDoS attacks around the world, the DOJ said in a statement. Short for distributed-denial-of- service, DDoS attacks direct huge amounts of junk internet traffic at a website or computer network to knock it offline.

DDoS-for-hire services often refer to themselves as "stresser" or "booter" tools that purport to offer a way for individuals to test the resilience of websites and services they operate, according to cybersecurity experts. In reality, the services are often used for harassment, extortion and criminal mischief, they say. The sites seized by the FBI include royalstresser, securityteam and dragonstresser, among others.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday asked the Biden administration to weigh in on song-lyric website Genius' attempt to revive a lawsuit over Google's alleged theft of its work. From a report: The justices are considering whether to hear ML Genius Holdings LLC's bid to overturn a U.S. appeals court's ruling that its case against Google LLC was preempted by federal copyright law. The Supreme Court often asks for the solicitor general's input on cases in which the U.S. government may have an interest.

Genius, formerly known as Rap Genius, keeps a database of song lyrics and annotations maintained by volunteers. It sued Google and its partner LyricFind in New York state court in 2019 for allegedly posting its lyric transcriptions at the top of Google search results without permission. Genius argued Google violated its terms of service by stealing its work and reposting it on Google webpages, decreasing traffic to Genius' site. The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in March affirmed a decision to dismiss the case, finding Genius' breach-of-contract claims were based on copyright concerns and should have been brought under copyright law.

Longtime Slashdot reader UnanimousCoward writes: Forbes has published a transcript of SBF's planned testimony as well as a synopsis which, of course, will not happen now. At no point does he admit fraudulent behavior and does not address the (multi-)billion dollar loans that helped contribute to the flywheel Ponzi scheme. FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried was arrested yesterday by the Royal Bahamas Police Force. He was set to testify virtually before the House Financial Services Committee about the exchange's collapse on Tuesday (today).

Here are the key takeaways from SBF's draft testimony, as highlighted by Forbes: - Bankman-Fried is being ghosted by FTX's court-appointed CEO John Ray.
- Bankman-Fried says that FTX.US general counsel and former Sullivan & Cromwell partner, Ryne Miller, put intense pressure on Bankman-Fried and others to rush into filing for Chapter 11.
- Bankman-Fried believes that John Ray and law firms managing the bankruptcy, including Sullivan and Cromwell, are dusting off the Enron playbook in an effort to reap enormous fees from FTX's bankruptcy.
- The Chapter 11 team is not playing nice with foreign regulators.
- Bankman-Fried thinks that John Ray and the U.S. Bankruptcy Court is bullying the Bahamian government and overstepping its rights as the main domicile for FTX International.
- Bankman-Fried devotes seven pages to a section he calls "Misstatements," detailing instances where John Ray and team are disseminating false and inaccurate information about the companies he created.
- FTX did not have a risk management team.
- Bankman-Fried claims that there are signed Letters of Intent (LOIs) from prospective investors that could recapitalize the exchange.
- Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao orchestrated a negative public relations campaign to bring down FTX.
- Having eliminated FTX as its largest global competitor, Binance is now averaging approximately 70% of global cryptocurrency volume.
- Bankman-Fried wants to set the record straight on false reports of hard partying at FTX and on his own drug usage. He says he has never been drunk in his life, and has been on an antidepressant for the last decade.

The European Union took a significant step toward completing a deal with the U.S. that would allow personal information about Europeans to be stored legally on U.S. soil, reducing the threat of regulatory action against thousands of companies that routinely transmit such information. From a report: The European Commission, the EU's executive arm, on Tuesday published a draft approval of the preliminary deal it struck in March with the U.S. government. The agreement would re-establish a framework that makes it easy for businesses to transfer such information again following the invalidation of a previous agreement by an EU court in 2020.

As part of the new deal, the U.S. is offering -- and has started to implement -- new safeguards on how its intelligence authorities can access that data. If concluded, the deal could resolve one of the thorniest outstanding issues between the two economic giants. Hanging in the balance has been the ability of businesses to use U.S.-based data centers to do things such as sell online ads, measure their website traffic or manage company payroll in Europe. Blocking data transfers could upend billions of dollars of trade from cross-border data activities, including cloud services, human resources, marketing and advertising, if they involve sending or storing information about Europeans on U.S. soil, tech advocates say.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission sued Sam Bankman-Fried, FTX and Alameda Research for violations of federal commodities laws. From a report: The top US derivatives regulator claims Bankman-Fried and other FTX executives took hundreds of millions of dollars in loans from Alameda they used to buy real estate and make donations to politicians. "At Bankman-Fried's direction, FTX executives created features in the underlying code for FTX that allowed Alameda to maintain an essentially unlimited line of credit on FTX," the CFTC said in a complaint filed Tuesday in Manhattan federal court. Further reading: SEC Charges Sam Bankman-Fried With Defrauding Investors in FTX; and FTX Founder Arrested.

The testimony of the new FTX CEO, John Ray III, is now public (PDF), and it includes some shocking revelations about the nature of the cryptocurrency firm. The court documents show that Alameda Research borrowed FTX customer funds for trading and investment purposes without any limits. Watcher Guru reports: In the court documents, Ray relayed a detailed account of how Alameda Research would utilize FTX customer assets. Subsequently, the firm utilized them for the purposes of trading and investment. The document noted, "The ability of Alameda, the crypto hedge fund within the FTX Group, to borrow funds held at FTX.com to be utilized for its own trading or investments without any effective limits." As the shocking statement was reported under inappropriate business practices that Ray has uncovered amidst his disappointment.

Ray revealed that access to those funds was not at all protected from management. The statement noted, "The use of computer infrastructure that gave individuals in senior management access to systems that stored customer assets," according to the documents. Furthermore, Ray revealed that "Private keys to access hundreds of millions of dollars in crypto assets," lacked property security or description. Conversely, Ray notes that assets were commingled, and the platform lacked proper documentation of nearly 500 investments made by the FTX group. UPDATE 12/12/22 00:13 UTC: FTX Founder Sam Bankman-Fried Arrested

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Techdirt: "In an enormous breakthrough for those seeking transparency and accountability to the shadowy surveillance industry, the Swiss Government has been forced to publish the list of export licenses for surveillance technologies and other equipment, including details of their cost and destination," [reports The Unwanted Witness.] "The decision by the Federal Information and Data Protection Commissioner comes on the heels of consistent pressure from Privacy International, Swiss journalists, and several Members of Parliament on policymakers, government officials, and companies in Switzerland over the past year and a half. The commissioner's decision was the result of a FOI challenge filed against the State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO) for its refusal to reveal information regarding the destination of the pending exports for surveillance technologies."

The beneficiary of this release by SECO is, of course, everyone who's interested in government accountability and transparency, especially when it involves an area of government work that tends to shrouded in often impenetrable secrecy. The most direct beneficiary -- Swiss news agency Tagblatt -- has plenty to say about the release of this information, including how much SECO simply did not want to reveal the countries Swiss surveillance tech providers sell to. (The following was translated by Google Translate, so apologies for the clunky English.) The Seco does not act entirely voluntarily: Our newspaper only received the list after it requested access to the administration in 2013 based on the principle of transparency. At the end of 2014, the federal data protection officer recommended granting access, although Seco wanted to refuse this. [The Data Protection Commissioner] picks [Seco's] arguments to pieces. It didn't even provide a minimal justification. But that's not all: Seco was unable to prove why the announcement of the recipients was affecting Switzerland's foreign policy relations.

The technology these countries acquired from Swiss tech purveyors are IMSI catchers -- cell tower spoofers capable of forcing all phones in the area to connect to it so investigators can locate sought devices or (if enabled) intercept communications. Twenty-one export licenses were issued in 2014, with the list encompassing a long list of human rights abusers. [...] The approved list for full licenses doesn't exactly suggest a whole lot of discretion from Swiss IMSI manufacturers. Nor does it say much about SECO, which allowed these sales (and demonstrations) to happen. The list of denied license applications (which includes Russia, Yemen, and Turkmenistan) suggests some restraint by SECO. But the fact that Swiss spy tech makers requested the licenses shows they are just as willing to sell to terrible governments as other surveillance tech purveyors who've made international headlines repeatedly. (Yes, we're talking about Israel's NSO Group. And, to a lesser extent, Italy's Hacking Team.) "And it's not just IMSI catchers," says Techdirt's Tim Cushing. "Plenty of human rights violators were on the list of potential customers for internet surveillance tech sold by Swiss companies. That those violators were unable to access this tech is largely due to the Snowden leaks, which forced a lot of countries to look more closely at their own spying efforts and surveillance contractors."

"That's a pretty nasty group of customers to want to sell to. And that the companies appear to have been deterred by a series of leaks suggests they were more motivated by potential backlash from the Snowden revelations, rather than any sense of responsibility or propriety."

In closing, Cushing writes: "You don't have to sell to the worst governments in the world. But, like far too many other surveillance tech purveyors, Swiss companies seemed more than willing to sell powerful spy tech to governments they knew with certainty would abuse it."