This story originally appeared on CNET

---

STANFORD, Calif.--President Obama is planning to hand the U.S. Commerce Department authority over a forthcoming cybersecurity effort to create an Internet ID for Americans, a White House official said here today.

It's "the absolute perfect spot in the U.S. government" to centralize efforts toward creating an "identity ecosystem" for the Internet, White House Cybersecurity Coordinator Howard Schmidt said.

That news, first reported by CNET, effectively pushes the department to the forefront of the issue, beating out other potential candidates, including the National Security Agency and the Department of Homeland Security. The move also is likely to please privacy and civil-liberties groups that have raised concerns in the past over the dual roles of police and intelligence agencies.

The announcement came at an event today at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, where U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke and Schmidt spoke.

Continue »

This story originally appeared on CNET

---

The new revelations originating from WikiLeaks are both embarrassing and rapid-fire: Afghanistan's vice president was found to be transporting $52 million in cash; Saudi Arabia's king called for the U.S. to attack Iran; a British duke mocked Americans' understanding of geography.

This week's leak -- still incomplete -- of some 250,000 State Department dispatches follows WikiLeaks' April release of a video showing U.S. troops firing on journalists and its release of hundreds of thousands of classified military dispatches from Afghanistan and Iraq. There was also, earlier this year, an internal Army report that worried about the threat posed by WikiLeaks.

Continue »

Two months ago, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano announced that the federal stimulus legislation would pay for the purchase of hundreds of controversial full-body scanners.

"Through the Recovery Act, we are able to continue our accelerated deployment of enhanced technology as part of our layered approach to security at airports nationwide," Napolitano said at the time.

The number of scanners has roughly doubled since Napolitano's announcement and are now found in 68 U.S. airports, and the Transportation Security Administration says the controversial devices have proven to be a success.

"We have received minimal complaints," a TSA spokeswoman told CNET yesterday. She said that the agency, part of DHS, keeps track of air traveler complaints and has not seen a significant rise.

Continue »

A federal agency recently brought a complaint against a Connecticut medical-services company for allegedly firing an employee over a Facebook post.

But it may not be wise to take that as carte blanche to go online and type in exactly what you think of your boss.

Continue »

Forget China or Al Qaeda. In a twist that would have been inconceivable even a few months ago, the WikiLeaks.org Web site is being proposed as the first public target for a U.S. government cyberattack.

After the shadowy, document-leaking organization distributed nearly 400,000 classified documents from the Iraq war on Friday, Washington officialdom responded with a torrent of denunciations alleging violations of national security and endangering U.S. military operations.

In a rare point of congruence, the Washington Post and the Washington Times both criticized the release, with the smaller paper arguing that WikiLeaks' offshore Web site should be attacked and rendered "inoperable" by the U.S. government. Some hawkish conservatives followed suit, including Christian Whiton, a State Department adviser under President George W. Bush, who wrote a column calling on the U.S. military to "electronically assault WikiLeaks and any telecommunications company offering its services to this organization."

If such an action were planned, one wouldn't have to look far for their target. WikiLeaks' Web site is actually hosted on Amazon.com servers on United States soil near San Jose, Calif.

Continue »

Intel chief executive Paul Otellini offered a depressing set of observations about the economy and the Obama administration Monday evening, coupled with a dark commentary on the future of the technology industry if nothing changes.

Otellini's remarks during dinner at the Technology Policy Institute's Aspen Forum here amounted to a warning to the administration officials and assorted Capitol Hill aides in the audience: Unless government policies are altered, he predicted, "the next big thing will not be invented here. Jobs will not be created here."

The U.S. legal environment has become so hostile to business, Otellini said, that there is likely to be "an inevitable erosion and shift of wealth, much like we're seeing today in Europe--this is the bitter truth."

Not long ago, Otellini said, "our research centers were without peer. No country was more attractive for start-up capital... We seemed a generation ahead of the rest of the world in information technology. That simply is no longer the case."

The phenomenon of technology executives advancing dismal predictions and offering pointed critiques of Washington politicking isn't new, of course.

For instance: In 2005, midway through the Bush administration, Microsoft's Bill Gates told a Washington audience that curbs on immigration and guest workers would provide a boost to research institutions in China and India. A year earlier, then-Intel CEO Craig Barrett warned that the U.S. must dramatically improve its education system.

That never happened. Nor did politicians follow Gates' advice to rethink laws that led to foreign engineers being kicked out of the country as soon as they finish their degrees.

And now, six years later with no significant reforms, it should come as no surprise that the predictions have become more dire.

Deep in a 'Do' loop
Otellini singled out the political state of affairs in Democrat-dominated Washington, saying: "I think this group does not understand what it takes to create jobs. And I think they're flummoxed by their experiment in Keynesian economics not working."

Since an unusually sharp downturn accelerated in late 2008, the Obama administration and its allies in the U.S. Congress have enacted trillions in deficit spending they say will create an economic stimulus -- but have not extended the Bush tax cuts and have pushed to levy extensive new health care and carbon regulations on businesses.

"They're in a 'Do' loop right now trying to figure out what the answer is," Otellini said.

As a result, he said, "every business in America has a list of more variables than I've ever seen in my career." If variables like capital gains taxes and the R&D tax credit are resolved correctly, jobs will stay here, but if politicians make decisions "the wrong way, people will not invest in the United States. They'll invest elsewhere."

Take factories. "I can tell you definitively that it costs $1 billion more per factory for me to build, equip, and operate a semiconductor manufacturing facility in the United States," Otellini said.

The rub: Ninety percent of that additional cost of a $4 billion factory is not labor but the cost to comply with taxes and regulations that other nations don't impose. (Cypress Semiconductor CEO T.J. Rodgers elaborated on this in an interview with CNET, saying the problem is not higher U.S. wages but anti-business laws: "The killer factor in California for a manufacturer to create, say, a thousand blue-collar jobs is a hostile government that doesn't want you there and demonstrates it in thousands of ways.")

"If our tax rate approached that of the rest of the world, corporations would have an incentive to invest here," Otellini said. But instead, it's the second highest in the industrialized world, making the United States a less attractive place to invest--and create jobs--than places in Europe and Asia that are "clamoring" for Intel's business.

The comments from Intel's chief executive echoed statements made a day earlier by Carly Fiorina, the former HP CEO turned Republican Senate candidate.

America's skilled-worker visa system is so badly broken and anti-immigration that "we have to start from scratch," Fiorina said, adding that too many government policies push jobs overseas instead of making U.S. companies competitive against international rivals.

"Our corporate tax rates are the second highest in the world," and Congress has repeatedly failed to make an R&D tax credit permanent, Fiorina told the Aspen audience. It's time to start "acknowledging the reality that companies go where they're welcome," she said. (The effective U.S. corporate income tax is 35 percent, far over the industrialized-nation average of 18.2 percent.)

Chris Marangi, associate portfolio manager at Gamco Investors in Rye, N.Y., said Tuesday: "Capital is agnostic. It doesn't have a religion. It doesn't have a philosophy. It goes where it finds the highest returns." The problem, Marangi said, is that many other "countries have a more friendly regulatory regime than we do."

This article originally appeared on CNET

For the last few years, federal agencies have defended body scanning by insisting that all images will be discarded as soon as they're viewed. The Transportation Security Administration claimed last summer, for instance, that "scanned images cannot be stored or recorded."

Now it turns out that some police agencies are storing the controversial images after all. The U.S. Marshals Service admitted this week that it had surreptitiously saved tens of thousands of images recorded with a millimeter wave system at the security checkpoint of a single Florida courthouse.

This follows an earlier disclosure (PDF) by the TSA that it requires all airport body scanners it purchases to be able to store and transmit images for "testing, training, and evaluation purposes." The agency says, however, that those capabilities are not normally activated when the devices are installed at airports.

Body scanners penetrate clothing to provide a highly detailed image so accurate that critics have likened it to a virtual strip search. Technologies vary, with millimeter wave systems capturing fuzzier images, and backscatter X-ray machines able to show precise anatomical detail.

This privacy debate, which has been simmering since the days of the Bush administration, came to a boil two weeks ago when Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano announced that scanners would soon appear at virtually every major airport. The updated list includes airports in New York City, Dallas, Washington, Miami, San Francisco, Seattle, and Philadelphia.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group, has filed a lawsuit asking a federal judge to grant an immediate injunction pulling the plug on TSA's body scanning program. In a separate lawsuit, EPIC obtained a letter (PDF) from the Marshals Service, part of the Justice Department, and released it on Tuesday afternoon.

These "devices are designed and deployed in a way that allows the images to be routinely stored and recorded, which is exactly what the Marshals Service is doing," EPIC executive director Marc Rotenberg told CNET. "We think it's significant."

William Bordley, an associate general counsel with the Marshals Service, acknowledged in the letter that "approximately 35,314 images...have been stored on the Brijot Gen2 machine" used in the Orlando, Fla. federal courthouse. In addition, Bordley wrote, a Millivision machine was tested in the Washington, D.C. federal courthouse but it was sent back to the manufacturer, which now apparently possesses the image database.

The Gen 2 machine, manufactured by Brijot of Lake Mary, Fla., uses a millimeter wave radiometer and accompanying video camera to store up to 40,000 images and records. Brijot boasts that it can even be operated remotely: "The Gen 2 detection engine capability eliminates the need for constant user observation and local operation for effective monitoring. Using our APIs, instantly connect to your units from a remote location via the Brijot Client interface."

This trickle of disclosures about the true capabilities of body scanners--and how they're being used in practice--is probably what alarms privacy advocates more than anything else.

A 70-page document (PDF) showing the TSA's procurement specifications, classified as "sensitive security information," says that in some modes the scanner must "allow exporting of image data in real time" and provide a mechanism for "high-speed transfer of image data" over the network. (It also says that image filters will "protect the identity, modesty, and privacy of the passenger.")

"TSA is not being straightforward with the public about the capabilities of these devices," Rotenberg said. "This is the Department of Homeland Security subjecting every U.S. traveler to an intrusive search that can be recorded without any suspicion--I think it's outrageous." EPIC's lawsuit says that the TSA should have announced formal regulations, and argues that the body scanners violate the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits "unreasonable" searches.

For its part, the TSA says that body scanning is perfectly constitutional: "The program is designed to respect individual sensibilities regarding privacy, modesty and personal autonomy to the maximum extent possible, while still performing its crucial function of protecting all members of the public from potentially catastrophic events."

This story originally appeared on CNET

A Republican congressman who's a member of the House Intelligence Committee lashed out at Wikileaks this week, saying the Web site's alleged source should be executed for treason.

Rep. Mike Rogers of Michigan told a local radio station on Monday (MP3 audio) that he believes that Bradley Manning, the Army intelligence specialist who is suspected of being a source for the document-sharing Web site, should be charged with treason.

When the WHMI interviewer suggested that treason in war is a capital crime, Rogers replied: "Yes, and I would have absolutely, I would support it 100 percent. He put soldiers at risk who are out there fighting for their country, and he put people who are cooperating with the United States government clearly at risk."

Rogers added: "If you have an 18- or 19-year-old over there, you want to get your hands on this private first class yourself. I know I do."

with disclosing classified information to people not authorized to receive it and obtaining "more than 150,000 diplomatic cables" from the State Department. He has since been been transferred from Kuwait to a brig in Quantico, Va.--and has not been charged with treason.

Rogers' remarks add to an

that has appeared since

Wikileaks' war files disclosure roils Washington

Political circles respond angrily to the disclosure of thousands of confidential military reports from Afghanistan, and the Pentagon says an investigation is under way.

from Afghanistan.

An opinion piece in Tuesday's Washington Post by a former Bush speechwriter called Wikileaks a "criminal enterprise" and asked the U.S. government to employ "intelligence and military assets" to take it offline and nab

.

Continue »

LAS VEGAS--The United States should decide on rules for attacking other nations' networks during an actual cyberwar, which could include an international agreement not to disable banks and electrical grids, the former head of the CIA and National Security Agency said Thursday.

Michael Hayden, who was the principal deputy director of national intelligence and retired last year, said the rules of engagement for electronic battlefields are still too murky, even after the Defense Department created the U.S. Cyber Command this spring. The new organization is charged with allowing the U.S. armed forces to conduct "full-spectrum military cyberspace operations in order to enable actions in all domains," which includes destroying electronic infrastructure as thoroughly as a B-2 bomber would level a power plant.Continue »

LAS VEGAS--Hacking into an ATM isn't impossible, a security researcher showed Wednesday. With the right software, it's actually pretty easy.

Barnaby Jack, director of security testing at Seattle-based IOActive, hauled two ATMs onto the Black Hat conference stage and demonstrated to a rapt audience the fond daydream of teenage hackers everywhere: pressing a button and having an automated teller machine spew out its cash until a pile of paper lay on the ground.

"I hope to change the way people look at devices that from the outside are seemingly impenetrable," said Jack, a New Zealand native who lives in the San Jose area. One vulnerability he demonstrated even allows a hacker to connect to the ATM through a telephone modem and, without knowing a password, instantly force it to disgorge its entire supply of cash.

Jack said he bought the pair of standalone ATMs--one manufactured by Tranax Technologies and the other by Triton--over the Internet and then spent years poring over the code. The vulnerabilities and programming errors he unearthed during that process, Jack said, let him gain complete access to those machines and learn techniques that can be used to open the built-in safes of many others made by the same companies.

"Every ATM I've looked at, I've found a game-over vulnerability that allows an attacker to get cash from the machine," Jack said. "I've looked at four ATMs. I'm four for four." (He said he has not evaluated built-in ATMs like those used by banks and credit unions.)

He said both Tranax and Triton had patched the security vulnerabilities since he brought them to the companies' attention a year ago. If a customer with an ATM such as a convenience store or a restaurant doesn't apply the fix, though, the machines remain vulnerable.

 Read the full story at CNET News

To help answer some questions about this week's Copyright Office announcement regarding the legality of so-called cell phone jailbreaking, or the modification of the software that comes with iPhones and other handsets that is designed not to be changed, CNET News compiled the following list of Frequently Asked Questions.

What does the Copyright Office's ruling mean?

The short answer is that jailbreaking your iPhone or other mobile device will no longer violate a controversial federal copyright law called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA. Bypassing a manufacturer's protection mechanisms to allow "handsets to execute software applications" is now permitted.

But in practice, the actual impact of that portion of the decision may be limited.

How does it affect iPhones specifically?

Apple exercises greater control of its hardware and software than most of its competitors. Anyone remember last fall's court-ordered permanent injunction that Apple won against Psystar, which sold PCs with OS X pre-installed?

On the iPhone, Apple restricts the software that can be loaded onto the device. Applications can be downloaded through the App Store, and to be included in the App Store, the program has to be vetted and approved by Apple.

Apple says this maintains a high-quality user experience and weeds out malware. (An executive summed it up: "You and your family and friends can download applications from the store, and for the most part they do what you'd expect, and they get onto your phone, and you get billed appropriately, and it all just works.")

But if users want software that's not permitted in the App Store--Google Voice is a big one, and tethering is another--they need to jailbreak their phone. That unlocks the file system, allowing apps to be added without Apple's permission.

Groups of software developers and individuals work to devise jailbreaking software for every new version of the iPhone's operating system that is released. The best known is probably the iPhone Dev Team, which makes its software available at no cost.

Why do you say the practical impact of the Copyright Office's decision is limited?

Until this week, Apple has possessed the legal equivalent of a double-barreled shotgun, which would have permitted the company to file lawsuits accusing users (or jailbreak software creators) of violating both the DMCA and breaching the contract in the form of the Apple iPhone Software License Agreement.

Now, thanks to the Copyright Office, Apple's legal arsenal has been reduced to a single-barreled shotgun, the license agreement.

But these amount to legal claims that the company could in theory pursue. In reality, Apple has never sued a single person for jailbreaking or distributing jailbreaking software. It's never even threatened to do so, even after years have elapsed.

Translated: If Apple isn't going to sue the hundreds of thousands of customers merrily jailbreaking their iPhones, or the active developer community abetting their theoretically illicit activities, it doesn't matter what the caliber of their legal weaponry is.

So why should we care?

We asked Jennifer Granick, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the San Francisco-based civil liberties group that successfully petitioned the Copyright Office for the exception.

Here's what she told us: "Apple's never sued jailbreakers, but they claim it violates the DMCA, and thus there's a legal cloud. If they were right, they could stop people from jailbreaking the phones, i.e. get an injunction. Now, they can't. Even if it violates contract law, they'd have to sue, and all they could get would be a tiny bit of money. It greatly decreases any incentive they might have or develop to sue. And it takes injunction off the table. Which means that the law will not, in the next three years, prevent people from jailbreaking their phones."

In addition, the possibility of punitive damages has been eliminated.

What does Apple say?

Our old friend Leander Kahney extracted a statement from Apple on Monday, which says simply: "Apple's goal has always been to insure that our customers have a great experience with their iPhone and we know that jailbreaking can severely degrade the experience. As we've said before, the vast majority of customers do not jailbreak their iPhones as this can violate the warranty and can cause the iPhone to become unstable and not work reliably."

Earlier, Apple had told the Copyright Office it opposed EFF's request in part because the App Store process protected consumers, because iPhone customers only license the software and do not own it, and that fair use should not allow circumvention.

What was the Copyright Office's reasoning?

On all the important counts, it agreed with the EFF. It said, for instance, that "the amount of copyrighted work modified in a typical jailbreaking scenario is fewer than 50 bytes of code out of more than 8 million bytes, or approximately 1/160,000 of the copyrighted work as a whole." The Obama administration had sided with Apple. The Department of Commerce said that granting the exemption "might just as likely deter innovation by not allowing the developer to recoup its development costs and to be rewarded for its innovation."

A side note: the Copyright Office also granted another exemption, which allows used handsets to be reprogrammed to enable use of the mobile phone on another network.

Why would I want to risk jailbreaking my iPhone?

You might want to jailbreak your phone if there's a piece of software you simply must have. But jailbreaking should probably be left to people who are technologically savvy--after all, if something goes wrong, you're on your own.

The two big dangers to jailbreaking your phone are voiding your warranty, and not correctly following the instructions of whatever software program you're using to do the jailbreak, which can lead to a unusable or "bricked" phone. Taking a phone that's been jailbroken into an Apple store, or sending it to Apple's service center means they likely won't fix it because you've violated your user agreement.

This includes repairing something that is not software-related, like a cracked screen. You may be able to find an authorized repair center that would do it, but it's still a risk.

According to Apple, the company's support department already receives "literally millions of reported instances of problems flowing from jailbroken phones." In a letter to the U.S. Copyright Office (PDF) opposing the new exemption, Apple warned that legitimizing the practice of jailbreaking would be a security risk for the devices and result in more malware being installed because the App Store's protections would be bypassed.

So does Apple have to support jailbreaking?

Nope. Section 2(c) of the Apple iPhone Software License Agreement (PDF) bans any attempt to "modify" the iPhone software or to reverse-engineer it.

What that means is that Apple can still legally--if it chooses--protect its phones from jailbreaking. The contract formed between the user and Apple (and the user and the wireless carrier) when the iPhone owner agrees to the user licensing agreement is binding, says Tom Sydnor, a senior fellow with the Progress and Freedom Foundation who takes an expansive view of copyright law.

Just because the DMCA allows individuals an exemption to jailbreak their own phones, "it doesn't mean Apple or a carrier can't protect contractual restrictions to deal with it," Sydnor said. "Essentially the exemption says this is the sort of thing that falls in bounds of contracts."

Apple could pursue breach of contract if someone jailbreaks their phone, or they could sue a person or company that creates jailbreak software for inducing someone to breach their contract with Apple. In other words, Sydnor said, "even if there was no DMCA, you could still be bound not to circumvent that technological protection."

What does the DMCA do, exactly?

Check out section 1201 of the text of the 1998 law. Part 1 says that, in general, "no person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access" to a copyrighted work, including a computer program.

Part 2 says that "no person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic" in any software that allows such circumvention. (Note this restriction has little impact on overseas software developers.)

But there's an important caveat to the first part. The Library of Congress' Copyright Office is charged with evaluating the DMCA's impact every three years and adding exemptions on behalf of Americans who want to make "noninfringing uses" of copyrighted works.

The last round of exemptions, for instance, said it's officially legal to "unlock" your cell phone's firmware if you're hoping to switch carriers while continuing to use the same device.

So how does this week's DMCA announcement benefit consumers?

While it doesn't completely remove all legal repercussions from users who want to jailbreak their own phone, losing the protection of the DMCA was a blow to Apple and other phone makers with proprietary software, according to Jason Schultz, co-director of Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic at UC Berkeley School of Law.

"It is an uphill battle now for Apple. What this does is kind of shifts things in favor of users," said Schultz. "If Apple goes to court they have to explain to a judge why the copyright office is wrong (in this case) or why other laws should trump copyright laws."

"Another way to say it is the DMCA was Apple's strongest weapon in controlling the iPhone platform. (Losing that exemption) is like losing your best player on the team," he said.

CNET's Josh Lowensohn contributed to this report.

See Also:

iPhone 4 sleek, but not perfect (full review)

A new privacy bill introduced in the U.S. Congress this week would have serious unintended consequences and could even harm the nation's economy unless its Democratic sponsor rewrites it, Internet industry representatives warned Thursday.

The proposal, introduced by Rep. Bobby Rush of Illinois, slaps fines of up to $5 million on businesses and even some individuals unless they abide by a complex set of new regulations to be administrated by the Federal Trade Commission.

That legislation "would turn the Internet from a fast-moving information highway to a slow-moving toll-road," Michael Zaneis, vice president of public policy at the Interactive Advertising Bureau, told Rush's committee on Thursday. "Such a move would hinder, not facilitate e-commerce." The group's board members include representatives of Google, Facebook, Microsoft, AOL, Comcast, Amazon.com, Fox Interactive, and CBS Interactive, which publishes CNET.

Zaneis took pains to compliment some portions of the legislation (H.R. 5777) drafted by Rush, the chairman of a House consumer protection subcommittee. But, Zaneis added, "our industry is a major component of the national economy," and burdensome regulations would retard its growth and cause economic harm.

Continue »

Seven Republican senators have announced a plan to curb the Obama administration's push to impose controversial Net neutrality regulations on the Internet.

On Wednesday, Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina and six other GOP senators introduced legislation that would sharply curb the Federal Communications Commission's ability to regulate broadband providers.

"The FCC's rush to takeover the Internet is just the latest example of the need for fundamental reform to protect consumers," DeMint said in a statement. Without this legislation, DeMint said, the FCC will "impose unnecessary, antiquated regulations on the Internet."

The new bill--called the Freedom for Consumer Choice Act, or FCC Act--doesn't eliminate the FCC's power over broadband providers. But that power would become sharply limited, and come to resemble the antitrust enforcement power of the Department of Justice.

One section, for instance, lets the FCC define "unfair methods of competition" and levy "requirements" on the industry, but only if marketplace competition is inadequate.

In May, a federal appeals court unanimously ruled that the FCC's attempt to slap Net neutrality regulations on Internet providers--in a case that grew out of Comcast throttling BitTorrent transfers--was not authorized by Congress. The opinion called the FCC's claims "flatly inconsistent" with the law.

Supporters of Net neutrality say new Internet regulations or laws are necessary to prevent broadband providers from restricting content or prioritizing one type of traffic over another. Broadband providers and many conservative and free-market groups, on the other hand, say some of the proposed regulations would choke off new innovations and could even require awarding e-mail spam and telemedicine identical priorities.

A broadband industry representative, who did not want to be identified by name, said DeMint's measure turns the current debate upside-down. Currently, that person said, Net neutrality advocates can invent a "parade of horribles that could happen if the Internet was left unregulated." But under the DeMint bill, the FCC and Net neutrality advocates "would need to prove a tangible consumer benefit in order to impose new regulation."

New regulation would only be permitted if the FCC can demonstrate that "marketplace competition is not sufficient to adequately protect consumer welfare" and the lack of competition "causes or is likely to cause substantial injury to consumers." (If the FCC decides to impose regulations without sufficient proof, look for broadband providers to file a lawsuit.)

Art Brodsky of Public Knowledge, one of the more prominent supporters of Net neutrality regulations, told CNET that: "No one wants to regulate the Internet. They start from that premise, which is mistaken." The bill takes a wrong turn, Brodsky said, by "duplicating the jurisdiction and purpose" of the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission, which share antitrust authority.

In theory, many Democrats favor Net neutrality. President Obama recently reiterated through a spokesman that he remains "committed" to the idea, as have some Democratic committee chairmen.

But theory doesn't always mesh with political practice. Some rank-and-file Dems are clamoring for Net neutrality about as much as Bush-era Republicans were clamoring for limited government. Yet 74 House Democrats sent a letter to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski instructing him to abandon his Net neutrality plans.

Other sponsors of the FCC Act, all Republicans, are Orrin Hatch of Utah; John Ensign of Nevada; John Thune of South Dakota; Tom Coburn of Oklahoma); John Cornyn of Texas; and Jeff Sessions of Alabama.

This article originally appeared on CNET

A Wikileaks representative has denied receiving more than 150,000 classified U.S. State Department cables.

Wikileaks co-founder Julian Assange said at the TED Global conference in Oxford, England, last week that if the organization had received the cables, "we would have released them."

The question of diplomatic cables arose after an Army intelligence specialist, Bradley Manning, was linked to Wikileaks. Manning may face a court-martial; one document listing charges against Manning says he transmitted "more than 50 classified U.S. State Department cables" to an unnamed person not authorized to receive them, in violation of federal law.

Another paragraph in the list of charges against Manning is more interesting. It alleges that he obtained "more than 150,000 diplomatic cables" from State Department computers. But it doesn't actually accuse him of transmitting them.

In January, Wikileaks published a classified cable from the U.S. embassy in Reykjavik, Iceland. It appears to describe conversations with Reykjavik officials about the country's economic crisis and what the United States had been asked to do.

The U.S. Army's list of charges against Manning lists the "Reykjavik 13" cable by name, saying he transmitted it "to a person not entitled to receive it, with reason to believe that such information could be used to the injury of the United States or the advantage of any foreign nation."

On Tuesday, CNET published a lengthy interview with Cryptome.org editor John Young, who participated in the creation of Wikileaks over three years ago. Young has subsequently become a critic of the organization, saying "I certainly would not trust them with information if it had any value, or if it put me at risk or anyone that I cared about at risk."

Assange said he would have published the diplomatic correspondence without hesitation "because these sort of things reveal what the true state of, say, Arab governments are like--the true human rights abuses in those governments. If you look at declassified cables, that's the sort of material that's there."