Department of Justice

The Supreme Court was asked by the Obama administration to address the issue among federal appellate courts over the necessity to get a warrant before attaching a GPS device to a suspect's vehicle to track their location. In fact, the Justice Department said that a person traveling on public roads has "no reasonable expectation of privacy" in his movements, even if 'scientific enhancements' are used to help law enforcement with the tracking.

In order to effectively charge Julian Assange with the crime committed against the American nation the Justice Department just needs to cogently prove that WikiLeaks differs from traditional media and as such is subject to the Espionage Act, a former federal prosecutor told lawmakers Thursday.

 One of the giants of payment processing market MasterCard Incorporated has entered into a Consent Decree with the Department of Justice (DOJ), says the recent press release of the company. The terms of the settlement are consistent with the Company’s long standing business practices and will require MasterCard only to modify its rules to more specifically conform to its business practices. The resolution follows a two-year investigation involving an extensive review of MasterCard’s acceptance rules and practices.

Apple and Google are close to reaching an agreement not to solicit each other's staff, according to the documents of the Department of Justice, who has been investigating the process. 

At the time of the alleged collusion Google's CEO Eric Schmidt was on the board of Apple - a situation also under investigation by the Federal Trade Commission.

An investigation was launched by the US Department of Justice into the Google’s deal to overtake airline ticketing software firm ITA Software Inc. The DoJ wants to determine if the deal would exert too much influence on the online travel industry, the Wall Street Journal said.

Google bought ITA Software, one of the Web's key providers of airline travel software, for $700 million in July, in a move that Google said would allow it to improve the way consumers find flight and fare information online.

Hewlett-Packard has come to a settlement agreement with the US Department of Justice to pay the US government US$55 million. The fine comes as HP allegedly defrauded the U.S. General Service Administration and other agencies by paying kickbacks to systems integrators in exchange for recommendations that agencies purchase HP products.

Apart from this, the settlement also resolves government claims that a 2002 contract HP had with the GSA was defectively priced because the company provided incomplete information to GSA contracting officers during negotiations, the DOJ said.

The US Federal Bureau of Investigation demanded the popular online encyclopedia to stop showing high-resolution image of its seal saying it violates the federal law and could be misused my miscreants to create fake documents, as reported by the New York Times.

In the letter sent to Wikipedia the FBI says:

"Unauthorized reproduction or use of the FB I Seal is prohibited by 18 United States Code, Section 701, which provides:

Thursday, Google is to come back to the New York court to face critics over the collaboration with US publishers concerning world’s books digitizing.

The case is considered by some as giving the search engineer great opportunity to become the monopolist of the world's literature market.

Judge Denny Chin will hear evidence today from 26 critics over Google’s deal, including Amazon and Microsoft, along with several publishers. France and Germany also intend to give evidence.

Two Bulgarians, Ivaylo Vasilev Pletnyov, 39,and Nikolay Georgiev Minchev, 45, has been arrested for their roles in an online money-laundering scheme.

  Thus, about $1.2 million from U.S. residents was collected and sent to a criminal group in Eastern Europe, according to the U.S. Department of Justice said. Two fraudsters used eBay and other Web sites to advertise expensive vehicles and boats they did not own. The two defendants and co-conspirators ran the scheme from about July 2005 to May 2006.

 U.S. optical disc drive operations of Sony Corporation are under the probe of the regulators for possible violations of anti-trust laws. The company reported that it had received a subpoena from the U.S. Department of Justice's antitrust division.

Sony Optiarc America supplies a lineup of optical disc drives, including those for DVDs, CD-ROMs, CD-Rs and Blu-ray discs.

"Other countries are also seeking information on the state of competition in optical disc drives," Sony spokesperson said.