In the months leading up to Mr Ulbricht's arrest, investigators undertook a painstaking process of piecing together the suspect's digital footprint, going back years into his history of communicating with others online.

With a Gmail address to hand, Agent-1 linked this address to accounts on the Google+ social network and YouTube video site. There he discovered some of Mr Ulbricht's interests.

A 15-year-old boy in Terrebone Parish is facing criminal charges after authorities say he used a mobile app to go on a virtual mass shooting at his high school.

"You can't ignore it," Major Malcolm Wolfe told WGNO. "We don't know at what time that game becomes reality."

The boy is charged with terrorizing and interference with the operation of a school.

British dance music label Ministry of Sound (MoS) has filed a lawsuit against Spotify. MoS claims that by hosting playlists that mimic tracklists on its collections, Spotify has violated UK copyright law.

The company is now arguing that its actual track listings are creative works worthy of copyright protection. It's an extraordinary claim, not too different from claiming a copyright over something like a simple list of one's own favorite songs.

BT, Virgin Media, BSkyB and TalkTalk are being asked by music and film companies to sign up to a voluntary code for policing illegal downloading. Negotiations have been under way for months with the BPI and the British Video Association, whose members include the BBC and Hollywood studios.

Measures could include throttling internet connections to slow them down, blocking users from particular sites, disconnecting offenders from broadband for a limited period and ultimately prosecution. Broadband companies would need to keep a list of those customers they had sent letters to.

Police have found that the GCSB broke the law by eavesdropping on Kim Dotcom, but they are not going to prosecute the spy agency for doing it.

"While GCSB staff did commit the act prohibited by section 216B of the Crimes Act 1961, they did not have the necessary intent to satisfy the elements of the offence and be considered criminally liable," he said.

Lawyers in New Jersey are trying to explore whether calling or texting someone who you know is driving makes you legally liable in the event of an accident.

Attorney Marc Saperstein, an expert in distracted driving cases, told WPIX: "One of the great arguments that my colleague made was to analogize that when you text, as the texter, you are electronically in that car.

The owner of an encrypted email service used by ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden said he has been threatened with criminal charges for refusing to comply with a secret surveillance order to turn over information about his customers.

Levison stressed that he has complied with "upwards of two dozen court orders" for information in the past that were targeted at "specific users" and that "I never had a problem with that." But without disclosing details, he suggested that the order he received more recently was markedly different, requiring him to cooperate in broadly based surveillance that would scoop up information about all the users of his service.

"I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly ten years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit," founder Ladar Levinson said in a statement posted to the company's homepage on Thursday. "After significant soul searching, I have decided to suspend operations."

"This experience," Levinson wrote, "has taught me one very important lesson: without congressional action or a strong judicial precedent, I would strongly recommend against anyone trusting their private data to a company with physical ties to the United States."

In a letter from U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman, the Obama administration overruled an import ban on older iPhone and iPad models issued by the International Trade Commission at Samsung’s request earlier this year.

According to The Wall Street Journal, this is the first time since 1987 that an administration has vetoed a ban ordered by the Commission.

Prime minister John Key dismissed the protests as small, saying that protesters are either “politically aligned” or “misinformed”.

The controversial legislation was introduced after the arrest of Kim Dotcom and fellow operators of the Megadownload Website in 2012 led to the discovery that the GCSB had intercepted his communications. This turned out to be illegal, since at the time Dotcom was a New Zealand resident.