Morning Security Brief: Google Spy Scandal, HLS Photography, Wireless Power, Unstable Flight Attendant, & Unlucky Thief

♦ Google's collection of unprotected information over WiFi networks during it's global street-mapping sessions provoked a larger question during a congressional hearing yesterday: Is Google collecting information for the U.S. government? "Recently, the Washington Post noted as part of a two-year investigation into America's intelligence community that Google supplies special mapping and search products to the U.S. military and intelligence community, with some Google employees enjoying top secret clearance to work with the government," reports FOXNews.com. "That news has consumer advocates and politicians asking exactly what information Google has collected -- and why." Jamie Court, president of Consumer Watchdog, is pressing the issue: "Is there some relationship between Google and the NSA (National Security Agency)?" Google for their part continues to say that misplaced code led to WiFi data collection.

♦ Taking pictures in public is simply not illegal, writes Glenn Reynolds in Popular Mechanics. "Legally, it's pretty much always okay to take photos in a public place as long as you're not physically interfering with traffic or police operations. As Bert Krages, an attorney who specializes in photography-related legal problems and wrote Legal Handbook for Photographers, says, 'The general rule is that if something is in a public place, you're entitled to photograph it,'" reports Reynolds, who writes the popular blog Instapundit. "What's more, though national-security laws are often invoked when quashing photographers, Krages explains that 'the Patriot Act does not restrict photography; neither does the Homeland Security Act.' But this doesn't stop people from interfering with photographers, even in settings that don't seem much like national-security zones."

♦ Scientists in the United Kingdom believe they developed a new technology to wirelessly send power through steel. The technology, reports BBC News, could be used to send power through submarine hulls and armored doors. The technology will need time to be perfected, said Dr John Bagshaw, a technology executive from BAE Systems Advanced Technology Centre in Bristol. In the earliest demonstrations to submarine commanders, he sent power to a DVD player through a block of steel and played the film Das Boot. "We got a top quality image, and the response from the Navy was: 'this is brilliant - we want to get it onto a boat'."

♦ A disgruntled flight attendant has been charged with terrorism after he threatened to feed jihadists intelligence on how to access airline cockpits. "[Rodney] Lorenzo mailed letters in 2008 to top American Airline executives with the word, "Boom!!" written on the envelopes," UPI.com reported. "The envelopes contained pages from an employee handbook with instructions on how to access the cockpit, a prosecutor said. Lorenzo said in the letters he would forward the information to Islamic groups, hoping they would use it against the airline and its passengers."

♦ Sometimes the world's just out to get you. Take Horatio Toure for instance. "According to San Francisco police, the 31-year-old city resident rode a bicycle up to a woman Monday afternoon in the South of Market neighborhood, snatched an iPhone out of her hands, and then pedaled away," reports the San Francisco Chronicle. "Problem was, the woman was carrying the phone as part of a company's demonstration of a real-time GPS tracking program. If the bandit would have taken a peek at the screen, he would have seen himself traveling across a map of San Francisco.Toure was captured a half-mile away about 10 minutes later, at 4:01 p.m., said police Sgt. Troy Dangerfield."