From Internet Uprisings to John McAfee: The Year in Privacy and Security

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10. It’s a Bird! It’s a Plane! No, It’s a Government Spybot!

It’s not enough that the U.S. government uses drones to pick off targets on a death wishlist — unmanned spybots are being scooped up by municipalities across the country as if they were one-off wedding dresses at a Filene’s fire sale.

9. Bradley Manning Gets His Day in Court

It’s been more than two years since former Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning was arrested and charged with leaking more than a million government documents to WikiLeaks. Military rules require the Army try a suspect within 190 days of being incarcerated, but more than 800 days after his arrest, Manning still hasn’t had his trial.

8. SOPA and PIPA Wake Up a Sleeping Giant

History was made on January 18 when more than 100,000 web sites around the world went dark for a day as part of the internet’s first digital uprising.

7. Supreme Court Takes a Stand Against Warrantless GPS Tracking — Sort Of

It was no doubt a heady day for law enforcement agents in numerous states around the country when they realized that they could slap GPS trackers on the vehicles of suspects and then follow their movements without ever leaving the squad room. Even better was the fact that they didn’t have to show probable cause or get a warrant to do the surveillance. They could just tag a car on nothing more than a flimsy hotline tip.

6. Megaupload Becomes Mega Headache for U.S. Government

It must have seemed like a good idea at the time when New Zealand authorities, in cooperation with the U.S. government, sent in a swarm of 70 heavily armed police officers via helicopter to raid the New Zealand mansion of copyright scofflaw Kim Dotcom in January of this year. But that Hollywood takedown has turned out to be one major headache for both governments as the legal case against Megaupload founder Dotcom has spiraled out of control over the last twelve months.

5. Sabu and the Crackdown on Anonymous

The world of Anonymous and its offshoot LulzSec was rocked earlier this year when authorities revealed that a top LulzSec leader named Hector Xavier Monsegur, a 28-year-old New Yorker who went by the online moniker “Sabu,” had become a turncoat and was working undercover for the feds since the FBI had secretly arrested him in June 2011.

4. Stuxnet and Flame: The Buddy Film

When a small antivirus firm in Belarus discovered the world’s first known cyberweapon lurking on computers in Iran in 2010, a lot of mysteries surrounded the malware — not just about who was behind the worm that came to be known as Stuxnet, but about how exactly the attackers had pulled off their sophisticated hack.

3. Assange Seeks Asylum

Just when it seemed the Julian Assange saga couldn’t get any weirder, with the WikiLeaks founder facing sex-crimes allegations in Sweden, the controversial figure fled to the Ecuadorean embassy in June to seek asylum and prevent U.K. authorities from extraditing him to the Scandinavian country for questioning.

2. Paula and Petraeus

Every year careless hackers, cyberstalkers and others are undone by the digital trails they leave behind for law enforcement to collect and trace back to them.

1. John McAfee Unhinged

It’s hard to turn away from a train wreck. Even harder when the train wreck involves a brash-talking 66-year-old former millionaire with a penchant for tattoos, teenage girls, and posing provocatively with guns.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/12/2012-year-in-review/all/