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Yes, it's true. The FBI had a file on Steve Jobs. It's not what you might think, though. The FBI performed a "level III" background investigation on Jobs as a potential presidential appointee in 1991. He was described by most witnesses as an "individual of good character and integrity" that would be suitable for a "position of trust and confidence with the Government." Jobs also had a brush with the FBI when Apple received a bomb threat in 1985.

On Monday, 34 American Civil Liberties Union affiliates across the U.S. sent 379 records requests to local law enforcement agencies seeking to know when, how and why they are using cellphone location data to track American citizens. The ACLU wants to know if law enforcement is going over the heads of the U.S. court system to use what should be private information against American citizens. How big of a concern is this for the average American?

The ACLU wants to know how law enforcement obtains and uses location data from cellphones. Are they contacting the cellular operators directly? Are they issuing warrants to the operators? If so, is the person who owns the location data aware of the warrant? The implications are far reaching. Law enforcement's access to location data affects law-abiding private citizens, not just those involved in criminal activities.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has raided the homes of over a dozen alleged "hacktivists" associated with Anonymous in New York, New Jersey, Florida and California this morning, according to Fox News. The main Anonymous Twitter accounts, the group's primary mode of communication with the world, have been silent but a correlated account @ThaiAnonymous has weighed in on the raids.

"It doesnt matter how many people the 'FBI' arrest.. wether they are core members or not.. #anonymous have started something unstoppable."

Anonymous and related hacker group LulzSec have angered governments across the United States and Europse in recent weeks with an "AntiSec" campaign designed to attack government agencies and contractors. It was just a matter of time before the FBI tracked some members down.

The Amazon Web Services cloud outage lead to some contemplation from cloud computing leaders such as Krishnan Subramanian. I'm wondering if the FBI raid on co-location host DigitalOne will lead to some similar considerations.

Colos aren't cloud in most senses of the word, but multi-tenant cloud providers are at least as vulnerable to this sort of problem. There are ways to mitigate the problems, such as fail-over servers with other cloud providers and encrypting data before storing in the cloud, but I don't think anyone wants to deal with this issue.

Early Tuesday morning, the FBI raided a datacenter run by the Swiss hosting company DigitalOne in what it claimed was a move to thwart "international cyber crime rings distributing scareware." But it appears as though the Feds seized a lot more than just those "scareware" servers, as, according to Marco Arment, creator of Instapaper, one of the servers that the startup leased from DigitalOne was also taken.

The FBI raid on Tuesday caused outages to several services unrelated to the alleged criminal activities, including that of the bookmarking tool Pinboard. While Instapaper itself wasn't knocked offline, Arment says that the server it leases from DigitalOne remains offline.

Gay Girl in Damascus a straight man in Scotland. When the "cousin" of blogger "Amina Abdallah Arraf" reported her abduction, people around the world were upset. This lesbian, half-American Syrian blogger seemed like someone they could relate to. Soon, questions arose and, in part due to the efforts of NPR's Andy Carvin, it came out that this was a fake account.

It turned out the blog was created by Tom MacMaster, an American living in Scotland. Regardless of his motivations, which seemed decent, it was a profoundly stupid move that will be seized by detractors to "prove" there are no oppressed bloggers in tyrannical regimes and no gay women in Arabic countries.

Hackers are turning on each other in droves. One in four hackers will snitch on their hacker buddies when pressured by the United States Secret Service or Federal Bureau of Investigation, according to an investigation done by The Guardian.

Apparently there is no omerta between hackers. The Guardian says that the FBI has so thoroughly infiltrated the hacker community "that it is now riddle with paranoia and mistrust." Arrested hackers often turn into moles for the FBI, acting on behalf of the agency as informants in underground chat rooms and forums to sniff out other hackers susceptible to arrest. Hackers of the world: how likely are you to become a snitch for the U.S. government if you are arrested?

The Guardian has a great story today about how to be a data journalist. It's a timely post. The forces that drive online law enforcement are increasing. It's affecting the world of cloud computing and the open Web.

The FBI is telling us that they need access to encrypted messages. They want peer-to-peer technology to be outlawed. It's centralization that they desire, not the chaos of an increasingly fragmented world.

But who is responsible for watching the FBI?

The FBI's hopes to "wiretap" the Internet show that federal officials and the Obama administration have little understanding of its implications and further almost no understanding of the technology and the way security functions in a communications environment.

It's dangerous stuff if nothing else than for its clear attempt to intrude deeper into our personal lives in the name of safety and security.

But before we get too tripped up on those silly worries about personal freedoms, let's look at what the effects would be on cloud computing and in particular, the customers who use it.

The Obama administration is pushing for new regulations governing Internet communications, giving broader authority to federal law enforcement to wiretap the Web. New regulations will be sent to Congress next year, The New York Times reports, that would require online companies to build in "back doors" for law enforcement, making it possible for the government to both intercept and unscramble encrypted messages.

Many government regulations lag behind the realities of technological change. So, gone are the days when the FBI could easily tap into land line telephone conversations to monitor criminal conversations. These conversations first moved to mobile phones, and now they're online. And according to law enforcement, they're increasingly occurring via social networks like Facebook and peer-to-peer services like Skype.