Free Republic

A journalist and a researcher have sued the Justice Department for access to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s records on the late journalist Michael Hastings. The lawsuit follows the FBI’s failure to respond to separate Freedom of Information Act requests for records on Hastings submitted by journalist Jason Leopold of al-Jazeera and Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher Ryan Shapiro. Agencies are required by statute to notify applicants about whether it will fulfill their requests within a 20-working-day period of the initial application. In the hours before his death, which was ruled an accident by the Los Angeles Police Department, Hastings...

Barnaby Jack, a celebrated computer hacker who could force a bank ATM to spit out cash and sparked safety improvements in medical devices, has died in San Francisco. The San Francisco Medical Examiner's Office said Jack died in the city on Thursday. It gave no details. He was believed to be in his mid-30s. Jack was due to appear at the Black Hat hacking convention in Las Vegas next week, demonstrating techniques for remotely attacking implanted heart devices. He said he could kill a man from 30 feet away. His genius was finding bugs in the tiny computers embedded in...

A computer hacker who gained cult status across the internet after revealing how to hack cash machines has been found a week before he was due to demonstrate how to kill someone by hacking their pacemaker. The body of Barnaby Jack was found in San Francisco yesterday. The city's medical examiner's office would not give any further details. Jack, a security expert, became one of the most famous hackers on the planet after a 2010 demonstration in which he forced ATMs to spit out cash, dubbed 'Jackpotting'.