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  Our current Cybersecurity Czar is fed up, and has put in her two weeks notice. Melissa E. Hathaway, the current senior cybersecurity aid to the President, a holdover from Bush, has decided to do something more productive. She notes that Obama made a riveting speech two months ago on how he was going to personally pick a Cybersecurity Czar, and make cybersecurity a national priority. However time has passed, and nothing has happened. Hathaway expressed her frustration at the President's fai...

For more background on "flash" trading, see my prior post "Not Insider Trading? Part I." Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) said earlier today that an SEC ban on flash trading was "imminent." Schumer said that in a discussion he had with Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Mary Schapiro, she personally promised him that the ban would be forthcoming. This is part of a broader investigation into questionable trading practices such as "dark pools," anonymous trading groups, and high frequenc...

An interesting issue has developed in the law of cell phone handsets, and more generally the anti-competitive practices of large national wireless carriers. The issue stems from Apple's refusal to host a Google application in the iPhone App Store. The refusal to host the Google Voice app has not only irritated iPhone users, like myself, but has attracted the attention of the FCC.   Google Voice is a unique and useful currently web-based program in development for individuals and small busine...

See if you can figure this one out: if you are extremely rich and influential, then you can receive market news before the general public, and legally trade on it. What?! The service provided to these traders, known as "flashing," allows them to view orders submitted to exchanges, like the Nasdaq, before they are actually placed on the open market. The time period to review the information before the trade is placed is very short, fractions of a second, but enough time for an automated comput...

"Concerted rings" located in Eastern Europe and Asia have been identified as the perpetrators of complex market manipulating fraud schemes. The schemes involve criminals gaining access to individual brokerage accounts, or opening accounts with stolen identities. One permutation involved using compromised accounts to buy up shares of infrequently traded stocks to inflate their value, and then selling shares of the stock the criminals owned in their personal accounts that had been purchased at ...