congress

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By Jonathan Stempel NEW YORK (Reuters) – A U.S. spying program that systematically collects millions of Americans' phone records is illegal, a federal appeals court ruled on Thursday, putting pressure on Congress to quickly decide whether to replace or end the controversial anti-terrorism surveillance. Ruling on a program revealed by former government security contractor Edward Snowden, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan said the Patriot Act did not authorize the National Security Agency to collect Americans' calling records in bulk. Circuit Judge Gerard Lynch wrote for a three-judge panel that Section 215, which addresses the FBI's ability to gather business records, could not be interpreted to have permitted the NSA to collect a “staggering” amount of phone records, contrary to claims by the Bush and Obama administrations.

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By Euan Rocha and Alastair Sharp TORONTO (Reuters) – BlackBerry Ltd posted a surprise quarterly profit on Friday and said it is pushing to end a slide in its revenue in this fiscal year, sending the stock up as much as 5.1 percent. We're now turning our attention to revenue stabilization,” BlackBerry Chief Executive John Chen said on a conference call. Chen plans to grow BlackBerry's small but high-margin software division by moving more customers onto its products, including a system that allows companies and government agencies to manage multiple employee devices. The stock rose as high as $9.77, before easing to $9.59, up 3.1 percent on the Nasdaq, despite a much bigger-than-expected decline in fiscal fourth quarter revenue.

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Nokia, the world's third-largest mobile equipment maker, has seen nothing in its business that would lead it to change its financial outlook, its chief executive said on Sunday. It is kind of business as usual,” Nokia CEO Rajeev Suri said in response to a reporter's question during a press conference ahead of the Mobile World Congress trade show in Barcelona. In late January, the company said that for its mainstay Nokia Networks’ business, it expected net sales and operating margins in the first quarter to decline compared to the fourth quarter of 2014, typically a seasonally stronger quarter.

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By Joseph Menn and Roberta Rampton SAN FRANCISCO/WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Barack Obama is set to sign an executive order on Friday aimed at encouraging companies to share more information about cybersecurity threats with the government and each other, a response to attacks like that on Sony Entertainment. The order sets the stage for new private-sector led “information sharing and analysis organizations” (ISAOs) – hubs where companies share cyber threat data with each other and with the Department of Homeland Security. It is one step in a long effort to make companies as well as privacy and consumer advocates more comfortable with proposed legislation that would offer participating companies liability protection, the White House said. “We believe that by clearly defining what makes for a good ISAO, that will make tying liability protection to sectoral organizations easier and more accessible to the public and to privacy and civil liberties advocates,” said Michael Daniel, Obama's cyber coordinator, in a conference call with reporters.

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SEOUL (Reuters) – Samsung Electronics Co Ltd said on Thursday that all its new smart television products launched in 2015 will be powered by the Tizen operating system, marking a fresh effort by the company to increase the usage of the software platform. Smart TVs offer additional software and connectivity functions, such as video streaming and web browsing capabilities. Samsung demonstrated TV sets powered by Tizen at developer conferences last year. “We are focusing our efforts on Tizen right now,” Kim Hyun-suk, Samsung's president of visual display business, told Reuters in an interview. …