Oct 25 - Tesla Inc (TSLA.O) is under criminal investigation in the United States over claims that the company's electric vehicles can drive themselves, three people familiar with the matter said. The U.S. Department of Justice launched the previously undisclosed probe last year following more than a dozen crashes, some of them fatal, involving Tesla's driver assistance system Autopilot, which was activated during the accidents, the people said. As early as 2016, Tesla's marketing materials have touted Autopilot's capabilities. On a conference call that year, Elon Musk, the Silicon Valley automaker's chief executive, described it as "probably better" than a human driver. Last week, Musk said on another call Tesla would soon release an upgraded version of "Full Self-Driving" software allowing customers to travel "to your work, your friend's house, to the grocery store without you touching the wheel."

Japanese police have been using a system that can match photos of people who have been previously arrested with images gathered by surveillance cameras and social media, police officials said Saturday, a move that could raise concerns about privacy violations. The facial analysis system has been operated by police across the nation since March to identify criminal suspects more quickly and accurately, the officials said. But critics warn that the system could turn the country into a surveillance society unless it is operated under strict rules. "We are using the system only for criminal investigations and within the scope of law. We discard facial images that are found to be unrelated to cases," a senior National Police Agency official said.

WASHINGTON - U.S. authorities are in the "advanced" stages of a criminal probe that could result in an indictment of Chinese technology giant Huawei, a report said Wednesday. The Wall Street Journal, citing anonymous sources, said the Justice Department is looking into allegations of theft involving trade secrets from Huawei's U.S. business partners, including a T-Mobile robotic device used to test smartphones. The Justice Department declined to comment on the report and Huawei did not respond to a request for comment. The move would further escalate tensions between the U.S. and China after the arrest last year in Canada of Huawei's chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou, who is the daughter of the company's founder and remains under house arrest, awaiting proceedings. The Meng case has inflamed U.S.-China and Canada-China relations.

Gait recognition technology, a method to identify people by characteristics shown unconsciously in the ways they walk, is being utilized in criminal investigations in Japan. The technology enables the identification of individuals even from images taken from a distance and low-resolution footage. According to advocates, a video image of only two strides is sufficient to identify a person with a high rate of accuracy, based on arm swings, length of stride and other characteristics. Researchers are working to improve the accuracy of the technology with the use of artificial intelligence. In a brazen daytime attack in Tokyo's upscale Ginza district in April 2017, a man was robbed of some ¥40 million on a street after he had converted gold into cash.

Editor's Note: This story was originally published on May 9, 2017. It has been updated to reflect developments including Uber's firing of 20 employees following an internal investigation into its corporate culture, as well as self-driving engineer Anthony Levandowski. If you haven't heard (maybe you've been toiling in Elon's tunnels?), Uber has had a rough start to 2017. The Department of Justice has launched a criminal probe into the company's use of "Greyball," a system it used to identify regulatory officials and block them from booking rides. In January, it lost riders who objected to CEO Travis Kalanick's (soon abandoned) seat on President Trump's economic council.

If you haven't heard (maybe you've been toiling in Elon's tunnels?), Uber has had a rough start to 2017. The Department of Justice just launched a criminal probe into the company's use of "Greyball," a system it used to identify regulatory officials and block them from booking rides. In January, it lost riders who objected to CEO Travis Kalanick's (soon abandoned) seat on President Trump's economic council. In late February, former Uber engineer Susan Fowler published an explosive blog post, accusing Uber of fostering a misogynistic corporate culture. A few days later, Google autonomous driving spinoff Waymo filed a lawsuit alleging Uber boosted its self-driving program by stealing its trade secrets.

Uber could be facing a criminal probe by the Department of Justice into its use of a ghost-app program called Greyball, according to a Reuters report late Thursday. The controversial program allowed Uber engineers to take over a user's app and send them a map that did not accurately reflect which drivers were in the area. Uber admitted that Greyball was used in part to track and avoid regulators who might be hailing rides to scrutinize the company's business practices, and discontinued the practice five days after a March 3 New York Times report exposed the program. If true, a criminal investigation would represent a significant ratcheting up of problems for the world's most valuable startup, which already is dealing with an internal probe about a sexist work environment and a lawsuit from Waymo over allegedly stolen self-driving car technology. Uber declined to comment, but provided a letter the company sent to Portland, Ore., officials in March that describes the program.