Google appears to be the worst of the major search engines from a privacy point of view; Ask.com, with AskEraser turned on, is among the best.
Barton Gellman
The NSA has different reporting requirements for each branch of government and each of its legal authorities.
Experts said public companies worry about the loss of customer confidence and the legal liability to shareholders or security vendors when they report flaws.
As militias go, the Ohio Defense Force is on the moderate side.
Even complex passwords are getting easy to break if they're too short. That's because today's inexpensive computer chips have the power of supercomputers from the year 2000.
During the morning rush hour on March 20, 1995, the Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo placed packages on five subway trains converging on Tokyo's central station. When punctured, the packages spread vaporized Sarin through the subway cars and then into the stations as the trains pulled in.
Privacy is relational. It depends on the audience. You don't want your employer to know you're job hunting. You don't spill all about your love life to your mom or your kids. You don't tell trade secrets to your rivals.
Doctrines don't govern policy. They provide a conceptual framework by which policymakers approach their decisions. But there is no such thing as a doctrine that controls policy in every way.
Ghostery lets you spy on the spies in your computer. For each web page you visit, this extension uncloaks some - but not all - of the invisible tracking software that is working behind the scenes.
As Trotsky didn't exactly say, you may not be interested in electronic snoops, but snoops are interested in you, whether or not you keep Coke's secret recipe on your iPhone.
Some misunderstandings are hard to cure.
At the height of Iraq's clandestine nuclear weapons program, which nearly succeeded in building a bomb in 1991, Tuwaitha incorporated research reactors, uranium mining and enrichment facilities, chemical engineering plants and an explosives fabrication center to build the device that detonates a nuclear core.
I have no evidence of any relationship between IRS and NSA.
All Americans are dependent for their energy on the Arabian peninsula.
Given the volume of PC sales and the way McAfee runs its operation, I imagine there must be thousands of phantom subscribers - folks who signed up once upon a time and left the software behind two or three computers ago.
I doubt there's any government in the world that guides itself primarily by strategy or conceptual documents or worldview. Anybody who has the reins of power has to look at practical limitations and tradeoffs - the fact that you can focus at most on one or two things at a time, that resources are limited.
Scores of armed antigovernment groups, some of them far more radical, have formed or been revived during the Obama years, according to law-enforcement agencies and outside watchdogs.
Iraq has, in effect, one export of any consequence. That's oil.
We know what's in our Cheerios and in our retirement accounts because the law requires disclosure.
In the field of biological weapons, there is almost no prospect of detecting a pathogen until it has been used in an attack.
I don't say I never use Facebook, but I often think about closing my account.
White House officials acknowledge in broad terms that a president's time and public rhetoric are among his most valuable policy tools.
Stuxnet, a computer worm reportedly developed by the United States and Israel that destroyed Iranian nuclear centrifuges in attacks in 2009 and 2010, is often cited as the most dramatic use of a cyber weapon.
Scott Ritter is a very well-known archetype of a certain U.S. military officer. Very hard talking, very ambitious, zealous, and completely consumed with carrying out his mission. He's a guy who, throughout his career, I would say, did not break rules, but he worked around road blocks.
On March 12, 2004, acting attorney general James B. Comey and the Justice Department's top leadership reached the brink of resignation over electronic surveillance orders that they believed to be illegal.
Ordinary Geiger counters, worn on belt clips and resembling pagers, have been in use by the U.S. Customs Service for years.
Searches of al Qaeda sites in Afghanistan, undertaken since American-backed forces took control there, are not known to have turned up a significant cache of nuclear materials.
A national security letter cannot be used to authorize eavesdropping or to read the contents of e-mail. But it does permit investigators to trace revealing paths through the private affairs of a modern digital citizen.
'Social engineering,' the fancy term for tricking you into giving away your digital secrets, is at least as great a threat as spooky technology.
First developed as a weapon by the U.S. Army, VX is an oily, odorless and tasteless liquid that kills on contact with the skin or when inhaled in aerosol form. Like other nerve agents, it is treatable in the first minutes after exposure but otherwise leads swiftly to fatal convulsions and respiratory failure.
Everyone and his Big Brother wants to log your browsing habits, the better to build a profile of who you are and how you live your life - online and off. Search engine companies offer a benefit in return: more relevant search results. The more they know about you, the better they can tailor information to your needs.
Throughout the early and mid-1990s, the Clinton administration debated the merits of paying for AIDS testing and counseling of vulnerable populations overseas.
True net-heads sometimes resort to punctuation cartoons to get around the absence of inflection.
The first reports of AIDS closely followed the inauguration of President Ronald Reagan, whose 'family values' agenda and alliance with Christian conservatives associated AIDS with deviance and sin.
If you do write down your passwords, don't make it obvious which password corresponds to which account. Even better, write the passwords incorrectly and make up an easy rule for fixing them. You could decide to add 1 to each number in your password, so that 2x6Y is written as 3x7Y.
In effect, you cannot stop Iraq from growing nasty bugs in the basement. You can stop them from putting operational warheads on working missiles and launching them at their neighbors.
Why does it appear that interested readers so often attribute flaws to 'the press' rather than taking particular issue with particular reports?
Companies that receive government information demands have to obey the law, but they often have room for maneuver. They scarcely ever use it.
Ecuador has never stated flatly that it would give asylum to Edward Snowden.
It turns out that American Express honors recurring payments even if the vendor is unable to supply an accurate card number and expiration date. An Amex phone representative said this is a feature, not a bug, which makes sure my bills are paid.
The Obama administration has provided almost no public information about the NSA's compliance record.
Palestinians have had to live for a long time with the fact that Israelis had power over them in their everyday lives.
There's a long history of private-company cooperation with the NSA that dates back to at least the 1970s.
Friend of mine, a smart journalist, had his iPad stolen. He couldn't help that - the thief broke into his house. But his private, personal data wasn't stolen, exactly. Donated, more like. He had no passcode set on the iPad.
Federal prosecutors want to indict Julian Assange for making public a great many classified documents.
The government of Sudan, employing a back channel direct from its president to the Central Intelligence Agency, offered in the early spring of 1996 to arrest Osama bin Laden and place him in Saudi custody, according to officials and former officials in all three countries.
The federal government is often said in militia circles to have made wholesale seizures of power, at times by subterfuge. A leading grievance holds that the 16th Amendment, which authorizes the federal income tax, was ratified through fraud.
For personal use, I recommend the free and open-source Truecrypt, which comes in flavors for Windows, Mac and Linux.
There is evidence that some of al Qaeda's nuclear efforts over the years met with swindles and false leads.
For political and bureaucratic reasons, governments at all levels are telling far less to the public than to insiders about how to prepare for and behave in the initial chaos of a mass-casualty event.
