The Obama administration will proceed with a Bush-era plan to use National Security Agency assistance in screening government computer traffic on private-sector networks, with AT&T as the likely test site, according to three current and former government officials.
President Obama said in May that government efforts to protect computer systems from attack would not involve "monitoring private-sector networks or Internet traffic," and Department of Homeland Security officials say the new program will scrutinize only data going to or from government systems.
But the program has provoked debate within DHS, the officials said, because of uncertainty about whether private data can be shielded from unauthorized scrutiny, how much of a role NSA should play and whether the agency's involvement in warrantless wiretapping during George W. Bush's presidency would draw controversy.
TVNL Comment: Still waiting for that change we were promised.
The use of unmanned drones as weapons of war in conflicts around the world has been called into question by one of Britain's most senior judges. Lord Bingham, until last year the senior law lord, said that some weapons were so "cruel as to be beyond the pale of human tolerance".
By the most extraordinary coincidence - Ripple Effect says it is a billion-to-one chance - there was a mock terrorist exercise going on in London that day. This was revealed by the organiser and former Scotland Yard officer Peter Power on BBC Radio 5 in the early evening after the atrocity.
The Americans wanted someone to build a police station in Abu Ghraib, another no-go zone for Western contractors. They were willing to pay $700,000 for the construction of the station, which they named Victory and Peace.
Our government, composed, ostensibly, of the people’s own representatives has refused to take the banks – merely corporations initially created to serve the needs of the people – in hand and deal with them. The tail has become the dog. The Federal Reserve and Rubin’s sorcerer’s apprentices of deregulation have unleashed the hounds of economic hell and allowed the few who rule from behind the curtains of the financial system to sit upon the rest of the American people as if on a throne. And by that I mean toilet. They’ve plundered and pillaged the United States of America into a reasonable facsimile of a banana republic after financial gang rape by NAFTA, the IMF and the World Bank.
Documents show detainee belted, another knocked unconscious A newly released document from 2005 shows that one of the first commanders of the US-run Guantanamo Bay prison said that he found the prison bedeviled by chaotic conditions and that prison interrogators were “virtually inexperienced.”
The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.
Scientists have discovered a remarkable similarity between the genetic faults behind both schizophrenia and manic depression in a breakthrough that is expected to open the way to new treatments for two of the most common mental illnesses, affecting millions of people.
