John O. Brennan couldn’t even finish introducing his family before he was interrupted four times by protesters at his confirmation hearing Thursday to become the new director of the CIA. Intelligence committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein halted the hearing and pulled Mr. Brennan from the room until it could be cleared of protesters, who she said were affiliated with Code Pink, the anti-war group. Mr. Brenna ...

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is telling a different story about Benghazi than the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency. If the story Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, is telling is correct, then the story the State Department Accountability Review Board (ARB) and the Central Intelligence Agency have told is not. If the story the State Department and the CIA have ...

Human rights advocates were floored on Monday night when NBC News published the details of an alarming Justice Department memo detailing the protocol for sending drones after United States citizens. It’s not as if they hadn’t suspected that the Obama administration’s top secret drone attack protocol contained some unsavory details. They just didn’t expect them to be so frightfully broad. The scoop by Michae ...

The full extent of the CIA's extraordinary rendition programme has been laid bare with the publication of a report showing there is evidence that more than a quarter of the world's governments covertly offered support. A 213-page report compiled by the Open Society Justice Initiative (OSJI), a New York-based human rights organisation, says that at least 54 countries co-operated with the global kidnap, deten ...

The outgoing US defence secretary has admitted that intelligence obtained using enhanced interrogation techniques or torture was used to "put together the puzzle" that led the American military to Osama bin Laden's compound in Pakistan. 'Zero Dark Thirty,' Kathyrn Bigelow's Oscar-nominated film chronicling the hunt for bin Laden that ended with his killing in Pakistan by US special forces in 2011, has spark ...

The U.S. isn’t just shoveling cash to stem the tide of narcotics in Mexico and Colombia. Quietly, it’s built up its drug war in Central America, too — spending nearly $100 million over four years on advanced gear for local forces. Not that Washington has any idea what it’s gotten for its money. A new report from the Government Accountability Office provides a rare glimpse into the Central American war on dr ...

Milan’s appeals court has sentenced a former Central Intelligence Agency chief to seven years in prison for kidnapping an Egyptian Muslim cleric. Jeff Castelli was found guilty along with two other agents, who were each given six years for abducting Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, also known as Abu Omar, as part of the CIA's ‘extraordinary rendition’ program in 2003. The trio had been acquitted at their first t ...

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Cell phones that can identify you by how you walk. Fingerprint scanners that work from 25 feet away. Radars that pick up your heartbeat from behind concrete walls. Algorithms that can tell identical twins apart. Eyebrows and earlobes that give you away. A new generation of technologies is emerging that can identify you by your physiology. And unlike the old crop of biometric systems, you don't need to be ri ...

Twitter has released its second transparency report, which demonstrated a frightening increase in requests for user data by the US government and ignited serious concerns over privacy and free expression. ­The list disclosed data requests from over 30 nations, and revealed that the US government was responsible for 815 of the 1,009 information requests in the second half of 2012 – just over 80 percent of al ...