As the US government depicts the Defense Department as shrinking due to budgetary constraints, the Washington Post this morning announces "a major expansion of [the Pentagon's] cybersecurity force over the next several years, increasing its size more than fivefold." Specifically, says the New York Times this morning, "the expansion would increase the Defense Department's Cyber Command by more than 4,000 peo ...

Google received a record number of requests to disclose user information to governments and law enforcement bodies in 2012. Requests have rocketed by 25 per cent in the last year, with the US leading the field by far in calls for data disclosure. The search giant published its findings in its annual transparency report, detailing the number of requests for user information by country. Since Google began doc ...

In the National Security Administration's (NSA) charter, their function and mission statement denotes that they are tasked by the government to promote security, and pursue surveillance. These functions allow the agency access, according to law, the power to collect and analyze data and information it deems necessary to ensure the national security of the country. 
 So it is with great interest to the Ameri ...

The Senate agreed on Friday to approve an extension of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, legislation that allows the NSA and other US intelligence agencies to wiretap conversations involving foreign citizens without obtaining a warrant. ­Despite growing opposition to one of the most notorious and secretive US spying programs, the Senate voted 73-23 early Friday to reauthorize the Foreign Intelligen ...

The National Security Agency’s Perfect Citizen program hunts for vulnerabilities in “large-scale” utilities, including power grid and gas pipeline controllers, new documents from EPIC show. Newly released files show a secret National Security Agency program is targeting the computerized systems that control utilities to discover security vulnerabilities, which can be used to defend the United States or disr ...

The most powerful company on the Internet just got a whole lot creepier: a new service from Google merges offline consumer info with online intelligence, allowing advertisers to target users based on what they do at the keyboard and at the mall. Without much fanfare, Google announced news this week of a new advertising project, Conversions API, that will let businesses build all-encompassing user profiles b ...

New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly has unveiled a precrime plan to find mass shooters before they strike. “The techniques would include cyber-searches of language that mass-casualty shooters have used in e-mails and Internet postings,” Kelly said in a statement, according to the New York Times. “The goal would be to identify the shooter in cyberspace, engage him there and intervene, possibly using an un ...

A Republican lawmaker is urging his colleagues in the Senate to approve without debate a bill that reaffirms the government’s power to place warrantless wiretaps on US citizens. Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Georgia) asked his fellow lawmakers on Capitol Hill this week to quickly reauthorize the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) before the end of the year. Should Congress fail to renew FISA by December ...

Thursday, the European Court of Human Rights in Salzburg found the CIA fully complicit in the kidnapping and torture of Khaled el-Masri, a German citizen now proven to have never had any ties whatsoever with a terror organization. The CIA and Macedonian government were found guilty of kidnapping, torturing and sodomizing an innocent German citizen based purely on his ethnicity alone. This is the first time ...

  A recent review of a relatively unknown program run by the National Counterterrorism Center shows innocent people can be investigated and their data can be kept for years.   Through Freedom of Information Act requests and interviews with officials at numerous agencies, The Wall Street Journal has reconstructed the clash over the counterterrorism program within the administration of President Bar ...