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May 07, 2011 | By Scott Calvert, The Baltimore Sun One day last year, a trusted courier for Osama bin Laden answered a phone call that might have been wholly unremarkable except for one thing — the National Security Agency was apparently listening in. That intercepted call helped American intelligence officials track the courier all the way to the walled compound in Pakistan where bin Laden was hiding. The discovery eventually led to last week's midnight assault by Navy SEALs who killed the al-Qaida leader, ending a pursuit that began in the mid-1990s. A spokeswoman for the NSA said the agency would not offer more detail, and intelligence officials won't even confirm the account, which was reported by several news outlets quoting anonymous sources. And yet for the super-secret NSA, one of Maryland's largest employers with a work force of some 30,000 and a budget in the billions, this singular act of eavesdropping now stands as one of its most notable and conspicuous achievements.
Md.-based intelligence agencies helped track bin Laden - baltimoresun.com
Revised ‘Net Censorship Bill Requires Search Engines To Block Sites, Too | Epicenter
<img class=" aligncenter" src="http://static.arstechnica.net/assets/2011/04/google-monitor-crossouts-ars-thumb-640xauto-20938.jpg" alt="" width="640" height="360" /> Surprise! After months in the oven, the soon-to-be-released new version of a major U.S. Internet censorship bill didn’t shrink in scope — it got much broader. Under the new proposal, search engines, internet providers, credit card companies, and ad networks would all have cut off access to foreign “rogue sites”– and such court orders would not be limited to the government. Private rightsholders could go to court and target foreign domains, too.