11/14-19. 11/7-11. 11/2-3. 11/1. 10/31. 10/28. 10-27. Patriot Act Turns 10, With No Signs of Retirement | Threat Level. Source: American Civil Liberties Union The USA Patriot Act, the law granting the government vast surveillance powers that was adopted in the wake of September 11, turns a decade old Wednesday. But despite its namesake of “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism,” the law seemingly is being invoked far more to target domestic crime than for fighting terrorism. The act, which has remained largely the same since President George W. Bush signed the legislation six weeks after 9/11, among other things gives the government powers to acquire phone, banking and other records via the power of a so-called “national security letter,” which does not require a court warrant.
The FBI need merely assert, in writing, that the information is “relevant” to an ongoing terrorism or national security investigation. Amendments requiring that the letters seek data relevant to a “terror” investigation have failed. Government Could Hide Existence of Records under FOIA Rule Proposal - ProPublica. Fails bioterrorism report card. By CNN's Jim Barnett The United States remains largely unprepared for a large-scale bioterrorism attack or deadly disease outbreak, according to the WMD Terrorism Research Center.
The finding are in a report card released Wednesday, which gave the country 15 failing grades in categories ranging from detection to medical countermeasures. The report card gave 15 F's,15 D's and no A's in its assessment of current bio-defense capabilities in the United States. The bipartisan center, headed by former Sen. Bob Graham, D-Florida, and former Sen. In a news release accompanying the report card, the Center said, "In the past decade the United States government has spent more than $65 billion on bio-defense, and yet it has done so without an end-to-end, strategic assessment of the nation's bio-response capabilities. " "America does not yet have adequate bio-response capability to meet fundamental expectations during a large-scale biological event," said Graham.
Gadgets the Pentagon Made — From the Microwave to the New iPhone | Danger Room. The cool voice assistant that runs on the iPhone 4S? Years ago, someone thought what Apple calls Siri would be a valuable tool for the military. Come to think of it, most of the technology we use — whether to cook our food, figure out directions, or gawk at adorable pictures of animals — was in some way designed to help, however tangentially, America go to war. Armchair sociologists like to ponder the distance between military and civilian life. In the tech world, at least, they're not so far apart. Innovations that began with the U.S.' well-funded defense establishment almost always filter down into commercial, mundane usage. PDF of Casting a Wider Net study. Battling Internet Censorship Must Evolve, Study Says. U.S. Intelligence Unit Aims to Build a ‘Data Eye in the Sky’ More than 60 years ago, in his “Foundation” series, the science fiction novelist Isaac Asimov invented a new science — psychohistory — that combined mathematics and psychology to predict the future.
Now social scientists are trying to mine the vast resources of the Internet — Web searches and Twitter messages, Facebook and blog posts, the digital location trails generated by billions of cellphones — to do the same thing. The most optimistic researchers believe that these storehouses of “big data” will for the first time reveal sociological laws of human behavior — enabling them to predict political crises, revolutions and other forms of social and economic instability, just as physicists and chemists can predict natural phenomena. “This is a significant step forward,” said Thomas Malone, the director of the Center for Collective Intelligence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Photo The government is showing interest in the idea. Some scientists are skeptical.