Barton Gellman
At Cheney's initiative, the United States stripped terror suspects of long-established rights under domestic and international law, building a new legal edifice under exclusive White House ownership.Collection: Legal
Most computers today have built in backup software.Collection: Computers
Smallpox, which spreads by respiration and kills roughly one in three of those infected, took hundreds of millions of lives during a recorded history dating to Pharaonic Egypt. The last case was in 1978, and the disease was declared eradicated on May 8, 1980.Collection: Dating
Experts said public companies worry about the loss of customer confidence and the legal liability to shareholders or security vendors when they report flaws.Collection: Legal
Given the volume of PC sales and the way McAfee runs its operation, I imagine there must be thousands of phantom subscribers - folks who signed up once upon a time and left the software behind two or three computers ago.Collection: Computers
The Patriot Act unleashed the FBI to search your email, travel and credit records without even a suspicion of wrongdoing.Collection: Travel
Iraq has the most extensive petrochemical industry in the Middle East and a wealth of vaccine factories, single-cell protein research labs, medical and veterinary manufacturing centers and water treatment plants.Collection: Medical
'Social engineering,' the fancy term for tricking you into giving away your digital secrets, is at least as great a threat as spooky technology.Collection: Technology
Privacy is relational. It depends on the audience. You don't want your employer to know you're job hunting. You don't spill all about your love life to your mom or your kids. You don't tell trade secrets to your rivals.Collection: Mom
The National Security Agency has broken privacy rules or overstepped its legal authority thousands of times each year since Congress granted the agency broad new powers in 2008, according to an internal audit and other top-secret documents.Collection: Legal
Daniel Ellsberg showed tremendous courage back in the '70s.Collection: Courage
On March 12, 2004, acting attorney general James B. Comey and the Justice Department's top leadership reached the brink of resignation over electronic surveillance orders that they believed to be illegal.Collection: Leadership
Enclosed by a sand berm four miles around and 160 feet high, the Baghdad Nuclear Research Facility entombs what remains of reactors bombed by Israel in 1981 and the United States in 1991. It has stored industrial and medical wastes, along with spent reactor fuel.Collection: Medical
I favor pocket-sized hard drives that travel between home and office, syncing with computers on both ends.Collection: Computers
Dell fills its computers with crapware, collecting fees from McAfee and other vendors to pre-install 'trial' versions.Collection: Computers
Cloud services cut both ways in terms of security: you get off-site backup and disaster recovery, but you entrust your secrets to somebody else's hands. Doing the latter increases your exposure to government surveillance and the potential for deliberate or inadvertent breaches of your confidential files.Collection: Government
The NSA has different reporting requirements for each branch of government and each of its legal authorities.Collection: Legal
Stuxnet, a computer worm reportedly developed by the United States and Israel that destroyed Iranian nuclear centrifuges in attacks in 2009 and 2010, is often cited as the most dramatic use of a cyber weapon.
First developed as a weapon by the U.S. Army, VX is an oily, odorless and tasteless liquid that kills on contact with the skin or when inhaled in aerosol form. Like other nerve agents, it is treatable in the first minutes after exposure but otherwise leads swiftly to fatal convulsions and respiratory failure.
Privacy and encryption work, but it's too easy to make a mistake that exposes you.
In the field of biological weapons, there is almost no prospect of detecting a pathogen until it has been used in an attack.
For months, Obama administration officials attacked Snowden's motives and said the work of the NSA was distorted by selective leaks and misinterpretations.
Federal prosecutors want to indict Julian Assange for making public a great many classified documents.
Everyone and his Big Brother wants to log your browsing habits, the better to build a profile of who you are and how you live your life - online and off. Search engine companies offer a benefit in return: more relevant search results. The more they know about you, the better they can tailor information to your needs.
The U.S. government has known since the early 1990s about Soviet-era smallpox weapons, and collected circumstantial evidence of programs elsewhere.
Rolf Ekeus, his appearance can deceive. He looks somewhere between an international diplomat and a mad professor. He's got that sort of shock of white hair and a slightly absent-minded way of speaking. But he's extremely sharp and very serious about power relationships.
Iraq has, in effect, one export of any consequence. That's oil.
Scott Ritter is a very well-known archetype of a certain U.S. military officer. Very hard talking, very ambitious, zealous, and completely consumed with carrying out his mission. He's a guy who, throughout his career, I would say, did not break rules, but he worked around road blocks.
In effect, you cannot stop Iraq from growing nasty bugs in the basement. You can stop them from putting operational warheads on working missiles and launching them at their neighbors.
NSA surveillance is a complex subject - legally, technically and operationally.
The NSA is forbidden to 'target' American citizens, green-card holders or companies for surveillance without an individual warrant from a judge.
U.S. intelligence services routinely use collection methods against foreigners that foreseeably - with certainty - ingest high volumes of U.S. communications as well.
Some misunderstandings are hard to cure.
As militias go, the Ohio Defense Force is on the moderate side.
Scores of armed antigovernment groups, some of them far more radical, have formed or been revived during the Obama years, according to law-enforcement agencies and outside watchdogs.
The federal government is often said in militia circles to have made wholesale seizures of power, at times by subterfuge. A leading grievance holds that the 16th Amendment, which authorizes the federal income tax, was ratified through fraud.
Obama's ascendancy unhinged the radical right, offering a unified target to competing camps of racial, nativist and religious animus.
Holding our own government to account for the use of its power is, in my view, the highest mission of a U.S. news organization.
I have no evidence of any relationship between IRS and NSA.
I'm a journalist and author. I make my living by finding things out and writing about them.
Why does it appear that interested readers so often attribute flaws to 'the press' rather than taking particular issue with particular reports?
In general, states do not count on pledges of 'no more war' from their neighbors. Israel's army never counted on it from Egypt, for example.
Palestinians have had to live for a long time with the fact that Israelis had power over them in their everyday lives.
All Americans are dependent for their energy on the Arabian peninsula.
Doctrines don't govern policy. They provide a conceptual framework by which policymakers approach their decisions. But there is no such thing as a doctrine that controls policy in every way.
Clinton saw himself much more as the steward of alliances and of consensus that moved in the right direction. He didn't see himself as someone who could change the overall thrust, I think, of global policy.
I doubt there's any government in the world that guides itself primarily by strategy or conceptual documents or worldview. Anybody who has the reins of power has to look at practical limitations and tradeoffs - the fact that you can focus at most on one or two things at a time, that resources are limited.
Snowden has yet to tell me anything that was a fact that I have been able to rebut or that anybody in the U.S. government I have talked to has been able to rebut.
Snowden has been very sparing about discussing his early life or his personal life.
The surveillance of ordinary people is far greater than I would have imagined and far greater than the American public has been able to debate.