Siobhan Gorman blazes a trail through Ft. Meade: A program that was supposed to help the National Security Agency pluck out electronic data crucial to the nation’s safety is not up and running more than six years and $1.2 billion after it was launched, according to current and former government officials. The classified project, code-named…

From LGF: Search Engine: Google – Search Term: Tiananmen What the Chinese see What the rest of the world sees

Yeah, get some! You might not agree with their positions, but you can’t argue with the quality of their content.

They’re coming to take the waters: Mexican federal agents have arrested four Iraqis trying to sneak into the United States without proper documents, the government said Monday. […] Many undocumented Iraqi nationals have been captured in Mexico en route to the U.S. border. None has been found to have had any links to terrorism.

William Arkin points out an interesting set of coincidences: The National Security Agency is in the process of building a new warning hub and data warehouse in the Denver area, realigning much of its workforce from Ft. Meade, Maryland to Colorado. On the surface, the NSA move seems to be a management and cost cutting…

Reuters opens the back door (draft) – (thanks E.D.):   The U.S. Army has forced about 50,000 soldiers to continue serving after their voluntary stints ended under a policy called “stop-loss,” but while some dispute its fairness, court challenges have fallen flat.   The policy applies to soldiers in units due to deploy for the…

DOJ PAO explains what all the fuss is about.

My Weekly Standard article is up. Thanks Steve, R, C, and of course WK. Pre-emptive note to the CF community: Yes, if this were going to the IJDE  it would read a lot differently. Consider who the average WS reader is. I’m on the HTCIA listserv if you want to discuss technology/technique.

I spent a brief but memorable time in West Texas many years ago. Unlike a lot of my cohorts I never made a weekend trip south of the border; in part because I’m not all that interested in donkey shows, and because I had a bad experience with tequila once that haunts me to this…

In case I needed to paint a bolder and more colorful picture of what one can find on captured media . . . from crypto/privacy guru Bruce Schneier in Wired:   Some years ago, I left my laptop computer on a train from Washington to New York. Replacing the computer was expensive, but at the…