The Senate Intelligence Committee released its report on CIA torture today, and the news is as bad as it could be. Of the 119 prisoners detained by the CIA, more than one in five were wrongfully imprisoned, while CIA interrogators ran through a host of barbaric tactics including Russian roulette, shoving hummus up a detainee's rectum, and simply leaving targets to freeze to death in an unheated cell. And while all of it was happening, many officials within the agency harbored real doubts about whether the program was working at all.
Last month, this blog featured a story about an innovation in ATM skimming known as wiretapping, which I said involves a “tiny” hole cut in the ATM’s front through which thieves insert devices capable of eavesdropping on and recording the ATM user’s card data. Turns out, the holes the crooks make to insert their gear tend to be anything but tiny.
The NSA's bulk phone metadata spying program was renewed for another 90 days, the fourth time the warrantless snooping has been reauthorized following President Barack Obama promising reform last January, the government said Monday.
Since the Snowden leaks first made clear the US government's sweeping database of phone call data, four separate legal challenges to that program have been filed in federal courts. Three of them now await decision from appeals courts.
The unsuccessful raid to free Luke Somers garnered rare bipartisan support and renewed the spotlight on America's controversial captive policy.
During a surprise trip to Afghanistan, U.S. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel said on Saturday that up to 1,000 additional American troops will remain in the country for the first part of 2015. This means abandoning a plan to cut U.S. troop levels to 9,800 by the end of the year because of a temporary shortfall in allied forces, not because of a recent surge in Taliban attacks.
A new report from the U.S. Treasury Department found that a majority of bank account takeovers by cyberthieves over the past decade might have been thwarted had affected institutions known to look for and block transactions coming through Tor, a global communications network that helps users maintain anonymity by obfuscating their true location online.
Paige Young was the November 1968 Playboy Playmate of the Month and, after years of being used by powerful Hollywood men, she shot herself in the head. She was found dead laying on an American flag, next to a pentagram laid out on the ground, in a room full of pictures on which were written “Hugh Hefner is the devil”.
After a smooth launch from Florida's Cape Canaveral, Orion splashed down at 11:29AM Eastern time, west of Baja California, in the Pacific Ocean. Orion's two loops around Earth got as high as 3,600 miles— about 15 times higher than the International Space Station and the highest any spacecraft made for people has gone in decades.
To combat an unexpected, mutated version of influenza, the CDC has warned Americans to supplement their shots with anti-viral medicine.
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