Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
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.
CloudShield did not see itself as a cloak-and-dagger company. It made its name for high-end hardware that could peer deeply into Internet traffic and pull out and analyze 'packets' of data as they flew by.
As digital communications have multiplied, and NSA capabilities with them, the agency has shifted resources from surveillance of individual targets to the acquisition of communications on a planetary scale.
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.
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.
The causes and severity of NSA infractions vary widely. One in 10 incidents is attributed to a typographical error in which an analyst enters an incorrect query and retrieves data about U.S phone calls or emails.
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.
Leaders at the top of al Qaeda's hierarchy, the evidence shows, completed plans and obtained the materials required to manufacture two biological toxins - botulinum and salmonella - and the chemical poison cyanide.
A national security letter cannot be used to authorize eavesdropping or to read the contents of e-mail. But it does permit investigators to trace revealing paths through the private affairs of a modern digital citizen.
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.
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.
Among all the upheavals of war with al Qaeda, the surest indicator of the historic stakes is the ongoing rotation of top U.S. government managers - scores at a time - into a bunker deep underground and far from Washington.
Friend of mine, a smart journalist, had his iPad stolen. He couldn't help that - the thief broke into his house. But his private, personal data wasn't stolen, exactly. Donated, more like. He had no passcode set on the iPad.
The first time I set out to find George F. Kennan, in 1982, I had just turned 21, begun my final semester at Princeton University and noticed with astonishment that the senior thesis deadline had crept to within four months.
The $52.6 billion U.S. intelligence arsenal is aimed mainly at unambiguous adversaries, including al-Qaida, North Korea and Iran. But top-secret budget documents reveal an equally intense focus on one purported ally: Pakistan.
On average, since 9/11, the FBI reckons that just over 100,000 terrorism leads each year have come over the transom. Analysts and agents designate them as immediate, priority or routine, but the bureau says every one is covered.
Pakistan has accepted some security training from the CIA, but U.S. export restrictions and Pakistani suspicions have prevented the two countries from sharing the most sophisticated technology for safeguarding nuclear components.
Nearly all government advice on terrorism sacrifices practical particulars for an unalarming tone. The usual guidance is to maintain a three-day supply of food and water along with a radio, flashlight, batteries and first-aid kit.
In the urgent aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, with more attacks thought to be imminent, analysts wanted to use 'contact chaining' techniques to build what the NSA describes as network graphs of people who represented potential threats.
Pakistan has dozens of laboratories and production and storage sites scattered across the country. After developing warheads with highly enriched uranium, it has more recently tried to do the same with more-powerful and compact plutonium.
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.
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.
It turns out that American Express honors recurring payments even if the vendor is unable to supply an accurate card number and expiration date. An Amex phone representative said this is a feature, not a bug, which makes sure my bills are paid.
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.
One common puzzle for the security-minded is how to work with confidential data on the road. Sometimes you can't bring your laptop, or don't want to. But working on somebody else's machine exposes you to malware and leaves behind all kinds of electronic trails.
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.
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.
The government of Sudan, employing a back channel direct from its president to the Central Intelligence Agency, offered in the early spring of 1996 to arrest Osama bin Laden and place him in Saudi custody, according to officials and former officials in all three countries.
In the wealthy industrialized nations, effective drug therapies against AIDS became available - AZT as early as 1987, then combinations of antiretroviral agents in 1996. The new drugs offered hope that fatal complications might be staved off and AIDS rendered a chronic condition.
If you do write down your passwords, don't make it obvious which password corresponds to which account. Even better, write the passwords incorrectly and make up an easy rule for fixing them. You could decide to add 1 to each number in your password, so that 2x6Y is written as 3x7Y.
During the morning rush hour on March 20, 1995, the Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo placed packages on five subway trains converging on Tokyo's central station. When punctured, the packages spread vaporized Sarin through the subway cars and then into the stations as the trains pulled in.
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.
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.
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.
At the height of Iraq's clandestine nuclear weapons program, which nearly succeeded in building a bomb in 1991, Tuwaitha incorporated research reactors, uranium mining and enrichment facilities, chemical engineering plants and an explosives fabrication center to build the device that detonates a nuclear core.
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.
Cheney was among the best secretaries of defence the country has ever had. He was a very effective White House chief of staff. He did not make many enemies, and he had the ability to persuade people with that soft tone and very reasonable style of his. He's always been exceptionally good as the right-hand man.
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.
Snowden grants that NSA employees by and large believe in their mission and trust the agency to handle the secrets it takes from ordinary people - deliberately, in the case of bulk records collection, and 'incidentally,' when the content of American phone calls and e-mails are swept into NSA systems along with foreign targets.
For a decade, makers of AIDS medicines had rejected the idea of lowering prices in poor countries for fear of eroding profits in rich ones. The position required a balancing act, because the companies had to deflect attacks on the global reach of their patents, which granted exclusive marketing rights for antiretroviral drugs.
Suppose a bad guy guesses the password for your throwaway Yahoo address. Now he goes to major banking and commerce sites and looks for an account registered to that email address. When he finds one, he clicks the 'forgot my password' button and a new one is sent - to your compromised email account. Now he's in a position to do you serious harm.