655 articles on Politics

  • Insurgents' Homemade Bombs Are Increasingly Duds
    Improvised explosive devices, the Afghanistan War's signature insurgent weapon, are now a quarter less effective than they were last year, according to Pentagon statistics provided to Danger Room. During the year that just ended, from April 1, 2011 to March 31, 2012, insurgents detonated 7,166 bombs against U.S. troops and their allies. During the previous year -- April 2010 through March 2011 -- insurgents detonated 8,557 such bombs.
    05.04.12
  • Feds Seized Hip-Hop Site for a Year, Waiting for Proof of Infringement
    Federal authorities seized a popular hip-hop music site based on assertions from the Recording Industry Association of America that it was linking to four "pre-release" music tracks, giving it back more than a year later without filing civil or criminal charges because of apparent recording industry delays in confirming infringement, according to court records obtained by Wired.
    05.03.12
  • E-Mail Confused Osama, and 5 Other Revelations From the Bin Laden Files
    Osama bin Laden may have been the evil mastermind behind the world's most successful terrorist group. But in his final days, he sounded more and more like your great aunt Henrietta: nagging his subordinates for not hating America enough -- the terrorist equivalent of telling the kids to get off his lawn -- and getting awfully confused about this whole e-mail thing.
    05.03.12
  • U.S. Turns Osama Against Al-Qaida With Document Dump
    In an apparent attempt to sow discord within the ranks of al-Qaida's remaining sympathizers, the U.S. government declassified personal communications from Osama bin Laden showing the terror leader fretting about the bloodthirsty movement he launched.
    05.03.12
  • Here's the Plan to Fly Missile-Packed Blimps Over Your Home
    Upstart Virginia aerospace firm Mav6 is offering to install guided missiles on the massive, robotic spy blimp it's building for the Air Force. The idea would only be slightly terrifying, if the massive airship was headed to Afghanistan, as originally planned. But Mav6 and its CEO, a respected retired Air Force general, are also promoting the giant airship for homeland security missions over U.S. soil. In that way, today's war blimp could become tomorrow's all-seeing, lethal Big Brother.
    05.03.12
  • E-Mail Now, and You Could Be Al-Qaida's Next Terrorist
    Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula is the terrorist group that worries American officials the most. It's eclipsed the declining core al-Qaida organization, causing the U.S. to step up the drone campaign in Yemen targeting it, out of fear that the group will launch another strike at New York or Washington. But its plans for launching new terror attacks at those faraway targets apparently depend on recruiting ordinary slobs on the internet.
    05.02.12
  • 9/11 Mastermind Says He Wants to Die; Gitmo Trial May Be His Chance
    A year after the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, the United States has another opportunity on the horizon to take down a major terrorist figure, albeit in a much different way. Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the confessed mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, will finally begin a military commission for the murders of 3,000 Americans at Guantanamo Bay on Saturday morning, when he'll appear at a Guantanamo Bay courtroom for his belated arraignment. But even as the U.S. boasts about the justice its reformed military trials will dispense, those trials might ironically give the man known as KSM the conclusion he sees as a final victory: death.
    05.02.12
  • Obama Uses Bin Laden Death to (Kind of) End Afghan War
    The symbolism couldn't be starker. A year after ordering Navy SEALs to execute the raid that killed Osama bin Laden -- the man who triggered the Afghan War -- President Obama flew to Afghanistan to sign a pact with Afghan President Hamid Karzai winding down the decade-long conflict. It's the first time since the killing that Obama has used the bin Laden raid as a lever for getting out of Afghanistan. Only, in classic Obama fashion, he's doing it halfway.
    05.01.12
  • Dial-a-Bullet Tech Could Make Chain Guns Even Scarier
    In sci-fi books like Old Man's War, troops lay waste to their alien foes by effortlessly switching between incendiary rounds and grenades and smart bullets that steer themselves to the target. All of which sounds like a pretty hot idea to researchers at the U.S. Army -- even if the plans to conquer other planets are temporarily on hold.
    05.01.12
  • U.S. Has No Idea Whether al-Qaida Is Beaten
    A year ago today, Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden, a capstone event in the decade-long war on terrorism. Bin Laden's death, coupled with other setbacks for the terrorist movement he led, has allowed U.S. officials to muse openly about the ultimate defeat of al-Qaida. There's just one problem: U.S. counterterrorism officials do not know how they would know if the terrorist movement is actually destroyed.
    05.01.12
  • Oxford Docs: We Can Prevent PTSD ... With Tetris
    In recent years, the military's top brass have funded some truly bizarre approaches -- from neck injections to Reiki -- in an effort to treat symptoms of post-traumatic stress afflicting today's soldiers. Turns out, they could've just equipped troops with Game Boys.
    05.01.12
  • Congress Wants Broken Laser to Zap North Korea's Broken Missiles
    North Korea's missile program seems to be moving backwards, with its latest failed launch crapping out earlier than its 2009 dud. Yet House Republicans still want a flying, missile-zapping laser cannon to stop Pyongyang and its ballistic "threats."
    04.30.12
  • Are Afghans Too Depressed to Beat the Taliban?
    Maybe the reason that the Afghan counterinsurgency has been such a flop is that the people there are too traumatized and depressed to make nation-building work. That's the controversial conclusion of an Air Force colonel who recently spent a year in Afghanistan as the head of a reconstruction team.
    04.30.12
  • Justice Department Clears Google in Wi-Fi Sniffing Scandal
    The Justice Department has cleared Google of wiretapping violations in connection to the company secretly intercepting Americans' data on unencrypted Wi-Fi routers for two years ending in 2010, Google said. The development means that at least three government agencies -- the FCC, Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department found Google committed no wrongdoing in the so-called Street View debacle.
    04.27.12
  • Designing Sailbots to Mop Up Oil Spills
    It¿s the second anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Of the many terrible lessons learned from the event, perhaps the most tragic is the shocking inadequacy of current cleanup technology. Given how often we spill oil this is an urgent problem. Enter Protei: an open source, shapeshifting, oil-spill-cleaning sailboat drone. Developed by a globally connected network of designers, engineers, tinkerers, and makers who are hell-bent on finding a better way to clean up the ocean, Protei kicked off just after the Deepwater Horizon accident.
    04.27.12
  • China, Russia Team Up at Sea
    Don't freak out. But the Russian and Chinese militaries just joined forces -- at least for a week, for a major exercise at sea.
    04.27.12
  • Your Google Drive Files Can End Up in Ads
    The combination of Google's new storage service, Google Drive, and the company's recently unified terms of service and privacy policy, have riled the Internet into demanding to know why Google seemed to be claiming ownership of their customers' files. As it turns out, the company claims no ownership -- it says so right in the terms of service, and a comparison between Google Drive's terms and that of other storage services turns up few material differences, except for a couple of questionable terms that may land your content in Google's promotional materials.
    04.26.12
  • Meth Smugglers Tried to Sell Secret Drone Parts to China
    It began as a conspiracy by two international drug traffickers to smuggle meth into New Jersey, but ended as a plot to steal U.S. military drone technology on behalf of the Chinese. At least, that's the rather fantastic claim made by the Justice Department in an oddball caper that seems to borrow equally from Burn After Reading and Breaking Bad.
    04.26.12
  • U.S. Drones Can Now Kill Joe Schmoe Militants in Yemen
    In September, American-born militant Anwar al-Awlaki and his son were killed by a U.S. drone strike in Yemen. In the seven months since, the al-Qaida affiliate there has only grown in power, influence and lethality. The American solution? Authorize more drone attacks -- and not just against well-known extremists like Awlaki, but against faceless, nameless, low-level terrorists as well.
    04.26.12
  • Army's 'Magic Bullet' Will Hang Out in Midair, But Won't Kill You
    This is the recipe for peak absurdity in weapons design. One part bazooka round; one part suicidal drone; one part stun round. What the U.S. Army hopes will emerge from that mix is a warhead that can loiter in midair while it hunts a human target -- but won't kill him when it finds him.
    04.25.12
  • Storyboard Podcast: James Bamford on How the NSA's New Spy Center Might Know Everything
    Big Brother is watching. And when we say ¿big,¿ we mean big¿the National Security Agency is building a surveillance center in the Utah desert that¿s five times larger than the U.S. Capitol building. If the new center¿s sheer size isn¿t intimidating enough, consider the fact that it could potentially store enough data that would equal 500 quintillion pages of information.
    04.25.12
  • One U.S-Afghan Security Pact, Two Very Different Missions
    The U.S. has finally completed an agreement pledging to protect Afghanistan for another decade, even after the vast majority of troops withdraw. (We hate to say we told you so.) But don't misunderstand. This deal isn't really about Afghanistan at all.
    04.23.12
  • USA Today: Online Pentagon Payback Campaign Targeted Us
    The U.S. military's propaganda activities -- known formally and euphemistically as "information operations" -- has this week faced serious accusations of targeting Americans, a major infraction. According to USA Today, military personnel (or contractors) apparently took to the web to unleash a vitriolic, and embarrassingly transparent, smear campaign against two of the paper's staff members. Why? Because they published a damning investigation of the military's dubious propaganda campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan.
    04.20.12


 

 

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