Politics

703 articles on Politics

• Exclusive: Pentagon Probe Will Review Every Darpa Contract
  Since Regina Dugan became the director of Darpa, the Pentagon's top research division has signed millions of dollars' worth of contracts with her family firm, which in turn owes her at least a quarter-million dollars. It's an arrangement that has raised eyebrows in the research community, and has now drawn the attention of the Defense ...
  08.16.11

• If China Saw U.S. Stealth Copter, It's No Big Deal
  By now, everyone with an internet connection has seen pictures of the stealthy helicopter used in the raid to take out Osama bin Laden. So, if the Pakistani government provided Chinese engineers with a closer look at the "Airwolf," as the copter was nicknamed in some military circles, it's not necessarily a security disaster. The ...
  08.15.11

• Syria's Rusting Navy Turns On Its Own People
  Updated 12:47 pm EDT. The Syrian navy is a pissant, 4th-rate force, incapable of even slowing down any half-decent fleet. A foe would have to be virtually unarmed for Syria's rusting warships to threaten it. Which means the fleet still does have some purpose for the Assad regime: terrorizing its own people. On Sunday, just before dawn, ...
  08.15.11

• Google+ Punts on Kafkaesque Name Policy
  One of my favorite moments in Franz Kafka's The Trial is shortly after the protagonist Josef K is placed under arrest for an unnamed offense. The men notifying him of his arrest don't cuff him or take him to jail. They just tell him proceedings are underway and that he'll learn everything in due course. ...
  08.12.11

• Owner of Video Rental Stores Stocked With Pirated DVDs Sentenced to Prison
  A California man has been sentenced to 18 months in prison for running three Sacramento-area video stores offering mostly pirated music and movies for sale or rental.
  08.12.11

• Pentagon's Mach 20 Missile Lost Over Pacific -- Again
  For the second time in a row, the Pentagon has lost contact with an experimental hypersonic vehicle over the Pacific, just minutes after it was launched from space. The flight of the Falcon Hypersonic Technology Vehicle 2 was hotly anticipated in military and aerospace circles. The HTV-2 was supposed to ride on the back of a ...
  08.11.11

• Chinese Army Targets iPhone, iPad With Propaganda App
  Updated: This story was updated with information on the app's availability on August 14, 2011 at 12:44 EDT. The U.S. isn't the only military with designs on invading the smartphone world. China's armed forces are starting to fill the app gap with a new iPhone program from the People's Liberation Army. China's Ministry of Defense announced Monday ...
  08.11.11

• Zap! Marines Cancel Lightning Gun Deal
  Infamous wonder-weapon peddler Ionatron loses another big military contract. Strangely, the company chief neglects to mention it in a call with investors.
  08.10.11

• U.S. Insists: We Killed The Guy That Shot Down Our SEALs
  Updated 6:54 p.m. EDT The U.S. military says they know who shot down a helicopter filled with 38 American and Afghan troops, including 19 Navy SEALs. That man is now dead, killed by a "precision airstrike" from an F-16, according to statement from the American-led coalition in Kabul. But the military won't say how they're so sure ...
  08.10.11

• Bruce Schneier's Telepathic Takeover of the TSA
  Bruce Schneier is a telepath of unimaginable power. That's the only possible explanation for the stunning reversal at the top of the Transportation Security Administration. For years, Schneier, the well-known security gadfly, has blasted the TSA for its brain dead approach to passenger screening: the "security theater" of naked scanners and slipped-off shoes; the focus on ...
  08.10.11

• Pentagon's Mach 20 Missile Ready for Ultimate Test
  08.09.11

• Laser Weapons Might Protect U.S. Copters From Next Attack
  With a little more time and a little more technology, there's a chance, maybe, that the tragic shoot-down of an American helicopter in Afghanistan could have been stopped; 38 lives might've been saved, if two existing Army systems had been packaged into one. Military researchers are looking to combine an acoustic gunshot detector with a dazzling ...
  08.08.11

• 70 Days at Sea for New Navy Robot Subs
  The U.S. military wants an underwater robot that's strong enough to stay at sea for months, and smart enough to avoid any obstacles it might find along the way. The American Navy has hundreds of manned ships and subs, of course. But it's a big ocean out there: they can't be everywhere at once. So the ...
  08.08.11

• FUBAR: Army Blew Tests on 5 Million Body Armor Plates
  Updated: This story was updated with new information from Stars and Stripes on August 5, 2011 at 5:42 EDT The U.S. Army didn't bother to properly test five million body armor plates that were supposed to protect soldiers on the battlefield. In some cases, certain tests of the live-saving gear were ignored altogether. That's according to a ...
  08.05.11

• Can Darpa Fix the Cybersecurity 'Problem From Hell?'
  There are computer security threats -- and then there are computer security nightmares. Put sabotaged circuits firmly in the second category. Last week, retired Gen. Michael Hayden, the former CIA and NSA chief, called the hazard of hacked hardware "the problem from hell." "Frankly, it's not a problem that can be solved," he added. "This is ...
  08.05.11

• Shoot the Moon: Missile Defense Costs as Much as Apollo Program
  America's budget woes may have the Obama administration eyeing $400 billion in cuts to the defense budget. But, for now at least, there's one program that appears relatively safe: the star-crossed missile defense effort. Congress plans on increasing missile defense spending 1.2 per cent to $8.6 billion for fiscal year 2012.  Bloomberg Government tallied the increase up ...
  08.04.11

• DIY Spy Drone Sniffs Wi-Fi, Intercepts Phone Calls
  What do you do when the target you're spying on slips behind his home security gates and beyond your reach? Launch your personal, specially-equipped drone to fly overhead and sniff his Wi-Fi network, intercept his cellphone calls, or launch denial-of-service attacks with jamming signals.
  08.04.11

• Pentagon's Lightning Gun Sold for Scraps on eBay
  There was a time, not all that long ago, when the Pentagon sank tens of millions of dollars into remote-controlled lightning guns that it hoped would fry insurgent bombs before they killed any more troops. Now, disassembled parts from the one-time wonder-weapons are being sold on eBay. At least one buyer snatched up the gear, ...
  08.04.11

• Spotify, Spokeo, AOL, Others Sued Over Web Tracking
  Website analytics firm KISSmetrics and more than 20 of its customers, including Spotify, AOL's About.me, Slideshare.net, Spokeo and the news site Gigaom.com were sued Monday on the grounds that KISSmetrics' tracking technology violated federal and state privacy laws. The suit (.pdf), filed in a federal court in Northern California, is seeking class-action status and unspecified damages. At ...
  08.03.11

• New Player in Mexico's Drug War: The NRA
  We may have avoided default - for now. But there's another political monster we've tried to postpone that's fed up with our recalcitrance. By this, of course, we mean Mexico's drug war. There's not just an out-of-control conflict on our border. There's also the very much related battle of gun lobbyists against the Obama administration, which ...
  08.03.11

• GeekDad Exclusive: Lego Minifigs Soon Headed for Deep Space
  This Friday, NASA will launch an Atlas V rocket that will be contain a very special payload. Not only will the rocket be carrying Juno, a space probe that is being sent to Jupiter to study the fifth planet from the Sun, but there will be a few unique stowaways. Thanks to a joint mission between NASA and Lego, there will be three very special Lego minifigs affixed to the spacecraft.
  08.03.11

• U.S. Doubles Down on Afghan Air War; 650 Strikes in July
  In July of 2010, when Gen. Stanley McChrsytal handed over command of the war in Afghanistan to Gen. David Petraeus, air strikes had become a tool of absolute last resort. NATO planes were only making about 10 attack runs a day -- in the middle of Afghanistan's fighting season, and with an influx of tens ...
  08.03.11

• How the Navy's Warship of the Future Ran Aground
  With an enormous splash and cheers from spectators, the 378-foot-long vessel Freedom slid sideways into the Menominee River in Wisconsin. It was Sept. 23, 2006, and the U.S. Navy had just launched its first brand-new warship class in nearly 20 years. Freedom also represented a new strategy. Where previous warships had been tailored for open-ocean warfare ...
  08.03.11

• Senate Panel Keeps 'Secret Patriot Act' Under Wraps
  The secret Patriot Act is staying secret. Two Senators have been warning for months that the government has a secret legal interpretation of the Patriot Act so broad that it amounts to an entirely different law -- one that gives the feds massive domestic surveillance powers, and keeps the rest of us in the dark about ...
  08.02.11

• U.S. Weapons Now in Somali Terrorists' Hands
  Bad news in the five-year-old U.S. proxy war against al-Qaida–allied Somali insurgents. Half of the U.S.-supplied weaponry that enables cash-strapped Ugandan and Burundian troops to fight Somalia's al-Shabab terror group is winding up in al-Shabab's hands. The kicker: It's the cash-strapped Ugandans who are selling the weapons to the insurgents. This revelation, buried in U.N. reports and ...
  08.02.11

• It's Not Just Bin Laden; U.S. Commandos Raid Pakistan All the Time
  U.S. special operations forces have regularly and "surreptitiously" slipped into Pakistan in recent years, raiding suspected terrorist hideouts on Pakistani soil. The team that killed Osama bin Laden -- those guys alone had conducted "10 to 12" of those missions before they hit that infamous compound in Abbottabad. In a remarkable story for this week's New ...
  08.01.11

• Spy Babe Turns Copyright Troll in New Lawsuit
  As a covert infiltrator in the United States, stealing information was Anna Chapman's job. Back home in Russia, however, it turns out she's not terribly fond of the practice. Chapman, America's favorite counterintelligence threat, is now suing Russia's News Media Group for using her image without permission, the country's state-funded RIA Novosti reported Thursday. Specifically, she's ...
  07.29.11