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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.
Barton Gellman -
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.
Barton Gellman
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Most people inside the bureau believe that the blown opportunities to head off 9/11 would not recur today. Even among the FBI's doubters, few disagree that the bureau has come a long way.
Barton Gellman -
As militias go, the Ohio Defense Force is on the moderate side.
Barton Gellman -
As Trotsky didn't exactly say, you may not be interested in electronic snoops, but snoops are interested in you, whether or not you keep Coke's secret recipe on your iPhone.
Barton Gellman -
In late 2003, the Bush administration reversed a long-standing policy requiring agents to destroy their files on innocent American citizens, companies and residents when investigations closed.
Barton Gellman -
In Africa through the 1990s, with notable exceptions in Senegal and Uganda, nearly all the ruling powers denied they had a problem with AIDS.
Barton Gellman -
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.
Barton Gellman
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NoScript is probably the most important privacy tool, but it costs you in convenience.
Barton Gellman -
Doctrines don't govern policy. They provide a conceptual framework by which policymakers approach their decisions. But there is no such thing as a doctrine that controls policy in every way.
Barton Gellman -
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.
Barton Gellman -
In effect, you cannot stop Iraq from growing nasty bugs in the basement. You can stop them from putting operational warheads on working missiles and launching them at their neighbors.
Barton Gellman -
For personal use, I recommend the free and open-source Truecrypt, which comes in flavors for Windows, Mac and Linux.
Barton Gellman -
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.
Barton Gellman
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In computer circles, any unencrypted data is known as 'cleartext.'
Barton Gellman -
Snowden has yet to tell me anything that was a fact that I have been able to rebut or that anybody in the U.S. government I have talked to has been able to rebut.
Barton Gellman -
The defection of Hussein Kamel was a turning point in the U.N.-imposed disarmament of Iraq in the 1990s.
Barton Gellman -
Activists and geeks, standing together, are demonstrating powers beyond the reach of government control.
Barton Gellman -
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.
Barton Gellman -
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.
Barton Gellman
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Experts said public companies worry about the loss of customer confidence and the legal liability to shareholders or security vendors when they report flaws.
Barton Gellman -
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.
Barton Gellman -
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.
Barton Gellman -
The NSA's business is 'information dominance,' the use of other people's secrets to shape events.
Barton Gellman