The gravest risks from al Qaeda combine its affinity for big targets and its announced desire for weapons of mass destruction.
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.
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.
Early in 1986, the World Health Organization in Geneva still regarded AIDS as an ailment of the promiscuous few.
Ordinary Geiger counters, worn on belt clips and resembling pagers, have been in use by the U.S. Customs Service for years.
If Iraq had succeeded in spray-drying anthrax spores to extend their life and lethality, that would have been among the most important secrets of its wide-ranging weapons program.
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.
The funny thing is that Dick Cheney has done more than anybody in the White House for quite a long time to throw up roadblocks against future historians.
The first and pivotal negotiations over global access to AIDS drugs began in Geneva in 1991. They lasted two years, but confidential minutes suggest they were doomed the first day.
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.
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.
The first reports of AIDS closely followed the inauguration of President Ronald Reagan, whose 'family values' agenda and alliance with Christian conservatives associated AIDS with deviance and sin.
There is no reliable way to calculate from the number of recorded compliance issues how many Americans have had their communications improperly collected, stored or distributed by the NSA.
The best way to preserve your privacy is to use a search engine that does not keep your logs in the first place. That's the approach used by Startpage and its European parent company, Ixquick.