• Controversial Mississippi power station to cut emissions by more than half

    A new $5 billion state-of-the-art power facility is under construction Kemper County, Mississippi. It places a firm bet on the future of carbon-capture technology, and other technological advancements, including: it utilizes the gasification process with carbon in unique ways; it recycles treated wastewater to generate power; and it makes money from the carbon dioxide it has removed by selling it to oil companies for their own extraction. Critics say that investing so much money in untested technologies is too much of a gamble.

  • NSA program captures, replays phone calls

    The NSA’s MYSTIC program, created in 2009, deploys a “retrospective retrieval” (RETRO) tool which allows agents to rewind and playback all phone conversations that have taken place in the past thirty days in an unnamed foreign country, according to Edward Snowden-leaked documents. The MYSTIC program differs from other NSA surveillance programs revealed by Snowden because it captures the content of phone conversations, not just calls’ metadata.

  • Facebook making snooping more difficult

    Facebook has joined its Silicon Valley competitors to improve cybersecurity following a recent report suggesting that the NSA may have posed as Facebook to infect targeted computers. Joe Sullivan, Facebook’s chief security officer, said Facebook was working to “make sure the system is robust enough that everyone should be coming in the front door with legal process and not getting information any other way.” He added that no one could pose as Facebook servers any more since the company made “https,” a secure method of accessing Web pages, standard last year.

  • The Qatar organizers of the 2022 Soccer World Cup are tied to terrorist groups

    Qatar bribed FIFA officials so they would vote to award it the 2022 Soccer World Cup. In addition to the likely corruption investigation, FIFA is also grappling with the question of the temperature in Qatar in the summer. Several state football associations, and many medical specialists, said that the summer heat in Qatar is such that it would be dangerous for players to play for ninety minutes, and risky for spectators to sit in the stands during games. Now news has emerged that leading figures inthe Qatar World Cup committee are supporters of terrorism, contributing millions of dollars to al Qaeda and its affiliates in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen.

  • S.C. sues DOE over Savanah River MOX facility

    South Carolina decided to go to court to prevent the Obama administration from cutting off funding for a troubled multi-billion dollar Savanah River plant in which weapons-grade plutonium would be processed and turned into suitable fuel for commercial nuclear reactors. The initial budget for the MOX project, when it was launched a decade ago, was just under $4 billion. Since then, construction costs have reached $8 billion, and DOE officials now say the plant will cost about $30 billion over the years it is in use.

  • IDF ordered to continue preparations for striking Iran’s nuclear sites this year

    The negotiations between the P5+1 and Iran over Iran’s nuclear program continue, with an eye to replacing, by June, the current temporary agreement with a permanent one, but Israel let it be known that it is continuing to its preparations for a military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon have instructed the IDF to continue its preparations for carrying out such a strike, at a cost estimated to be at least ten billion shekels ($2.89 billion) this year.

  • Howard County, Md. attracts cybersecurity firms

    Howard County, Maryland boasts a growing presence of cybersecurity firms and specialists at a time when the industry is gaining attention. The proximity of the county to government agencies has helped cybersecurity firms gain federal contracts, and the proximity of large cybersecurity consumers like the NSA offers cybersecurity firms in Howard County a large pool of cybersecurity specialists to select from when NSA employees decide to shift to the private sector.

  • KSM: al Qaeda’s strategy is war of attrition to force U.S. out of Islamic lands

    In one of the only statements he has made since his capture in 2003, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the accused mastermind of the 9/11 terror attacks, has said al Qaeda is in “a war of attrition” with the United States. He made the statement during a 27 February interview with U.S. defense attorneys for Osama bin Laden’s son-in-law, Suleiman Abu Ghaith, who is facing conspiracy charges in a U.S. federal court in New York. Mohammed said the primary operational goal of al Qaeda was to provoke the United States into futile, expensive, and bloody wars, thus advancing a strategic aim of forcing U.S. and Western retrenchment from Islamic lands. “Every state of emergency declared and every change of alert level that inflicts specific procedures on the military and civilian sectors costs the country millions of dollars. It is enough that the U.S. government has incurred losses upwards of a trillion dollars in the wars it has waged in the aftermath of 9/11, the bleeding of which continues to this day,” Mohammed said.

  • Post-Qaddafi Libya needs more international support: study

    The international community’s limited approach to postwar Libya has left the nation struggling and on the brink of civil war, according to a new study from the RAND Corporation. Libya’s most serious problem since 2011 has been a lack of security, which has undermined efforts to build functioning political and administrative institutions, further constricted an already minimal international footprint, and facilitated the expansion of criminal and jihadist groups. The lack of security stems primarily from the failure of the effort to disarm and demobilize rebel militias after the war.

  • Synthetic biology makes bioweapons easier to make

    Scientists and policy makers are no longer unconditionally promoting scientific innovation for fear that current and future biological breakthroughs may lead to dangerous applications. Traditionally, government-backed institutions and pharmaceutical firms fueled biological innovation, but today, the barriers that limited innovation to those institutions are diminishing. The low cost and significantly reduced level of necessary expertise have provided anyone interested in developing biological technology the tools to do so. Synthetic biology, the design and engineering of biological devices and systems, has given terrorists the capability to launch attacks using synthetic organisms without detection.

     

  • Budget proposal cuts funds for nuclear nonproliferation programs

    The White House’s fiscal 2015 budget proposal includes more than $220 million in cuts for nuclear security initiatives such as the International Material Protection and Cooperationprogram, which aims to secure and eliminate vulnerable nuclear weapons and materials, and the Global Threat Reduction Initiative, which supports the Energy Department’s efforts to prevent terrorists from acquiring nuclear and radiological materials that could be used in weapons of mass destruction. The administration says that 54 percent of the reduction in the administration’s nonproliferation budget request can be accounted for by the decision to halt the South Carolina Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility(MOX), which would have convert weapons-grade plutonium into nuclear reactor fuel, because the project proved to be too costly.

  • S.C. politicians want decision to halt work on Savannah River plutonium plant reversed

    Three Republican lawmakers from South Carolina — Senator Lindsey Graham and Representatives Tim Scott and Joe Wilson have – have asked South Carolina governor Nikki Haley to “explore any legal avenues” to prevent the mixed-oxide fuel (MOX) project at the Savannah River Sitefrom shutting down. The administration has decided to put the project on hold after repeated delays and cost overruns averaging 60 percent over the original estimates.

  • MetaPhone: The sensitivity of telephone metadata

    Is telephone metadata sensitive? This is, at base, a factual dispute. Is it easy to draw sensitive inferences from phone metadata? How often do people conduct sensitive matters by phone, in a manner reflected by metadata? New research finds that phone metadata is unambiguously sensitive, even in a small population and over a short time window. The researchers were able to infer medical conditions, firearm ownership, and more, using solely phone metadata.

  • Libyan PM escapes country after assembly ousts him over oil tanker fiasco

    Libya’s General National Congress has approved a no-confidence motion against Prime Minister Ali Zeidan and designated the defense minister as acting prime minister. Zeidan left Libya after the vote, in all likelihood for Italy. The no-confidence vote came after a North Korean-flagged tanker named Morning Glory managed to sail away from the port of al Sidra, carrying 234,000 barrels of crude oil from rebel-held oil fields. Last summer, armed militias in east Libya took over most of the country’s oil fields – and also three ports, with partial control of a fourth — bringing oil exports, which had amounted to 1.6 million barrels a day, to a halt. U.S. describes oil sale by the militias as “theft” from the Libyan people.

  • East Europe’s natural gas networks vulnerable during conflicts and crises

    Gas networks in Eastern European countries, such as Ukraine and Belarus, are less resilient than the U.K. gas networks during conflicts and crises, according to new research. The authors suggest that a decentralized approach to managing congestion on gas pipeline networks could be crucial for energy security during geopolitical conflicts or natural disasters, for example.