China has sent 17 soldiers to make its debut in Asia‘s biggest military exercise, co-hosted by the United States and Thailand, in a move experts said reflects Beijing‘s growing military capability and impact on the region.

Andrew M. Perlman, a Suffolk University law professor who specializes in legal ethics and technology issues, said the growth of surveillance was troubling for lawyers. He helped create the bar association’s ethics code revisions that require lawyers to try to avoid being overheard by eavesdroppers.

by Michel Chossudovsky

Washington’s Hidden Agenda: Restore the Drug Trade

Robert King sat, slept and ate every meal alone in a cramped cell at Louisiana‘s notorious Angola prison for 29 long and lonely years.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Saturday she would talk to French President Francois Hollande about building up a European communication network to avoid emails and other data passing through the United States.

Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) Deputy Ozcan Yeniceri criticized the HSYK bill, saying it was aimed at „meeting the needs of the AK Party“ to impede the graft investigation in which dozens of prominent business people, the sons of three cabinet ministers, and state officials were questioned.

Wer hat diese Mittäter eigentlich ins Parlament gewählt?

EPIC has accepted the NSA‘s offer to settle a Freedom of Information Act case EPIC v. NSA. EPIC sought both National Security Presidential Directive 54, a Presidential Directive setting out the scope of the NSA‘s authority over computer networks in the United States, as well as documents related to NSPD 54. EPIC received some of the documents as a result of the lawsuit, „substantially prevailing“ under the FOIA, and prompting the NSA to make a settlement offer to EPIC. As a consequence, EPIC will receive attorneys fees from the NSA.

On Wednesday, journalist Popi Christodoulidou was taken to Greek Police Headquarters after she published an article on a website. The prosecutor investigates whether the article contained “sensitive military information”. The journalist had claimed that “coastguard divers are involved in guarding sensitive sites along with the police, despite the fact that the law does not provide for that.” Popi Christostoulidou had based her claims on a law published in the Official Government Gazette (FEK), which is a public document. Also here and here.

After seven years of litigation, two trips to a federal appeals court and $3.8 million worth of lawyer time, the public has finally learned why a wheelchair-bound Stanford University scholar was cuffed, detained and denied a flight from San Francisco to Hawaii: FBI human error.

FBI agent Kevin Kelley was investigating Muslims in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2004 when he checked the wrong box on a terrorism form, erroneously placing Rahinah Ibrahim on the no-fly list.

What happened next was the real shame.

Obama made the announcement while meeting with Jordan‘s King Abdullah at a summit at a California retreat.

France sent 1,600 troops to the country in December to assist some 5,000 African Union peacekeepers.

India may buckle to international pressure to drop terrorism charges against two Italian marines accused of killing two Indian fishermen two years ago, while Italy could take the knotty case to international arbitration.

Just as child porn is used to justify broader porn filters, beheading videos appear to be the magic bullet into scaring people into accepting filters that move well beyond porn. According to the BBC, government-funded operations within the counter-terrorism referral unit will soon order UK broadband ISPs like TalkTalk, Virgin Media and BSkyB to expand filters to include websites declared to be promoting terrorism.

President Juan Manuel Santos ordered the investigation after a report by the respected magazine Semana said members of the military had intercepted the text messages of the government team negotiating with guerrilla representatives in Havana, Cuba.