Absolut Hacker + Red Bull

Googleis reversing a long-standing policy to retain all the data on its users indefinitely, and by the end of the year will begin removing identifying data from its search logs after 18 months to two years, depending on the country the servers are located in.

Currently, Google retains indefinitely detailed server logs on its search engine users, including user's IP addresses – which can identify a user's computer, the query, any result that is clicked on, their browser and operating system, among other details. Even if a user never signs up for a Google account, those searches are all tied together through a cookie placed on the user's computer, which currently expires in 2038.

27B Stroke 6 | Google To Anonymize Data

Here are the transcripts of the interviews by the Defense Department of the three most senior Al Qaeda leaders in custody in the world, provided to us by Jean Charles Brisard. The Defense Department has posted more information at a special website.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed: "I was responsible for the 9/11 operation from A to Z"

Abu Faraj al-Libi (who did not attend his session)

Ramzi Binalshibh (who refused to attend the session)

Counterterrorism Blog: Transcripts of Interviews of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Faraj al-Libi, & Ramzi Binalshibh

The House of Representatives on Wednesday passed three bills to open government records to the public, brushing aside White House opposition, and in one case, a veto threat.

The measures, highlighting the media-led "Sunshine Week," would force government to be more responsive to Freedom of Information Act requests, make contributions to presidential libraries public and overturn a 2001 presidential directive giving the president authority to keep his records from public view.

The White House issued a veto threat on the presidential records bill and voiced opposition to the FOIA legislation. It also said the president would veto a fourth bill the House is to debate later Wednesday on whistle-blower protections.

Hopefully Congress can get somewhere with this...

House passes 3 bills to shine light on records - CNN.com

For the past 13 years, offerings from IntelCenter and its sister company, Tempest Publishing, have been designed to assist professionals in furthering this goal. All of our products are designed to achieve real results for the operator, analyst or first responder.

Our focus as a company is on studying terrorist groups and other threat actors and disseminating that information in a timely manner to those who can act on it. We look at capabilities and intentions, warnings and indicators, operational characteristics and a wide variety of other points in order to better understand how to interdict terrorist operations and reduce the likelihood of future attacks.

The results of this work is then disseminated in a variety of Alert, Current Intelligence and Analytical Resource services. It also provides the foundation for our field books such as the "First Responder Chem-Bio Handbook." Our primary client base is comprised of military, law enforcement and intelligence agencies in the US and other allied countries around the world.

This is another, and apparently older, company doing the same type of of OsInt as the SITE Institute.

IntelCenter

Each year since 2004 the Project for Excellence in Journalism has dropped the bomb of knowledge on the media world in the form of the State of the News Media report. The report is breathtaking in scope, with quantitative research on newspapers, online, TV, magazines, radio and ethnic media. What are the trends? What's working and what's failing? PEJ looks at the quality of the journalism done along with the business models and the way audiences are becoming fragmented.

I have yet to dive into the report, but I surely will at some point in the near future..

MediaShift | State of the News Media 2007 : Project for Excellence in Journalism Dissects 38 Sites

How the Media Companies did more to spread cryptography, anonymity preserving technology and general knowledge about good online privacy hygiene than an army of activist cypherpunks ever could have

Perspective from Chris Soghoian... I completely agree. The battle against piracy has had many side effects.

slight paranoia: How The RIAA and MPAA Unknowingly Assist Child Pornographers

We are doing a test of Google Ads on the site. These are only going to stick around if they generate enough revenue to be worth it.

Feedback is welcome.

We've made an update to MemeStreams that hopefully improves the look of the site. There are also some security fixes in here, as well as some new features which should help us fight spam more effectively going forward. In addition, Acidus contributed some improvements to the MemeBox to make it easier to sort and keep track of new messages. We'd also like to thank Eric White for some HTML input that helped us improve the look of the site and Terratogen for some graphics work.

As always, let us know if you discover anything that isn't working right...

(Safari users may find some color misalignment. We're going to address that in a future update. We wanted this out and we decided to optomize for FF and IE for the time being. Safair literally displays some colors differently in some contexts.)

MemeStreams Look and Feel update

Cofer Black, former CIA Center for Counterterrorist (CTC) and Vice Chairman of Blackwater USA along with some other former CIA heavy-hitters have created a new private intelligence corporation, Total Intelligence Solutions with Black as chairman. The new firm is marketing itself as a security and intelligence solution for large corporations, with little emphasis upon government contracting except in Homeland Security, signaling a major shift in private intelligence corporations. Former spies are prohibited by law from plying their trade to lobby the US Government on behalf of foreign governments, corporations or individuals (that's Congressional turf). However, nothing forbids them from using their own contacts--in spy terms, agents--to get information to further the interests of clients--foreign or domestic.

Read the whole post. And I strongly suggest following RJ Hillhouse's blog.

Just in case anyone here hasn't been paying attention.. We continue on the gentle side into the world envisioned by William Gibson and Neil Stephenson. I, for one, am no longer bothered by this. Quite on the contrary, it sounds like more fun every day.

So, now we have non-nation-state standing armies * * and non-nation-state intelligence services, complete with DO. The jokes I can make here could go on forever. The only problem, is that they would only be funny to those with my warped sense of humor.

Total Intel has an infosec group too. Don't miss their Google Maps mashup intel watch map. Very Web2.0. Trans-national non-state warfare 2.0, even. Just think, with any luck... ...We will be able to trade stocks of trans-national armies and IC organizations in a few years.

The Spy Who Billed Me: New Intel Firm Signals Major Shift in Industry: CIA Knock-Off For Rent