To beat the FBI at its own investigative game, Police Chief Ray Kelly sent NYPD officers to various locations around the world to gather better, faster intel for the city's anti-terrorist division. As Kelly himself noted as he exited office, the FBI just "can't be trusted" to protect New York from terrorist attacks. That's why local police officers have been stationed overseas for more than a decade at this point.

Worse, though, is the fact that the NYPD's overseas deployments tend to show up uninvited, giving law enforcement and intelligence agencies one more thing to worry about when securing a scene or, in this case, hunting down four terrorists in a crowded mall.

Spend a morning or two with "Sesame Street" and you should have all the skills you need to crack the passwords of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of online accounts worldwide. This according to a new list of the worst passwords of 2013 from security-focused developer SplashData that lists "123456" as the most common and new worst password on the Internet, unseating "password," which topped the previous year's list.

Similar to the original task force report, for which the White House first leaked claims that the recommended changes would be "cosmetic"... and then presented something a little more powerful, to try to win people over by beating low expectations.

Bulk data collection will still continue in some form, despite the fact that it appears that bulk data collection is rarely useful, compared to targeted surveillance. There will be slightly more oversight, despite the fact that oversight in the past has failed. There will be no effort to stop trying to compromise the technology of American (and foreign) companies leading to serious questions about our tech industry's ability to do business overseas (and at home).

Within the year, we could discover whether legal availability erases black market sales, and whether traffic accidents decrease as drinkers switch to marijuana, says Jonathan Caulkins of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. "It will also be interesting to see if we get a noticeable decline in jail populations, as fewer people are arrested for illegally selling or using marijuana," he says.

On October 23, 2013 the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) issued the proposed rules for Regulation Crowdfunding.

For raises under $100,000, the SEC estimates portal and compliance fees will eat up between 12.9% and 39% of the money raised.

If you are looking to raise money via crowdfunding, the moral of the story is, try to raise as close to the next threshold as possible.

"A child born today will grow up with no conception of privacy at all. They’ll never know what it means to have a private moment to themselves; an unrecorded, unanalyzed thought."

Snowden told WaPo journalist Barton Gellman that he had lobbied within the NSA against the internet dragnets, adding: "All I wanted was for the public to be able to have a say in how they are governed. I am still working for the NSA right now. They are the only ones who don’t realize it."

While many pro-IP groups hailed the report as demonstrating the importance of IP to the American economy, the report was panned by critics who pointed out that the definition of “IP-intensive industries” was so broad as to be meaningless.

According to the NSF, the Business Research and Development and Innovation Survey (BRDIS) “is an annual, nationally representative sample survey of approximately 43,000 companies, including companies in manufacturing and nonmanufacturing industries.

Formal intellectual property protection is far less important to the vast majority of U.S. businesses than some would like us to believe.

Pennsylvania police this week were pulling people to the side of the road, quizzing them on their driving habits, and asking if they’d like to provide a cheek swap or a blood sample — the latest in a federally contracted operation that’s touted as making roads safer.

Fort Worth residents had complained about the high-pressure questioning, the intimidating presence of uniformed officers, and what they called a clear hit to their constitutional rights.

Officials at the National Security Agency are divided over whether to offer an amnesty deal to espionage suspect Edward Snowden, who is said to have cost the agency tens of millions of dollars to ensure his presence was removed from its networks.

Whether return of that cache is worth a deal with Snowden is a contentious subject within the NSA. Rick Ledgett, who runs the NSA task force assessing the damage on the Snowden leaks, told CBS' news program "60 Minutes" during a segment aired Sunday (see below) that an amnesty deal is "worth having a conversation about.

nvestigative journalists have exploited a cryptographic weakness in a third-party website commenting service to expose politicians and other Swedish public figures who left highly offensive remarks on right-wing blogs, according to published reports.

The Gravatar hashes, which are typically embedded in any comment left on millions of sites that use the avatar service, are generated by passing a user's e-mail address through the MD5 cryptographic function.