It turns out that American Express honors recurring payments even if the vendor is unable to supply an accurate card number and expiration date. An Amex phone representative said this is a feature, not a bug, which makes sure my bills are paid.
The U.S. government has known since the early 1990s about Soviet-era smallpox weapons, and collected circumstantial evidence of programs elsewhere.
I learned the technology and tradecraft of electronic security in self defense, with a lot of expert help.
No one ought to be under any illusion that Cheney privately thinks himself a failure.
The National Security Agency has broken privacy rules or overstepped its legal authority thousands of times each year since Congress granted the agency broad new powers in 2008, according to an internal audit and other top-secret documents.
Snowden has been very sparing about discussing his early life or his personal life.
Rolf Ekeus, his appearance can deceive. He looks somewhere between an international diplomat and a mad professor. He's got that sort of shock of white hair and a slightly absent-minded way of speaking. But he's extremely sharp and very serious about power relationships.
Friend of mine, a smart journalist, had his iPad stolen. He couldn't help that - the thief broke into his house. But his private, personal data wasn't stolen, exactly. Donated, more like. He had no passcode set on the iPad.
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.
By now, you've heard endless warnings about the risk of short, trivial passwords. There's a good chance you ignore them.
There's a long history of private-company cooperation with the NSA that dates back to at least the 1970s.
During the morning rush hour on March 20, 1995, the Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo placed packages on five subway trains converging on Tokyo's central station. When punctured, the packages spread vaporized Sarin through the subway cars and then into the stations as the trains pulled in.
The United States, a signatory to the Chemical Weapons Convention, destroyed the last of its stocks of VX and other chemical agents on the Johnston Atoll, 825 miles southwest of Hawaii, in November 2000.
Pakistan has dozens of laboratories and production and storage sites scattered across the country. After developing warheads with highly enriched uranium, it has more recently tried to do the same with more-powerful and compact plutonium.
Nothing is absolute in security.
Experts said public companies worry about the loss of customer confidence and the legal liability to shareholders or security vendors when they report flaws.
Activists and geeks, standing together, are demonstrating powers beyond the reach of government control.
Everyone and his Big Brother wants to log your browsing habits, the better to build a profile of who you are and how you live your life - online and off. Search engine companies offer a benefit in return: more relevant search results. The more they know about you, the better they can tailor information to your needs.
You don't need to be a spook to care about encryption. If you travel with your computer or keep it in a place where other people can put their hands on it, you're vulnerable.
NoScript is probably the most important privacy tool, but it costs you in convenience.
Throughout the early and mid-1990s, the Clinton administration debated the merits of paying for AIDS testing and counseling of vulnerable populations overseas.
Most computers today have built in backup software.
A minimum precaution: keep your anti-malware protections up to date, and install security updates for all your software as soon as they arrive.
'Social engineering,' the fancy term for tricking you into giving away your digital secrets, is at least as great a threat as spooky technology.
Some misunderstandings are hard to cure.
As militias go, the Ohio Defense Force is on the moderate side.
We know what's in our Cheerios and in our retirement accounts because the law requires disclosure.
In 1995, Glaxo bought Burroughs Wellcome and became the presumptive leader in AIDS therapy.
Why does it appear that interested readers so often attribute flaws to 'the press' rather than taking particular issue with particular reports?
Snowden has yet to tell me anything that was a fact that I have been able to rebut or that anybody in the U.S. government I have talked to has been able to rebut.
The first time I set out to find George F. Kennan, in 1982, I had just turned 21, begun my final semester at Princeton University and noticed with astonishment that the senior thesis deadline had crept to within four months.
The defection of Hussein Kamel was a turning point in the U.N.-imposed disarmament of Iraq in the 1990s.