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White House spokesman Jay Carney, an "essential" federal employee, can tell you how many people have visited the Obamacare website ("7 million") but he can't tell you how many people have enrolled in Obamacare:

France has proposed the European Union study taxing companies for transferring personal data outside of the bloc, for example in call centers abroad. The proposal is part of a series France has made ahead of an EU summit next month that also includes a call to put in place new tax rules that would require non-European Internet companies to pay taxes in Europe on profits earned there. …

Washington - Eight Democratic senators and congressmen have asked Attorney General Eric Holder to answer questions about a Reuters report that the National Security Agency supplies the Drug Enforcement Administration with intelligence information used to make non-terrorism cases against American citizens. The August report revealed that a secretive DEA unit passes the NSA information to agents in the field, including those from the Internal Revenue Service, the FBI and Homeland Security, with instructions to never disclose the original source, even in court.

WikiLeaks has released a trove of encrypted “insurance” data on Twitter and Facebook. The data can’t be read without an encryption key, but the movement’s supporters say that could be published later in case anything happens to leading WikiLeaks figures. The whistleblowing organization published links for a massive 400 gigabytes worth of encrypted data it described as “insurance documents” on its Twitter and Facebook accounts. It is possible to download the files but advanced encoding prevents them from being opened.

New data from Greenland ice cores suggest North America may have suffered a large cosmic impact about 12,900 years ago. A layer of platinum is seen in ice of the same age as a known abrupt climate transition, US scientists report. The climate flip has previously been linked to the demise of the North American "Clovis" people. The data seem to back the idea that an impact tipped the climate into a colder phase, a point of current debate. Rapid climate change occurred 12,900 years ago, and it is proposed that this is associated with the extinction of large mammals...

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration on Wednesday released formerly classified documents outlining a once-secret program of the National Security Agency that is collecting records of all domestic phone calls in the United States, as top officials testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee. As the hearing began, The Guardian newspaper published another document from the archives of Top Secret surveillance matters leaked to it by the former N.S.A. contractor Edward J. Snowden. It was a 32-page presentation describing the N.S.A.´s XKeyscore program, by which N.S.A. analysts can mine vast databases of phone and Internet information the agency has vacuumed up.

The Obama administration, already under fire for the IRS scandal and National Security Agency snooping of the computers and cellphones of Americans, is also spending millions to have private contractors conduct a dragnet for confidential and personal credit and bank transactions without a warrant. Newly obtained documents from the Obama-created Consumer Financial Protection Bureau reveal that the administration has OK'd a project to accumulate the personal financial data of some 5 million and share it with other agencies to build a "nationally representative panel of credit information on consumers for use in a wide range of policy research projects." The...

Fox News host Greta Van Susteren on Tuesday hosted Investor’s Business Daily writer John Merline to discuss a potentially disturbing aspect of “Obamacare.” Under the Affordable Care Act, a “big data system” will be created to track millions of Americans’ information, including tax and Social Security information, according to Merline. “Well, the government has to verify all this information because, among other things, they have to make sure you’re eligible for insurance in the exchange. But, more importantly, they have to determine whether you’re eligible for any of these subsidies,” he explained. “So in order to do that, they have...

Edward Snowden’s expansive disclosures to the Guardian and the Washington Post about various National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance programs have only two corollaries in contemporary history—the classified cache Bradley Manning allegedly released to WikiLeaks a few years ago and Daniel Ellsberg’s dissemination of the voluminous Pentagon Papers to the New York Times and other newspapers in 1971. Leakers like Snowden, Manning and Ellsberg don’t merely risk being called narcissists, traitors or mental cases for having liberated state secrets for public scrutiny. They absolutely guarantee it. In the last two days, the New York Times’s David Brooks, Politico’s Roger Simon, the...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: This is Matt from Miami and it says you are an exec in the telecommunications industry, right? CALLER: Yes, that's right, Rush. Thank you so much. It's been 15 years listening to you, and I'm thrilled that my expertise and your expertise may actually intersect and allow me to make you look good. RUSH: Well, thanks very much. That is the purpose of a caller, and let's hope you can do it. CALLER: Well, first off, I think it's important to think about motivations. Our president, like all the Democratic presidents, would love to be Bill Clinton...

Monitoring hundreds of millions of phone records is an extraordinary invasion of privacy. When Americans expressed outrage last week over the seizure and surveillance of Verizon's client data by the National Security Agency, President Obama responded: "In the abstract, you can complain about Big Brother . . . but when you actually look at the details, I think we've struck the right balance." How many records did the NSA seize from Verizon? Hundreds of millions. We are now learning about more potential mass data collections by the government from other communications and online companies. These are the "details," and few...

Technique that hides rapid data streams could provide ultra-secure communications. If you’ve ever wanted to edit an event from your history, then help may soon be at hand. Electrical engineers have used lasers to create a cloak that can hide communications in a 'time hole', so that it seems as if they were never sent. The method, published today in Nature1, is the first that can cloak data streams sent at the rapid rates typically seen in telecommunications systems. It opens the door to ultra-secure transmission schemes, and may also provide a way to better shield information from noise corruption....

Anyone else see the irony? The day Americans of one generation launched the greatest invasion to liberate people is the day their ancestors learned they lived in a police state the nazis would have killed for.

A new lawsuit in Manhattan pitting the U.S. Department of Justice against Google offers a rare glimpse of how determined prosecutors are to defend a process that allows federal agents to gain warrantless access to user records, and how committed the Mountain View, Calif., company is to defending its customers' privacy rights against what it views as illegal requests. The Justice Department's lawsuit, filed April 22 and not disclosed until this article, was sparked by Google's decision to rebuff the FBI's legal demands for confidential user data. It centers on the bureau's controversial use of so-called National Security Letters (NSL),...

Obamacare Funded big IRS Data - By October 2010, the Internal Revenue Service had the capability to sift through emailing patterns associated with millions of individual internet addresses and have already established 32,000 categories of metadata and 1 million unique “attributes.” The IRS continues to collect tax data, but they also are now acquiring huge volumes of personal information on taxpayers’ digital activities, from eBay auctions to Facebook posts and, for the first time ever, credit card and e-payment transaction records. Dean Silverman, who led the IBM zEnterprise™ 196 systems upgrade bragged: “Private industry would be envious if they knew...

Show us the data. That’s the message behind a joint lawsuit seeking to force the Los Angeles law enforcement authorities to release a massive trove of information collected by ubiquitous cameras that read license plates and can thus track the movements of millions of motorists not suspected of any crime. The cameras, called automatic license plate readers (ALPRs), are on fixed locations, including stop lights, street signs and in squad cars. Each camera can record as many as 1,800 plates per minute, and more than 160 million "data points" have been collected in Los Angeles County, according to one report....

U.S. forces are so heavily saturated with different communication devices that if not transmitted by satellite would cause serious problems. Data flow is so great that there are no adequate available satellites. The Pentagon has quietly hired a Chinese satellite, APSTAR-7, through which will flow communications with the army in Africa. Information about buying Chinese satellite transfers arose at a meeting of one of the sub-committees of the U.S. Congress. - snip - Due to the embargo of military technology, it is ironic that the APSTAR-7 is used by he Americans, who are the leaders in the construction of satellites,...

Finding ET in the Data by Paul Gilster on April 17, 2013 As we saw yesterday, the Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS) has been the source of data for a number of searches for unusual infrared signatures. The idea is to look for the artifacts of advanced extraterrestrial civilizations, under the assumption that a sufficiently advanced culture will be capable of engineering projects that could be detected from light years away. A Dyson sphere, existing either as a completely enclosed star or as a swarm of artifacts around a star, is but one example of such engineering, but it’s a sensible...

On Wednesday, the CIA's chief technology officer detailed the Agency's vision for collecting and analyzing all of the information people put on the Internet. The wide-ranging presentation at GigaOM's Structure:Data conference in New York City came two days after it was reported the spy agency is on the verge of signing a cloud computing contract with Amazon — worth up to $600 million over 10 years — that involves Amazon Web Services helping the CIA build a "private cloud" filled with technologies like big data.… "You're already a walking sensor platform," Hunt said, referring to all of the information captured...

Laboratory advance shows that nano-imprinting could help the hard drive industry meet its long-term goals for data storage capacity. Researchers at HGST, a major manufacturer of hard disk drives, have shown that an emerging fabrication technology called nano-imprinting could be used to double the data storage capacity of today’s hard disks. They say the patent-pending work, done in collaboration with a company called Molecular Imprints, could lead to a cost-effective manufacturing process by the end of the decade. Hard disk drives store data in magnetic material on the surface of a spinning disk. During production, this material is deposited as...