Pentagon Woos Tech Startups

Boast they've thwarted attacks

(NEWSER) - The intel community has struck back fast at a scathing Washington Post investigation that portrayed post-9/11 intelligence gathering as wastefully massive and out of control. "The fact is, the men and women of the intelligence community have improved our operations, thwarted attacks, and are achieving untold successes every day," National Intelligence director David Gompert said, while admitting that spies "operate in an environment that limits the amount of information we can share." More»

Post 9/11 buildup has left us with more info than we can handle

(NEWSER) - In the wake of 9/11, the US has built an unspeakably massive top-secret counter-terrorism apparatus that appears to be riddled with waste, according to a major investigative piece that some 20 journalists spent nearly two years working on for the Washington Post . The paper found that 1,271 government organizations, and another 1,931 private ones are working on homeland security, intelligence, and counter-terrorism. A whopping 854,000 people—1.5 times the population of Washington—have “top-secret” security clearance, including everyone from phone operators to janitors. More»

Like other new media, site beefs up brain if used wisely

(NEWSER) - It's fashionable to cry about how Twitter and other new forms of electronic media are making us intellectually lazy and downright stupid. In fact, the opposite is true, writes Harvard's Steven Pinker. "Don’t rail at PowerPoint or Google," he writes. "It’s not as if habits of deep reflection, thorough research and rigorous reasoning ever came naturally to people. They must be acquired in special institutions, which we call universities, and maintained with constant upkeep, which we call analysis, criticism and debate." More»

(NEWSER) - The US military is considering restrictions on access to social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, citing privacy and security concerns, the Military Times reports. “Sometimes people, because of the nature of these sites, can have a tendency to get lax in what they put on there,” a Pentagon spokesman says. On the table are everything from shuttering access on government computers to setting up a separate “private” net. More»

(NEWSER) - Cyborg bugs may sound like creatures in a Michael Bay movie, but they could save your life, New Scientist reports. The Pentagon is trying to implant electrodes in crickets and cicadas—which communicate via wingbeats—and program them to “speak” differently around certain chemicals. “The insect itself might not even notice the modulation,” says Ben Epstein, who conceived of the technology. More»