Obama Lays Out Plans for 'Cyber Czar'

President's 32 czars an 'end-run' around Congress: Cantor

(NEWSER) - President Obama has broken his promise to restore the power of Congress “by appointing a virtual army of ‘czars,’” Republican Eric Cantor writes in the Washington Post. The administration now has at least 32 czars—more than Russia ever did—with each spearheading major policy initiatives. That’s an “end-run around the legislative branch of historic proportions,” the House minority whip contends, because the president's czars don’t need to be confirmed. More»

(NEWSER) - Major defense contractors are already staffed with "hacker soldiers" who can help them earn billions of dollars in Washington's new cyberwar, the New York Times reports. Cranking rock tunes and piling up pop cans, engineers hack away at companies like Raytheon, working for the Pentagon or protecting internal documents. Now, with President Obama seeking a new cyberwar command, the rush for government contracts is on. More»

...because he's not terribly interested in fighting it

(NEWSER) - Democrats saw the way Mitt Romney's super PAC destroyed Newt Gingrich in Iowa, and it terrified them, because President Obama's super PAC—or as Politico terms it, "not-so-super PAC"—doesn't have the muscle for anything like that. "It's like when China got the bomb," says one Democrat close to the PAC, "We thought we were the ones with cash supremacy. That's clearly not the case." Obama's Priorities USA Action has just $5 million in the bank, less than half Romney's $12 million. More»

Semi-secret assassination program has expanded greatly in his term

(NEWSER) - In the five years before President Obama took office, America’s drones launched 44 strikes, all confined to Pakistan, killing about 400 people. But during his Oval Office tenure there have been almost 240 strikes, killing at least four times as many people, and the US has built dozens of secret drone facilities, with bases in at least six countries, the Washington Post reports, in an in-depth look into what it terms Obama’s “emerging global apparatus for drone killing.” Though the technology was already developing under President George W Bush, Obama has greatly expanded its use. More»

Balks against State Dept., says US has apologized enough

(NEWSER) - President Obama has decided against issuing a formal apology to Pakistan over a NATO airstrike that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers, even as the State Department insists he must do so to salvage relations with Pakistan, officials tell the New York Times . The administration is instead backing the Defense Department, which thinks the US has apologized enough, and wants Obama to wait at least until its internal investigation of the incident is complete. More»