SANA, Yemen — An airstrike killed 13 people suspected as Qaeda militants in the central Yemeni province of al-Bayda on Saturday, a security official and tribal representatives said. Three civilians in a nearby car were also killed, they said.

SANAA, Yemen (AP) — A U.S. drone strike in southern Yemen killed at least nine suspected al-Qaida militants and three civilians Saturday, authorities said, as part of America's ongoing strikes in the country against what it considers the terror network's most dangerous local group.

A US drone raid on Saturday killed 16 Al Qaeda militants and five civilians in Yemen, an army officer said.

When NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden first emailed Glenn Greenwald, he insisted on using email encryption software called PGP for all communications. But this month, we learned that Snowden used another technology to keep his communications out of the NSA’s prying eyes. It’s called Tails. And naturally, nobody knows exactly who created it.

Tails is a kind of computer-in-a-box. You install it on a DVD or USB drive, boot up the computer from the drive and, voila, you’re pretty close to anonymous on the internet. At its heart, Tails is a version of the Linux operating system optimized for anonymity. It comes with several privacy and encryption tools, most notably Tor, an application that anonymizes a user’s internet traffic by routing it through a network of computers run by volunteers around the world.

Snowden, Greenwald and their collaborator, documentary film maker Laura Poitras, used it because, by design, Tails doesn’t store any data locally. This makes it virtually immune to malicious software, and prevents someone from performing effective forensics on the computer after the fact. That protects both the journalists, and often more importantly, their sources.

“The installation and verification has a learning curve to make sure it is installed correctly,” Poitras told WIRED by e-mail. “But once the set up is done, I think it is very easy to use.”

The NSA’s decision to keep the bug secret in pursuit of national security interests threatens to renew the rancorous debate over the role of the government’s top computer experts.

"Society does not win when the Government stoops to the same level as the defendants it seeks to prosecute — especially when the Government has acted solely to achieve a conviction for a made-up crime," Wright wrote. He said the stings have done little to deter crime and instead are "ensnaring chronically unemployed individuals from poverty-ridden areas."

"The time has come to remind the Executive Branch that the Constitution charges it with law enforcement — not crime creation. A reverse-sting operation like this one transcends the bounds of due process and makes the Government the oppressor of its people," Wright wrote in a scathing 24-page order.

Wright's order, filed March 10, instructed federal officials to release Antuan Dunlap, who was arrested during an ATF sting in Los Angeles last year. Wright said agents had no evidence that Dunlap had been involved in drug house robberies in the past or that he would have participated in one had an undercover ATF agent not offered him the chance to steal as much as 25 kilograms of non-existent cocaine. He criticized the government for basing the severity of the charges Dunlap faced on the "whims" of federal agents and questioned whether the ATF's investigations have done anything to benefit public safety.

"Zero. That's the amount of drugs that the Government has taken off the streets as the result of this case and the hundreds of other fake stash-house cases around the country. That's the problem with creating crime: the Government is not making the country any safer or reducing the actual flow of drugs," Wright wrote.

A behind-the-scenes battle between the CIA and Congress erupted in public Tuesday as the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee accused the agency of breaking laws and breaching constitutional principles in an alleged effort to undermine the panel’s multi-year investigation of a controversial interrogation program.

Chairman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) accused the CIA of secretly removing documents, searching committee-used computers and attempting to intimidate congressional investigators by requesting an FBI inquiry of their conduct — charges that CIA Director John Brennan disputed within hours of her appearance on the Senate floor.

Video

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) questioned whether a CIA search of congressional records might have undermined government oversight during a Senate floor speech Tuesday.
Read more:
Why the CIA and lawmakers are feuding

Adam Goldman 8:16 AM ET
What you need to know about the dispute over an investigation o the agency’s interrogation program.
Transcript: Feinstein says CIA searched Intelligence panel computers

7:32 AM ET
“Let me say up front that I come to the Senate floor reluctantly,” she said.
Transcript: Brennan says his agency has done nothing wrong
10:53 AM ET
“If I did something wrong, I will go to the president and I will explain to him exactly what I did and what the findings were,” he said.
Senators praise Feinstein speech, want answers from CIA

Wesley Lowery and Ed O'Keefe 12:32 PM ET
If true, “this is Richard Nixon stuff,” one senator says.
Feinstein described the escalating conflict as a “defining moment” for Congress’s role in overseeing the nation’s intelligence agencies and cited “grave concerns” that the CIA had “violated the separation-of-powers principles embodied in the United States Constitution.”

According to the fuel records, H2-11 purchased jet fuel for prices ranging from $2.37 to $3.20 a gallon. At nearby local airports, the exact same jet fuel goes for between $5 and $8.50 per gallon.

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According to the inspector general’s report, the discount fuel saved Google’s principals between $3.3 million and $5.3 million since H2-11 was able to purchase the taxpayer subsidized fuel at Ames.

Tens of thousands of accounts associated with customers of Microsoft, Google, Facebook and Yahoo have their data turned over to US government authorities every six months as the result of secret court orders, the tech giants disclosed for the first time on Monday.

As part of a transparency deal reached last week with the Justice Department, four of the tech firms that participate in the National Security Agency’s Prism effort, which collects largely overseas internet communications, released more information about the volume of data the US demands they provide than they have ever previously been permitted to disclose.

But the terms of the deal prevent the companies from itemising the collection, beyond bands of thousands of data requests served on them by a secret surveillance court. The companies must also delay by six months disclosing information on the most recent requests – terms the Justice Department negotiated to end a transparency lawsuit before the so-called Fisa court that was brought by the companies.

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Documents that Snowden disclosed to the Guardian, Washington Post and other outlets show that the NSA also siphons communications and associated data from information in transit across the global communications infrastructure – without court orders, under authority claimed under a seminal executive order known as executive order 12,333.

Washington: The US military has destroyed more than 77,000 metric tons of military equipment - including mine-resistant troop transport vehicles - as it prepares to withdraw from Afghanistan in late 2014, the Washington Post reported today.

More than 7-billion-dollar worth of military equipment is no longer needed, or would be too expensive to ship back to the United States, and much of it is being shredded and sold locally as scrap metal, the Post reported, citing US military officials.

Donating the gear to the Afghan government is difficult because of complicated bureaucratic rules, plus US officials do not believe the Afghans could maintain the gear.