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Revealed: The Private Firms Tracking Terror Targets at Heart of US Drone Wars
Corporate staff are reviewing top-secret data and helping uniformed colleagues decide whether people under surveillance are enemies or civilians

The overstretched US military has hired hundreds of private sector contractors in the heart of its drone operations to analyse top secret video feeds and help track high value terror targets, an investigation has found.

Contracts unearthed by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism reveal a secretive industry worth hundreds of millions of dollars, placing a corporate workforce alongside uniformed personnel, analysing battlefield intelligence.

While it has long been known that US defence firms supply billions of dollars’ worth of equipment for drone operations, the role of the private sector in providing analysts to comb through military surveillance video has remained almost entirely unknown until now.

Approximately one in 10 people involved in the effort to process data captured by drones and spy planes is estimated to be non-military. And as the rise of Islamic State fuels what military commanders describe as an “insatiable demand” for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR), the Air Force is considering a further expansion of its contractor workforce, a spokeswoman confirmed.

Samuel DuBose video appears to show two officers reinforced false account of police killing
Analysis of Cincinnati shooting’s aftermath reveals how multiple officers discussed claim – disputed as the basis of a murder charge – that Ray Tensing was ‘dragged’ by unarmed black man’s car

Police officers in Cincinnati appear to have corroborated a false account of the fatal shooting of Samuel DuBose in the immediate aftermath of the incident, a detailed analysis of body-camera video released on Wednesday shows.

DuBose, an unarmed 43-year-old black man, was shot dead by white University of Cincinnati police officer Ray Tensing on 19 July. The officer claimed he was “dragged” by DuBose’s vehicle following an altercation during a routine traffic stop, and was therefore forced to open fire, shooting DuBose once in the head.

On Wednesday, Tensing was indicted for murder after Hamilton County prosecutor Joseph Deters said body-camera footage, which he released at a press conference announcing the charge, showed the officer was not dragged during the encounter.

“It is our belief that he was not dragged. If you slow down this tape you see what happens, it is a very short period of time from when the car starts rolling to when a gun is out and he’s shot in the head,” Deters told reporters on Wednesday.

Drivers, Beware: The Costly, Deadly Dangers of Traffic Stops in the American Police State

Trying to predict the outcome of any encounter with the police is a bit like playing Russian roulette: most of the time you will emerge relatively unscathed, although decidedly poorer and less secure about your rights, but there’s always the chance that an encounter will turn deadly.

The odds weren’t in Walter L. Scott’s favor. Reportedly pulled over for a broken taillight, Scott—unarmed—ran away from the police officer, who pursued and shot him from behind, first with a Taser, then with a gun. Scott was struck five times, “three times in the back, once in the upper buttocks and once in the ear — with at least one bullet entering his heart.”

Samuel Dubose, also unarmed, was pulled over for a missing front license plate. He was reportedly shot in the head after a brief struggle in which his car began rolling forward.

Levar Jones was stopped for a seatbelt offense, just as he was getting out of his car to enter a convenience store. Directed to show his license, Jones leaned into his car to get his wallet, only to be shot four times by the “fearful” officer. Jones was also unarmed.

The Crypto Wars Have Gone Global

Recently, Congress heard testimony about whether or not backdoors should be introduced into encryption technologies, a technically problematic proposal that would fundamentally weaken the security of the Internet, according to a recent report written by eleven of the world's leading cryptographers. But while Congress is reliving these debates from the nineties (we hear they're in these days), the Crypto Wars are very much alive and well in other parts of the world.

The United Kingdom, Netherlands and Australia have gone farther than the proposals put forward by the FBI by introducing new regulations that seek to weaken and place limits on the development and use of encryption. These efforts, made ostensibly to protect citizens against terrorism, are likely to have severe economic, political and social consequences for these nations and their citizens, while doing little to protect their security.

According to the cryptographers' report, encryption in fact has a critical role to play in national security by protecting citizens against malicious threats. The harm to the public that can be presented by lax digital security has been illustrated a number of times over recent months: data breaches such as the hack of the Office of Personnel Management compromised the personal information of tens of millions of Americans, while weak or flawed cryptography led to vulnerabilities such as Logjam and FREAK that compromised the transport layer security protocols used to secure network connections worldwide. Encryption is not only essential to protecting free expression in the digital age—it's also a critical part of national security.

Out of the abyssal depths: Divers find mysterious giant blob near Turkish coast

An enigmatic and gigantic translucent sphere floating near the Turkey’s coast recently found by a group of divers, baffling the experts around the world.

A car-sized almost invisible underwater object was discovered by a pair of divers as they were swimming near the coast of a small town in Turkey on July 9. The sphere was drifting 22 meters below the sea level and was about 4 meters wide.

The blob looked gelatinous and felt “very soft,” according to one of the divers, named Lutfu Tanriover, who also took footage of the strange phenomenon.

The Istanbul-based diver investigated it with an underwater torch. Although the mass was looking totally transparent, upon a closer view the group spotted small white dots filling the underwater “cloud.”