by Spencer Ackerman | Aug 2, 2012 | Monitor
Maintenance techs perform inspections on a Global Hawk Block 30 surveillance drone. The Air Force wants to stop buying it; a key Senate panel wants to keep the cash flowing. Photo: U.S. Air Force For the first time in over a decade, the Pentagon’s budget has to...
by Spencer Ackerman | Aug 2, 2012 | Monitor
These soldiers had better not be looking at porn, lest they run afoul of Pentagon rules. Photo: U.S. Army Sometimes the Pentagon acts like a lumbering bureaucrat, other times like an outraged schoolmarm. When it comes to online porn, it acts like both, as evidenced by...
by Cade Metz | Jul 17, 2012 | Monitor
The Senate Armed Service Committee isn’t exactly pleased with the NSA’s Google-like database. Image: jim.greenhill/Flickr In 2008, a team of software coders inside the National Security Agency started reverse-engineering the database that ran Google. They...
by Arikia Milikan | Jul 16, 2012 | Monitor
A social media kiosk in Fort Riley, Kansas. Photo: U.S. Army Captain Obvious, report for duty. The Air Force wants you to know that “eye-catching” pictures on Facebook are good and that comment trolls are bad — so don’t feed them. Those are some of...
by Noah Shachtman | Jul 10, 2012 | Monitor
New Darpa director Arati Prabhakar. Photo courtesy of SRI International Until last year, Arati Prabhakar worked for the venture capitalists who backed Solyndra, the green-tech firm that imploded in a scandal described by Mitt Romney as an example of the White...