Spying | featured news

The Chinese national taken into custody on an airplane waiting to take off for home had pornography and illegally downloaded movies on his NASA computer, not government secrets, reports say. He is now set to plead guilty to a misdemeanor charge of violating NASA computer rules. A felony charge of allegedly lying to FBI agents has been resolved, reports say, but it is not immediately clear if it is being dropped outright. Reports do indicate the lying charge is not going forward.

Congress approved a measure Friday that would renew expansive U.S. surveillance authority for five more years, rejecting objections from senators who are concerned the legislation does not adequately protect Americans’ privacy.

A BRITISH businessman whose murder triggered China's biggest political scandal in decades had been informing MI6 of the private affairs of one of the most powerful families in the Communist Party in the last year of his life.

The murder of the British businessman, Neil Heywood, is still seen as stemming from a financial dispute, but the intelligence links add an enticing subplot to his death.

While most people decide to buy their computers outright, some come to the decision that rent-to-own is a better option. What these people might not know is that their rented computer could have been spying on them.

Personnel records of former and current members of Nigeria's top domestic spy agency, including home addresses and names of immediate family members, leaked onto the Internet in a threatening message that claimed to come from a radical Islamist sect that's killed hundreds of people this year alone, The Associated Press has learned.

In more than six years of spying on Muslim neighborhoods, eavesdropping on conversations and cataloguing mosques, the New York Police Department's secret Demographics Unit never generated a lead or triggered a terrorism investigation, the department acknowledged in court testimony unsealed late Monday. The Demographics Unit is at the heart of a police spying program, built with help from the CIA, which assembled databases on where Muslims lived, shopped, worked and prayed. Police infiltrated Muslim student groups, put informants in mosques, monitored sermons and catalogued every Muslim in New York who adopted new, Americanized surnames.

A Chinese state security official has been arrested on suspicion of spying for the United States, sources said, a case both countries have kept quiet for several months as they strive to prevent a fresh crisis in relations.

The Pentagon said on Friday it believes China spent up to $180 billion on its military buildup last year, a far higher figure than acknowledged by Beijing, and it accused "Chinese actors" of being the world's biggest perpetrators of economic espionage.

The infiltration of an agent into the ranks of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula provides a rare insight into the shadowy world of counter-terrorism and the problems for both intelligence agencies and al-Qaeda in knowing whom to trust.