The Justice Department for the first time has notified a criminal defendant that evidence being used against him came from a warrantless wiretap, a move that is expected to set up a Supreme Court test of whether such eavesdropping is constitutional.

Prosecutors filed such a notice late Friday in the case of Jamshid Muhtorov, who was charged in Colorado in January 2012 with providing material support to the Islamic Jihad Union, a designated terrorist organization based in Uzbekistan.

Mr. Muhtorov is accused of planning to travel abroad to join the militants and has pleaded not guilty. A criminal complaint against him showed that much of the government's case was based on intercepted e-mails and phone calls.

The government's notice allows Mr. Muhtorov's lawyer to ask a court to suppress the evidence by arguing that it derived from unconstitutional surveillance, setting in motion judicial review of the eavesdropping.

The New York Times reported on Oct. 17 that the decision by prosecutors to notify a defendant about the wiretapping followed a legal policy debate inside the Justice Department.

The debate began in June when Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr. discovered that the department's National Security Division did not notify criminal defendants when eavesdropping without a warrant was an early link in an investigative chain that led to evidence used in court. As a result, none of the defendants knew that they had the right to challenge the warrantless wiretapping law.

Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward said a "rat's nest of concealment and lies" is at the heart of many Obama administration scandals and miscues, including the disastrous Obamacare website rollout.

"They need to review the this secret world and its power in their government because you run into this rats nest of concealment and lies time and time again then and now," Woodward said of the White House during his appearance on CBS' "Face the Nation" Sunday. "You get to a point where it's what do you worry about? Secret governments."

As for Obamacare, Woodward said "it clearly isn't working" and it connects to the idea that America possesses an "incredibly powerful government that gets on automatic pilot and you have people with inexperience who don't know about nuts and bolts questions. People who don't go in and say, 'Well, now is this going to work? Let's test it.'

An unidentified preschool in Richmond, Virginia is refusing to allow parents to pack their child's lunch from home, unless they have a doctor's note.

A letter from the school was recently posted by a mom on her blog My2CrazyCurls.com. She packed a lunch anyway for her son, and then got the letter again with a handwritten part at the top: "Ms Brooks, Please do not send a lunch to school unless a doctor's note is sent in connection with this letter."

The letter, also featured on the website Momdot.com, states:

TheBlaze reported on the chilling objective stated by Al Qaeda terrorists in the 2012 Benghazi attack - "We're here to kill Americans" - as a preview of a "60 Minutes" segment, "Benghazi."

The report aired Sunday and examines the horrific attack on the U.S. mission in Libya that took the lives of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans on Sept. 11, 2012, noting that there were many unheeded warnings about the attack as well as misinformation regarding what sparked it - i.e., it wasn't caused by an anti-Muslim YouTube video, rather it was an Al Qaeda operation from the beginning.

President Obama repeatedly assured Americans that after the Affordable Care Act became law, people who liked their health insurance would be able to keep it. But millions of Americans are getting or are about to get cancellation letters for their health insurance under Obamacare, say experts, and the Obama administration has known that for at least three years.

Four sources deeply involved in the Affordable Care Act tell NBC NEWS that 50 to 75 percent of the 14 million consumers who buy their insurance individually can expect to receive a "cancellation" letter or the equivalent over the next year because their existing policies don't meet the standards mandated by the new health care law. One expert predicts that number could reach as high as 80 percent. And all say that many of those forced to buy pricier new policies will experience "sticker shock."

None of this should come as a shock to the Obama administration. The law states that policies in effect as of March 23, 2010 will be "grandfathered," meaning consumers can keep those policies even though they don't meet requirements of the new health care law. But the Department of Health and Human Services then wrote regulations that narrowed that provision, by saying that if any part of a policy was significantly changed since that date -- the deductible, co-pay, or benefits, for example -- the policy would not be grandfathered.

Buried in Obamacare regulations from July 2010 is an estimate that because of normal turnover in the individual insurance market, "40 to 67 percent" of customers will not be able to keep their policy. And because many policies will have been changed since the key date, "the percentage of individual market policies losing grandfather status in a given year exceeds the 40 to 67 percent range."

Gen. Keith Alexander, the head of the embattled National Security Agency, is calling on governments to stop journalists from public disclosure of his agency's secret documents.

"I think it's wrong that that newspaper reporters have all these documents, the 50,000-whatever they have and are selling them and giving them out as if these-you know it just doesn't make sense," Alexander said in an interview with the Defense Department's "Armed With Science" blog.

"We ought to come up with a way of stopping it. I don't know how to do that. That's more of the courts and the policymakers but, from my perspective, it's wrong to allow this to go on," the NSA director added.

Gen. Alexander accused journalists of "selling" classified documents on the NSA's surveillance activities worldwide, insisting that media reports on his agency were a "dramatic, convenient lie."

Press TV has conducted an interview with Susan Lindauer, a former CIA asset from Washington, about the United States spying on its people as well as its European allies.

Below is an approximate transcription of the interview.

Press TV: How vast and extensive is this NSA spying program?

Lindauer: It has been revealed that the NSA spied on 124 billion phone conversations throughout the world in a one-month period. Thus it is enormous; it is beyond the scope of comprehension for ordinary citizens but the implications are vast because it is a Stasi program whereby it applies to the industrial espionage.

But it also allows the United States to impose our laws on other countries on an extraterritorial basis and we are hunting down citizens of foreign countries whose activities might very well be legal within their own country, but which violate our own US policies.

And then we are sabotaging them or even arresting them and extraditing them to the United States for prosecution and this goes well beyond terrorism cases. So, it is something that ordinary citizens should be afraid of; it is not just the government elite that should be. This is affecting the whole society.

A prominent American economist says the United States has already become a Third World economy as the world superpower continues to offshore its gross domestic product (GDP).

"If jobs offshoring continued, the US would be a Third World economy in 20 years," Paul Craig Roberts wrote in a column for the Press TV website on Thursday.

"America is in the toilet, and the rest of the world knows it," he wrote, noting, "More small businesses close, as memberships decline in golf clubs, as more university graduates return home to live with their parents, who are drawing down their savings to live."

"With the world moving away from using the dollar to settle international accounts, as the Federal Reserve prints more dollars, the rate at which foreign holders of dollar assets sell off their holdings will rise," wrote Roberts.

A former high-ranking official from the Department of State claims that the mass loss of civilian life caused by American-launched drone strikes in Yemen are creating dozens of new militants with each attack.

Nabeel Khoury, the deputy chief of mission in Yemen for the State Department from 2004 to 2007, writes in the Cairo Review this week that the use of unmanned aerial vehicles against alleged Al-Qaeda operatives is breeding anti-American sentiment overseas.

The editorial, published Wednesday, comes as the United States' use of drones is dominating discussions in Washington and around the world. Two leading human rights organizations condemned drones in a pair of reports released earlier this week, and on Wednesday the prime minister of Pakistan urged US President Barack Obama to cease drone strikes in his country and essentially halt an operation that has involved hundreds of attacks since 2004.

According to Khoury, similar attacks conducted in Yemen during the last few years have spawned a hatred that could immensely hurt America's efforts.

"Drone strikes take out a few bad guys to be sure, but they also kill a large number of innocent civilians. Given Yemen's tribal structure, the US generates roughly forty to sixty new enemies for every AQAP operative killed by drones," Khoury wrote, referring to Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

Well well lookie what the cat dragged in.

That's a link to the unsubsidized data dump -- all 78,437 records -- for each county and State under the Obamacare exchange program. I can verify that for at least my state and county the table is correct, since you can now look it up on Healthcare.gov without creating an account first (which I am not about to do.)

There are several very interesting statistical facts that come from this.

First, if you're "27", the average premium is $266.20/month or $3,194.40 per year. How many 27 year olds have an extra $3,200 to spend on this? Remember, this is the price that virtually every uninsured 27 year old must be willing -- and able -- to cough up in order to prevent the model this system is predicated on from collapsing.

If those 27 year olds don't show up, and they won't, then the system collapses instantly. If they do show up because the government threatens them with fines the economy collapses as $3,200 a year exceeds the average 27 year old's disposable personal income after mandatory expenses (e.g. food, shelter, etc.) Remember, there are always exceptions but these premiums are averages and over large pools of people the statistical averages are what matters -- not the ends of the barbell.

It gets better. The "average" 50 year old premium, again, for single coverage, is $452.87, or $5,434.44/year. How many 50 year olds will find that attractive compared against what they're paying now? Probably more of them, especially if they're already sick. But how about the healthy ones?

Note two things as well on this account -- these premiums are for non-smokers (smoker premiums are grossly surcharged with reports being 1.5x the above) and they do not account for anyone other than one person. If you are a single parent with kids (rather common) the premium on average is $610.23/month or about $7,300, and if you're a couple it's $647.86 (again, $7,774 annually.)

Now let's look at the government's own claims. First, the CPI index claims that health insurance is 0.656% of the family budget. What percentage of couples make $1.185 million a year? Why do I ask? Because that's the alleged median income for a couple if you believe the government's CPI numbers.