The House Judiciary Committee approved legislation on Thursday that would require Internet service providers (ISPs) to collect and retain records about Internet users' activity.

CNET reported the bill would require ISPs to retain customers' names, addresses, phone numbers, credit card numbers, bank account numbers, and temporarily-assigned IP addresses for 12 months.

The bill passed by a vote of 19 to 10, and is aimed at helping law enforcement track down pedophiles.

Detroit's Democratic mayor, David Bing, revealed further details Wednesday of his plan to shrink the city by forcing residents out of neighborhoods deemed too poor or underpopulated. Under the "planned contraction" scheme, the city will reduce or eliminate trash pickup, street lighting, fire and police protection, public schools and other essential services to drive residents out.

The Motor City, which has been decimated by decades of factory closures and downsizing, is being used as a model by the Obama administration to drastically reduce spending to blighted urban areas. Far from reviving these cities - through government spending to create jobs and expand services - Detroit is one of several hard-hit industrial cities, including Youngstown, Ohio and Flint, Michigan, targeted for "right-sizing."

The scheme, which is being funded by a "public-private partnership" of the federal government and the multibillion-dollar Kresge and Skillman Foundations, will divide Detroit into three "market-type" categories, according to analysis of the plan by the Detroit News.

The first, deemed "steady" neighborhoods, would include those with a higher level of owner-occupied homes. These would see "more code enforcement, debris cleanups, streetlight repairs, business recruitment and commercial area improvements," the newspaper reported.

With the world concerned about US financial credibility and the poor outlook for the US economy, now is not the time for the Republicans to grandstand on the public debt. The debt ceiling needed to be quietly raised. Instead, the Republicans started a fire and then threw gasoline on it, creating an inferno that could burn up the US social safety net or the US Treasury's credit rating and the US dollar's role as reserve currency or what remains of the separation of powers.

Consequently, world financial markets, currency markets, commodity markets, central banks, and mutual fund money market and bond funds are on pins and needles.

This level of irresponsibility is seldom seen even from American politicians.

Republicans have created a totally unnecessary crisis and turned it into compelling political theater. Will the US default? Will entitlements be slashed? Will Obama seize the power of the purse from Congress in order to save the dollar and the US credit rating? None of these questions needed to arise.

The federal government is planning to introduce new behavior detection techniques at airport checkpoints as soon as next month, Transportation Security Administration chief John Pistole said Thursday.

TSA already has "behavior detection officers" at 161 airports nationwide looking for travelers exhibiting physiological or psychological signs that a traveler might be a terrorist. However, Pistole said TSA is preparing to move to an approach that employs more conversation with travelers - a method that has been employed with great success in Israel.

"I'm very much interested in expanding the behavior detection program, upgrading it if you will, in a way that allows us to....have more interaction with a passsenger just from a discussion which may be able to expedite the physical screening aspects," Pistole said during an appearance at the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado. "So, we've looked at what works around the world, some outstanding examples and we are planning to do some new things in the near future here."

Will the real Topiary please stand up?

The 19-year-old Scotsman fingered Wednesday as a central figure of the LulzSec hacking crew is a fall guy who was framed to take the heat off the real culprit, according to unconfirmed claims from a rival group.

"We believe MET Police got the wrong guy and it happens because of lot of disinformation floating on the web," a Thursday post on the LulzSec Exposed blog said. "LulzSec and Anonymous members are Master trolls and they are good at this."

According to the post, penned by members of a group calling itself the Web Ninjas, the real LulzSec figure known as Topiary is a 23-year-old Swede, who stole the handle from a low-level member after he ran afoul of its parent group Anonymous. The mistaken identity was part of an elaborate ruse to confuse authorities about Topiary's true identity, the speculation claims.

Local equivalent of Facebook hit: Fingers point at China

Personal information on as many as 35 million users of a South Korean social network site may have been exposed as the result of what has been described as the country's biggest ever hack attack.

Local authorities were quick to blame hack attacks against the Cyworld social networking website and the Nate web portal - both of which are run by SK Telecom - on Chinese hackers, the BBC reports.

Names, phone numbers, email addresses, and other details may have been exposed through the Cyworld hack, which follows previous attacks against South Korean government sites and financial service firms. North Korea has been implicated in some of these hacks.

Barr barred from no-holds-barred battle

Ex-HBGary chief exec Aaron Barr has abandoned plans to speak at the DefCon security conference in Vegas next week.

Barr was due to take part in a panel discussion on 6 August but cancelled these plans in response to a threatened legal injunction by lawyers acting for his former employers, security blog Threatpost reports.

It's unclear whether or not the panel, entitled 'Whoever Fights Monsters...' Aaron Barr, Anonymous and Ourselves, will go ahead or not without its main attraction. Barr and fellow panel members Joshua Corman and Jericho of Attrition.org were due to debate the activities of LulzSec and Anonymous as well as the US military's interest in cyberwar.

A scientific study of fish genes has turned a spotlight on a lesser-known facet of the Canadian government: rigid control over its scientists' contact with the media. In an article published online yesterday, Postmedia News reporter Margaret Munro reported that fish scientist Kristi Miller had been forbidden by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) to talk with the media about her genomic analysis of sockeye salmon. The story, based on 792 pages of e-mail and memos that Munro requested under the country's Access to Information Act, has left Canadian science writers fuming about what they call the latest of many examples of unwarranted muzzling.

Miller's paper, which was published in Science in January, is part of an effort to discover why sockeye in the Fraser River in western Canada began dying in record numbers in 2007. It's a contentious and highly political topic in British Columbia, enmeshed in larger debates over the rights of commercial fisheries versus indigenous peoples and whether salmon farms might be in some way responsible for the die-off that threatens to wipe out the $1 billion industry. The reason for the decline is unknown, but Miller's tour-de-force genomic study identified a set of genes expressed at unusual levels in the diseased salmon: genes associated with fighting infection or leukemia. Perhaps, the authors concluded, the mysterious death was due to "a virus infecting fish before river entry and that persists to the spawning areas."

The article impressed other scientists, and media outlets deluged Miller and DFO media officer Diane Lake with requests for interviews, Munro's article says. Like scientists in most government agencies in Canada, Miller must get clearance from her agency's media office before talking with reporters. This time, DFO said no. The reason: Miller's position as an expert for the Cohen Commission, a task force set up by the Prime Minister in 2009 to investigate the cause of the salmon death. According to Munro's article, Miller will be testifying before the commission in August.

A one-time limited GAO audit of the Federal Reserve that was mandated by the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act has uncovered some eye-popping corruption at the Fed and the mainstream media is barely even covering it. It turns out that the Federal Reserve made $16.1 trillion in secret loans to their bankster friends during the financial crisis. You can read a copy of the GAO investigation for yourself right here. These loans only went to the "too big to fail" banks and to foreign financial institutions. Not a penny of these loans went to small banks or to ordinary Americans. Not only did the banksters get trillions in nearly interest-free loans, but the Fed actually paid them over 600 million dollars to help run the emergency lending program. The GAO investigation revealed some absolutely stunning conflicts of interest, and yet the mainstream media does not even seem interested. Solid evidence of the looting of America has been put right in front of us, and yet hardly anyone wants to talk about it.

Many Americans have a hard time grasping just how large 16.1 trillion dollars is. It is an amount of money that is almost inconceivable. It is more than the GDP of the United States for an entire year. It is more than the U.S. government has spent over the last four years combined.

The Federal Reserve was just creating gigantic piles of cash out of thin air and throwing them around with wild abandon.

A foreign country with the population the size of Wisconsin is getting $100 billion in USA tax Dollars while states all around our Union are going Bankrupt. 5.8 million Israelis Get 100 Billion In US Tax Dollars While American States Are Falling Apart. Israel is a criminal kabbal and must be stopped for good. Better 5.8 million go than 350 million in the USA.