Anyway, here's a dose of news to hold you over:
- Law enforcement officials are vastly expanding their collection of DNA to include millions more people who have been arrested or detained but not yet convicted. Until now, the federal government genetically tracked only convicts. But starting this month, the FBI will join 15 states that collect DNA samples from those awaiting trial and will collect DNA from detained immigrants — the vanguard of a growing class of genetic registrants. The F.B.I., with a DNA database of 6.7 million profiles, expects to accelerate its growth rate from 80,000 new entries a year to 1.2 million by 2012 — a 17-fold increase.
- New details have emerged about the FBI's homebrew spyware with the publication of some heavily redacted documents. Wired reports that "on page 152, the FBI's Cryptographic and Electronic Analysis Unit (CEAU) 'advised Pittsburgh that they could assist with a wireless hack to obtain a file tree, but not the hard drive content.'" Be wary anarchist hackers, the FBI has learned to use the series of tubes.
- And everyone's favorite swashbucklers continue to wreak havoc on the world's busiest shipping lane, despite recent U.S. military intervention. Over the weekend, Somali gunmen seized a Belgian-registered vessel in the Indian Ocean; that ship is now being steered toward Somalia. And early this morning, a Maltese-flagged ship managed to shake off Somali pirates after they attacked it with rocket-propelled grenades. Illustrating one of the pirates' strategic advantages, Dutch commandos freed 20 Yemeni hostages on Saturday and briefly detained seven pirates who had forced the Yemenis to sail a "mother ship" attacking vessels in the Gulf of Aden, before freeing the pirates due to a lack of legal jurisdiction. Oh, and ship mounted non-lethal weapons aren't going to stop them either.
- C.S.A. Strategy Quote Of The Day: “It is necessary to develop a strategy that utilizes all the physical conditions and elements that are directly at hand. The best strategy relies upon an unlimited set of responses.”--Morihei Ueshiba
