Free Republic

Cruz has largely built his program out of his Houston headquarters, where a team of statisticians and behavioral psychologists who subscribe to the burgeoning practice of “psychographic targeting” built their own version of a Myers-Briggs personality test. The test data is supplemented by recent issue surveys, and together they are used to categorize supporters, who then receive specially tailored messages, phone calls and visits. Micro-targeting of voters has been around for well over a decade, but the Cruz operation has deepened the intensity of the effort and the use of psychological data. Cruz, a critic of excessive government data collection,...

The Pakistani who owned the compound that was Osama bin Laden's final hideaway meticulously bought up adjoining plots of land over two years and once cryptically told a seller that the property he bought for "an uncle" had become very valuable. The new information that emerged Wednesday provided a new glimpse of one of two key figures who sheltered bin Laden in his last years and whose identities remain one of the biggest mysteries surrounding the al-Qaida chief. ..... [ snip ] ..... Property records obtained by The Associated Press on Wednesday show that a man named Mohammed Arshad bought...

A member of the US Senate Intelligence Committee has told CNBC that the death of Osama Bin Laden was a direct result of enhanced interrogations."The information that eventually led us to this compound was the direct result of enhanced interrogations; one can conclude if we had not used enhanced interrogations, we would not have come to yesterday's action," US Senator Richard Burr in a telephone interview with CNBC. As a member of the US Senate Intelligence Committee, Burr was briefed on the attack on the compound that led to Bin Laden's death and believes the failure of Pakistani security forces...

U.S. forces finally found al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden not in the rugged mountains of Afghanistan's border, but in a million-dollar compound in an upscale suburb of Pakistan's capital, with his youngest wife, U.S. officials said early on Monday. They were led to the fortress-like three-story building after more than four years tracking one of bin Laden's most trusted couriers, whom U.S. officials said was identified by men captured after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. "Detainees also identified this man as one of the few al Qaeda couriers trusted by bin Laden. They indicated he might be living with...

Recently declassified documents obtained by Wired magazine reveal a massive Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) data mining operation. It already possesses over 1.5 billion records from government and private-sector sources. That figure is expected by the FBI to balloon to over 6 billion within a few years. And it is not just terrorists they are after.  According to the documents, the National Security Branch Analysis Center (NSAC) is being used to pursue multiple types of non-terrorism domestic investigations. It is also meant to be able to sort through the data — everything from health and travel records to credit card...