government

If you aren’t familiar with We The People, it’s a section of whitehouse.gov that allows Americans to file or sign a petition in an attempt to engage government on issues that matter to them. Well, naturally since just about anyone can create a petition, you’re going to get some pretty ridiculous petitions mixed in with the genuine ones. After the re-election of President Obama this month, petitions for a number of states to secede from the rest of the country started popping up.  This one is for the state of Louisiana to withdraw from the USA and create its own new government. But keep clicking ...

by Allison Churchill, Geoffrey Ingersoll, and Robert Johnson They're the guys in suits surrounding the President of the United States, ready to take a bullet to protect the leader of the free world But that wasn't always their main role. President Abraham Lincoln created the United States Secret Service (USSS) to deal with the mad influx of counterfeit money after the Civil War. A move ironically made just hours before he was assassinated April 14,1865. Four months later the Service was fully operational. In the 2004 run up to the presidential election George W. Bush spoke at Louisiana State University (LSU), where ...

Robotic land mammals that are faster than the fastest man; human soldiers replaced by smarter, stronger robots; hummingbirds and flies as spies; the reality of the not-too-far-off future in top secret government technology is steadily becoming more and more terrifying. Here are 10 incarnations of military and technological imagination gone wild. Secret Air Force Space Plane Next month, the Air Force’s super-secretive X-37B space plane will take is third trip into orbit—and like its two predecessors, the government isn’t saying much about its purpose. Some speculate it’s a spy station. China says ...

American workers everywhere can relate: You quietly go about your business and do a good job, but you are never noticed unless you make a mistake. Then it seems like the whole company is in the know. Such is life, but on a much larger scale at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Created by the National Security Act of 1947, it succeeded the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) formed during World War II. Day in and day out, analysts work to provide information to our elected leaders, forgotten in the minds of the public until something goes wrong. And when things go wrong in the intelligence community, they go very, very ...