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The Washington based advocacy group Electronic Privacy Information Center sued in federal district court here to obtain documents about any such agreement between the Internet search giant and the security agency.

The NSA responded to the suit with a so-called “Glomar” response in which the agency said it could neither confirm nor deny whether any responsive records exist. U.S. District Judge Richard Leon in Washington sided with the government last July.

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit is scheduled to hear the dispute March 20.

EPIC filed a Freedom of Information Act request in early 2010, noting media reports at the time that the NSA and Google had agreed to a partnership following the cyber attacks in China that year against Google.

EPIC asked for, among other things, communication between the NSA and Google about Gmail and Google’s “decision to fail to routinely encrypt” messages before Jan. 13, 2010.

The NSA’s response to the request for records noted that the agency “works with a broad range of commercial partners and research associations” to ensure the availability of secure information systems. The agency, however, refused to confirm or deny any partnership with Google.

The security agency said it routinely monitors vulnerabilities in commercial technology and cryptographic products because the government relies heavily on private companies for word processing systems and e-mail software.

“If NSA determines that certain security vulnerabilities or malicious attacks pose a threat to U.S. government information systems, NSA may take action,” DOJ Civil Division lawyers Catherine Hancock and Douglas Letter said in a brief in the D.C. Circuit in January.

DOJ’s legal team said that acknowledging whether NSA and Google formed a partnership from a cyber attack would illuminate whether the government “considered the alleged attack to be of consequence for critical U.S. government information systems.”

NSA said it cannot provide documents—or confirm their existence—because the information would alert adversaries about the security agency’s priorities, threat assessments and countermeasures.

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In this exclusive interview, you can hear James Stewart describe, in his own words, the shocking details of prisoner abuse right here in America. Among the highlights from his interview with Mike Adams:

• How James was subjected to severe food deprivation.

• How he was interrogated by deputies and accused of being a “sovereign,” then branded with a red arm band (Nazi-style) to falsely indicate that he was a danger to the general population.

• How James was shackled in long chains wrapped around his waist multiple times, then had his hands cuffed behind his back which was bound to the heavy waist chain to restrict his movement. His handcuffs were so tight he thought his wrists would break.

• James was then handcuffed to a cold bench, restricting his movement to just six inches, then left on the bench for 4-5 hours.

• James was then forcibly subjected to various medical tests, including forced chest X-rays even while he was handcuffed.

• He was placed in a cold cell wearing only a T-shirt and pants, where he soon began to suffer from hypothermia and found himself violently shivering just to stay alive.

• How he was made to suffer through total sleep deprivation all night long as other prisoners were screaming and banging on the walls.

• His cell was then flooded with raw human sewage, which flowed into his jail cell 2-3 inches deep, covering his shoes and shirt. LA County jail guards then ordered James to clean up all the raw sewage in his cell by handing him a small hand-held squeegee and demanding that he squeegee out all the raw sewage himself (which he reluctantly did).

• He was then forced to stay in the putrid raw sewage cell for over 30 hours, fighting off nausea and living in bacteriological filth that threatened his health.

• All along, the LA County prison guards gloated over their treatment of prisoners while laughing and joking about their power to subject prisoners to such abuse. This behavior openly mimics that of Gitmo guards who took pictures gloating over their torture and murder of prisoners of war.

• During this entire process, James was not allowed a single phone call nor any visit from an attorney. His right to speak to an attorney was repeatedly denied.

• At no point was James notified of what he was being charged with. He was never presented with an arrest warrant nor were any charges explained to him.

• James was mysteriously “lost” in the system and LA County officials claimed they did not know where he was. This was apparently a deliberate attempt to subject an individual to drawn-out torture without legal representation and make sure no one could locate them to check on their health or arrest status.

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He left his military base in the early hours of the morning and opened fire in at least two homes; women and children were among the dead.

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The soldier has not been named, but is thought to be a staff sergeant.

Arresting bystanders made it look like the department was efficient, while artificially reducing the amount of serious crime made the commander look good.

Two probes of the Afghan Air Force, or AAF, are under way—one led by the U.S. military coalition and another by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, officials said.

“The nature of the allegations is fairly dramatic and indicated that [AAF officials] were transporting drugs on aircraft and transported weapons not owned by the government of Afghanistan for the use of private groups,” said U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Daniel Bolger, commander of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization Training Mission-Afghanistan, the command that is establishing and financing Afghan security forces, including the AAF.

Gen. Bolger cautioned that the investigation was still preliminary and the allegations couldn’t be proved at this stage.

As part of the inquiry, the military also is looking into whether the alleged transporting of illegal drugs and weapons was linked to an April incident in which an AAF colonel gunned down eight U.S. Air Force officers at Kabul Airport. In a 436-page report released by the U.S. Air Force in January about the killings, several American officials are quoted as mentioning that the shooter, Col. Ahmed Gul, was likely involved in the transportation of illicit cargo and wanted to shut down a probe into it.

The April shooting, for which the Taliban claimed responsibility, was the deadliest attack by Afghan troops on coalition personnel in the 10 years of war. The majority of the victims were involved in an early inquiry into the misuse of AAF aircraft. Col. Gul, the Afghan officer who killed them, coordinated AAF’s cargo movement.

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U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. Frank Bryant, a coalition adviser at AAF, spearheaded an initial, informal, investigation after months of watching Afghan “helicopters just disappearing without flight plans,” said an American military officer who worked closely with him.

Early last year, Col. Bryant decided to impose U.S. control over the scheduling of Afghan military flights and suggested cutting off fuel to the AAF until it improved transparency about flight destinations and cargo, according to interviews with officials and the U.S. Air Force report on the shooting in April at Kabul International Airport.

Of particular concern was cargo ramp No. 5 at the airport, where unscheduled aircraft were landing late at night and cargo was being unloaded in a hurry, several Western officials with knowledge of Col. Bryant’s probe said.

The airport is a joint civilian-military facility. Unlike in most of the airport, the U.S.-led coalition has no oversight role at ramp No. 5. A Western official called that cargo-loading area the “Grand Central station of illicit activities” in Afghanistan.

That initial probe was cut short on April 27, when Col. Gul burst into a meeting room at the military side of Kabul airport and shot Col. Bryant, seven other U.S. service members and a U.S. contractor. Col. Gul killed himself later that day.

A U.S. Air Force investigation into the shooting, released in January, didn’t establish a conclusive motive for the attack, but said Col. Gul, had “self-radicalized,” possibly during a stay in Pakistan.

Now, senior American military officers in Kabul are pushing for that probe into the April killings to be reopened, saying Col. Gul may have been trying to derail the inquiry into a high-powered network of organized crime.

“These guys didn’t die because of some nut job that radicalized overnight. They died because they took a stand to not let a criminality expand,” one of the officials said. “It’s not just Afghans profiting from Afghans but includes international mafias. In a landlocked country, moving goods by air is everything.”

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Another witness, a U.S. lieutenant colonel, was cited in the report as saying some senior Afghan officials see the AAF aircraft as a source of income.

They “want to continue these nefarious and profitable activities with the billions of dollars worth of aircraft we’re buying them and the hundreds of millions we spend every year on maintenance and fuel,” he told investigators.

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The current probe into alleged drugs and weapons transport continues to look into ramp No. 5. Investigators are also looking into movements at other military airfields used by the AAF, especially those close to northern border areas.

Northern Afghanistan is a major route for the transport of opium and heroin to consumers in Russia and Western Europe. Opium is mostly grown in southern Afghanistan, and is smuggled to the north to be moved on to the rest of the world, Western officials say.

The AAF has 86 aircraft, including 16 C-27 cargo planes, 41 Russian-made Mi-17 transport helicopters and 11 Russian-made Mi-35 helicopter gunships.

The downgrade to ‘RD’ reflects Fitch’s previous commentary that the exchange would constitute a sovereign default event under the agency’s distressed debt exchange (DDE) rating criteria, and follows the downgrade of Greece to ‘C’ from ‘CCC’ on 22 February. Greece’s Short-term foreign currency IDR remains unchanged at ‘C’. The euro area Country Ceiling, which is applicable to all euro area member states, also remains unchanged at ‘AAA.’

“It is how small you can go without causing psychological problems,” jokes Kennedy, who, through his company, Panoramic Interests, is responsible for developing swathes of Berkeley. His projects include the Gaia Building on Allston Way, the Berkeleyan Apartments on Oxford Street, and the Touriel Building on University.

The “bijou” apartment in which we are standing, with its trompe l’oeil view of the Bay Bridge, is the prototype for the SmartSpace, a largely prefabricated, furnished space that, when multiplied and stacked together like Lego blocks, creates a fully fledged apartment building.

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“They distill the essence of urban living in that they are efficient, esthetically pleasing and easily duplicated,” says Kennedy of the units.

The researchers, Parthiban Santhanam and coauthors from MIT, have published their study in a recent issue of Physical Review Letters.

As the researchers explain in their study, the key to achieving a power conversion efficiency above 100%, i.e., “unity efficiency,” is to greatly decrease the applied voltage. According to their calculations, as the voltage is halved, the input power is decreased by a factor of 4, while the emitted light power scales linearly with voltage so that it’s also only halved. In other words, an LED’s efficiency increases as its output power decreases. (The inverse of this relationship – that LED efficiency decreases as its output power increases – is one of the biggest hurdles in designing bright, efficient LED lights.)