Planet Venus has put on a show for skywatchers by moving across the face of the Sun as viewed from Earth.

The transit was a very rare astronomical event that would not be seen again for another 105 years.

Observers in north and central America, and the northern-most parts of South America saw the event start just before local sunset.

The far northwest of America, the Arctic, the western Pacific, and east Asia witnessed the entire passage.

While the UK and the rest of Europe, the Middle East, and eastern Africa waited for local sunrise to try to see the closing stages of the transit.

Venus appeared as a small black dot moving slowly but surely across the solar disc. The traverse lasted more than six and a half hours.

Some of the best pictures of the event were provided by the US space agency’s (Nasa) Solar Dynamics Observatory, which studies the Sun from a position 36,000km above the Earth.

“We get to see Venus in exquisite detail because of SDO’s spatial resolution,” said agency astrophysicist Dr Lika Guhathakurta.

“SDO is a very special observatory. It takes images that are about 10 times better than a high-definition TV and those images are acquired at a temporal cadence of one every 10 seconds. This is something we’ve never had before.”

Many citizens keen to observe the transit first hand attended special events at universities and observatories where equipment for safe viewing had been set up.

In Hawaii, one of the best places to see the whole event, the university’s Institute of Astronomy set up telescope stations on Waikiki beach.

“We’ve had 10 telescopes and the queues have been 10 deep to each telescope all day long,” said the institute’s Dr Roy Gal.

“It’s a great opportunity to get people excited and teach them stuff. I was hoping for a big turn-out, and it’s been fantastic,” he told BBC News.

Joe Cali viewed the transit on the edge of the Outback in New South Wales, Australia, another ideal vantage point.

“It is exciting. It may look like just a black dot on the Sun but if you think about it, it’s one of the few times you get to see a planet in motion,” he said.

UK skywatchers had to deal with quite extensive cloud conditions across the country.

“We’ve had total cloud and rain,” said Brian Sheen from the Roseland Observatory in Cornwall.

“But we’ve been improving our chances by connecting with the Shetland Islands and the people up there have done rather better than we have. We’ve been seeing the transit through [a feed] of one of their telescopes,” he explained.

Scientists observed the transit to test ideas that will help them probe Earth-like planets elsewhere in the galaxy, and to learn more about Venus itself and its complex atmosphere.

As part of Horizon’s Transit of Venus programme, science presenter Liz Bonnin explains what the transit of Venus is and why it is such a rare event

Venus transits occur four times in approximately 243 years; more precisely, they appear in pairs of events separated by about eight years and these pairs are separated by about 105 or 121 years.

The reason for the long intervals lies in the fact that the orbits of Venus and Earth do not lie in the same plane and a transit can only occur if both planets and the Sun are situated exactly on one line.

This has happened only seven times previously in the telescopic age: in 1631, 1639, 1761, 1769, 1874, 1882 and 2004.

The next pair will not now occur until 2117 and 2125.

The phenomenon has particular historical significance. The 17th- and 18th-Century transits were used by the astronomers of the day to work out fundamental facts about the Solar System.

Employing a method of triangulation (parallax), they were able to calculate the distance between the Earth and the Sun – the so-called astronomical unit (AU) – which we know today to be about 149.6 million km (or 93 million miles).

This allowed scientists to get their first real handle on the scale of things beyond Earth.

Modern instrumentation now gives us very precise numbers on planetary positions and masses, as well as the distance between the Earth and the Sun. But to the early astronomers, just getting good approximate values represented a huge challenge.

This is not to say the 2012 Venus transit was regarded as just a pretty show with no interest for scientists.

Planetary transits have key significance today because they represent one of the best methods for finding worlds orbiting distant stars.

Nasa’s Kepler telescope, for example, is identifying thousands of candidates by looking for the tell-tale dips in light that accompany a planet moving in front of its host sun.

These planets are too far away to be visited by spacecraft in the foreseeable future, but scientists can learn something about them from the way the background star’s light is affected as it passes through the planetary atmosphere.

And observing a transiting Venus, which has a known atmospheric composition, provides a kind of benchmark to support these far-flung investigations.

Researchers also took a close look at Venus itself during the transit, used the occasion to probe the middle layers of the planet’s atmosphere – its mesosphere.

They were looking for a very thin arc of light, called the aureole, which can only be seen when Venus appears to just touch the edge of the Sun’s disc at ingress and egress.

The brightness and thickness of the aureole depends on the density and temperature of the atmospheric layers above Venus’s cloud tops.

Observations of the aureole were being combined with data from Europe’s Venus Express spacecraft in orbit around the planet to provide information on high-altitude winds.

The Venusian atmosphere experiences super-rotation. That is – the whole atmosphere circles the planet in four Earth days, on a body that turns around just once in 243 Earth days.

Would you barcode your baby?

Microchip implants have become standard practice for our pets, but have been a tougher sell when it comes to the idea of putting them in people.

Science fiction author Elizabeth Moon last week rekindled the debate on whether it’s a good idea to “barcode” infants at birth in an interview on a BBC radio program.

“I would insist on every individual having a unique ID permanently attached — a barcode if you will — an implanted chip to provide an easy, fast inexpensive way to identify individuals,” she said on The Forum, a weekly show that features “a global thinking” discussing a “radical, inspiring or controversial idea” for 60 seconds.

Moon believes the tools most commonly used for surveillance and identification — like video cameras and DNA testing — are slow, costly and often ineffective.

In her opinion, human barcoding would save a lot of time and money.

The proposal isn’t too far-fetched – it is already technically possible to “barcode” a human – but does it violate our rights to privacy?

Opponents argue that giving up anonymity would cultivate an “Orwellian” society where all citizens can be tracked.

“To have a record of everywhere you go and everything you do would be a frightening thing,” Stanley, senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union, told the Daily News.
He warned of a “check-point society” where everyone carries an internal passport and has to show their papers at every turn, he said.

“Once we let the government and businesses go down the road of nosing around in our lives…we’re going to quickly lose all our privacy,” said Stanley.

There are already, and increasingly, ways to electronically track people. Since 2006, new U.S. passports include radio frequency identification tags (RFID) that store all the information in the passport, plus a digital picture of the owner.

In 2002, an implantable ID chip called VeriChip was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The chip could be implanted in a person’s arm, and when scanned, could pull up a 16 digit ID number containing information about the user.

It was discontinued in 2010 amid concerns about privacy and safety.

Still scientists and engineers have not given up on the idea.

A handful of enterprising companies have stepped into the void left by VeriChip, and are developing ways to integrate technology and man.

Biotech company MicroCHIPS has developed an implantable chip to deliver medicine to people on schedule and without injection. And technology company BIOPTid has patented a noninvasive method of identification called the “human barcode.”

Advocates say electronic verification could help parents or caregivers keep track of children and the elderly. Chips could be used to easily access medical information, and would make going through security points more convenient, reports say.

But there are also concerns about security breaches by hackers. If computers and social networks are already vulnerable to hacking and identify theft, imagine if someone could get access to your personal ID chip?

Stanley cautioned against throwing the baby out with the bathwater each time someone invents a new gadget.

“We can have security, we can have convenience, and we can have privacy,” he said. “We can have our cake and eat it too.”

The Harbinger is a novel that is becoming very popular among both Christians and non-Christians, even reaching the top of the New York Times best-seller list at this writing. Continue reading →

The head of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood has called on Arab forces to confront Israel and for the international community to pressure the “Zionist government to withdraw from the land of Palestine.”

The comments by Brotherhood General Guide Mohammed Badie came in a written statement issued May 17 to commemorate Nakba Day, when Palestinians and other Arabs mourn Israel’s creation in 1948.

The statement – the existence of which was revealed Wednesday by the Investigative Project on Terrorism blog – reminds Brotherhood followers of the movement’s decades-long “sacrifices” in efforts to destroy the Jewish state.

“On this day, like every year, the Arab and Islamic nations remember the worst catastrophe ever to befall the peoples of the world,” Badie wrote in the text, translated by The Jerusalem Post. “We demand the international community rectify the historic injustice [of 1948] and pressure the government of the Zionist entity to withdraw from the land of Palestine.”

The statement portrays the Arab revolts of the last 18 months as part of an inexorable process to “liberate” land now in the State of Israel.

“We have toppled the most repressive regimes with purpose and determination,” Badie wrote. “We have begun the era of liberation of all peoples, first of all the Palestinian people, [suffering from] the worst occupation known to man – the Zionist occupation.”

Uriya Shavit, a lecturer in Tel Aviv University’s Department for Arabic and Islamic Studies, said those acquainted with the Brotherhood’s history will find the message unsurprising.

“The idea that the Brotherhood doesn’t recognize the legitimacy of Israel, and the call to eradicate it at some point, is something the group has never denied. It’s been in Brotherhood literature from its founding in 1928 until this very day,” Shavit said.

“What they have tried to do, not just during the Arab Spring but before, is to try to reconcile the ideology of never recognizing Israel, or the 1979 Egypt- Israel peace treaty, with the understanding that if they’re to be in power, they have to be realistic,” he added. “That’s why they offer statements like ‘We realize we will have to recognize agreements signed by previous governments,’ but then always add a ‘but.’”

The Brotherhood took half of Egypt’s parliamentary seats in elections earlier this year, with even harder-line Salafis taking another quarter. The Brothers’ presidential candidate, Mohamed Mursi, barely edged former prime minister Ahmed Shafiq in firstround elections last month, and the two hopefuls will meet in a runoff ballot June 16-17.

Asked about Egypt’s peace agreement with Israel, Mursi has variously called for its revision or for putting it to referendum. Aides to the candidate have said that if elected he would not meet with Israeli officials, though his assistants might.

Badie’s Nakba Day message repeatedly cites passages from the Koran to explain political events. The Arab revolts showed popular will can topple “corrupt regimes which knelt at the feet of the Zionists,” he wrote, adding the Koranic verse, “They are those with whom thou didst make a covenant but they break their covenant every time.”

“The idea is there is no point in signing treaties with Jews – not Israelis, by the way, but Jews – because the Koran tells you just how unreliable they are,” Shavit said. “This is rhetoric even Hamas has used less in the past year, because it’s seen in the West as plain anti-Semitism, albeit in Islamic garb.”

Dan Schueftan, director of the National Security Studies Center at the University of Haifa, said the question of Palestine has always been at the forefront of Brotherhood doctrine.

“This rhetoric has little to do with the Palestinians, and a lot to do with the fact that all this land is Muslim, and Israel is therefore inherently illegitimate,” he said. “Egypt is moving from a bad situation to a much worse one. Naturally, Israel will suffer: when Egypt can’t deal with its own problems, it will deflect them at us.”

Nonetheless, he said, Israelis should watch developments in Egypt and across the region with a measure of both caution and confidence.

“I’m pessimistic and optimistic at the same time,” he said. “Pessimistic about what’s happening in the Arab world, but optimistic over Israel’s ability to deal with it.”

Operation Locked Shields, an international military exercise held last month, was not exactly your usual game of soldiers. It involves no loud bangs or bullets, no tanks, aircraft or camouflage face-paint. Its troops rarely even left their control room, deep within a high security military base in Estonia.

These people represent a new kind of combatant – the cyber warrior.

One team of IT specialists taking part in Locked Shields, were detailed to attack nine other teams, located all over Europe. At their terminals in the Nato Co-operative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence, they cooked up viruses, worms, Trojan Horses and other internet attacks, to hijack and extract data from the computers of their pretend enemies.

The idea was to learn valuable lessons in how to forestall such attacks on military and commercial networks. The cyber threat is one that the Western alliance is taking seriously.

It’s no coincidence that Nato established its defence centre in Estonia. In 2007, the country’s banking, media and government websites were bombarded with Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attacks over a three week period, in what’s since become known as Web War I. The culprits are thought to have been pro-Russian hacktivists, angered by the removal of a Soviet-era statue from the centre of the capital, Tallinn.

DDOS attacks are quite straightforward. Networks of thousands of infected computers, known as botnets, simultaneously access the target website, which is overwhelmed by the volume of traffic, and so temporarily disabled. However, DDOS attacks are a mere blunderbuss by comparison with the latest digital weapons. Today, the fear is that Web War II – if and when it comes – could inflict physical damage, leading to massive disruption and even death.

“Sophisticated cyber attackers could do things like derail trains across the country,” says Richard A Clarke, an adviser on counter-terrorism and cyber-security to presidents Clinton and Bush.

“They could cause power blackouts – not just by shutting off the power but by permanently damaging generators that would take months to replace. They could do things like cause [oil or gas] pipelines to explode. They could ground aircraft.”

Clarke’s worries are fuelled by the current tendency to put more of our lives online, and indeed, they appear to be borne out by experiments carried out in the United States.

At the heart of the problem are the interfaces between the digital and physical worlds known as Scada – or Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition – systems.

Today, these computerised controllers have taken over a myriad jobs once performed manually. They do everything from opening the valves on pipelines to monitoring traffic signals. Soon, they’ll become commonplace in the home, controlling smart appliances like central heating.

And crucially, they use cyberspace to communicate with their masters, taking commands on what to do next, and reporting any problems back. Hack into these networks, and in theory you have control of national electricity grids, water supplies, distribution systems for manufacturers or supermarkets, and other critical infrastructure.

In 2007, the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) demonstrated the potential vulnerability of Scada systems. Using malicious software to feed in the wrong commands, they attacked a large diesel generator. Film of the experiment shows the machine shaking violently before black smoke engulfs the screen.

Although this took place under laboratory conditions, with the attackers given free rein to do their worst, the fear is that, one day, a belligerent state, terrorists, or even recreational hackers, might do the same in the real world.

“Over the past several months we’ve seen a variety of things,” says Jenny Mena of the DHS. “There are now search engines that make it possible to find those devices that are vulnerable to an attack through the internet. In addition we’ve seen an increased interest in this area in the hacker and hacktivist community.”

One reason why Scada systems may be prone to hacking is that engineers, rather than specialist programmers, are often likely to have designed their software. They are expert in their field, says German security consultant Ralph Langner, but not in cyber defence. “At some point they learned how to develop software,” he adds, “but you can’t compare them to professional software developers who probably spent a decade learning.”

Moreover, critical infrastructure software can be surprisingly exposed. A power station, for example, might have less anti-virus protection than the average laptop. And when vulnerabilities are detected, it can be impossible to repair them immediately with a software patch. “It requires you to re-boot,” Langner points out. “And a power plant has to run 24-7, with only a yearly power-down for maintenance.” So until the power station has its annual stoppage, new software cannot be installed.

Langner is well-qualified to comment. In 2010 he, along with two employees, took it upon himself to investigate a mystery computer worm known as Stuxnet, that was puzzling the big anti-virus companies. What he discovered took his breath away.

Stuxnet appeared to target a specific type of Scada system doing a specific job, and it did little damage to any other applications it infected. It was clever enough to find its way from computer to computer, searching out its prey. And, containing over 15,000 lines of computer code, it exploited no fewer than four previously undiscovered software errors in Microsoft Windows. Such errors are extremely rare, suggesting that Stuxnet’s creators were highly expert and very well-resourced.

It took Langner some six months to probe just a quarter of the virus. “If I’d wanted to do all of it I might have gone bust!” he jokes. But his research had already drawn startling results.

Stuxnet’s target, it turned out, was the system controlling uranium centrifuges at Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility. There is now widespread speculation that the attack was the work of American or Israeli agents, or both. Whatever the truth, Langner estimates that it delayed Iran’s nuclear project by around two years – no less than any air strike was expected to achieve – at a relatively small cost of around $10 million. This success, he says, means cyber weapons are here to stay.

Optimists say Stuxnet does at least suggest a scrap of reassurance. Professor Peter Sommer, an international expert in cyber crime, points out that the amount of research and highly skilled programming it involved would put weapons of this calibre beyond anyone but an advanced nation state. And states, he point out, usually behave rationally, thus ruling out indiscriminate attacks on civilian targets.

“You don’t necessarily want to cause total disruption. Because the results are likely to be unforeseen and uncontrollable. In other words, although one can conceive of attacks that might bring down the world financial system or bring down the internet, why would one want to do that? You would end up with something not that different from a nuclear winter.”

But even this crumb of comfort is denied by Langner, who argues that, having now infected computers worldwide, Stuxnet’s code is available to anyone clever enough to adapt it, including terrorists.

“The attack vectors and exploits used by Stuxnet – they can be copied and re-used reliably against completely different targets. Until a year ago no one was aware of such an aggressive and sophisticated threat. With Stuxnet that has changed. It is on the table. The technology is out there on the internet.”

One thing is for sure, he adds: If cyber weapons do become widespread, their targets will lie mostly in the west, rather than in countries like Iran, which have relatively little internet dependence. This means that the old rules of military deterrence which favoured powerful, technologically advanced countries like the United States do not apply: Responding in kind to a cyber attack could be effectively impossible.

This asymmetry is likely to grow, as developed countries become ever more internet-dependent. So far, the Internet Protocol format allows only 4.3 billion IP addresses, most of which have now been used. But this year, a new version is rolling out, providing an inexhaustible supply of addresses and so allowing exponential growth in connectivity. Expect to see far more machines than people online in the future.

In the home, fridges will automatically replenish themselves by talking to food suppliers; ovens and heating systems will respond to commands from your smartphone. Cars may even drive themselves, sharing GPS data to find the best routes. For industry, commerce and infrastructure, there will be even more reliance on cyber networks that critics claim are potentially vulnerable to intrusion.

“There will be practically infinite number of IP addresses,” says former hacker Jason Moon. “Everything can have an IP address. And everything will have one. Now, that’s great. But think what that’s going to do for the hacker!”

In fact, it has already become a challenge for even sensitive installations, let alone households, to remain offline. Although military and other critical networks are supposedly isolated from the public internet, attackers can target their contractors and suppliers, who plug into the “air-gapped” system at various times. Somewhere down the food chain, a vulnerable website or a rogue email will provide a way in.

According to Richard Clarke, the mighty American armed forces themselves are not immune, since their command & control, supplies, and even some weapons systems, also rely on digital systems.

“The US military ran headlong into the cyber age,” he says. “And we became very dependent on cyber devices without thinking it through. Without thinking that if someone got control of our software, what would we be able to do? Do we have backup systems? Can we go back to the old days?”

The answer it seems is no. A new form of weapon appears to be emerging. And the world may have to learn to adapt.

Every time a Bilderberg Meeting takes place, important things happen. The last time they met in the US was an election year, 2008 – and the world got Obama. This year they’re back in the US: will they decide who the next president will be?

­When in 2008 they gathered from June 5 to 8 in Chantilly, Virginia – just a stone’s throw from the Washington DC – Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were neck-in-neck in the battle for the Democratic Party’s presidential candidacy. 

On June 5 of that year, Barack and Hillary mysteriously “disappeared” for some hours “somewhere in the DC area.”  Their agendas blocked out, they clearly sneaked off to “Meet the Bilderbergers.” 

The media kept mum about that, save for an Associated Press report on the campaign trail saying that, “reporters traveling with Obama sensed something might be happening between the pair (i.e. Obama and Hillary) when they arrived at Dulles International Airport after an event in Northern Virginia and Obama was not aboard the airplane. Asked at the time about the Illinois Senator’s whereabouts, Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs smiled and declined to comment.” (The AP dispatch “Obama and Clinton meet, discuss uniting Democrats” is, strangely, “no longer available” on their website).

Be that as it may, two days later, Hillary withdrew from the race and Obama became the presidential candidate. Did Bilderberg make Hillary “an offer she couldn’t refuse” to clear the way for Obama to the White House? Did they promise her that she would become his Secretary of State?

Although most Bilderberg annual meetings are held in Europe – France, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, Denmark, England, Scotland, Norway – this US election year they’re again gathering at the Westfield Marriott Hotel in Virginia from May 30 to June 3.  Either they’re very fond of that place… or of US elections… or both…!  

So the question is: will “key presidential candidacy decisions” be made again this year?  Will a Republican wildcard appear?  A “God-inspired Burning Bush” of some sort, perhaps?

Exerting Global Leverage

A favorite Bilderberg method consists of inviting wannabe future heads of state to their meetings to determine whether they will go along with their agenda.  We thus saw George H. W. Bush attend their 1985 meeting, Bill Clinton attend their 1991 meeting, Tony Blair in 1993, and Romano Prodi, former head of the EU Commission, in 1999.

So what exactly is Bilderberg?  It’s neither an organization nor a lobby. The “Bilderberg Meetings,” as they dub themselves in their (apparently) official website www.bilderbergmeetings.com, is a “by-invitation-only” club of around 140 very high-power people from business, finance, oil, politics, media, industry, academia and nobility who come together in a very private no-media / no cameras / extremely-tight-security surroundings to discuss…  Well… there’s the rub: what exactly do they discuss?

They describe themselves as “a small, flexible, informal and off-the-record international forum in which different viewpoints can be expressed and mutual understanding enhanced. Bilderberg’s only activity is its annual Conference. At the meetings, no resolutions are proposed, no votes taken, and no policy statements issued.”

True enough.  Actually, they don’t need to because each individual member’s power is so very vast that whatever they agree will forcefully span the globe through their far-reaching leverage and clout.

A Global Web of Private Power

Though very high up on the Pyramid, Bilderberg is not the Global Elite’s power center.
Rather, Bilderberg is a key group within a much more vast, more complex, less centralized, and highly effective Global Power Network, where they interact and overlap with other organizations, clubs, lobbies and groups, all having common economic, financial, social and (geo)political objectives in the Globalist Agenda. 

This includes such key entities as the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations (long-term geopolitical planners), its London-based sister entity Royal Institute of International Affairs (aka “Chatham House”), RAND Corp., CSIS, the American Enterprise Institute (strategic affairs specialists), Tavistock Institute in London (mass psychology research), the Carnegie Endowment, and the Trilateral Commission “umbrella” entity (founded 1973 by Rockefeller / Morgan / Rothschild interests, geared to coordinating the Americas, Europe and the East). 

These so-called “Think Tanks” in turn interact with consultancies like Kissinger Associates, The Carlyle Group (specializing in oil strategies and having the Bush, Bin Laden and Baker families as key shareholders), or Trilateralist Claus Schwab’s World Economic Forum. 

Thus, Bilderberg is basically part of that very powerful Global Private Power Web; a “node” so to speak… And a very powerful one at that!! 

It’s therefore no surprise to see that last year’s attendee list looks like a Who’s Who of banking, industrial and media CEO top brass: Deutsche Bank, HSBC, CitiCorp, European Central Bank, US Federal Reserve Bank, Lazard Frères, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Barclays, World Bank, Bank of Canada, AXA, Royal Dutch Shell, BP, Fiat, Nestle, Novartis, Coca-Cola, Airbus, Eni, Telecom Italy, ExxonMobil, Alcoa, Marks & Spencer, Die Zeit, The Economist.

As their website points out about Meeting participants, “about one-third is from government and politics, and two-thirds from finance, industry, labour, education and communications. Participants attend Bilderberg in a private and not an official capacity.”

European nobility regularly attend too: the Dutch Queen, the Spanish King and Queen, Norway’s Crown Prince… 

Bilderberg’s high-power participants interact with, and are cross-represented on, the global private power web through membership and directorship in the Trilateral Commission, CFR, AEI, governments, corporations, banks, media and others. 

Interestingly, also in attendance are founders and top executives of giant Internet management and intelligence gathering companies as Google, Facebook, LinkedIn and Microsoft.
Clearly, they run countries around the world, not voting citizens…

Perhaps it’s high time “We the People” in every country started listening to those of us saying,“It’s the Bilderbergers and Trilateralists, Stupid!”   

After months of negotiation, Johannes Caspar, a German data protection official, forced Google to show him exactly what its Street View cars had been collecting from potentially millions of his fellow citizens. Snippets of e-mails, photographs, passwords, chat messages, postings on Web sites and social networks — all sorts of private Internet communications — were casually scooped up as the specially equipped cars photographed the world’s streets.

“It was one of the biggest violations of data protection laws that we had ever seen,” Mr. Caspar recently recalled about that long-sought viewing in late 2010. “We were very angry.”

Google might be one of the coolest and smartest companies of this or any era, but it also upsets a lot of people — competitors who argue it wields its tremendous weight unfairly, officials like Mr. Caspar who says it ignores local laws, privacy advocates who think it takes too much from its users. Just this week, European antitrust regulators gave the company an ultimatum to change its search business or face legal consequences. American regulators may not be far behind.

The high-stakes antitrust assault, which will play out this summer behind closed doors in Brussels, might be the beginning of a tough time for Google. A similar United States case in the 1990s heralded the comeuppance of Microsoft, the most fearsome tech company of its day.

But never count Google out. It is superb at getting out of trouble. Just ask Mr. Caspar or any of his counterparts around the world who tried to hold Google accountable for what one of them, the Australian communication minister Stephen Conroy, called “probably the single greatest breach in the history of privacy.” The secret Street View data collection led to inquiries in at least a dozen countries, including four in the United States alone. But Google has yet to give a complete explanation of why the data was collected and who at the company knew about it. No regulator in the United States has ever seen the information that Google’s cars gathered from American citizens.

The tale of how Google escaped a full accounting for Street View illustrates not only how technology companies have outstripped the regulators, but also their complicated relationship with their adoring customers.

Companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple supply new ways of communication, learning and entertainment, high-tech wizardry for the masses. They have custody of the raw material of hundreds of millions of lives — the intimate e-mails, the revealing photographs, searches for help or love or escape.

People willingly, at times eagerly, surrender this information. But there is a price: the loss of control, or even knowledge, of where that personal information is going and how it is being reshaped into an online identity that may resemble the real you or may not. Privacy laws and wiretapping statutes are of little guidance, because they have not kept pace with the lightning speed of technological progress.

Michael Copps, who last year ended a 10-year term as a commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission, said regulators were overwhelmed. “The industry has gotten more powerful, the technology has gotten more pervasive and it’s getting to the point where we can’t do too much about it,” he said.

Although Google thrives on information, it is closemouthed about itself, as the Street View episode shows. When German regulators forced the company to admit that the cars were sweeping up unencrypted Internet data from wireless networks, the company blamed a programming mistake where an engineer’s experimental software was accidentally included in Street View. It stressed that the data was never intended for any Google products.

The F.C.C. did not see it Google’s way, saying last month the engineer “intended to collect, store and review” the data “for possible use in other Google products.” It also said the engineer shared his software code and a “design document” with other members of the Street View team. The data collection may have been misguided, the agency said, but was not accidental.

Although the agency said it could find no violation of American law, it also said the inquiry was inconclusive, because the engineer cited his Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination. It tagged Google with a $25,000 fine for obstructing the investigation.

Google, which has repeatedly said it wants to put the episode behind it, declined to answer questions for this article.

“We don’t have much choice but to trust Google,” said Christian Sandvig, a researcher in communications technology and public policy at the University of Illinois. “We rely on them for everything.”

That reliance has built an impressive company — and a self-assurance that can be indistinguishable from arrogance. “Google doesn’t seem to think it ever will be held accountable,” Mr. Sandvig said. “And to date it hasn’t been.”

When Street View was introduced in 2007, it elicited immediate objections in Europe, where privacy laws are tough. The Nazis used government data to systematically pursue Jews and other unwanted groups. The East German secret police, the Stasi, similarly controlled data to monitor perceived enemies.

“In the United States, privacy is a consumer business,” said Jacob Kohnstamm, chairman of the Dutch Data Protection Authority. “In Europe, it is a fundamental rights issue.”

Germany was a hotbed of protest. In Molfsee, a town of 4,800 people on the Baltic Sea, the deputy mayor, Reinhold Harwart, organized a group of residents in a protest.

“The main feeling was: Who gives Google the right to do this?” Mr. Harwart, now 74, said in a recent interview. “We were outraged that Google would come in, invade our privacy and send the data back to America, where we had no idea what it would be used for.”

Google offered few clues. After French privacy regulators inspected a Street View car in early 2010, the company was forced to explain that the cars were collecting information about household’s Wi-Fi networks — in essence, how they connected to the Internet — to improve location-based services.

Peter Fleischer, Google’s global privacy counselor, wrote in a blog post on April 27, 2010, that the company had not previously revealed this part of Street View because, “We did not think it was necessary.” But he said only technical data about networks was being collected, not the actual content sent out.

Still, German regulators, particularly Mr. Caspar, the data protection commissioner for Hamburg, were alarmed. Google, Mr. Caspar noted, had said nothing about collecting Wi-Fi data when negotiating permission for Street View.

Mr. Caspar wanted to inspect a Street View car. Google first said it didn’t know where they were, so it couldn’t produce them. Then, on May 3, it allowed a technical expert in Mr. Caspar’s office to see a vehicle. But the hard drive with data was missing.

Faced with the Germans’ persistence, Google published a post, on May 14, 2010, saying it had been prompted to “re-examine everything we have been collecting.” It turned out that Google was collecting e-mails and other personal data after all.

For a company like Google, which thrives on data, more is always better.

“The Google privacy officers are going to look at this and say, ‘It’s not illegal, maybe no one is ever going to be the wiser, and meanwhile we’ll have stored the data away in some big database,’ ” said Helen Nissenbaum, a privacy expert at N.Y.U. “We’re so enthralled with data, and the good it can bring, that we might overlook any problems.”

Mr. Caspar asked to see the hard drive. Google said handing it over could expose it to liability for violating German telecommunications law, which prohibits network operators and other data managers from disclosing the private communications of their clients.

This made no sense to Mr. Caspar, who explained that as data protection commissioner he was empowered to receive the data. Finally, in autumn 2010, the company yielded and gave Mr. Caspar the hard drive. By this point, Hamburg prosecutors had opened a criminal investigation.

Google was equally resistant with the American authorities.

Richard Blumenthal, Connecticut’s attorney general at the time, announced in late June 2010 that he and attorneys general from more than 30 other states had begun an investigation. Like the Europeans, they asked for the data. For months.

“Google resisted providing more information, even in the face of its acknowledgment that the collection was a mistake,” Mr. Blumenthal recalled in a recent interview.

Google argued that its data scooping was legal in the United States. But it told regulators it could not show them the data it collected, because to do so might be breaking privacy and wiretapping laws.

In December 2010, Mr. Blumenthal issued a civil investigative demand — the equivalent of a subpoena — and threatened further legal action if he did not get results. Then he became Connecticut’s junior senator and his successor, George Jepsen, took over.

No formal settlement was ever reached.

Some of those who were involved in the case are mystified.

“I cannot think of a single other multistate case that just disappeared,” said one former state regulator who asked not to be named since he did not want to be seen as bashing his former colleagues. “Individual state investigations, yes. But to start up a multistate and not end it with at least a consent judgment or even some token resolution is very unusual.”

A spokeswoman for Mr. Jepsen said the inquiry was still “active and ongoing.” Mr. Jepsen declined to be interviewed.

“The legal platform has not kept pace with the technology platform,” Mr. Blumenthal said. “So the investigative effort was done with less legal ammunition than might otherwise exist.”

The same was true of other challenges to Street View.

Citizens in several states filed suits against Google, saying the company had violated federal wiretapping laws through Street View. These suits were consolidated into a class action in San Francisco.

Google moved for dismissal, arguing that because it had picked up information only from unencrypted networks, it had not broken the law. In a significant loss, a federal judge said what the company was doing might be more akin to tapping a phone and allowed the suit to proceed. But he let Google appeal immediately, saying these were novel questions of law. The case may eventually end up at the United States Supreme Court.

In Germany, Mr. Caspar’s effort has also ground to a stop. He is waiting for prosecutors to file the criminal charges. If they do not, he said he would file his own administrative charges.

As for the engineer at the center of the controversy, Marius Milner lives in Palo Alto, Calif., in the heart of Silicon Valley, and apparently still works for Google. His garage door was open, displaying a black Miata convertible with a license plate holder featuring the famous phrase from the Google search page, “I’m feeling lucky.”

During a brief conversation on his front porch, Mr. Milner declined to say much of anything.

What may be the Vatican’s biggest scandal in decades is widening amid reports an Italian cardinal could be involved in a power struggle involving leaked documents, corruption and intrigue.

Leading Italian newspapers Corriere della Sera and Il Messaggero reported Monday that the pope’s butler — arrested three days ago for allegedly feeding documents to Italian journalists — did not act alone.

The papers allege an unidentified cardinal is suspected of playing a major role in the scandal. However, Vatican spokesman Rev. Federico Lombardi, denied the reports that a cardinal might be the next target of the “Vatileaks” probe.

Lombardi said many Vatican officials were being questioned in the investigation but insisted: “There is no cardinal under suspicion.”

Earlier last week, the publication of “His Holiness,” a new book by Italian journalist Gianluigi Nuzzi brought the Vatican leaks scandal new life in the Italian press.

Nuzzi, who was first leaked some of the documents in January and aired them on a television show, says he was given the material by people loyal to the Church who wanted to expose corruption.

The leaked documents included letters by an archbishop who was transferred to Washington after blowing the whistle on what he saw as a web of corruption and cronyism, a memo that cast suspicion on several cardinals, and documents alleging internal corruption in the Vatican bank.

Nuzzi told viewers on his television show that he did not pay anything for the documents.
Meanwhile, the lawyer for the pope’s butler says his client has pledged “full cooperation” in the investigation and wants the truth to come out.

The decision by butler Paolo Gabriele to cooperate with Vatican investigators raises the specter that higher-ranking prelates may soon be named in the scandal.

Attorney Carlo Fusco said in a statement Monday that Gabriele would “respond to all the questions and will collaborate with investigators to ascertain the truth.”

Gabriele, the pope’s personal butler since 2006, was arrested Wednesday evening after documents he should not have had in his possession were found inside his Vatican City apartment.

He remains in detention in a Vatican detention facility, accused of theft, and has met with his wife and lawyers. The Vatican, as a sovereign city-state, maintains its own police and courts.
His arrest was pursuant to leaks of confidential Vatican correspondence that have shed light on power struggles and intrigue inside the highest levels of the Catholic Church.

According to the Associated Press, the 46-year-old father of three was always considered extremely loyal to Pope Benedict XVI and his predecessor, John Paul II, whom he briefly served.

Vatican insiders were quoted as being “baffled” by his alleged involvement.  “Either he lost his mind or this is a trap,” a friend of Gabriele’s in the Vatican told the newspaper La Stampa.
“Whoever convinced him to do this is even more guilty because he manipulated a simple person.”

One prominent cardinal, illustrating the growing emotion of the debate in Vatican circles, wrote in an Italian newspaper that the pope had been “betrayed just as Jesus was betrayed 2,000 years ago.”

Gabriele’s arrest gave the already high-profile scandal of the leaks a melodramatic twist, but Fusco reported Monday that Gabriele was “very serene and calm.”

AFP quoted Vatican sources saying the probe is working on two separate tracks: Vatican magistrates are pursuing the criminal investigation, and Gabriele was arrested as part of that.
Separately, Pope Benedict XVI appointed three cardinals to form an investigative commission to look beyond the narrow criminal scope of the leaks.

Those cardinals have carte blanche to interview the Vatican bureaucracy en toto, Lombardi said, and can both share information with Vatican prosecutors and receive information from them.

They report directly to the pope, whom Lombardi said was being kept informed of the investigation. Benedict has not commented directly on the scandal.

However, aides close to the pope told reporters he is “deeply saddened” by the affair.
Church observers also note the scandal underscores the deep political tensions and power plays that occupy the Roman Catholic Church’s most prominent leaders.

“This is a strategy of tension, an orgy of vendettas and pre-emptive vendettas that has now spun out of the control of those who thought they could orchestrate it,” Church historian Alberto Melloni wrote in the Corriere della Sera newspaper.

Iran envisions the imminent destruction of Israel, perhaps in a nuclear strike by Teheran, a report said.

The Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs asserted that the Iranian leadership has formed a consensus of the need to destroy the Jewish state.

The center, in a report by Michael Segall and Joshua Teitelbaum, said Iran, particularly supreme leader Ali Khamenei, was becoming increasingly belligerent in their threats to eliminate Israel.

“What is striking is that these declarations calling for Israel’s destruction are being voiced by a broad spectrum of the Iranian leadership, including different senior officers in the Revolutionary Guard,” the report, titled “What Iranian Leaders Really Say about Doing Away with Israel,” said.

“Moreover, these spokesmen are not talking about a long historical process regarding Israel’s elimination, but rather a development that is to take place in the near term.”

The report, a revised version of a 2008 study, cited statements by Khamenei and key government and military aides over the last few years. The authors argued that Iran appeared to be waiting until it reached nuclear weapons capability before attacking Israel.

“Finally, these calls for the destruction of Israel for the most part are not made in the context of an Iranian retaliatory strike, and are not contingent upon what actions Israel will take,” the report said.

The report cited an article posted on the website of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps on April 24, 2011. IRGC, responsible for Iran’s missile and nuclear programs, envisioned a supremely confident Teheran the day after a nuclear weapons test, and then quoted a Koranic passage on the need to frighten enemies of Islam.

“Despite all the financial and other sanctions on Iran enacted by the international community, Iran has developed a core group of scientific nationalists who continue to develop nuclear potential and cross technical thresholds,” the report said. “Although estimates vary, it seems clear that in the not-too-distant future Iran will be capable of detonating a nuclear device.”