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🔗 United States/U.S. Government 🔗 United States

The Kyl–Bingaman Amendment (Public Law 104-201, Section 1064) is a United States law. It was put into force by the Military Defense National Defense Authorization Act for 1997.

The Kyl–Bingaman Amendment (KBA) prohibits US authorities from granting a license for collecting or disseminating high resolution satellite imagery of Israel at a higher resolution than is available from other commercial sources, that is, from companies outside of the United States. An exception exists if this is done by a US federal agency, or if it is done in order to abolish the secrecy of such recordings.

U.S. law mandates U.S. government censorship of American commercial satellite images of no country in the world besides that of Israel. The largest and most important global sources of commercial satellite imagery, such as Maxar Technologies, Capella, and Umbra, and the largest and widely-used online resources, such as Google and Bing, are American and this makes KBA a powerful instrument of U.S. government suppression of information. For example, as a result of KBA, images on internet platforms such as Google Earth have been deliberately blurred.

🔗 United States/U.S. Government 🔗 United States 🔗 Law 🔗 Lists

A national emergency is a situation in which a government is empowered to perform actions not normally permitted. The 1976 National Emergencies Act implemented various legal requirements regarding emergencies declared by the President of the United States.

Between the enactment of the National Emergencies Act in 1976 through March 13, 2020, 61 emergencies have been declared; 27 have expired while 34 are currently in effect, each having been renewed annually by the president.

🔗 United States/U.S. Government 🔗 United States 🔗 Philately

The Office of Censorship was an emergency wartime agency set up by the United States federal government on December 19, 1941 to aid in the censorship of all communications coming into and going out of the United States, including its territories and the Philippines. The efforts of the Office of Censorship to balance the protection of sensitive war related information with the constitutional freedoms of the press is considered largely successful. The agency's implementation of censorship was done primarily through a voluntary regulatory code that was willingly adopted by the press. The phrase "loose lips sink ships" was popularized during World War II, which is a testament to the urgency Americans felt to protect information relating to the war effort. Radio broadcasts, newspapers, and newsreels were the primary ways Americans received their information about World War II and therefore were the medium most affected by the Office of Censorship code. The closure of the Office of Censorship in November 1945 corresponded with the ending of World War II.

🔗 United States/U.S. Government 🔗 United States 🔗 Aviation 🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/Military aviation 🔗 Military history/North American military history 🔗 Military history/United States military history 🔗 Africa 🔗 United Kingdom 🔗 Correction and Detention Facilities 🔗 Military history/Maritime warfare 🔗 Cold War 🔗 Islands 🔗 British Overseas Territories 🔗 Aviation/airport 🔗 Asia 🔗 Asia/British Indian Ocean Territory 🔗 Africa/Mauritius

Diego Garcia () is the largest island of the Chagos Archipelago. It has been used as a joint UK–U.S. military base since the 1970s, following the expulsion of the Chagossians by the UK government. The Chagos Islands are a British overseas territory, though a treaty to transfer sovereignty from the UK to Mauritius was signed on 22 May 2025, with a provision that the military base at the island would remain under British control for at least 99 years. The agreement may be renewed for an additional 40 years after the initial 99-year period, and for an additional period thereafter. The UK government expected the treaty to be ratified sometime in 2026. The UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination has expressed "deep concern" at the terms of the deal.

Located just south of the equator in the central Indian Ocean, Diego Garcia lies 3,535 km (2,197 mi) east of Tanzania, 2,984 km (1,854 mi) east-southeast of Somalia, 726 km (451 mi) south of the Maldives, 1,796 km (1,116 mi) southwest of India, 2,877 km (1,788 mi) west-southwest of Sumatra, 4,723 km (2,935 mi) northwest of Australia, and 2,112 km (1,312 mi) northeast of Mauritius Island. Diego Garcia is part of the Chagos–Laccadive Ridge, an underwater mountain range that includes the Lakshadweep, the Maldives, and the other 60 small islands of the Chagos Archipelago. The island observes UTC+6 year-round.

Diego Garcia was discovered by Portuguese sailors in 1512 and remained uninhabited until the French began using it as a leper colony and for coconut plantations in the late 18th century. After the Napoleonic Wars, the island was transferred to British control. It remained part of Mauritius until 1965, when it became part of the newly formed British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT).

In 1966, Diego Garcia had a population of 924, mostly contract workers employed in coconut plantations. However, between 1968 and 1973, the Chagossian inhabitants were forcibly removed to make way for the military base. In 2019, the International Court of Justice issued a non-binding advisory opinion that the decolonisation of Mauritius had not been lawfully completed when it gained independence in 1968, and that the UK was "under an obligation to end its administration of the Chagos Archipelago as rapidly as possible". The United Nations General Assembly later voted overwhelmingly in favour of a resolution endorsing this opinion and calling on the UK to end its administration, though the UK has dismissed the ruling as non-binding.

Until the resettlement of Île du Coin, Diego Garcia remained the only inhabited island of the BIOT, with a population of around 4,000 consisting predominantly of military personnel. It is one of two critical U.S. bomber bases in the Indo-Pacific region, alongside Andersen Air Force Base in Guam. It is nicknamed the "Footprint of Freedom" by the U.S. Navy due to its shape and strategic location in the Indian Ocean.

🔗 United States/U.S. Government 🔗 United States 🔗 Appalachia 🔗 National Archives 🔗 Tennessee 🔗 Energy 🔗 Alabama

The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) is a federally owned electric utility corporation in the United States. TVA's service area covers all of Tennessee, portions of Alabama, Mississippi, and Kentucky, and small areas of Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia. While owned by the federal government, TVA receives no taxpayer funding and operates similarly to a private for-profit company. It is headquartered in Knoxville, Tennessee, and is the sixth-largest power supplier and largest public utility in the country.

The TVA was created by Congress in 1933 as part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. Its initial purpose was to provide navigation, flood control, electricity generation, fertilizer manufacturing, regional planning, and economic development to the Tennessee Valley, a region that had suffered from lack of infrastructure and even more extensive poverty during the Great Depression than other regions of the nation. TVA was envisioned both as a power supplier and a regional economic development agency that would work to help modernize the region's economy and society. It later evolved primarily into an electric utility. It was the first large regional planning agency of the U.S. federal government, and remains the largest.

Under the leadership of David E. Lilienthal, the TVA also became the global model for the United States' later efforts to help modernize agrarian societies in the developing world. The TVA historically has been documented as a success in its efforts to modernize the Tennessee Valley and helping to recruit new employment opportunities to the region. Historians have criticized its use of eminent domain and the displacement of over 125,000 Tennessee Valley residents to build the agency's infrastructure projects.

🔗 United States/U.S. Government 🔗 United States 🔗 Cold War 🔗 Conservatism 🔗 United States/U.S. history 🔗 United States/United States Presidents

"We begin bombing in five minutes" is the last sentence of a controversial, off-the-record joke made by U.S. President Ronald Reagan in 1984, during the Cold War.

While preparing for a scheduled radio address from his vacation home in California, President Reagan joked with those present about outlawing and bombing Russia. This joke was not broadcast live, but was recorded and later leaked to the public. The Soviet Union criticized the president's joke, as did Reagan's opponent in the 1984 United States presidential election, Walter Mondale.

🔗 United States/U.S. Government 🔗 United States 🔗 Law 🔗 Open

Patentleft (also patent left, copyleft-style patent license or open patent) is the practice of licensing patents (especially biological patents) for royalty-free use, on the condition that adopters license related improvements they develop under the same terms. Copyleft-style licensors seek "continuous growth of a universally accessible technology commons" from which they, and others, will benefit.

Patentleft is analogous to copyleft, a license which allows distribution of a copyrighted work and derived works, but only under the same or equivalent terms.

🔗 United States/U.S. Government 🔗 United States 🔗 Terrorism

The 1983 U.S. Senate bombing was a bomb explosion at the United States Senate on November 7, 1983, motivated by United States military involvement in Lebanon and Grenada. The attack led to heightened security in the DC metropolitan area, and the inaccessibility of certain parts of the Senate Building. Six members of the radical left-wing Resistance Conspiracy were arrested in May 1988 and charged with the bombing, as well as related bombings of Fort McNair and the Washington Navy Yard which occurred April 25, 1983, and April 20, 1984, respectively.

🔗 United States/U.S. Government 🔗 United States 🔗 Biography 🔗 International relations 🔗 Human rights 🔗 Mass surveillance 🔗 Espionage 🔗 United States/North Carolina

Edward Joseph Snowden (born June 21, 1983) is an American whistleblower who copied and leaked highly classified information from the National Security Agency (NSA) in 2013 when he was a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) employee and subcontractor. His disclosures revealed numerous global surveillance programs, many run by the NSA and the Five Eyes Intelligence Alliance with the cooperation of telecommunication companies and European governments, and prompted a cultural discussion about national security and individual privacy.

In 2013, Snowden was hired by an NSA contractor, Booz Allen Hamilton, after previous employment with Dell and the CIA. Snowden says he gradually became disillusioned with the programs with which he was involved and that he tried to raise his ethical concerns through internal channels but was ignored. On May 20, 2013, Snowden flew to Hong Kong after leaving his job at an NSA facility in Hawaii, and in early June he revealed thousands of classified NSA documents to journalists Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, and Ewen MacAskill. Snowden came to international attention after stories based on the material appeared in The Guardian and The Washington Post. Further disclosures were made by other publications including Der Spiegel and The New York Times.

On June 21, 2013, the United States Department of Justice unsealed charges against Snowden of two counts of violating the Espionage Act of 1917 and theft of government property, following which the Department of State revoked his passport. Two days later, he flew into Moscow's Sheremetyevo Airport, where Russian authorities noted that his U.S. passport had been cancelled, and he was restricted to the airport terminal for over one month. Russia later granted Snowden the right of asylum with an initial visa for residence for one year, and repeated extensions have permitted him to stay at least until 2020. In early 2016, he became the president of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, a San Francisco-based organization that states its purpose is to protect journalists from hacking and government surveillance.

On September 17, 2019, his memoir Permanent Record was published. On the first day of publication, the U.S. Department of Justice filed a civil lawsuit against Snowden over publication of his memoir, alleging he had breached nondisclosure agreements signed with the U.S. federal government. Former The Guardian national security reporter Ewen MacAskill called the civil lawsuit a "huge mistake", noting that the "UK ban of Spycatcher 30 years ago created huge demand". The memoir was listed as no. 1 on Amazon's bestseller list that same day. In an interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! on September 26, 2019, Snowden clarified he considers himself a "whistleblower" as opposed to a "leaker" as he considers "a leaker only distributes information for personal gain".

🔗 United States/U.S. Government 🔗 United States 🔗 Politics 🔗 Food and drink 🔗 Politics/American politics 🔗 U.S. Congress

Freedom fries was a politically motivated renaming of french fries in the United States. The term was coined in February 2003 in a North Carolina restaurant, and was widely publicized a month later when the then Republican Chairman of the Committee on House Administration, Bob Ney, renamed the menu item in three Congressional cafeterias. The political renaming occurred in context of France's opposition to the proposed invasion of Iraq. Although some restaurants around the nation adopted the renaming, the term became unpopular, in part due to decreasing popularity of the Iraq War. After Ney's resignation as Chairman in 2006, the change of name in Congressional cafeterias was reverted.