Today's Headlines and Commentary

While everyone is still talking about the National Security Agency, other arms of the American intelligence community are bulking up their technologies. The elusive Intelligence Advance Research Projects Agency is launching a new project that will radically expand the capabilities of biometric facial recognition software. The Janus Program, slated to take off in April 2014,

…seeks to improve face recognition performance using representations developed from real-world video and images instead of from calibrated and constrained collections. During daily activities, people laugh, smile, frown, yawn and morph their faces into a broad variety of expressions. For each face, these expressions are formed from unique skeletal and musculature features that are similar through one's lifetime. Janus representations will exploit the full morphological dynamics of the face to enable better matching and faster retrieval.

The Senate will begin its official review of the National Security Agency’s surveillance practices later this month. The Senate Intelligence Committee, chaired by Senator Dianne Feinstein, will review the various methods of surveillance and their direction by government personnel.  Foreign Policy has the story. NPR has this story on the end of the conflict with Al Qaeda in the context of the speech given on the subject by Jeh Johnson, whose nomination to head DHS the Senate Homeland Security Committee takes up today: Brazil has been very vocal in its outrage over the National Security Agency’s practice of listening in on United States’ allies. (Despite, of course, evidence that Brazil engages in very similar practices.) Brazil’s President, Dilma Rousseff, has announced that new legislation on internet usage must be a priority in parliament. A bill focusing on the civil rights framework of internet usage---the Marco Civil da Internet---must now be debated before any other parliamentary business. On to Iran. Thomas Friedman of the New York Times pens an Op-Ed on why a deal with Iran is in the United States’ best interest. (Yesterday’s piece by the paper’s Editorial Board supported continued negotiations between the Islamic Republic and the United States.) The talks are facing increasing resistance from Congress. Al Jazeera has obtained the diaries of Zain Abidin Mohammed Husain Abu Zubaydah, one of the highest-profile prisoners in Guantanamo Bay. Zubaydha details his reaction to the events of September 11, 2001 and the events that followed the attack on the United States. The diaries offer "an unprecedented — even if partial — glimpse into the inner life of a senior self-styled 'holy warrior' close to the center of the events that unfolded before, during and after what he calls 'a declaration of war' on the United States." Saudi Arabia officially declined its seat on the Security Council yesterday. The Saudi Foreign Ministry has accused the Security Council of not doing enough to end the crisis in Syria or the conflict between Israel and Palestine. There is tension in Pakistan between the country’s army and its most powerful religious political party. The army has publicly condemned Jamaat-e-Islami, the oldest and most powerful Islamist party in the country, after the head of the party declared the deceased Taliban leader, Hakimullah Meshud, a martyr. Despite years of efforts to curb opium production in Afghanistan, cultivation and production of the drug have hit record levels. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime calls the news “sobering” and worries that this increase in drug production will pose serious threats to the viability of Afghanistan’s continuing economic and social development. Two United States citizens who were kidnapped off the coast of Nigeria have been freed. The rebel group Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta originally claimed responsibility for the kidnapping in October; since then, questions have arisen about whether the group actually was involved. Meanwhile, the United States will officially label a Nigerian Islamist militant group, Boko Haram, a “foreign terrorist organization.” Foreign Policy has a good “primer” on the ins and outs of United States aid to the Philippines after the devastation of Typhoon Haiyan. And, to satiate Raffaela’s fascination with Bitcoin: NPR tells us that food producers are likely to begin accepting the cryptocurrency. Email the Roundup Team noteworthy law and security-related articles to include, and follow us on Twitter and Facebook for additional commentary on these issues. Visit our Events Calendar to learn about upcoming national security events, and check out relevant job openings on our Job Board.