Agencies

WASHINGTON - The massive leaks about U.S. spying systems caused sharp political and legal aftershocks Tuesday as the Justice Department prepared to file criminal charges against Edward Snowden, a government contractor who has publicly admitted disclosing highly classified telephone and Internet data-gathering operations. The vast scope of the government surveillance sparked the first federal lawsuit challenging its legality, a bipartisan effort in the Senate to declassify secret court orders that authorize the operations, and requests from Google and Facebook for permission to disclose more about National Security Agency requests for users' emails and other online communications.

Los Angeles County bus drivers say they are regularly becoming ill - sometimes while behind the wheel - from pesticides sprayed inside their vehicles by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. At least 14 Metro drivers are pursuing workers' compensation claims, and more than 110 have signed a petition that demands a halt to the spraying, according to their attorney. Some operators are on medical leave, and a few say they have left Metro because of repeated exposure. "You can be driving your bus and get hit with the symptoms," said Frank Portillo, a 23-year coach operator who retired in March, sooner than planned, because of medical issues he believes are pesticide related.

WASHINGTON -- Federal banking regulators have ordered Capital One Bank to refund $150 million to about 2 million customers for deceptive marketing of payment protection and other add-on products sold with its credit cards. Capital One also must pay $60 million in civil penalties for the practices. The refunds and fines, which the bank has agreed to pay under consent orders, were announced Wednesday by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.

WASHINGTON - Mathematician William Binney worked for the National Security Agency for four decades, and in the late 1990s he helped design a system to sort through the digital data the agency was sucking up in the exploding universe of bits and bytes. When the agency picked a rival technology, he became disillusioned. He retired a month after the terrorist attacks of Sept 11, 2001, and later went public with his concerns. Binney and several other former NSA employees said that the cyber-spying agency had created a massive digital dragnet to secretly track communications of Americans.

As lifeguards begin their busy summer season, the bronzed guardians of California's beaches find themselves at the unlikely center of the battle over costly public pensions. The six-figure salaries of some full-time municipal lifeguards have fueled talk radio segments and blog comments in recent weeks, with some commentators expressing surprise at the pay for those who patrol the beaches. For local government, the larger concern is over the pensions that lifeguards receive when they retire.

President Obama this morning will ask Congress to give him authority to significantly shrink the federal government by merging six agencies dealing with trade and commerce, a senior administration official said. Obama is seeking power to propose a sweeping consolidation of agencies with overlapping duties with an eye toward saving money and improving performance, the official said. The president is asking Congress to grant him authority held by no president since Ronald Reagan.

At Royal Staffing Services Inc., an employment agency in Westlake Village, more requests are coming in for temporary workers. And the agency has no trouble finding people to fill the jobs. On a recent morning, agency Chief Executive Joe Cummings got a phone call requesting two $14-an-hour customer service representatives with good computer skills. The client wanted temp workers who could be hired permanently if they worked out. "Within 20 minutes they had two resumes, and 10 minutes after that we had two interviews scheduled," Cummings said.

The angst-ridden process of merging the two federal agencies that govern research and education on substance-abuse problems will drag on for another two years. Officials at the National Institute on Drug Abuse said Sunday that the opening of a new agency that will take the place of both the NIDA and the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, will likely occur in October 2013 instead of 2012. The merger was discussed Sunday at a meeting of the College on Problems of Drug Dependence.

A widespread and unusually resilient computer attack that began July 4 knocked out the websites of several government agencies, including some that are responsible for fighting cyber crime, the Associated Press has learned. The Treasury Department, Secret Service, Federal Trade Commission and Transportation Department websites were all down at varying points over the holiday weekend and into this week, according to officials inside and outside the government.

California legislators voted to open an official inquiry into two state agencies that channel money earned from issuing municipal bonds to private companies. Assemblyman Mike Feuer (D-Los Angeles) in May requested the audit of the California Statewide Communities Development Authority (CSCDA) and the California Municipal Financial Authority (CMFA). The Joint Legislative Audit Committee approved the request on an 8-3 vote Wednesday and will now conduct a full review of both agencies.

WHITMORE VILLAGE, Hawaii - Sure, Edward Snowden just used a simple thumb drive to smuggle classified information out of the National Security Agency. But one look at the sprawling NSA compound where he is believed to have worked in the mountains of central Oahu - with its chain-link fences and barbed wire, massive entrance gates and "Keep out" signs - raises the question of how even a trusted employee with a high-level security clearance could sneak out even an innocuous piece of equipment.

The leaders of Orange County's toll road network on Thursday approved a $2.4-billion bond sale to refinance one of its highway corridors - a move that would probably extend the number of years drivers must pay to use the system. The planned restructuring could shore up the operation's sagging finances but add 13 more years of tolls, meaning that the Foothill-Eastern system would not become free to motorists until 2053. The corridor includes the 133 tollway in central Orange County and the 241 and 261 tollways, which slice through the hills from Yorba Linda to Rancho Santa Margarita.

When federal officials recently confirmed the existence of a massive National Security Agency program that has been collecting Americans' phone data for years, they argued it was needed to fight terrorism. But that acknowledgment has opened potentially seismic rifts in the nation's legal system, allowing defendants to argue that the government is holding a massive trove of evidence that is necessary to their cases - the same kind of evidence that, when it's collected by police, is commonly turned over to defendants.

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted to cancel its decades-long relationship with a foster care contractor amid allegations of financial mismanagement and child abuse at the hands of staff and foster parents. The move came after weeks of closed-door debates about the fate of Teens Happy Homes following a Times investigation outlining the agency's problematic history. Supervisors Gloria Molina and Michael D. Antonovich had pushed to end the contract, saying many children there were living under unsafe conditions but struggled to get a third supervisor's support.

WASHINGTON - Security experts questioned Monday how, three years after Army Pfc. Bradley Manning downloaded a trove of secret material, low-level computer specialist Edward Snowden was able to copy documents that are far more sensitive and walk them out of his National Security Agency workplace in Hawaii. After Manning released hundreds of thousands of classified documents - for which he is now being court-martialed - government officials vowed to curtail the broad access to intelligence that came into being after the Sept.

After 9/11, there was a widespread expectation of many more terrorist attacks on the United States. So far that hasn't happened. We haven't escaped entirely unscathed (see Boston Marathon, bombing of), but on the whole we have been a lot safer than most security experts, including me, expected. In light of the current controversy over the National Security Agency's monitoring of telephone calls and emails, it is worthwhile to ask: Why is that? It is certainly not due to any change of heart among our enemies.

Perhaps a name change is in order for some agencies under the U.S. Interior Department umbrella. These days at least two of them would more accurately be referred to as the Minerals Mismanagement Service and the Bureau of Land Mismanagement. The Minerals Management Service is charged with overseeing offshore oil and gas leases; it's the agency that failed to require a realistic emergency response plan from BP before giving its Deepwater Horizon rig permission to drill. It has also been at the center of assorted scandals involving employees who accepted gifts or solicited jobs from the oil companies they were supposed to regulate.

A group of online hackers says it has gained access to more than 70 law enforcement agency websites in the United States, obtaining emails, credit card information and other sensitive data in retaliation for the arrests of alleged members in the U.S. and England. The group, called AntiSec, said Saturday that it had breached 10 gigabytes of sensitive data from the agencies. AntiSec is composed of members from two separate hacking groups, Anonymous and LulzSec. AntiSec said its cyber-attack affected agencies in Arkansas, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri and Mississippi.

Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Jackie Lacey is considering whether criminal charges should be filed against officials at Teens Happy Homes, a foster care contractor with a long history of financial improprieties and substantiated instances of child abuse, according to spokeswoman Jane Robison. The review by prosecutors in the department's Public Integrity Division follows a recent examination in The Times detailing allegations of financial misconduct involving evidence that employees may have used taxpayer money intended for abused children for their own personal gain.

Under pressure from lawmakers and flight attendants, the Transportation Security Administration said it would indefinitely prohibit passengers from carrying small pocket knives on planes - a ban that began after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The decision is a dramatic reversal for TSA chief John Pistole. Two months ago he decided to lift the ban, saying the move would enable airport security officers to focus on bigger threats, such as explosives. Just days before the TSA planned to lift the ban April 25, Pistole said he was temporarily putting off the policy change to consider the comments and concerns of a security panel made up of pilots, flight attendants and other airline workers.