For all the explosive revelations about the U.S. government monitoring online activity, several intriguing mysteries remain. One of them is how the government actually gets the information it monitors.

In a Top Secret slide presentation obtained and published by the Guardian and the Washington Post, the government claimed to gather data “directly from the servers” of nine prominent U.S. firms: Microsoft (MSFT), publisher of this web site Yahoo! (YHOO), Google (GOOG), Facebook (FB), PalTalk, AOL (AOL), Skype (owned by Microsoft), YouTube (owned by Google) and Apple (AAPL). All those firms have denied giving the government direct access to their servers or voluntarily providing customer data to the feds. But those statements seemed carefully crafted to allow exceptions, since U.S. companies must comply with court orders or other legal authorizations requiring them to turn over user data.

The big question privacy experts are now asking is whether the government can essentially gain

By Desmond Lachman

John Maynard Keynes famously remarked that, “when the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” Sadly the same might not be said for the Obama Administration in relation to its unwavering support for a bigger International Monetary Fund. For, despite the progressive weakening over the past three years of the arguments favoring a larger IMF, the U.S. administration continues to badger a reluctant U.S. Congress for an effective doubling in the IMF’s size.

Prior to the outbreak of the European sovereign debt crisis in early 2010, the IMF’s future role as a multilateral lender was in serious question. The IMF’s traditional Latin American clientele had for the most part mended its profligate ways and became increasingly determined not to subject itself again to IMF tutelage. Meanwhile, following IMF overreaching during the Asian crisis of the late 1990s, the Asian countries built up enormous cushions of international reserves. They did so with the express