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So too with the America's drone industry. The Israeli influence is not visible but it is real, documented and extremely relevant to the future of drones in America. If you want to know how drones may change American airspace in coming years, just look to Israel, where the unmanned aerial vehicle market is thriving and drones are considered a reliable instrument of "homeland security.”

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The propriety and legality of the NYPD's activities is under dispute. Mayor Michael Bloomberg – who claimed last year that the NYPD does not focus on religion and only follows threats or leads – is now arguing that, as he said last week, "Everything the NYPD has done is legal, it is appropriate, it is constitutional." Others disagree. In fact, Bloomberg himself signed a law in 2004 prohibiting profiling by law enforcement based on religion.

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Some Democratic pundits are giddy at their party’s turnaround on national security. "There's no doubt Obama's had a better first term in the White House on foreign policy than any Democrat going back to Truman, and frankly better than most Republicans' first terms as well," crowed Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution. Michael Tomasky has argued that Obama is on his way to being “not just a good but a great foreign-policy president.”  Michael Cohen made a good case in Foreign Policy for the Democrats being “the new national security party.” In other words, Obama has reversed decades of public perception about Democratic weakness, and it is time to uncork the champagne.

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As he shopped for a children's watch inside the sprawling Mall of America, two security guards approached and began questioning him. Although he was not accused of wrongdoing, the guards filed a confidential report about Kleinerman that was forwarded to local police.

The reason: Guards thought he might pose a threat because he had been looking at them in a suspicious way.

Najam Qureshi, owner of a kiosk that sold items from his native Pakistan, also had his own experience with authorities after his father left a cellphone on a table in the food court.

The consequence: An FBI agent showed up at the family's home, asking if they knew anyone who might want to hurt the United States.

Mall of America officials say their security unit stops and questions on average up to 1,200 people each year. With 4.2 million square feet under one roof, the two-decade-old mall is a monument to suburban shopping and entertainment. Nearly 100,000 people from around the world pass through on a given day.

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None of this should surprise you. As with all addictions, once you're hooked on massive military spending, it's hard to think realistically or ask the obvious questions. So, at a moment when discussion about cutting military spending is actually on the rise for the first time in years, let me offer some little known basics about the spending spree this country has been on since September 11, 2001, and raise just a few simple questions about what all that money has actually bought Americans.

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Without warning, the network -- a set of terrorist super cells -- struck in northern Germany and Germans began to fall by the hundreds, then thousands. As panic spread, hospitals were overwhelmed with the severely wounded. More than 20 of the victims died.

No one doubted that it was al Qaida, but where the terrorists had come from was unknown. Initially, German officials accused Spain of harboring them (and the Spanish economy promptly took a hit); then, confusingly, they retracted the charge. Alerts went off across Europe as fears spread. Russia closed its borders to the European Union, which its outraged leaders denounced as a "disproportionate" response. Even a small number of Americans visiting Germany ended up hospitalized.

In Washington, there was panic, though no evidence existed that the terrorists were specifically targeting Americans or that any of them had slipped into this country. Still, at a hastily called news conference, Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano raised the new terror alert system for the first time from its always "elevated" status to "imminent" (that is, "a credible, specific, and impending threat"). Soon after, a Pentagon spokesman announced that the U.S. military had been placed on high alert across Europe.

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Now, you couldn't call me a legal scholar. I've never set foot inside a law school, and in 66 years only made it onto a single jury (dismissed before trial when the civil suit was settled out of court). Still, I feel at least as capable as any constitutional law professor of answering such questions.

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Lockheed Martin, the Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon confirmed that the contractor's information systems had come under attack. Lt. Col. April Cunningham, speaking for the Defense Department, said the impact on the Pentagon "is minimal and we don't expect any adverse effect."

Still, the concerted attempt to breach the contractor's systems underscored the risk to the nation's critical defense data. Chris Ortman, Homeland Security spokesman, said his agency and the Pentagon were working with the company to determine the breadth of the attack and "provide recommendations to mitigate further risk."

Lockheed Martin said in a statement that it detected the May 21 attack "almost immediately" and took countermeasures. As a result, "our systems remain secure; no customer, program or employee personal data has been compromised." The company's security team is still working to restore employee access to the targeted network. Neither Lockheed Martin nor the federal agencies revealed specifics of the attack.

AP writer Jennifer Malloy contributed to this report from Los Angeles.

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More important: This time the guys wake up in Bangkok the day before Stu's wedding, a location that is presented as some sort of wacky alternative to their previous Las Vegas excursion. If these guys had watched any movie about Americans partying too hard in foreign countries, they'd know that Thailand is literally the worst place in the world to do this.

With that in mind, we created a list of films featuring stupid American tourists getting into hot water abroad. We can only hope one of these guys has seen "Brokedown Palace"; otherwise "The Hangover II" may take a much darker turn than its predecessor.

Of course, we didn't have space for every movie, so leave your favorite American-in-a-foreign-country thriller in the comments.

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A "perfect storm" of economic woes, repression and popular discontent could destabilize the Middle East, said Clinton, lending strong backing for Vice President Omar Suleiman's efforts.

Clinton's comments at an international security conference suggested that the U.S. believes Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak has set in motion the "orderly transition" it had demanded by appointing Suleiman, pledging not to run for re-election in a scheduled September vote and taking his son, Gamal, out of the succession picture.

"We have to send a consistent message supporting the orderly transition that has begun," Clinton told government officials, politicians, security experts and policy analysts.

Suleiman, appointed as Egypt's first vice president during Mubarak's three-decade reign, has begun to reach out to long-ignored opposition figures and aims to make constitutional and other changes before the elections are held. Suleiman was elevated from intelligence chief amid violent anti-government protests seeking to topple Mubarak.

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Here's a look at what the consequences of the cables' release has been so far, and what the future could hold for WikiLeaks.

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IT'S LIFTED THE VEIL ON INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

WikiLeaks has given the world's public an unprecedented, behind-the-scenes look at U.S. diplomacy. Among the most eye-catching revelations were reports that Arab countries had lobbied for an attack on Iran, China had made plans for the collapse of its North Korean ally, and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton had ordered U.S. diplomats to gather the computer passwords, fingerprints and even DNA of their foreign counterparts.

Some of the most controversial cables dealt with a directive to harvest biometric information on a range of officials. U.S. diplomats have been forced repeatedly to deny spying on their counterparts -- although none have specifically addressed the instructions to gather personal details, sensitive computer data, and even genetic material or iris scans.

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Amid its struggle to contain damage from the WikiLeaks revelations, the State Department announced Saturday that "The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers" will be one of 18 films to tour the world this year as part of its "American Documentary Showcase" program.

Ellsberg, whom the film portrays as a whistleblower of conscience, has been a champion of Pfc. Bradley E. Manning, the suspected leaker of the documents who is currently jailed, and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who may also face charges for publishing classified information.

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WikiLeaks' founder Julian Assange said he believed other American Internet companies such as Facebook and Google may also have been ordered to divulge information on himself and colleagues.

The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia issued a subpoena ordering Twitter Inc. to hand over private messages, billing information, telephone numbers and connection records of accounts run by Assange and others.

The subpoena also targeted Pfc. Bradley Manning, the U.S. Army intelligence analyst suspected of supplying the site with classified information; Birgitta Jonsdottir, an Icelandic parliamentarian and one-time WikiLeaks collaborator; and Dutch hacker Rop Gonggrijp and U.S. programmer Jacob Appelbaum, both of whom have worked with WikiLeaks in the past.

The subpoena, dated Dec. 14, asked for information dating back to November 1, 2009.

Assange blasted the U.S. move, saying it amounted to harassment, and vowed to fight it.

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Trains on the Washington area Metro system were forced to bypass the huge Defense Department headquarters after the object was discovered in the station at 7:15 a.m., said Chris Layman, spokesman for the Pentagon police force.

"Someone spotted some lights that were was blinking in a trash can," Layman said. "We took it seriously, it was called a 'suspicious object and they came and x-rayed and inspected the item."

Trains were forced to pass through the station without stopping, meaning passengers had to get off at a different station and walk, or take a bus back, to the building. The Pentagon is also a major transit point for a number of area buses, and people lined up by the hundreds as police investigated.

"We determined it was a battery-operated Christmas ornament," Layman said.

An "all clear" was issued at 8:44 a.m.

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Just ask Rolando Negrin, a Transportation Security Administration screener who passed through one of those new "whole body image" scanners last May as part of his training for airport security. His co-workers claimed to have gotten a look at his "junk" and mocked him mercilessly, evidently repeatedly asking, "What size are you?" and referring to him as "little angry man."  In the end, calling it "psychological torture," he insisted that he snapped, which in his case meant that he went after a co-worker, baton first, demanding an apology.

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Clinton's trip, announced by State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley Sunday evening, had been planned long before hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables were released by WikiLeaks, the online anti-secrecy group, and published by The New York Times and newspapers in Europe.

Crowley said Clinton will begin her trip Tuesday in Kazakhstan, where she will head the U.S. delegation to a summit meeting of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe -- the first top-level meeting of the 56-nation group in 11 years.

Clinton also will meet with Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev and his foreign minister, Kanat Suadabeyev. Nazarbayev has ruled Kazakhstan unchallenged since the late 1980s, when it was still part of the Soviet Union, and has been repeatedly re-elected by landslide victories.

Clinton also will visit Kyrgyzstan, which hosts a U.S. air base that is important for resupplying and ferrying U.S. troops in Afghanistan. She also will visit Uzbekistan and stop in the Persian Gulf nation of Bahrain, which hosts the U.S. Navy's 5th Fleet headquarters.

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A loosely organized effort dubbed National Opt-Out Day plans to use flyers, T-shirts and, in one case, a Scottish kilt to highlight what some call unnecessarily intrusive security screenings. Others feared holdups: More than 40 million people plan to travel over the Thanksgiving holiday, according to AAA, with just more than 1.6 million flying -- a 3.5 percent increase in fliers from last year.

Transportation Security Administration chief John Pistole told ABC's "Good Morning America" Wednesday that his agency is "fully staffed" to deal with problems, but that travelers should expect delays because of the planned protests at airports across the country.

"I just feel bad for the traveling public that's just trying to get home for the holidays," Pistole said, noting that TSA screeners "just want to get you through."

No serious disruptions were reported at any major airports early Wednesday.

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He says he's asked security officials whether there's a less intrusive approach.

But Obama says that security officials have told him that the current procedures are the only ones considered effective enough right now to guard against terrorist threats.

Obama doesn't have to pass through normal airport security himself, so he says he hasn't experienced the new patdowns and imaging devices now in use.

Obama spoke at a news conference during the NATO summit in Portugal.

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