AP

SPOKANE, Wash. -- A father who discovered his 15-year-old daughter was being wooed on Facebook by a man twice her age took matters into his own hands.

He hatched a Facebook ruse that drew the 30-year-old Federal Way man to Spokane earlier this month. Then the father and a couple of his buddies staked out the arranged meeting spot and blocked the man's escape until police arrived.

The Spokesman-Review (http://bit.ly/190xaXm) reports that the suspect, identified in court documents as Jason D. Richards, faces charges of child rape and attempted kidnapping in Spokane County Superior Court. He is jailed on a $100,000 bond.

The newspaper did not publish the name of the girl or her family.

The relationship began in April through a Facebook dating application called "Are You Interested" and was discovered earlier this month by the parents, court records show.

Richards and the girl exchanged hundreds of Facebook messages, communicated via YouTube, met face-to-face in May and then made plans to elope, court records show.

When the girl's parents discovered the relationship on June 7, they took their daughter's computer and locked her out of her Facebook account.

The mother then continued to message the man, posing as her daughter, and persuaded him to go through with the runaway plan. When he arrived at the family's Spokane home in the early hours of June 8, the girl's father and two of his friends were waiting for him in an alley behind the house. They held him until police arrived.

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Information from: The Spokesman-Review, http://www.spokesman.com

BERLIN -- President Barack Obama says lives have been saved by sweeping surveillance programs run by the National Security Agency.

Obama says at least 50 threats have been averted because of phone records and Internet information the agency was able to access. He says those threats were not just in the U.S. but also in other countries like Germany.

Obama says both programs are subject to strict court oversight and are limited in scope. He says he believes the U.S. is striking the right balance between national security and civil liberties.

Obama spoke at a joint press conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel (AHN'-geh-lah MEHR'-kuhl).

Merkel says the topic came up in her meeting with Obama. She says proportionality and balance are important when it comes to surveillance.

FAIRPORT, Mich. — A wooden beam embedded at the bottom of northern Lake Michigan appears to have been there for centuries, underwater archaeologists announced Tuesday, a crucial finding as crews dig toward what they hope is the carcass of a French ship that disappeared while exploring the Great Lakes in the 17th century.

Expedition leaders still weren't ready to declare they had found a shipwreck or the long-lost Griffin. The ship, commanded by the French explorer Rene Robert Cavelier de la Salle, was never seen again after setting sail in September 1679 from an island near the entrance of Green Bay, in what is now northern Wisconsin, with a crew of a six and a cargo of furs.

But Michel L'Hour, director of France's Department of Underwater Archaeological Research and a shipwreck expert, said the timber appears to be a bowsprit, which is a spur or pole that extends from a vessel's stem. It also seems to be attached to another structure below the lake bed, he said.

"All the details could be interpreted as part of a bowsprit and there's no details which contract this hypothesis," said L'Hour, who dove to inspect the beam with two French colleagues Monday and Tuesday. "It's why it's the main hypothesis now. A bowsprit which has been buried in the sediment of the lake for many centuries."

Commercial divers overseen by scientists last week began excavating at the base of the wooden beam, hoping to determine whether it is part of the Griffin. Steve Libert, a diver and shipwreck enthusiast who has searched three decades for the Griffin, discovered the timber in 2001 and recently obtained state and federal permits to probe beneath the surface.

The beam extends 10.5 feet above the lake bed, and underwater excavators were opening a pit at the base of the post to determine whether it's affixed to anything beneath. In another key development Tuesday, they reported that a probing device had detected a hard surface 18 to 20 feet below the lake bed. It could be a ship's hull or deck.

"In essence, we have found a floor under that exposed wooden timber," said Ken Vrana, the project manager. "We have more excavation to do before verifying what that surface is."

L'Hour said the French archaeologists drew their conclusion about the beam's age after observing differences between the section above the lake floor and the portion below the surface that the pit has exposed. The aboveground section is narrower because of erosion that must have happened over hundreds of years, he said.

Libert said he was excited by the reports and had "no doubt" the beam was part of a ship. But it remained uncertain when the team might be able to positively identify the presumed vessel.

"I think that maybe Steve found the Griffin," L'Hour said at a briefing for reporters. "I can't be sure, which is why I'm waiting and waiting and waiting for the proof."

Although visibly optimistic, the searchers cautioned against expecting quick resolution of a mystery that has thrown numerous hurdles in Libert's path.

After years of research led him to an area near Poverty Island a few miles off Michigan's Upper Peninsula, he literally bumped into the timber during a dive. That touched off years of legal battles between his Great Lakes Exploration Group and the state over access to the presumed shipwreck.

When the excavation finally got underway last Friday, divers expected to find an object similar to the Griffin's reputed size a couple of feet below the surface, based on sonar readings. It's now believed to be perhaps 10 times farther down. Libert, who says he has spent more than $1 million on his long quest and put the excavation's price tag at "six figures," scrambled to obtain equipment that can dig deeper and is better able to break through the hard-packed mud.

It probably will take another day or two to widen the hole and reach the hard surface, Vrana said. The excavation permits expire Friday, although the group could seek extensions. But with the French team scheduled to leave by then, the divers were working faster in hopes of confirming at least the presence of a shipwreck.

State officials and Libert's group agree if the Griffin is found, it will belong to France because it was operating under authority of King Louis XIV. Graham Paul, a French consul general based in Chicago, visited the team over the weekend and said his government would favor attempting to recover the vessel.

"It would be a major excavation and very costly," Vrana said.

But the wreckage could be in surprisingly good condition after being encased in cold mud for 334 years because it wouldn't have been exposed to oxygen, which causes wood and metals to deteriorate, said Dave Miller, an archaeologist with Great Lakes Exploration Group.

"That's the best way of conservation for all the artifacts and for the hull," L'Hour said. "One can't imagine something better than this kind of clay and mud."

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has met South Korean President Park Geun-hye in Seoul to discuss ways to stimulate entrepreneurship and venture firms in Asia's fourth-largest economy.

Park's office said Zuckerberg assured the South Korean leader that Facebook would continue to invest in the country, and he invited South Korean firms to jump on Facebook to reach global users.

Zuckerberg's visit is the latest in series of meetings between Park and high-profile U.S. technology pioneers. In April, Park met Microsoft Founder Bill Gates and Google CEO Larry Page in her office.

Park sees fostering startups and entrepreneurship crucial to raise South Korea's employment rate to 70 percent before the end of her five-year term.

Zuckerberg is meeting executives at Samsung Electronics Co. before leaving Seoul later Tuesday.

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON -- The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee said Tuesday lawmakers are worried about the possibility of further disclosures about the government's sweeping electronic surveillance and the impact that could have on efforts to combat terrorism.

"We don't want to make this thing more damaging that it already has become," Rep. Mike Rogers said ahead of an open hearing the Intelligence Committee scheduled with Army Gen. Keith Alexander, head of the National Security Agency. Rogers said lawmakers, however, "know there are dozens" of terrorist plots that have been foiled by the programs.

Rogers said he expects the government to declassify additional information about the wide-ranging telephone surveillance program and a companion Prism program targeting the Internet and email communications.

Based on information the administration had declassified earlier in the wake of revelations about the program by former NSA contract employee Edward Snowden, members of Congress feel certain that the eavesdropping should be credited for thwarting an attempted attack on New York City's subway system, said Rogers, R-Mich., in an appearance on NBC's "Today" show.

Rogers previewed the latest public airing of the NSA controversy the morning after President Barack Obama, who is attending the G-8 summit in Ireland, vigorously defended the surveillance programs in a lengthy interview Monday, calling them transparent - even though they are authorized in secret.

"It is transparent," Obama told PBS' Charlie Rose in an interview. "That's why we set up the FISA court," the president added, referring to the secret court set up by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that authorizes two recently disclosed programs: one that gathers U.S. phone records and another that is designed to track the use of U.S.-based Internet servers by foreigners with possible links to terrorism.

Obama said he has named representatives to a privacy and civil liberties oversight board to help in the debate over just how far government data gathering should be allowed to go - a discussion that is complicated by the secrecy surrounding the FISA court, with hearings held at undisclosed locations and with only government lawyers present. The orders that result are all highly classified.

"We're going to have to find ways where the public has an assurance that there are checks and balances in place ... that their phone calls aren't being listened into; their text messages aren't being monitored, their emails are not being read by some big brother somewhere," the president said.

A senior administration official said Obama had asked Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to determine what more information about the two programs could be made public, to help better explain them. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to speak publicly.

Rogers said lawmakers are bewildered about the degree of access that Snowden, who is holed up in Hong Kong, apparently had to the classified information at NSA.

"He lied about his salary, he lied about his capabilities. He lied about his position," Rogers said of Snowden. Yet, the Intelligence Committee chairman said Congress wants to know how a "relatively low-level employee" could have gained access to such critical data.

He said panel members planned to question Alexander about this during the hearing later Tuesday.

Rogers speculated that in a position analagous to systems administrator, Snowden could have been akin to "a traffic cop at the busiest New York intersection. And every once in a while he was able to look in and grab hold of" sensitive information. But he said that Snowden erred in believing that the NSA "could listen to Americans' calls. They cannot. And that they can read Americans' emails. They cannot."

He slammed Snowden for revealing information "of which he has no understanding" about the risk that such an action poses to the U.S. government's counterterrorism efforts.

Rogers also said lawmakers are "a little nervous" about Snowden's next move.

For his part, Snowden, who leaked documents revealing the scope of the two programs to The Guardian and The Washington Post newspapers, accused members of Congress and administration officials Monday of exaggerating their claims about the success of the data gathering programs, including pointing to the arrest of the would-be New York subway bomber, Najibullah Zazi, in 2009.

In an online interview with The Guardian in which he posted answers to questions Monday, Snowden said that Zazi could have been caught with narrower, targeted surveillance programs - a point Obama conceded in his interview without mentioning Snowden.

"We might have caught him some other way," Obama said. "We might have disrupted it because a New York cop saw he was suspicious. Maybe he turned out to be incompetent and the bomb didn't go off. But, at the margins, we are increasing our chances of preventing a catastrophe like that through these programs," he said.

Obama repeated earlier assertions that the NSA programs were a legitimate counterterror tool and that they were completely noninvasive to people with no terror ties - something he hoped to discuss with the privacy and civil liberties board he'd formed. The senior administration official said the president would be meeting with the new privacy board in the coming days.

WASHINGTON — Republican Sen. John McCain is questioning President Barack Obama about political appointees' use of secret government email accounts to conduct official business.

The Arizona lawmaker sent a letter to Obama on Monday complaining that Congress cannot tell the American people what its government is doing if the administration creates a "secret alternate communications network." McCain said the administration's actions are undermining congressional oversight.

He asked the administration to respond to several questions by July 1.

The Associated Press reported earlier this month that officials are using the secret email accounts, making it difficult to respond to requests for public records and answer congressional inquiries.

The White House subsequently acknowledged the practice. Spokesman Jay Carney said all email accounts, public and otherwise, were subject congressional oversight.

WASHINGTON -- It's as if the United States has two governments, one open and one very much not. President Barack Obama leads both, trying not to butt heads with himself.

Since becoming president, Obama has churned out an impressive stream of directives flowing from his promise to deliver "the most transparent administration in history."

He established a center devoted to declassifying records and making them public. He announced an open government initiative. Dizzying quantities of information poured into public databases. New ways were devised to show taxpayers how their money is spent. Allegiance was pledged to the rule of law.

Then there's the other government.

It prosecutes leakers like no administration before it. It exercises state-secrets privileges to quash court cases against it. It hides a vast array of directives and legal opinions underpinning government actions – not just intelligence and not all of it about national security.

Now it's known to conduct sweeping phone-records and Internet surveillance of ordinary people in programs kept on the lowdown until an employee of a National Security Agency contractor revealed them.

Dick Cheney said this would happen.

Known as the master manipulator of power behind the scenes as George W. Bush's vice president, Cheney predicted at the dawn of Obama's presidency that the relentless campaign criticism of shadowed government would not come to much.

"My guess is, once they get here and they're faced with the same problems we deal with every day, that they will appreciate some of the things we've put in place," he said. "They'll need all the authority they can muster."

The empire of secrets lives on.

Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy for the Federation of American Scientists, says the U.S. has both the most open government in the world and arguably the most closed. Daily it publishes an unmatched avalanche of information. But daily its national security secrets also grow by staggering amounts.

Early on, there were signs Obama would not upend the fundamental balance of this parallel universe despite his pledges to take the government in a new, open direction.

Glasnost on the Potomac would have to wait.

One sign: Obama's 2009 marching orders for classifying documents closely resembled those of his predecessors at least back to Ronald Reagan.

Also, a 2011 review of the Obama administration's handling of public records requests under the Freedom of Information Act noted the many positive words from the president and his people about striving for a culture of disclosure. This included an executive order on his first day in office. But the review came to this jarring conclusion when actions were measured against words: "Most indicators of openness have not even returned to the average for the Bush years, a period known for secrecy." The report was by OMB Watch, now called the Center for Effective Government.

On the bright side, Aftergood says, the government puts more and better information online than ever before. But at the core, "Classification activity is very high. Secrecy has become an obstacle in many areas of public policy. And we still are living with a classification system that is a legacy of the Cold War era."

If President Dwight Eisenhower were around today, he says, "he would have no trouble understanding how the classification system works. He would feel quite at home. The rest of us feel like we're living in a `Flintstones' episode."

The secret side of government has many pillars, some fashioned with a compliant Congress, others raised from within.

A look at some, and the weird politics swirling around them:

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WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON AGAIN?

In the suddenly unfolding debate over secrecy in government, it takes a spreadsheet to know who stands where. The normal partisan divide that cleaves almost everything else in Washington is no guide. Obama at times seems to be on both sides at once.

In one corner, there's Democrat Dianne Feinstein of California, who leads the Senate Intelligence Committee, tag-teaming with Republican John Boehner of Ohio, the House speaker. Both are steaming over the actions of Edward Snowden, the NSA contractor who leaked the surveillance programs. "Treason," said Feinstein. "Traitor," said Boehner. National security hawks in both parties agree.

In the other corner, an unusual collection of liberals, civil libertarians and conservatives suspicious of government's reach is aligned against Big Brother. The American Civil Liberties Union, tea party favorites and dyed-in-the-wool progressives are these odd bedfellows.

"It's my fear that we are on the verge of becoming a surveillance state," said Rep. John Conyers of Michigan, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee.

Some other Democrats, too, are proving hostile to the administration on this. Sens. Ron Wyden of Oregon and Mark Udall of Colorado have dogged the administration to back off what they see as an assault on civil liberties and challenged its claims that the telephone and email monitoring programs helped stop specific acts of terrorism.

The debate places them and some other congressional critics in an awkward spot.

Intelligence committee members are briefed on certain national security secrets but not allowed to talk about them. That has left Udall, for one, champing at the bit. He told The Denver Post he was well aware of the monitoring programs that shocked lawmakers who hadn't been clued in and did "everything short of leaking classified information" to bring it to light.

As a candidate, Obama criticized Bush for putting forward a `false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we provide." Now he says, "You can't have 100 percent security and also then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience," and, "We're going to have to make some choices as a society."

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SECRET DIRECTIVES AND PRIVILEGES

These tools have been used just as vigorously as in the Bush years, watchdogs say, despite modest steps toward accountability.

The state-secrets privilege helps the government withhold sensitive national security records in court proceedings. But in its 2013 review of Obama's first term, the Center for Effective Government says both the Bush and Obama administrations used the privilege to dismiss entire cases against the government, not just protect specific records.

The government also operates with a range of regulations, legal opinions and policy directives that never see the light of day.

Targeted drone killings, the recently leaked phone and email surveillance programs, and a former Bush program of warrantless wiretapping came from these shadows.

"The administration has continued to use secret `laws' to make controversial decisions without oversight, to disallow legal challenge, and to withhold key decisions and memoranda that have the force of law from public scrutiny," the center says.

Certain actions are subject to court scrutiny but it's a court like none other. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court hears cases inside vaults in a federal courthouse. Legal justifications are classified, there's no lawyer countering the government's case for authority and the decisions are rarely made public.

In one step toward openness, the Obama administration has disclosed some secret legal opinions, but only those from the previous administration, regarding the treatment of terrorist detainees and some other matters specific to the Bush years.

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LOOSE LIPS SINK SHIPS

The Obama administration has pursued an unprecedented number of investigations of those who leak government secrets and taken extraordinary steps in doing so. Among them are the secret seizure by the Justice Department of two months of phone records for more than 20 Associated Press telephone lines and the gathering of emails of Fox News journalist James Rosen, in both cases to try to identify sources of stories.

At the same time, a 2012 law signed by Obama improved protections for whistle-blowers, generally understood to be those in government who expose waste, fraud or abuse. Spillers of national security secrets needn't apply.

All governments always have kept secrets on the grounds that sensitive information cannot fall into the hands of adversaries and that frank discussions among nations and inside the government must stay confidential until they no longer matter. But history is rife with secrets kept for political purposes, to conceal corruption and simply to avoid inconvenience or embarrassment.

The sensational leak of the classified Pentagon Papers in 1971 revealed pernicious efforts to mislead the public on the depth of U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia. Cascading revelations in that time laid bare domestic spying to disrupt civil rights and anti-Vietnam War protests, assassination plots against foreign leaders and a campaign of character assassination against Martin Luther King Jr.

Now the court martial of Army Pfc. Bradley Manning is addressing how grave were the secrets he revealed when he supplied WikiLeaks with more than 700,000 classified battlefield reports, diplomatic cables and video clips while working as an intelligence analyst in Iraq. His lawyers contend damage was minimal. The government argues the revelations included extraordinarily sensitive information that endangered lives – revealing troop movements, code words, the names of suspects under investigation and much more – and that some of it ended up in the hands of Osama bin Laden.

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FOR YOUR EYES ONLY

Classified government documents fall into one of three big categories: confidential, secret and top secret. Beyond that, though, is a plethora of subclassifications.

The government is awash in "sensitive but unclassified" material, information that doesn't meet the standard for national security classification but is touchy enough to warrant some level of protection. Each agency has had its own system and the result, of course, has been a mess: several hundred unique classifications or labels that sound official, mean little and confuse everything.

Obama ordered the administration in 2009 to speed up declassification, standardize the hodgepodge and restrain the bureaucratic tendency to mark records with more confidentiality than they deserve. But the rules deliberately left plenty of wiggle room, and there's been a lot of wiggling. The essential tenets of secrecy remained unchanged.

Obama specified that those who assign classification levels to federal records should, by default, pick the least restrictive category, not automatically bump it up, absent serious doubt about what to do.

Aftergood chuckled over that one. "That does not translate into an instruction that has any teeth."

"Classifiers," he said, "they do not sit, Hamlet-like, and wonder whether or not they should classify. They aren't crippled by doubt."

In other words, they do the safe thing and classify, classify and overclassify.

That's why the vast ocean of classified information is swimming with oh-so-ordinary material – rehashes of newspaper clippings, bland diplomatic cables conveying information anyone can find online, summaries of foreigners' public speeches and the like – as well as the juicy stuff. It costs billions a year to keep it all under wraps.

Now, it has emerged that some of Obama's political appointees are using secret government email accounts to conduct official business. This practice raises questions about how agencies can fulfill their legal obligation to find and share official emails in congressional inquiries and under public records requests.

As for the Freedom of Information Act pipeline, an AP analysis in March found that the Obama administration last year answered more requests from the public to see government records than ever before. But it also turned more frequently to legal exceptions to censor or withhold material. It turned over all or parts of the records in about 65 percent of all requests and fully rejected more than one-third, an uptick from 2011.

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PERIODS OF SUNSHINE

Watchdogs credit Obama with progress on some fronts: the first public accounting of the nuclear arsenal, more public detail on intelligence and national security "black budgets" that still remain largely hidden from view, disclosure of the numbers of people with security clearance, and more. The government puts out more information on nonclassified government operations than before and makes it easier to find and understand.

User-friendly websites have been the primary vehicle, augmented by sophisticated, if sometimes unwieldy, databases and gobs of social media chatter. At ethics.gov, for example, it's now possible with a few clicks to see lists of White House visitors and whether they were campaign contributors.

Moreover, each agency was directed to put an open-government plan in place. The results have been mixed.

NASA, an agency that depends on public outreach more than many others to keep support for its budget, rose to the occasion with all sorts of plans to increase access to scientific data, crowd-source research and keep people on top of what it's doing.

Closer to the levers of power, token steps were more the norm. In the estimation of open-government advocates, the heavy-lifting Justice Department did not transform transparently.

LONDON — The Guardian newspaper said the British eavesdropping agency GCHQ repeatedly hacked into foreign diplomats' phones and emails when the U.K. hosted international conferences, even going so far as to set up a bugged Internet cafe in an effort to get an edge in high-stakes negotiations.

The news prompted an angry response from Russian officials concerned that their communications had been intercepted.

The report – the latest in a series of revelations which have ignited a worldwide debate over the scope of Western intelligence gathering – came just hours before Britain was due to open the G-8 summit in Northern Ireland on Monday, a meeting of the world's leading economies that include Russia. The allegation that the United Kingdom has previously used its position as host to spy on its allies and other attendees could make for awkward conversation as the delegates arrive for talks.

"The diplomatic fallout from this could be considerable," according to British academic Richard J. Aldrich, whose book "GCHQ" charts the agency's history.

Speaking at the G-8 summit, Prime Minister David Cameron declined to address the issue.

"We never comment on security or intelligence issues and I am not about to start now," he said. "I don't make comments on security or intelligence issues. That would be breaking something that no government has previously done."

GCHQ also declined to comment on the report.

Russian officials complained Monday about reports that their delegation had been snooped on in earlier summits.

"It's a scandal! The U.S. and British special services tapped (then President Dmitry) Medvedev's phone at the 2009 G-20 summit. The U.S. denies it, but we can't trust them," Alexei Pushkov, the Kremlin-connected chief of foreign affairs committee in the lower house of Russian parliament, wrote on his Twitter feed Monday.

Sergei Devyatov, a spokesman for the Federal Protection Service that provides security for top Russian government officials, said in a statement carried by the Interfax news agency: "The Federal Protective Service is taking every necessary measure to provide the appropriate level of confidentiality of information for top-ranking officials of the country."

The Guardian cites more than half a dozen internal government documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden as the basis for its reporting on GCHQ's intelligence operations, which it says involved, among other things, hacking into the South African foreign ministry's computer network and targeting the Turkish delegation at the 2009 G-20 summit in London.

Clayson Monyela, a spokesman for South Africa's foreign ministry, declined to comment on the report Monday when reached by telephone by AP. Monyela said on his Twitter feed that "the matter is receiving attention."

The source material – whose authenticity could not immediately be determined – appears to be a mixed bag. The Guardian describes one as "a PowerPoint slide," another as "a briefing paper" and others simply as "documents."

Some of the leaked material was posted to the Guardian's website with heavy redactions. A spokesman for the newspaper said the redactions were made at the newspaper's initiative, but declined to elaborate.

It wasn't completely clear how Snowden would have had access to the British intelligence documents, although in one article the Guardian mentions that source material was drawn from a top-secret internal network shared by GCHQ and the NSA. Aldrich said he wouldn't be surprised if the GCHQ material came from a shared network accessed by Snowden, explaining that the NSA and GCHQ collaborated so closely that in some areas the two agencies effectively operated as one.

One document cited by the Guardian – but not posted to its website – appeared to boast of GCHQ's tapping into smartphones. The Guardian quoted the document as saying that "capabilities against BlackBerry provided advance copies of G-20 briefings to ministers." It went on to say that "Diplomatic targets from all nations have an MO (a habit) of using smartphones," adding that spies "exploited this use at the G-20 meetings last year."

Another document cited – but also not posted – concerned GCHQ's use of a customized Internet cafe which was "able to extract key logging info, providing creds (credentials) for delegates, meaning we have sustained intelligence options against them even after conference has finished." No further details were given, but the reference to key logging suggested that computers at the cafe would have been pre-installed with malicious software designed to spy on key strokes, steal passwords and eavesdrop on emails.

Aldrich said that revelation stuck out as particularly ingenious.

"It's a bit `Mission Impossible,'" he said.

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Vladimir Isachenkov in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland, and Jason Straziuso in Nairobi, Kenya, contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON — Thomas Penfield Jackson, who as a federal judge in Washington presided over a historic Microsoft antitrust case and the drug possession trial of former Mayor Marion Barry, has died.

Jackson died at his home in Compton, Md., his wife Patricia told The Associated Press on Sunday. He was 76 and had cancer.

Jackson, who retired from the bench in 2004, handled a variety of cases in more than two decades as judge. He sent Barry to prison for cocaine possession, conducted the perjury trial of former White House aide Michael Deaver, and ordered then-Sen. Bob Packwood to turn over his diaries to a committee investigating sexual harassment charges.

In 2000, ruling in a closely watched antitrust lawsuit brought by the government against Microsoft, Jackson ordered the software giant to be split in two after concluding the company had stifled competition and used illegal methods to protect its monopoly in computer operating systems. The decision rocked the software industry, and in interviews with the news media that were published after the ruling, Jackson was quoted as comparing Microsoft founder Bill Gates to Napoleon and likening the company to a drug-dealing street gang.

"I think he has a Napoleonic concept of himself and his company, an arrogance that derives from power and unalloyed success, with no leavening hard experience, no reverses," Jackson said in one interview.

An appeals court the following year unanimously reversed the breakup order – though it did agree that Microsoft had acted as an illegal software monopoly – saying Jackson had engaged in "serious judicial misconduct" with his derogatory out-of-court comments about the company. The court appointed a different judge to determine a new punishment. The company eventually negotiated a settlement.

Another high-profile case involved a North Carolina tobacco farmer who in 2003 drove his tractor into a pond on the National Mall, creating a lengthy standoff with the police and threatening to set off bombs. Jackson initially sentenced Dwight Watson to six years in prison, saying the city had regarded him as a "one-man weapon of mass destruction," but later sharply reduced the punishment following a U.S. Supreme Court ruling involving sentencing guidelines.

In 2004, he angered media advocates with his decision to hold five reporters in contempt and fine them $500 a day for refusing to identify their sources about nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee.

Jackson also presided over the 1990 drug trial of Marion Barry, the District of Columbia mayor caught in an FBI sting smoking crack-cocaine in a hotel room. The judge's original six-month sentence was thrown out after an appeals court said he didn't adequately explain how he applied federal sentencing guidelines.

Jackson re-sentenced him to a six-month term, despite challenges from Barry who said the judge had shown bias by telling a Harvard University audience that he was convinced Barry was guilty of perjury and other crimes but that some jurors would not have voted to convict him on most of the charges under any circumstances. The jury had convicted Barry of drug possession but deadlocked on other charges.

The appeals court refused to let Barry delay serving his sentence.

CHRISTCHURCH, New Zealand (AP) — Google is launching Internet-beaming antennas into the stratosphere aboard giant, jellyfish-shaped balloons with the lofty goal of getting the entire planet online.

Eighteen months in the works, the top-secret project was announced Saturday in New Zealand, where up to 50 volunteer households are already beginning to receive the Internet briefly on their home computers via translucent helium balloons that sail by on the wind 12 miles above Earth.

While the project is still in the very early testing stages, Google hopes eventually to launch thousands of the thin, polyethylene-film inflatables and bring the Internet to some of the more remote parts of the globe, narrowing the digital divide between the 2.2 billion people who are online and the 4.8 billion who aren't.

If successful, the technology might allow countries to leapfrog the expense of installing fiber-optic cable, dramatically increasing Internet usage in places such as Africa and Southeast Asia.

"It's a huge moonshot, a really big goal to go after," said project leader Mike Cassidy. "The power of the Internet is probably one of the most transformative technologies of our time."

The so-called Project Loon was developed in the clandestine Google X lab that also came up with a driverless car and Google's Web-surfing eyeglasses.

Google would not say how much it is investing in the project or how much customers will be charged when it is up and running.

The first person to get Google Balloon Internet access this week was Charles Nimmo, a farmer and entrepreneur in the small town of Leeston who signed up for the experiment. Technicians attached a bright red, basketball-size receiver resembling a giant Google map pin to the outside of his home.

In a successful preliminary test, Nimmo received the Internet for about 15 minutes before the 49-foot-wide transmitting balloon he was relying on floated out of range. The first thing he did was check the weather forecast because he wanted to find out if it was a good time for "crutching" his sheep, or removing the wool around their rear ends.

Nimmo is among the many rural folk, even in developed countries, who can't get broadband access. After ditching his dial-up four years ago in favor of satellite Internet service, he has gotten stuck with bills that sometimes exceed $1,000 a month.

"It's been weird," Nimmo said of the Google Balloon Internet experience. "But it's been exciting to be part of something new."

In recent years, military and aeronautical researchers have used tethered balloons to beam Internet signals back to bases on Earth. Google's balloons would be untethered and out of sight, strung out in a line around the globe. They would ride the winds around the world while Google ground controllers adjusted their altitude to keep them moving along the desired route.

Ground stations about 60 miles apart would bounce Internet signals up to the balloons. The signals would hop backward from one balloon to the next to keep people continuously connected. Solar panels attached to the inflatables would generate electricity to power the Internet circuit boards, radios and antennas, as well as the onboard flight-control equipment.

Each balloon would provide Internet service for an area twice the size of New York City, or about 780 square miles, and because of their high altitude, rugged terrain is not a problem. The balloons could even beam the Internet into Afghanistan's steep and winding Khyber Pass.

"Whole segments of the population would reap enormous benefits, from social inclusion to educational and economic opportunities," said DePauw University media studies professor Kevin Howley.

Once in place, the light but durable balloons wouldn't interfere with aviation because they fly twice as high as airplanes and well below satellites, said Richard DeVaul, an MIT-trained scientist who founded Project Loon and helped develop Google Glass, eyeglasses with a tiny, voice controlled computer display.

In the U.S., however, Google would have to notify the Federal Aviation Administration when the balloons are on their way up or down. The company is talking with regulators in other countries about meeting their requirements.

The Internet signals travel in the unlicensed spectrum, which means Google doesn't have to go through the onerous regulatory processes required for Internet providers using wireless communications networks or satellites.

At this stage, the company is putting a few dozen balloons up over New Zealand and then bringing them down after a short period. Later this year, Google hopes to have as many as 300 of them circling the globe continuously along the 40th parallel, on a path that takes them over New Zealand, Australia, Chile and Argentina.

Covering the whole world would require thousands of the balloons. No timetable has been set for that.

Google chose New Zealand in part because of its remoteness. Some Christchurch residents were cut off from the Internet for weeks after a 2011 earthquake that killed 185 people. Google said balloon access could help places suffering natural disasters get back online quickly.

"The potential of a system that can restore connectivity within hours of a crisis hitting is tremendously exciting," said Imogen Wall at the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, although she warned that the service must be robust. "If the service fails in a crisis, then lives are lost."

Temple University communications professor Patrick Murphy warned of mixed consequences, pointing to China and Brazil as places where Internet service promoted democratic principles but also contributed to a surge in consumerism that has resulted in environmental and health problems.

"The nutritional and medical information, farming techniques, democratic principles those are the wonderful parts of it," he said. "But you also have everyone wanting to drive a car, eat a steak, drink a Coke."

Already the world's largest advertising network, Google stands to expand its own empire by bringing the Internet to more corners of the Earth. More users means more potential Google searchers, which in turn translates into more chances for the company to display ads.

Richard Bennett, a fellow with the nonprofit Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, was skeptical of the project, noting that smartphones are increasingly being used in developing countries.

"I'm really glad that Google is doing this kind of speculative research," he said. "But it remains to be seen how practical any of these things are."

Before heading to New Zealand, Google spent a few months secretly launching two to five flights a week in California's Central Valley.

"People were calling in reports about UFOs," DeVaul said.

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Mendoza reported from Mountain View, Calif. Follow Martha Mendoza at http://twitter.com/mendozamartha

WASHINGTON — Top U.S. intelligence officials said Saturday that information gleaned from two controversial data-collection programs run by the National Security Agency thwarted potential terrorist plots in the U.S. and more than 20 other countries – and that gathered data is destroyed every five years.

Last year, fewer than 300 phone numbers were checked against the database of millions of U.S. phone records gathered daily by the NSA in one of the programs, the intelligence officials said in arguing that the programs are far less sweeping than their detractors allege.

No other new details about the plots or the countries involved were part of the newly declassified information released to Congress on Saturday and made public by the Senate Intelligence Committee. Intelligence officials said they are working to declassify the dozens of plots NSA chief Gen. Keith Alexander said were disrupted, to show Americans the value of the programs, but that they want to make sure they don't inadvertently reveal parts of the U.S. counterterrorism playbook in the process.

The release of information follows a bruising week for U.S. intelligence officials who testified on Capitol Hill, defending programs that were unknown to the public – and some lawmakers – until they were revealed by a series of media stories in The Guardian and The Washington Post newspapers, leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who remains in hiding in Hong Kong.

The disclosures have sparked debate and legal action against the Obama administration by privacy activists who say the data collection goes far beyond what was intended when expanded counterterrorism measures were authorized by Congress after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Intelligence officials said Saturday that both NSA programs are reviewed every 90 days by the secret court authorized by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Under the program, the records, showing things like time and length of call, can only be examined for suspected connections to terrorism, they said.

The officials offered more detail on how the phone records program helped the NSA stop a 2009 al-Qaida plot to blow up New York City subways. They say the program helped them track a co-conspirator of al-Qaida operative Najibullah Zazi – though it's not clear why the FBI needed the NSA to investigate Zazi's phone records because the FBI would have had the authority to gather records of Zazi's phone calls after identifying him as a suspect, rather than relying on the sweeping collection program.

WASHINGTON — In the months and early years after 9/11, FBI agents began showing up at Microsoft Corp. more frequently than before, armed with court orders demanding information on customers.

Around the world, government spies and eavesdroppers were tracking the email and Internet addresses used by suspected terrorists. Often, those trails led to the world's largest software company and, at the time, largest email provider.

The agents wanted email archives, account information, practically everything, and quickly. Engineers compiled the data, sometimes by hand, and delivered it to the government.

Often there was no easy way to tell if the information belonged to foreigners or Americans. So much data was changing hands that one former Microsoft employee recalls that the engineers were anxious about whether the company should cooperate.

Inside Microsoft, some called it "Hoovering" – not after the vacuum cleaner, but after J. Edgar Hoover, the first FBI director, who gathered dirt on countless Americans.

This frenetic, manual process was the forerunner to Prism, the recently revealed highly classified National Security Agency program that seizes records from Internet companies. As laws changed and technology improved, the government and industry moved toward a streamlined, electronic process, which required less time from the companies and provided the government data in a more standard format.

The revelation of Prism this month by the Washington Post and Guardian newspapers has touched off the latest round in a decade-long debate over what limits to impose on government eavesdropping, which the Obama administration says is essential to keep the nation safe.

But interviews with more than a dozen current and former government and technology officials and outside experts show that, while Prism has attracted the recent attention, the program actually is a relatively small part of a much more expansive and intrusive eavesdropping effort.

Americans who disapprove of the government reading their emails have more to worry about from a different and larger NSA effort that snatches data as it passes through the fiber optic cables that make up the Internet's backbone. That program, which has been known for years, copies Internet traffic as it enters and leaves the United States, then routes it to the NSA for analysis.

Whether by clever choice or coincidence, Prism appears to do what its name suggests. Like a triangular piece of glass, Prism takes large beams of data and helps the government find discrete, manageable strands of information.

The fact that it is productive is not surprising; documents show it is one of the major sources for what ends up in the president's daily briefing. Prism makes sense of the cacophony of the Internet's raw feed. It provides the government with names, addresses, conversation histories and entire archives of email inboxes.

Many of the people interviewed for this report insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss a classified, continuing effort. But those interviews, along with public statements and the few public documents available, show there are two vital components to Prism's success.

The first is how the government works closely with the companies that keep people perpetually connected to each other and the world. That story line has attracted the most attention so far.

The second and far murkier one is how Prism fits into a larger U.S. wiretapping program in place for years.

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Deep in the oceans, hundreds of cables carry much of the world's phone and Internet traffic. Since at least the early 1970s, the NSA has been tapping foreign cables. It doesn't need permission. That's its job.

But Internet data doesn't care about borders. Send an email from Pakistan to Afghanistan and it might pass through a mail server in the United States, the same computer that handles messages to and from Americans. The NSA is prohibited from spying on Americans or anyone inside the United States. That's the FBI's job and it requires a warrant.

Despite that prohibition, shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, President George W. Bush secretly authorized the NSA to plug into the fiber optic cables that enter and leave the United States, knowing it would give the government unprecedented, warrantless access to Americans' private conversations.

Tapping into those cables allows the NSA access to monitor emails, telephone calls, video chats, websites, bank transactions and more. It takes powerful computers to decrypt, store and analyze all this information, but the information is all there, zipping by at the speed of light.

"You have to assume everything is being collected," said Bruce Schneier, who has been studying and writing about cryptography and computer security for two decades.

The New York Times disclosed the existence of this effort in 2005. In 2006, former AT&T technician Mark Klein revealed that the company had allowed the NSA to install a computer at its San Francisco switching center, a key hub for fiber optic cables.

What followed was the most significant debate over domestic surveillance since the 1975 Church Committee, a special Senate committee led by Sen. Frank Church, D-Idaho, reined in the CIA and FBI for spying on Americans.

Unlike the recent debate over Prism, however, there were no visual aids, no easy-to-follow charts explaining that the government was sweeping up millions of emails and listening to phone calls of people accused of no wrongdoing.

The Bush administration called it the "Terrorist Surveillance Program" and said it was keeping the United States safe.

"This program has produced intelligence for us that has been very valuable in the global war on terror, both in terms of saving lives and breaking up plots directed at the United States," Vice President Dick Cheney said at the time.

The government has said it minimizes all conversations and emails involving Americans. Exactly what that means remains classified. But former U.S. officials familiar with the process say it allows the government to keep the information as long as it is labeled as belonging to an American and stored in a special, restricted part of a computer.

That means Americans' personal emails can live in government computers, but analysts can't access, read or listen to them unless the emails become relevant to a national security investigation.

The government doesn't automatically delete the data, officials said, because an email or phone conversation that seems innocuous today might be significant a year from now.

What's unclear to the public is how long the government keeps the data. That is significant because the U.S. someday will have a new enemy. Two decades from now, the government could have a trove of American emails and phone records it can tap to investigative whatever Congress declares a threat to national security.

The Bush administration shut down its warrantless wiretapping program in 2007 but endorsed a new law, the Protect America Act, which allowed the wiretapping to continue with changes: The NSA generally would have to explain its techniques and targets to a secret court in Washington, but individual warrants would not be required.

Congress approved it, with Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., in the midst of a campaign for president, voting against it.

"This administration also puts forward a false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we provide," Obama said in a speech two days before that vote. "I will provide our intelligence and law enforcement agencies with the tools they need to track and take out the terrorists without undermining our Constitution and our freedom."

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When the Protect America Act made warrantless wiretapping legal, lawyers and executives at major technology companies knew what was about to happen.

One expert in national security law, who is directly familiar with how Internet companies dealt with the government during that period, recalls conversations in which technology officials worried aloud that the government would trample on Americans' constitutional right against unlawful searches, and that the companies would be called on to help.

The logistics were about to get daunting, too.

For years, the companies had been handling requests from the FBI. Now Congress had given the NSA the authority to take information without warrants. Though the companies didn't know it, the passage of the Protect America Act gave birth to a top-secret NSA program, officially called US-98XN.

It was known as Prism. Though many details are still unknown, it worked like this:

Every year, the attorney general and the director of national intelligence spell out in a classified document how the government plans to gather intelligence on foreigners overseas.

By law, the certification can be broad. The government isn't required to identify specific targets or places.

A federal judge, in a secret order, approves the plan.

With that, the government can issue "directives" to Internet companies to turn over information.

While the court provides the government with broad authority to seize records, the directives themselves typically are specific, said one former associate general counsel at a major Internet company. They identify a specific target or groups of targets. Other company officials recall similar experiences.

All adamantly denied turning over the kind of broad swaths of data that many people believed when the Prism documents were first released.

"We only ever comply with orders for requests about specific accounts or identifiers," Microsoft said in a statement.

Facebook said it received between 9,000 and 10,000 requests for data from all government agencies in the second half of last year. The social media company said fewer than 19,000 users were targeted.

How many of those were related to national security is unclear, and likely classified. The numbers suggest each request typically related to one or two people, not a vast range of users.

Tech company officials were unaware there was a program named Prism. Even former law enforcement and counterterrorism officials who were on the job when the program went live and were aware of its capabilities said this past week that they didn't know what it was called.

What the NSA called Prism, the companies knew as a streamlined system that automated and simplified the "Hoovering" from years earlier, the former assistant general counsel said. The companies, he said, wanted to reduce their workload. The government wanted the data in a structured, consistent format that was easy to search.

Any company in the communications business can expect a visit, said Mike Janke, CEO of Silent Circle, a company that advertises software for secure, encrypted conversations. The government is eager to find easy ways around security.

"They do this every two to three years," said Janke, who said government agents have approached his company but left empty-handed because his computer servers store little information. "They ask for the moon."

That often creates tension between the government and a technology industry with a reputation for having a civil libertarian bent. Companies occasionally argue to limit what the government takes. Yahoo even went to court and lost in a classified ruling in 2008, The New York Times reported Friday.

"The notion that Yahoo gives any federal agency vast or unfettered access to our users' records is categorically false," Ron Bell, the company's general counsel, said recently.

Under Prism, the delivery process varied by company.

Google, for instance, says it makes secure file transfers. Others use contractors or have set up stand-alone systems. Some have set up user interfaces making it easier for the government, according to a security expert familiar with the process.

Every company involved denied the most sensational assertion in the Prism documents: that the NSA pulled data "directly from the servers" of Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, AOL and more.

Technology experts and a former government official say that phrasing, taken from a PowerPoint slide describing the program, was likely meant to differentiate Prism's neatly organized, company-provided data from the unstructured information snatched out of the Internet's major pipelines.

In slide made public by the newspapers, NSA analysts were encouraged to use data coming from both Prism and from the fiber-optic cables.

Prism, as its name suggests, helps narrow and focus the stream. If eavesdroppers spot a suspicious email among the torrent of data pouring into the United States, analysts can use information from Internet companies to pinpoint the user.

With Prism, the government gets a user's entire email inbox. Every email, including contacts with American citizens, becomes government property.

Once the NSA has an inbox, it can search its huge archives for information about everyone with whom the target communicated. All those people can be investigated, too.

That's one example of how emails belonging to Americans can become swept up in the hunt.

In that way, Prism helps justify specific, potentially personal searches. But it's the broader operation on the Internet fiber optics cables that actually captures the data, experts agree.

"I'm much more frightened and concerned about real-time monitoring on the Internet backbone," said Wolf Ruzicka, CEO of EastBanc Technologies, a Washington software company. "I cannot think of anything, outside of a face-to-face conversation, that they could not have access to."

One unanswered question, according to a former technology executive at one of the companies involved, is whether the government can use the data from Prism to work backward.

For example, not every company archives instant message conversations, chat room exchanges or videoconferences. But if Prism provided general details, known as metadata, about when a user began chatting, could the government "rewind" its copy of the global Internet stream, find the conversation and replay it in full?

That would take enormous computing, storage and code-breaking power. It's possible the NSA could use supercomputers to decrypt some transmissions, but it's unlikely it would have the ability to do that in volume. In other words, it would help to know what messages to zero in on.

Whether the government has that power and whether it uses Prism this way remains a closely guarded secret.

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A few months after Obama took office in 2009, the surveillance debate reignited in Congress because the NSA had crossed the line. Eavesdroppers, it turned out, had been using their warrantless wiretap authority to intercept far more emails and phone calls of Americans than they were supposed to.

Obama, no longer opposed to the wiretapping, made unspecified changes to the process. The government said the problems were fixed.

"I came in with a healthy skepticism about these programs," Obama explained recently. "My team evaluated them. We scrubbed them thoroughly. We actually expanded some of the oversight, increased some of the safeguards."

Years after decrying Bush for it, Obama said Americans did have to make tough choices in the name of safety.

"You can't have 100 percent security and also then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience," the president said.

Obama's administration, echoing his predecessor's, credited the surveillance with disrupting several terrorist attacks. Leading figures from the Bush administration who endured criticism during Obama's candidacy have applauded the president for keeping the surveillance intact.

Jason Weinstein, who recently left the Justice Department as head of its cybercrime and intellectual property section, said it's no surprise Obama continued the eavesdropping.

"You can't expect a president to not use a legal tool that Congress has given him to protect the country," he said. "So, Congress has given him the tool. The president's using it. And the courts are saying `The way you're using it is OK.' That's checks and balances at work."

Schneier, the author and security expert, said it doesn't really matter how Prism works, technically. Just assume the government collects everything, he said.

He said it doesn't matter what the government and the companies say, either. It's spycraft, after all.

"Everyone is playing word games," he said. "No one is telling the truth."

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Associated Press writers Eileen Sullivan, Peter Svensson, Adam Goldman, Michael Liedtke and Monika Mathur contributed to this report.

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Contact the AP's Washington investigative team at DCinvestigations(at)ap.org

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Online:

NSA: http://www.nsa.gov

MANAGUA, Nicaragua (AP) — A multi-billion dollar proposal to plow a massive rival to the Panama Canal across the middle of Nicaragua was approved by the leftist-controlled National Assembly Thursday, capping a lightning-fast approval process that has provoked deep skepticism among shipping experts and concern among environmentalists.

The assembly dominated by President Daniel Ortega's Sandinista Front voted to grant a 50-year concession to plan and build the canal —with an option for another 50 — to a Hong Kong-based company whose only previous experience appears to be in telecommunications.

The legislation approved Thursday by a 61-28 vote contains no specific route for a canal and virtually no details of its financing or economic viability. It grants the Hong Kong company exclusive rights to plan and build the canal in exchange for Nicaragua receiving a minority share of any eventual profits.

Ortega's backers say the Chinese will transform one of the region's poorest countries by turning a centuries-old dream of a Nicaraguan trans-ocean canal into reality, bringing tens of thousands of jobs to the country and fueling an economic boom that would mimic the canal-driven prosperity of nearby Panama.

The currently estimated cost is $40 billion.

"One of Nicaragua's great riches is its geographic position, that's why this idea has always been around," Sandinista congressman Jacinto Suarez said during the legislative debate Thursday. "Global trade demands that this canal is built because it's necessary. The data shows that maritime transport is constantly growing and that makes this feasible. Opposing it is unpatriotic."

While the Hong Kong company has said almost nothing about the canal's route, it would certainly cross Lake Nicaragua, the country's primary source of fresh water. If one of the world's largest infrastructure projects ever is actually built, the water used by the canal's locks could seriously deplete the lake, environmentalists say.

Global engineering and shipping experts say those concerns are real, but lowered demand for massive container shipping and increasing competition from potential routes, including the warming Arctic, may mean that the Nicaraguan canal will simply prove economically unfeasible, adding to a long list of unrealized visions of moving riches from sea to sea across the country.

Either way, the quick march of the canal project through the National Assembly has set off a backlash from environmental and other activists, who held a series of marches this week to protest the granting of rights to the HK Nicaragua Canal Development Investment Co., without any open bidding process or details of its financing.

"Nicaragua isn't for sale. Nicaragua belongs to all Nicaraguans and isn't the private property of Ortega and his family," the Movement for Nicaragua, a coalition of civil-society groups, said in an open letter to the country Wednesday.

When he took power in 1979, Ortega was a socialist firebrand whom the U.S. government tried to overthrow by backing Contra rebels in the 1980s. He was voted out of office in 1990 but returned after winning the 2006 election. Since then, critics allege, the 67-year-old leader has maneuvered to become president for life, using courts and electoral institutions that are stacked with appointees from his Sandinista Front.

In 2009 the Sandinista majority on the Supreme Court overruled limits on consecutive terms set by the Nicaraguan constitution, allowing Ortega to run for his third 5-year term. He won 64 percent of the vote, though opposition parties allege that total was inflated by fraud.

Other recent Nicaraguan presidents also have repeatedly tried to win support for a canal, without much success. Ortega, though has finally agreed on a formal deal.

North American companies are increasingly looking to factories and suppliers in the U.S. and Latin America rather than in Asia, where rising salaries in China are making manufacturing less appealing for foreign companies.

In addition, the global economic slowdown of recent years means large numbers of ships are unused, perhaps 5 percent of the global fleet. Many vessels are scheduled to be completed in coming years, meaning the percentage of idled ships could grow to more than 20 percent, experts said.

And global warming means that even the Arctic may become a viable alternative to crossing Central America by canal.

"Looking at the changing flows and where the growth is in the world economy, personally I'm not seeing it. I wouldn't invest my money in it," said Rosalyn Wilson, a senior business analyst at the Delcan Corporation, a Toronto-based transportation consultancy and author of the U.S. logistics industry's annual report.

"It's addressing a need that definitely is not here now and I'm not sure if it's 'a build it and they will come sort of thing,'" she said.

Eduardo Lugo, a Panamanian port logistics consultant who worked for 10 years studying traffic demand for the Panama Canal's expansion plan, also questioned whether global traffic demand would support the high costs of the Nicaragua project.

"There's going be some growth in world trade. The big question is, what routes is that trade going to move on. That's the real challenge that Nicaragua faces," said Paul Bingham, the head of economic analysis at engineering planning firm CDM Smith, which specializes in large water and transportation infrastructure. "It's very easy to say trade is going to grow but that doesn't mean that Nicaragua is going to be in a competitive position to take advantage of it ... I'm not convinced right now."

Backers of previous canal plans have argued that the Nicaraguan route would prove more economical than Panama's because it would handle ships with far larger cargo capacity.

But the Nicaraguan path would have to be roughly three times as long as than Panama's, which is about 50 miles (80 kilometers) long, a fact that Panama Canal Administrator Jorge Quijano said "gives us even more of a competitive advantage."

"It isn't easy," Quijano said. "The terrain is really complex, more than ours."

Wilson also said the project could have serious impacts on Lake Nicaragua, also known as Cocibolca, because of the amount of fresh water that would be used to operate the canal.

"It takes a lot of water to run locks," Wilson said. "Is it going to be done in such a way that's not trading away another part of the country's economy down the line?"

"We're at a crossroads because either you use Lake Cocibolca for floating boats or you use it for drinking water, but you can't use it for both things at once," said Victor Campos, assistant director of the Humboldt Center, an environmental organization.

Roberto Troncoso, president of the Panamanian Association of Business Executives, said China's government may be encouraging the new canal as a way to establish a route independent of the Panama Canal, which is perceived as remaining under heavy U.S. influence.

"The money is totally irrelevant," he said. "We're talking about national hegemony. China is looking to turn itself into the predominant economic power. Whoever dominates trade, dominates the world."

The United States has taken no official position on the Nicaraguan canal.

The Chinese company has declined to comment on the record about its funding and backers.

According to local records, HK Nicaragua Canal Development Investment Co. head Wang Jing has also been a director of about a dozen other companies, some current and others that have been dissolved.

He also heads Beijing Xinwei, a mid-sized telecommunications firm that, according to Chinese media, was partly owned by a large government telecoms equipment company, Datang, which sold its shares in a 2010 restructuring. Chinese media have reported that Beijing Xinwei made a profit of 650 million yuan (about $100 million) in the first eight months of last year.

Panama and Nicaragua were the top contenders for the route of a trans-ocean canal from the first arrival of Europeans in Latin America. A French company began excavating the Panama canal in 1880 but work was halted by rampant tropical diseases such as malaria and yellow fever. The project was sold for $40 million to the United States, which finished it in 1914.

The building of the Panama Canal cost an estimated $375 million and involved the excavation of 286 million cubic yards of earth, three times more than the Suez Canal.

Historians say 5,609 people, mainly West Indian workers, died during its construction, on top of the 22,000 dead during the period of French control.

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Correspondents Mark Stevenson in Mexico City, Joe McDonald in Beijing and Juan Zamorano in Panama City contributed to this report.