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Fourteen years after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and two years after Edward Snowden's revelations about extensive U.S. government surveillance of phone and internet data, Americans continue to have mixed - and sometimes conflicting - views about government surveillance programs.

On the one hand, a majority of Americans oppose the government collecting bulk data on its citizens, and two-thirds believe there aren't adequate limits on what types of data can be collected. But at the same time, Americans generally support monitoring the communications activity of suspected terrorists. Here's a rundown of what we know about attitudes toward U.S. government surveillance, at home and abroad:

1 A majority of Americans (54%) disapprove of the U.S. government's collection of telephone and internet data as part of anti-terrorism efforts, while 42% approve of the program. Democrats are divided on the program, while Republicans and independents are more likely to disapprove than approve, according to a survey we conducted in spring 2014.

2 More broadly, most Americans don't see a need to sacrifice civil liberties to be safe from terrorism: In spring 2014, 74% said they should not give up privacy and freedom for the sake of safety, while just 22% said the opposite. This view had hardened since December 2004, when 60% said they should not have to give up more privacy and freedom to be safe from terrorism.

3 While they have concerns about government surveillance, Americans also say anti-terrorism policies have not gone far enough to adequately protect them. More (49%) say this is their bigger concern than say they are concerned that policies have gone too far in restricting the average person's civil liberties (37%), according to a January survey. While Americans held this view between 2004 and 2010, they briefly held the opposite view in July 2013, shortly after the Snowden leaks.

4At the same time, Americans want to control their personal information, but few feel like they are able to. Most say it is important to control who can get their information (93%), as well as what information about them is collected (90%). But only 9% say they have a lot of control over how much information is collected about them, and 38% say they have some control, according to our survey conducted August-September 2014.

Just 6% of Americans say they are very confident that government agencies can keep their records private and secure, while 25% are somewhat confident. Similar shares express those views about their landline and cellular telephone companies.

5 Most Americans have heard about the U.S. government's surveillance programs, and some have changed their behavior because of it. Fully 87% are aware of the federal surveillance programs; among those aware of the programs, 25% - and 22% of adults overall - say they have changed the way they use technology at least somewhat after the Snowden revelations, according to our November 2014-January 2015 survey. Additionally, 61% of those aware of the programs say they have become less confident that the programs are serving the public interest.

6 The view from abroad is mostly one of disapproval. In most countries we surveyed in 2014, majorities opposed U.S. government monitoring of emails and phone calls of foreign leaders or their citizens. And a median of 62% in 43 countries also oppose U.S. monitoring of American citizens. In contrast, Americans tilt toward the view that eavesdropping on foreign leaders is an acceptable practice, though they are divided over using this technique on average people in other countries. But six-in-ten Americans (61%) also oppose the government monitoring communications of U.S. citizens.

Note: The introduction for this post has been updated.

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What Americans think about NSA surveillance, national security and privacy

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Fourteen years after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and two years after Edward Snowden's revelations about extensive U.S. government surveillance of phone and internet data, Americans continue to have mixed - and sometimes conflicting - views about government surveillance programs. On the one hand, a majority of Americans oppose the government collecting bulk data on its citizens, and two-thirds believe there aren't adequate limits on what types of data can be collected.

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Myth: Congress can act on June 1st to reauthorize or amend Section 215.
Fact: Three provisions of the Patriot Act, including Section 215, are set to expire at midnight on May 31, before the House is back in session. According to the Congressional Research Service, 'absent any reauthorization, beginning at 12:00 AM in the morning of June 1, 2015, §§ 501 and 502 of FISA would read as they read on October 25, 2001.' Moreover, the current FISA court order authorizing the NSA's bulk telephone metadata program expires on June 1 at 5:00 p.m.

Myth: The USA Freedom Act reverts our intelligence-gathering programs to a pre-9/11 posture.
Fact: The USA Freedom Act enacts sweeping reforms to surveillance programs - ending bulk collection, creating a panel of experts at the FISA court, and mandating transparency - but the bill also preserves key authorities. Section 215 will remain a valuable counterterrorism tool for the FBI. A targeted, narrowly-tailored call detail records authority will replace the NSA's current, unlawful program. Additionally, the USA Freedom Act enhances national security by providing targeted tools to keep America safe.

Myth: A brief sunset of Section 215 and other authorities under the Patriot Act is a mere technicality.
Fact: If the Senate chooses to allow these authorities to expire, they should do so knowing that sunset may be permanent. The USA Freedom Act has earned the support of the White House, the intelligence community, privacy and civil liberties advocates, and private industry. Nearly every member of the House of Representatives demands reform to these authorities. No such coalition exists for a clean reenactment of Section 215.

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USA Freedom Act Archives - House Judiciary Committee

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Myth: Congress can act on June 1st to reauthorize or amend Section 215. Fact: Three provisions of the Patriot Act, including Section 215, are set to expire at midnight on May 31, before the House is back in session.

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As the anniversary of 9/11 approaches, instead of listening to mainstream media and government propaganda about what happened that day, and how all of the police state measures that have followed have made us more free, we should continue to uncover the lies of what really happened.

Now that the entire police state apparatus has obviously turned inward, as admitted in numerous government announcements and reports that are putting everyday Americans on terror watch lists, whistleblowers are stepping forward to reveal just how extensive and ongoing the surveillance has been. Instead of being heralded for their patriotism, these whistleblowers are being persecuted by the U.S. government. However, key insiders such as Sibel Edmonds, Susan Lindauer, and Thomas Drake have prevailed to reveal a startling amount of information that should concern any American who values civil liberties.

Former top NSA mathematician and code breaker, William Binney, has gone on record to publicly reveal the scope of a top-secret surveillance program that has directly targeted everyday Americans following 9/11. He is sounding an alarm about the massive scope of this project that engages in 24/7 warrantless wiretapping of the American population.

Surveillance and data collection of the U.S. population has been in the making for some time, perhaps best known through programs like ECHELON, but to have a 32-year, top-level veteran of the NSA reveal in the video below the domestic component of a program code named Stellar Wind, and his concerns that we are heading down the road to totalitarianism if not brought under control, should be a wake-up call to those who still believe that we are immune from the treatment that has been dished out across the rest of the planet.

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Stellar Wind: The Secret NSA Domestic Spying Program; Whistleblower William Blinney Tells All

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As the anniversary of 9/11 approaches, instead of listening to mainstream media and government propaganda about what happened that day, and how all of the police state measures that have followed have made us more free, we should continue to uncover the lies of what really happened.

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Submitted by Jim Quinn via The Burning Platform blog,

The government released their monthly CPI report this week. Even though it came in at an annualized rate of 3.6%, they and their mouthpieces in the corporate mainstream media dutifully downplayed the uptrend. They can't let the plebs know the truth. That might upend their economic recovery storyline and put a crimp into their artificial free money, zero interest rate, stock market rally. If they were to admit inflation is rising, the Fed would be forced to raise rates. That is unacceptable in our rigged .01% economy. There are banker bonuses, CEO stock options, corporate stock buyback earnings per share goals and captured politician elections at stake.

The corporate MSM immediately shifted the focus to the annual CPI figure of 0.1%. That's right. Your government keepers expect you to believe the prices you pay to live your everyday life have been essentially flat in the last year. Anyone who lives in the real world, not the BLS Bizarro world of models, seasonal adjustments, hedonic adjustments, and substitution adjustments, knows this is a lie. The original concept of CPI was to measure the true cost of maintaining a constant standard of living. It should reflect your true inflation of out of pocket costs to live a daily existence in this country.

Instead, it has become a manipulated statistic using academic theories as a cover to systematically under-report the true level of inflation. The purpose has been to cut annual cost of living adjustments to Social Security and other government benefits, while over-estimating the true level of GDP. Artificially low inflation figures allow the mega-corporations who control the country to keep wage increases to workers low. Under-reporting the true level of inflation also allows the Federal Reserve to keep their discount rate far lower than it would be in an honest free market. The Wall Street banks, who own and control the Federal Reserve, are free to charge 18% on credit card balances while paying .25% to savers. The manipulation of the CPI benefits the vested interests, impoverishes the masses, and slowly but surely contributes to the destruction of our economic system.

A deep dive into Table 2 from the BLS reveals some truth and uncovers more lies. Their weighting of everyday living expenditures is warped and purposefully misleading. Let's look at the annual increases in some food items we might consume in the course of a month, living in this empire of lies:

Ground Beef - 10.1%

Roast Beef - 11.8%

Steak - 11.1%

Eggs - 21.8%

Chicken - 3.7%

Coffee - 3.4%

Sugar - 4.2%

Candy - 4.6%

Snacks - 3.5%

Salt & Seasonings - 5.3%

Food Away From Home - 3.0%

Despite these documented increases, the BLS says food inflation only ran at 1.8% in the last year. They show large decreases in pork, seafood, dairy, and vegetable prices. I grocery shop every week. I buy milk, fish, and vegetables and the prices have not fallen. The price of pork products has decreased from all-time highs, but is still well above prices from a few years ago. The BLS fraudulently keeps the food price increase lower by assuming you switch from beef to pork when the price of beef soars. That assumption does not lower the price of food. The assumption essentially builds in a lower standard of living for you in their model of the world. The other ridiculous assumption is the weighting for food eaten away from home. Giving this a weighting of 5.8% is outrageous when everyone knows obese Americans are chowing down at Taco Bell and the millions of other purveyors of toxic food sludge multiple times per day.

If you are like me, you probably need to live someplace. Food and shelter are the most basic of needs in a society. But according to the BLS they account for less than 50% of your expenses. Let's examine some shelter related costs to see how badly the BLS is lying in this area:

Rent - 3.5%

Owner's Equivalent Rent - 3.0%

Insurance - 3.1%

Water, Sewer, Trash - 4.7%

Household Operations - 3.6%

There is so much wrong with the BLS data, I don't know where to start. The rental market has been on fire since 2012. Builders are erecting apartments at a breakneck pace. Independent, non-captured, neutral real estate organizations show rents surging to all time highs, growing by 5.1% on an annual basis. Real rents in the real world have grown by 14% since 2012. The BLS says they've grown by 9%. Who do you believe?

It's funny how the mysterious owner's equivalent rent calculation spits out a 3% increase in the last year. National home prices, based on Case Shiller data and NAR data shows prices up between 5% and 10% in the last year and up by 25% since 2012. Mortgage rates have risen to 4% from the low 3% range. Property taxes are soaring across the country as indebted localities rape taxpayers to pay for their gold plated government benefits and pensions. Evidently the BLS just ignores prices, mortgage payments, and real estate taxes when calculating their lies.

The final outrage is the weighting applied by the BLS to the owners equivalent rent. It accounts for 24% of the CPI calculation, virtually the same as it did in 2007. In case you haven't noticed, the home ownership rate has plunged to 22 year lows since 2007, as millions of foreclosures booted people out of homes and millions of millennials are so loaded with student loan debt and stuck with low paying Obama jobs that home ownership is a distant dream. How can the BLS continue to weight home ownership at the same level when the percentage of rental units has soared?

There is no question the BLS should have dramatically increased the weighting of rental housing. In reality, the large increases in rental rates and the surge of rental households reflects a much higher inflation rate than is being reported by the government. The BLS figure is a blatant lie. The recent report from the Center for Housing Studies reveals the falsity of the government reported propaganda. Over 20.7 million renter households (49.0%) pay more than 30% of their income on housing. More than a quarter of all renter households, or 11.2 million, spend more than 50% of their income on housing. The median US renter household earned $32,700 in 2013 and spent $900 per month on housing costs. Renter housing costs are gross rents, which include contract rents and utilities. If the median renter household spends 33% of their income on housing costs how can the BLS give it only a 7.2% weighting in the CPI calculation?

The Center for Housing Studies report drives a stake into the heart of the manipulated, politically massaged, false data put out by the BLS to keep the masses sedated and their bosses fat, happy and rich:
Over the span of just 10 years, the share of renters aged 25-34 with cost burdens (paying more than 30 percent of their incomes for housing) increased from 40 percent to 46 percent, while the share with severe burdens (paying more than 50 percent of income) rose from 19 percent to 23 percent. During roughly the same period, the share of renters aged 25-34 with student loan debt jumped from 30 percent in 2004 to 41 percent in 2013, with the average amount of debt up 50 percent, to $30,700.
The faux journalists in the dying legacy media act baffled by the continued real decline in retail sales when the answer is staring them right in the face. True inflation in essential living expenses combined with declining real wages and increasing debt burdens has left the average household with little or no money to spend.

The next blatantly manipulated false data is related to healthcare. Let's peruse some this detailed inflation data:

Prescription Drugs - 4.8%

Non-Prescription Drugs - Negative 1.6%

Medical Equipment - 0.0%

Medical Care Services - 2.3%

Hospital Services - 3.5%

Health Insurance - 0.7%

Anyone living in the real world knows Obamacare has resulted in a tremendous increase in demand for drugs, medical services, and medical equipment. Health insurance companies, drug companies, drug wholesalers, hospital corporations, and drug stores are reporting record profits as their stock prices hit all-time highs. When was the last time you saw prices drop or stay flat in the healthcare arena?

It is patently outrageous for the BLS to report an annual health insurance cost increase of a mere 0.7%. The annual cost of employee sponsored health insurance is 6.3% higher than last year, with the employee portion skyrocketing by 8.0% based on real data in the real world. I work for the largest employer in Philadelphia, with the most negotiating clout against insurers, and my portion has gone up by 10% to 20% annually for the last five years. Everyone working for a company has experienced the same or higher increases.

Even the Obamacare exchanges are seeing double digit premium increases in many states. Studies from Price Waterhouse Coopers and McKinsey found increases in average premiums between 6% and 10% across the country. It takes major cajones for the BLS to report 0.7% health insurance inflation, but their job is not to report factual information. Their job is to keep the ignorant masses ignorant of their plight. The bigger the lie, the more likely it is to be believed. The even more ridiculous aspect to the BLS data is that health insurance is weighted at .75% in the CPI calculation. The median household income in this country is $52,000. Employees are paying approximately $4,000 in health insurance per year on average. That is 7.7% of their income. The BLS weighting is absurd. Using a true inflation rate and true weighting would add at least 2% to the CPI figure.

Another area that impacts every American every day is transportation. People need to drive or take public transportation in order to live their lives. Here are some more crucial inflation data points from the BLS:

New Cars - 1.2%

Used Cars - Negative 0.7%

Gasoline - Negative 23.3%

Vehicle Leasing - Negative 1.1%

Vehicle Insurance - 5.1%

Parking & Tolls - 2.4%

Public Transportation - Negative 3.2%

So we have near record levels of new auto sales, driven by subprime auto debt and 7 year 0% financing, with average vehicle prices at all-time highs, and the BLS reports prices only went up 1.2% in the last year. Edmunds, the authority in auto data, says prices went up 2.6% in the last year. Do you believe the BLS model or real data from the real world, broken down by automaker and vehicle? The even more ridiculous contention is that used car prices fell. I've bought two used cars in the last year and I can attest that prices are not falling. Edmunds reported that used car prices have risen by 7.1% in the last year. Leases as a percentage of total auto sales is also at record levels. Does this really jive with a decrease in leasing expenses? I think not.

There are 254 million passenger vehicles registered in the United States. We have a record level of auto loan debt totaling $1 trillion and a record level of auto leases. According to Edmunds, the average monthly car payment is $479. That is $5,748 per year. That equals 11% of the median household income. Why would the BLS only give this category a 5.7% weighting? Bankrupt states across the country have been jacking up tolls. The BLS says they went up by 2.4%. My beloved state of Pennsylvania has increased them by 10% per year for the last three years. The BLS says the cost of public transportation is plummeting. Has a Amtrak or any municipal public transportation system EVER reduced fares? Not a chance. They need more revenue to fund the government pensions of their union employees.
There are a few other categories that might be of interest to you:

Banking Fees - 5.9%

College Tuition - 3.4%

Childcare - 4.3%

Sporting Events - 8.8%

Pet Care - 3.5%

Cigarettes - 2.5%

Alcohol Served Away from Home - 4.0%

Isn't it delightful that your friendly neighborhood Wall Street bank gets free money from the Fed, charges you 18% on your credit card balance, pays you nothing for your deposits, and then jacks up your bank fees? The relentless inflation in college tuition is being driven by the relentless doling out of student loans by the Federal Government to people who aren't intellectually capable of completing college level material. The $1.4 trillion of student loans will never be repaid. The taxpayer will be on the hook for hundreds of billions in write-offs.

To celebrate the near zero inflation reported by your friendly government drones at the BLS take your family of four to a baseball game, spending $160 for tickets, $25 to park your car, $20 for two warm beers, $10 for two sodas, $24 for four hot dogs, and $10 for an order of cheese fries. Make sure you toast Greenspan, Bernanke, Yellen and the rest of the Federal Reserve governors who have purposefully reduced the purchasing power of your dollar by 96% over the last century.

You know your true level of inflation. You know it's not 0.1%. You know it's somewhere between 4% and 10%. You know your government is lying to you. You know the captured corporate media perpetuates the lies. You know those in control of the government must lie to keep their Ponzi scheme going. You know they are just following the Edward Bernays playbook. They want you to believe it's for your own good. Do you think it's for your own good?

"The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. ...We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. ...In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons...who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind." - Edward Bernays - Propaganda - 1928

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Lies, Damned Lies, & Inflation Statistics

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You know your true level of inflation. You know it's not 0.1%. You know it's somewhere between 4% and 10%. You know your government is lying to you. You know the captured corporate media perpetuates the lies. You know those in control of the government must lie to keep their Ponzi scheme going.

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Whether it's a racy act from college days, a child's confession that you promised not to share with your spouse or the revelation of your best friend's affair, by midlife you're probably carrying around a number of secrets. But whether you realize it or not, they're getting heavier all the time, especially the juicy ones - and they could be threatening your health.

Neuroscientists now believe it's biologically better for us to confess our secrets, or better, just to refuse to be party to someone else's. The reason: holding on to them puts the brain in an awkward, compromised position. The cingulate cortex, essential to our emotional responses, is wired to tell the truth. This "logical lobe" signals other regions of the brain to share information so it can move on to more important functions, like learning. But when you keep a secret locked inside, you don't allow the cingulate to perform its natural functions. Instead, the cortex becomes stressed.

( MORE: The Truth Is, Lying Makes You Sick)

When you choose to hold onto a secret, your brain's orbital prefrontal cortex simulates in your mind just how bad sharing the secret will be, imagining all the possible negative outcomes. "The prefrontal cortex is involved in decision-making, complex thought and deception," says neurosurgeon Gopal Chopra, chief executive of PINGMD, which provides an app to facilitate communication between doctors and patients. If the two regions are at cross-purposes, the end result is what Chopra calls "the complications of emotional burden."

In other words, if your prefrontal cortex wins the battle within your brain over keeping a secret, the pressure it causes in the cingulate cortex leads your body to ramp up production of stress hormones. This is known as the "fight or flight" response, often triggered when we feel anxiety or fear. If the reaction persists, it can have potentially serious consequences. Every time you think about a deeply held secret, stress hormones such as cortisol can surge, impacting your memory, blood pressure, gastrointestinal tract and metabolism. "Those hormones also include norepinephrine," Chopra says, "which affects parts of the brain where attention and responses are controlled."

The bigger the secret, or the riskier you perceive its protection, the more intense the conflict within your brain, resulting in higher anxiety and a more potent fight-or-flight effect.

( MORE: My 17-Year-Old Self Came Back to Haunt Me)

"Sleep may be disturbed, which could lead to emotional mood swings and a propensity to be ill-tempered or lose your cool," says Dr. Allen Towfigh, a neurologist and sleep medicine specialist at New York Presbyterian Hospital/Cornell Medical Center. "You may also have difficulty with memory and learning. And the excess release of cortisol will cause a host of other ailments, including possible increase or loss of appetite and disruption of metabolism."

Spiking cortisol levels have also been linked to a weakened immune system, osteoporosis, increased blood pressure and a loss of collagen in the skin, which can lead to deeper wrinkles and a loss of elasticity.
Should We Stop Keeping Secrets?
Despite the dangers, keeping secrets is part of human nature. "Even when there is risk involved in keeping a secret, we believe there is greater risk in its disclosure," says psychiatrist Peter Zafirides of Columbus, Ohio. "Simply, we decide that the disclosure of the secret will be more painful to us than keeping it hidden. So, it stays a secret."

Not all secrets bring us stress, Zafirides emphasizes. Some secrets are useful, even pleasant, like a child's gift or a spouse's surprise party. "As long as the secret isn't hurting you or anyone else, or isn't perceived by you as being a bad thing," he says, "keeping it doesn't have to be hazardous to your health."

But if a friend offers to tell you something weighty in strictest confidence, think before you sign on. Ask yourself first if the information truly warrants privacy, Zafirides advises. "Analyze the reasons that you are keeping something secret and the consequences of disclosing it," he says.

It also helps to consider other people's likely reactions to discovering the secret you're protecting, whether it's your own or someone else's. Often, Zafirides says, those reactions are much less dramatic than we imagine. This especially applies to embarrassing stories from years ago. "Many people find the reasons we may keep some secrets earlier in life may not be as relevant as we get older," he says.

Finally, while it may sound like a trivial exercise, research has found that writing out the pros and cons of holding on to a secret that's causing you stress may be helpful. "There is no real physiologic explanation," Chopra says, but behavioral studies have shown that writing it out leads to dramatic reductions in stress hormone levels and blood pressure, and improvements in mental health.

Taking the time to consider the implications of locking away sensitive intel is ultimately a healthy exercise - and that's no secret.

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Keeping Secrets Can Be Hazardous To Your Health

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Whether it's a racy act from college days, a child's confession that you promised not to share with your spouse or the revelation of your best friend's affair, by midlife you're probably carrying around a number of secrets.

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It's not just military secrets that governments keep close. And some information, like the recently revealed allegation that Winston Churchill ordered a cover-up of a UFO sighting, seems more amusing...

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by Electronic Frontier Foundation Congress has passed reforms to the Freedom of Information Act, which EFF hopes signals the beginning of a larger overhaul of the transparency law that will mark its 50th birthday in July. Earlier this year both chambers passed dueling FOIA reform bills. The House passed the FOIA Oversight and Implementation Act [...]

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by Electronic Frontier Foundation Congress has passed reforms to the Freedom of Information Act, which EFF hopes signals the beginning of a larger overhaul of the transparency law that will mark its 50th birthday in July. Earlier this year both chambers passed dueling FOIA reform bills.

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Government takes family's land near Area 51

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Private land overlooking the secret base at Area 51 has officially been taken from the owners and transferred to the United States Air Force.

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A misunderstood statistic

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In most discussions of suicide and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan - including the online buzz that followed publication of a Times analysis on how young California veterans die - one statistic gets repeated most: 22 veterans kill themselves each day.

That number comes from a study published in early 2013 by researchers at the federal Department of Veterans Affairs. But the recent wars were not the study's primary focus. In fact, they play a minor role in veteran suicides overall.

The VA researchers used death records from 21 states to come up with a 2010 national estimate for veterans of all ages. As a group, veterans are old. Military service being far rarer than it was in the days of the draft, more than 91% of the nation's 22 million veterans are at least 35 years old, and the overwhelming majority did not serve in the post-9/11 era.

About 72% of veterans are at least 50. It is not surprising, then, that the VA found that people in this age group account for 69% of veteran suicides - or more than 15 of the 22 per day.

Many experts believe that the farther a veteran is from military service, the less likely it is that his or her suicide has anything to do with his or her time in uniform. In other words, many older veterans are killing themselves for the same reasons that other civilians in the same age group kill themselves: depression and other mental health problems coupled with difficult life circumstances.

The VA analysis does not attempt to determine rates of veteran suicide or how they compare with rates for people who never served. Those are surprisingly difficult questions to answer, mainly because the government does not systematically track service members after they leave the military.

The Times tackled the problem using data on California deaths from 2006 to 2011, the most recent six years available. Rather than focus exclusively on suicide, the analysis considered all 42,734 deaths of adults under 35, a group that includes those veterans most likely to have served in the recent wars.

In addition to the cause of death and a variety of other information, each record includes a box indicating veteran status. In the course of reporting, it became clear that the local coroners and funeral home directors who fill out the forms also use that box for active-duty deaths. The Armed Forces Medical Examiner System provided data on active-duty deaths in California by age, gender and cause, allowing The Times to subtract those figures and arrive at the veteran totals.

The VA provided the California veteran population estimates that The Times used to calculate overall death rates and break them down by cause. The death rates for other civilians were determined using population data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

One more step was required to make the comparisons relevant. California veterans under 35 are about 80% male, and nearly half are over 29. A straight comparison to the general population in that age group would be less than ideal, since suicide and accident rates vary significantly by gender and age.

The Times adjusted the non-veteran death rates so they reflected the age and gender mix of the veteran population.

As the story explained, suicide and accident rates were substantially higher for veterans. Over the six years examined by The Times, 329 California veterans under 35 took their own lives. That amounts to an average annual rate of 27 suicides per 100,000 veterans.

If that rate were to hold true across the country, about 530 young veterans are committing suicide each year - roughly 1.5 each day.

That's probably an underestimate, because there are regional variations in suicide and California tends to fall on the low side. But in talking about the aftermath of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it's far closer to reality than 22 each day.

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A misunderstood statistic: 22 military veteran suicides a day

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In most discussions of suicide and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan - including the online buzz that followed publication of a Times analysis on how young California veterans die - one statistic gets repeated most: 22 veterans kill themselves each day.