The
Early Bird is also a form of
clipping service run by the United States Department of Defense. Every day, defense-related news items are selected from a wide range of publications and assembled into a newsletter, then distributed to American military and DoD personnel around the world. Originally, it was done via a vast '
phone tree' of
fax machines; in recent times, it has moved to keep up with the world and is now disseminated by
email or via the
web. Access to it is restricted to authorized personnel mostly for copyright reasons (as well as habitual military reflexes not to give anything to anyone who can't produce an
ironclad reason that they need it - and sometimes not even then).
The Early Bird is now, I believe, the responsibility of DTIC - the Defense Technical Information Center. Various links around the net point to a server named ebird.dtic.mil, but I suspect that DNS entry is only resolvable (and the server only reachable) from .mil or otherwise 'authorized' addresses.