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NEW YORK (AP) — GoPro has climbed mountaintops and dived to ocean bottoms. Now it's headed somewhere only slightly tamer: Wall Street.

The maker of wearable sports cameras, loved by mountain climbers, divers, surfers and other extreme sports fans, said late Wednesday it sold 17.8 million shares at $24 each in its initial public offering of stock.

The IPO was priced at the high end of GoPro's expected range and raised $427 million, valuing the whole company at about $3 billion. The proceeds from the IPO could rise to $491 million if underwriters use their option to buy more shares.

The stock will begin trading on the Nasdaq stock market Thursday under ticker symbol "GPRO."

The company is entering a busy time for initial public offerings, with seven companies expected to make their debut on the same day. It's the third busiest week for IPOs since 2000, according to IPO investment adviser Renaissance Capital.

But GoPro is likely to stand out. Its branded cameras have created a new market, selling electronics and accessories to people who want to take video of themselves jumping out of a plane or riding a skateboard — especially first-person videos that capture the experience as they saw it.

"They seem to have dominated this business," said Kathleen Smith, co-founder of Renaissance Capital, which manages a fund that tracks recent IPOs.

GoPro wants to go beyond cameras. It has hinted that it wants to be a media company, too, by making money off the videos created by the cameras. However, it hasn't laid out concrete plans to do that yet.

The company, which has its headquarters in San Mateo, California, was founded in 2004 by GoPro's CEO and Chairman Nicholas Woodman. Its first product was a waterproof camera that used film. In 2006, it launched its first digital camera. Three years later it began selling a high-definition camera. The cameras are light, small and waterproof. They have other uses besides sports. TV producers use them to film in areas where big professional cameras can't go.

Its list of competitors is short, but growing. Consumer electronics companies Garmin, Samsung and Sony have all entered the market.

GoPro had the best-selling camcorder last year, according to government paperwork filed by the company. Since launching its high-definition camera in 2009, it has sold 8.5 million of them, including 3.8 million in 2013. Its cameras are sold in more than 25,000 stores and cost between $200 and $400.

It also sells accessories such as cases, battery packs and mounts that help users attach their cameras to surfboards, helmets or their wrists. It also has a free app and software that lets users edit, store and publish their videos to their social media accounts including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube.

Additional growth may come from the wild videos its cameras create.

"We believe GoPro is well-positioned to become the first media company whose content is captured exclusively using its own hardware," the company said in its government filing.

But Wall Street analysts are ignoring that for now. "They haven't monetized it yet," said Smith.

It may one day sell ads for its videos, speculated Chris Chute, an analyst at technology market research firm IDC. But its value is the cameras.

"It's one of the bright spots in consumer electronics," said Chute.

The company has been able to sell cameras even as people prefer to use their smartphones to take pictures and video, Chute said.

GoPro did not respond to an interview request for this story.

GoPro's revenue jumped to $985.7 million in 2013, nearly double what it brought in the year before.

It says it plans to use the IPO money to pay down debt.

WASHINGTON (AP) — In a strong defense of digital age privacy, a unanimous Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that police may not generally search the cellphones of people they arrest without first getting search warrants.

Cellphones are powerful devices unlike anything else police may find on someone they arrest, Chief Justice John Roberts said for the court. Because the phones contain so much information, police must get a warrant before looking through them, Roberts said.

"Modern cellphones are not just another technological convenience. With all they contain and all they may reveal, they hold for many Americans the privacies of life," Roberts said.

The court chose not to extend earlier rulings that allow police to empty a suspect's pockets and examine whatever they find to ensure officers' safety and prevent the destruction of evidence.

The Obama administration and the state of California, defending the cellphone searches, said cellphones should have no greater protection from a search than anything else police find.

But the defendants in these cases, backed by civil libertarians, librarians and news media groups, argued that cellphones, especially smartphones, are increasingly powerful computers that can store troves of sensitive personal information.

In the cases decided Wednesday, one defendant carried a smartphone, while the other carried an older flip phone.

Roberts said the comparison to packages of cigarettes and other items that were at issue in the earlier cases is not apt.

A ride on horseback and a flight to the moon both "are ways of getting from point A to point B, but little else justifies lumping them together," he said.

Authorities concerned about the destruction of evidence can take steps to prevent the remote erasure of a phone's contents or the activation of encryption, Roberts said.

One exception to the warrant requirement left open by the decision is a case in which officers reasonably fear for their safety or the lives of others.

The two cases arose following arrests in San Diego and Boston.

In San Diego, police found indications of gang membership when they looked through defendant David Leon Riley's Samsung smartphone. Prosecutors used video and photographs found on the smartphone to persuade a jury to convict Riley of attempted murder and other charges. California courts rejected Riley's efforts to throw out the evidence and upheld the convictions.

The court ordered the California Supreme Court to take a new look at Riley's case.

In Boston, a federal appeals court ruled that police must have a warrant before searching arrestees' cellphones.

Police arrested Brima Wurie on suspicion of selling crack cocaine, checked the call log on his flip phone and used that information to determine where he lived. When they searched Wurie's home and had a warrant, they found crack, marijuana, a gun and ammunition. The evidence was enough to produce a conviction and a prison term of more than 20 years.

The appeals court ruled for Wurie, but left in place a drug conviction for selling cocaine near a school that did not depend on the tainted evidence. That conviction also carried a 20-year sentence. The administration appealed the court ruling because it wants to preserve the warrantless searches following arrest.

The justices upheld that ruling.

WASHINGTON (AP) — CIA officers in Iraq have been largely hunkered down in their heavily fortified Baghdad compound since U.S. troops left the country in 2011, current and former officials say, allowing a once-rich network of intelligence sources to wither.

That's a big reason, they say, the U.S. was caught flat-footed by the recent offensive by a Sunni-backed al-Qaida-inspired group that has seized a large swath of Iraq.

"This is a glaring example of the erosion of our street craft and our tradecraft and our capability to operate in a hard place," said John Maguire, who helped run CIA operations in Iraq in 2004. "The U.S. taxpayer is not getting their money's worth."

Maguire was a CIA officer in Beirut in the late 1980s during that country's bloody civil war. He spent weeks living in safe houses far from the U.S. Embassy, dodging militants who wanted to kidnap and kill Americans. In Iraq, where Maguire also served, the CIA's Baghdad station in Baghdad remains one of the world's largest. But the agency has been unwilling to risk sending Americans out regularly to recruit and meet informants.

Iraq is emblematic of how a security-conscious CIA is finding it difficult to spy aggressively in dangerous environments without military protection, Maguire and other current and former U.S. officials say. Intelligence blind spots have left the U.S. behind the curve on fast-moving world events, they say, whether it's disintegration in Iraq, Russia's move into Crimea or the collapse of several governments during the Arab Spring.

Without directly addressing the CIA's posture in Iraq, agency spokesman Dean Boyd noted that 40 officers have died in the line of duty since September 2001. He called "offensive" any suggestion that "CIA officers are sitting behind desks, hiding out in green zones, or otherwise taking it easy back at the embassy."

Boyd said the intelligence community provided plenty of warning to the Obama administration that the insurgent Islamic State in Iraq and Levant, known as ISIL, could move on Iraqi cities.

"Anyone who has had access to and actually read the full extent of CIA intelligence products on ISIL and Iraq should not have been surprised by the current situation," he said.

Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., the chairman of the House intelligence committee, agreed, saying, "This was not an intelligence failure — this was a policy failure."

However, while U.S. intelligence officials predicted that ISIL would attempt to seize territory in Iraq this year, they did not appear to anticipate ISIL's offensive on June 10 to seize Mosul, which created a momentum that led to other successes. Officials also expressed surprise at how quickly the Iraqi army collapsed. And military leaders contemplating quick airstrikes said there was not enough intelligence to know what to hit.

A senior U.S. intelligence official who briefed reporters this week acknowledged that "a lot of the (intelligence) collection that we were receiving diminished significantly following the U.S. withdrawal in Iraq in 2011, when we lost some of the 'boots on the ground' view of what was going on." Under rules for such briefings, the official spoke on condition that her name not be used.

In the same briefing, the official disclosed that U.S. intelligence did not know who controlled Iraq's largest oil refinery. And she suggested that one of the biggest sources of intelligence for American analysts is Facebook and Twitter postings.

The U.S. spent nearly $72 billion on intelligence gathering in 2013, and

It was telling that President Barack Obama sent 300 special operations troops "to help us gain more intelligence and more information about what ISIL is doing and how they're doing it," Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said — an implicit admission that American intelligence-gathering about ISIL has been insufficient.

No one suggests that the CIA carries all the blame. After American troops left Iraq, the State Department abandoned plans for a huge diplomatic staff at a network of facilities.

Kevin Carroll, a former CIA operations officer with Middle East experience, said it's unreasonable to expect the agency to collect "from a fortified war zone embassy the breadth and depth of information collected when U.S. military bases and troops throughout Iraq helped support CIA operations."

But for Maguire and other former intelligence officials, it's clear the CIA has allowed its espionage muscles to atrophy.

CIA officers lived in well-guarded bases all over Iraq during the U.S. occupation, and met frequently with Iraqis. But even then, it wasn't traditional spying. Often, agency operatives would travel to meet sources in highly visible armed convoys. They knew that the U.S. military was somewhere over the horizon if things went wrong. And security concerns often left case officers confined to their bases, several former CIA officers said.

The agency operates the same way in Afghanistan, where it is also closing a series of remote bases as the U.S. troop presence there draws down. Intelligence collection there is expected to suffer as well.

The CIA's approach is designed, current and former officials say, to prevent the sort of thing that happened in 1984, when Beirut station chief William Buckley was kidnapped from his apartment by Hezbollah and tortured to death. But bases can also be attacked, as in 2012 in Benghazi, Libya, when two CIA contractors were among four dead Americans.

Other intelligence services accept more risk. In Israel's Mossad intelligence agency, most case officers operate outside of embassies, posing as civilians under what the U.S. calls "non official cover," said Ronen Bergman, who covers intelligence affairs for Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth and is working on a history of the Mossad.

In countries such as Iran where Israel does not have an embassy, the Mossad sends deep cover operatives to live and gather intelligence, knowing they could be executed if discovered, Bergman said.

But Israel can call upon a large population of native Arabic speakers whose appearance allows them to blend in. U.S. intelligence leaders have been talking for years about the need to recruit non-white case officers and train them in difficult languages, but current and former officials say it just hasn't happened at the level anticipated after 9/11.

The intelligence budget document leaked last year by Edward Snowden shows that after 11 years of war in Afghanistan, just 88 people in civilian U.S. intelligence agencies got bonuses for speaking Pashto, the language of the Taliban and its allies.

WASECA, Minn. (AP) — A Minnesota teenager accused of planning to massacre his family and high school classmates mocked the attacks on the Boston Marathon and Sandy Hook Elementary School as "pretty lame" and "pathetic" and said he idolized one of the Columbine gunmen, according to recordings of his police interrogation.

The 17-year-old was arrested in April after authorities said they found him with bomb-making materials in a storage locker at his school in Waseca, 70 miles south of Minneapolis.

In the two recordings released Tuesday, the teen calmly described his plan to "dispose of" his family, set a fire as a diversion and use explosives and guns to attack his school. He said he thought it would be "fun" and that he was following his idol, Eric Harris, who alongside Dylan Klebold slaughtered 13 people and injured 26 more before committing suicide at Columbine High School in 1999.

The teen told police he was not targeting anyone specific at the school.

"I would have taken anyone out, I didn't care," he told detectives. He insisted, though, that he had only wanted to kill older students because he didn't want to be remembered in the same way as Sandy Hook shooter Adam Lanza, who killed 20 elementary school children in his December 2012 attack.

"That's just pathetic," he said. "Have some dignity."

He told officers he planned to use two pressure cooker bombs with explosives three times more powerful than the ones used in the 2013 Boston Marathon attack, according to the recordings.

"I thought three casualties was pretty lame," he said.

He planned to put one pressure cooker inside a recycling bin and detonate it during lunch when lots of students would be around. He would detonate a second bomb when students were running away, he told investigators. Then he would throw Molotov cocktails and pipe bombs, and "when the SWAT comes I would destroy myself," he said.

The teen said he had been planning the attack for more than a year and jotted it down in a notebook that he kept locked in his room.

However, his father told reporters last week that he does not believe his son would have carried out the plan and that there were no signs the teen was troubled.

The teen was charged with four counts of attempted murder, two counts of first-degree damage to property and six counts of possession of a bomb by someone under 18. The Associated Press generally does not identify juveniles accused of crimes. Prosecutors are trying to have the case moved to adult court.

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Information from: Star Tribune, http://www.startribune.com