Surveillance
Sealed court files obscure rise in electronic surveillance
Every year, the federal government makes thousands of requests for court-ordered electronic surveillance, often without a warrant. And long after the investigations that spawned them have ended, the vast majority of these legal proceedings are sealed indefinitely from public view—unlike nearly all other aspects of American judicial proceedings. The Wall Street Journal surveyed 25 of…
Read MoreUS secretly built ‘Cuban Twitter’ to stir unrest
The Associated Press reports that the U.S. Agency for International Development was behind the creation of a “Cuban Twitter,” a social network designed to undermine the communist government and push Cubans toward dissent. The project – called ZunZuneo – drew tens of thousands of subscribers in the more than two years in operated. American contractors…
Read MoreExtra Extra Monday: Overdoses, background checks, housing markets, midwifery and fraudulent accounting
Use only as directed | ProPublica and This American Life “About 150 Americans a year die by accidentally taking too much acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol. The toll does not have to be so high.” Read the stories from ProPublica. Company Behind Snowden Vetting Did Check on D.C. Shooter | Bloomberg “The U.S. government…
Read MoreNSA Officers Spy on Love Interests
The Wall Street Journal reports: “National Security Agency officers on several occasions have channeled their agency’s enormous eavesdropping power to spy on love interests, U.S. officials said. The practice isn’t frequent — one official estimated a handful of cases in the last decade — but it’s common enough to garner its own spycraft label: LOVEINT.”
Read MoreU.S. directs agents to cover up program used to investigate Americans
A secretive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration unit is funneling information from intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records to authorities across the nation to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans, according to a Reuters report.
Read MoreU.S. Postal Service Logging All Mail for Law Enforcement
“As the world focuses on the high-tech spying of the National Security Agency, (Leslie James Pickering’s) misplaced card offers a rare glimpse inside the seemingly low-tech but prevalent snooping of the United States Postal Service,” a New York Times report states.
Read MoreNSA in Utah: Mining a mountain of data
In many ways, the new Utah Data Center is the quintessential black box. But a sharper picture of what is likely to go on within its walls has come into focus with recently leaked documents on NSA surveillance, combined with prior revelations, building specifics, information from defense contractors and hints dropped by top NSA brass,…
Read MoreEdward Snowden: the whistleblower behind the NSA surveillance revelations
In this article published by The Guardian, the 29-year-old source behind the biggest intelligence leak in the NSA’s history explains his motives, his uncertain future and why he never intended on hiding in the shadows. Read this IRE Transparency Watch report for more coverage of the NSA surveillance.
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