Form Over Substance: The OLC Drone Memos
Harkening back to the days of appointing torture memo author Jay Bybee to a lifetime position as a federal judge, the Obama administration has nominated David Barron, author of at least two Office of...
View ArticleEspionage Act for Chinese Hackers vs. Espionage Act for Snowden
WaPo reports: The Justice Department has indicted five members of the Chinese military on charges of hacking into computers and stealing valuable trade secrets from leading steel, nuclear plant and...
View ArticleLowering the Bar for Government Transparency: Drone Memo and Freedom Act
The Obama administration has set the transparency bar for revealing secret law dreadfully low. WaPo reports: The Justice Department will publicly release a secret 2011 memo that provided the legal...
View ArticleVA Scandal: Remember the Whistleblowers
The U.S. Department of Veteran's Affairs (VA) scandal has started to take on a life of its own, as lawmakers and veterans are sharply criticizing VA head Eric Shinseki after employees called attention...
View ArticleDeception Retrospective: How NSA Deceived the Public About Mass Surveillance
This week is the one year anniversary of whistleblower Edward Snowden's groundbreaking revelations about the National Security Agency's (NSA) mass surveillance apparatus.Last week, Edward Snowden...
View ArticleOne Year Later: Clapper Gets a Little Better Than the "Least Untruthful"
One year after whistleblower Edward Snowden brought to light the National Security Agency's (NSA) out of control mass surveillance apparatus and exposed Director of National Intelligence James Clapper...
View ArticleWhistleblowers Refuse to be Silenced
Whistleblower Chelsea Manning wrote a timely and important op-ed in the New York Times this weekend. From jail, Chelsea warns that excessive secrecy has kept Americans in the dark about Iraq’s...
View ArticleBREAKING - When U.S. Government Claims Authority to Kill U.S. Citizens: OLC...
After the Justice Department fought aggressively for years to keep it secret, a court order finally forced the Obama administration to release a substantial portion of the Justice Department Office of...
View ArticleNewly Released Assassination Memo Reveals Unsound Legal Reasoning Used to...
Yesterday, the Obama administration complied with a Court order requiring release of the Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) memo justifying the assassination without charge or trial of...
View ArticleSupreme Court Stands Up for Privacy Rights: Holds Searching Cell Phone...
In a 9-0 ruling written by Chief Justice Roberts, the Supreme Court ruled today that searches of cell phones require a warrant except in cases with exigent circumstances. In addition to being a clear...
View ArticleHow many drones kill how many people? Questions Remain about Drone Program
This week's release of the Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel’s memo justifying the assassination by drone of American citizen Anwar Al-Awlaki sheds a sliver of light on an incredibly opaque,...
View ArticleSecrecy Agreements Violate Whistleblower Protection Law & Executive Order
The Washington Post has a must-read article on how federal agency "secrecy agreements" can violate federal whistleblower protection laws: The DOE wanted them to sign nondisclosure agreements that...
View ArticleThe Privacy and Civil Liberties Board's Fail on NSA Surveillance
After delivering a well-deserved blow to the NSA’s 215 domestic surveillance program the Privacy and Civil Liberties Board (PCLOB) fell flat on its face this morning and released a report endorsing the...
View ArticleNSA & FBI Targeted Muslim-American Leaders For Invasive Surveillance
Over the past year, the world learned that the National Security Agency (NSA) engages in costly, ineffective, mass surveillance collecting both metadata and content of communications of hundreds of...
View ArticleCIA Station Chief in Germany Expelled due to NSA Spying
The fallout over U.S. government espionage in Germany just got more serious. In a move uncommon among close allies the German government asked the CIA station chief to leave the country today.As the...
View ArticleLawsuit Challenges "Terrorist" Watchlists: Made Possible by Press and...
Last week The Intercept reported that the government's bloated "terrorist" watchlists would be more aptly named "innocents" watchlists: Nearly half of the people on the U.S. government’s widely shared...
View ArticleFerguson Spotlights War on Journalists
More journalists have been attacked, threatened and detained in Ferguson, MO. Scott Olsen, the Getty photographer who brought us some of the most stirring images from the Ferguson protests, and The...
View ArticleGovernment Sought to Punish Yahoo for Challenging Surveillance Orders
Tech companies have taken a lot of heat for their cooperation with the National Security Agency's (NSA) broad mass surveillance programs, particularly PRISM.Recently released Foreign Intelligence...
View ArticleNY Times (Again) Carries Water for Government's Post Hoc Drone Assassination...
American Anwar al-Awlaki has been dead for over four years now, but The New York Times is still giving substantial ink to the U.S. government's self-serving meme that Awlaki was an "operational"...
View ArticleClassified E-mail in the News Again: This Time, Hillary’s
It is not in dispute that Hillary Clinton had work e-mails on a private server at home while she served as Secretary of State. It is not in dispute that her cache of 30,000 e-mails contained classified...
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