The Moakley courthouse in Boston.
In court last week in US v. Tsarnaev, federal Judge George O'Toole said something stunning about the presumption of innocence in US trials.
Masha Gessen reports for the New Yorker:
Independent researcher Adam Johnson emailed the FBI this morning to ask them about who built the bombs that detonated at the Boston marathon in April 2013. The Bureau and DOJ have admitted in court that they do not know who built the bombs, or where they were built.
Here's the exchange:
When Massachusetts-based reporter Shawn Musgrave obtained some of the Boston Police Department's license plate reader data, he found that police appeared to be targeting working class and black neighborhoods with the controversial surveillance tool.
Those through-the-wall sensors police and federal agents have been using for years in secret? Like drones and other surveillance technologies, they migrated back to the United States from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Massachusetts state public records law is among the weakest in the nation. But even the toothless statute doesn't allow for flagrantly improper behavior like this, via the Bay State Examiner:
Help! What is this thing? Spotted at the Black Lives Matter protest today in Boston, on a truck with commercial plates. I saw the same piece of technology at an Occupy Wall Street protest in New York in 2012, and wrote about it here. I'm still not clear on what, exactly, it's for.
The Director of the FBI, James Comey, is outraged that the New York Times gave an al Qaeda official anonymity to discuss the Paris attacks. Outraged!
From the Times:
