Is the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence planning, amid the debt crisis theater, to quietly speed up the renewal of a terrible, Bush-era surveillance law? According to Wired.com's Spencer Ackerman, it looks like it.
Kathleen Turner, director of legislative affairs for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) has admitted that her agency doesn't have policies in place governing the use of cell phone tracking in the intelligence community. She told Congress that her office was still examining the “view of the full contours of this authority and will get back to you.”
The Committee to Stop FBI Repression has released a letter, written by Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), asking Attorney General Eric Holder about the infiltration of anti-war activism in the Midwest, and subsequent issuance of Grand Jury subpoenas to members of those activist groups.
Many privacy researchers and activists are up in arms about Google's policy on anonymity and its hot new social media service, Google+. The company has deleted entire Google accounts of people it says are using false names. Given the kinds of information people store in their Google cloud, people are seriously concerned and are taking their fight to the internet, hoping to convince the goliath to shift gears.
Wired.com's Spencer Ackerman has quite the scoop: it turns out the FBI was using questionably anti-Islam training materials as recently as 2009. A must read.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation reports that various Latin American countries have been engaged in extremely invasive political spying over the past five years.
In Sunday's Boston Globe, columnist Kevin Cullen finally, publicly asks some questions that Boston residents have been asking for years. What did Mr. Mueller know about the FBI's involvement with Whitey Bulger, and for how long did he know it? And perhaps more importantly, why is Mr. Mueller on his way to having his term as director of the FBI extended, given the agency's ugly history with long-term directors, and Mr.
Data centers are power hungry beasts of buildings. The federal government is looking to save some money, and so they are consolidating their information warehouses.
The Electronic Privacy Information Center is suing the NSA to find out what kind of technical standards the agency is developing for spying on internet traffic. A judge has allowed the NSA to say that it won't confirm or deny that it is working with Google to develop such a system.