Newly released Cambridge Police Department records cast doubt on FBI claims about its agents’ activities in Cambridge in the critical hours before the Tsarnaev brothers allegedly shot and killed MIT police officer Sean Collier, carjacked another man, and engaged in a spectacular firefight...
In recent months, the FBI has taken to the press and to congress to complain about how the increasingly widespread adoption of end-to-end encryption in commercial technologies like the iPhone and Whatsapp is resulting in an intelligence blackout, a process the feds...
In response to the FBI’s public relations blitz against encryption technology and recent proposals in Congress to undermine the security of digital information, the ACLU of Massachusetts today sent a letter to the Massachusetts Congressional delegation calling on them to reject any...
Wired’s Kim Zetter reports on a little known but hugely consequential FBI activity: hacking. RECENT HEADLINES WARN that the government now has greater authority to hack your computers, in and outside the US. Changes to federal criminal court procedures known as Rule...
How do you spell chutzpah? I submit an alternate spelling: O-B-A-M-A D-O-J. How the Obama administration interprets the phrase “government transparency,” in three acts. Act One: Secret Law The Obama administration is trying to keep secret a 2003 Office of Legal Counsel memo...
As the battle over digital security heats up, with the FBI and law enforcement on one side and security experts and even intelligence officials on the other, it’s more important than ever to shine a light on the government’s efforts to defeat...
The ACLU has filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the Department of Justice, seeking information about the department’s efforts to compel technology companies to provide access to encrypted messages. The request was filed on April 5, 2016, the very same...
People concerned about digital security can rest easy now that the FBI has backed away from its public fight with Apple over iPhone encryption, right? Not so fast. As many of us have said from the beginning, this case was not about...
The FBI has backed down from its legal battle with Apple. In a court filing yesterday, the government said it obtained the necessary data from Syed Farook’s county government owned iPhone and “no longer requires the assistance from Apple.” According to the Department of...
A Boston Regional Intelligence Center (BRIC) “quarterly threat assessment” dated January 2016 and marked “unclassified/not for public release,” but posted publicly online, lists “animal rights and environmental extremists” and “anarchist extremists” as “groups [that] represent a significant domestic terrorist threat.” Animal rights activists, environmentalists,...