The House and Senate intelligence oversight committees were established to provide a check against intelligence abuses run amok in the shadows. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court was set up for the same reason. But in the decades since these institutions were created, they...
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...
Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) sits on the Senate Intelligence Committee, where he has special access to classified information about United States intelligence operations. As I’ve written about before, Senator Wyden has repeatedly used that special access to warn the American people about gaps between...
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...
Last night, we learned some startling news about the Department of Justice’s battle against Apple: the FBI claims that an outside party recently demonstrated to the FBI a way to break into Syed Rizwan Farook’s iPhone, and so the DOJ has hit the...
On June 26, 2014, Muckrock contributing editor Evan Anderson filed a public records request with the Boston Police Department seeking emails between BPD officials and employees of the National Security Agency (NSA). More than two months later, the police told Anderson he would...
The wall separating “foreign” intelligence operations from domestic criminal investigations has finally, fully collapsed. The FBI now plans to act on a rule change initiated by the Bush administration and finally massaged into actionable policy by Obama: Soon, domestic law enforcement agencies like...
Today the ACLU of Massachusetts testified before the state legislature’s Joint Transportation Committee in support of proposals to regulate law enforcement and corporate use of license plate readers and the data they produce. If you haven’t heard of license plate readers, here’s...
California congressman Ted Lieu yesterday wrote FBI director Jim Comey a public letter, asking the nation’s top cop to withdraw “the FBI’s demand of Apple” that it “create software it does not have in order to weaken its smartphone encryption system.” The...