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...
The Sunlight Foundation has ranked Massachusetts among the worst states in the nation on government transparency. Journalist Joshua Eaton’s recent correspondence with the Boston Police Department shows just how absurd that secrecy looks on the ground. In June 2014, fellow Boston-based muckraker Evan...
If you’ve got nothing to hide, why worry about warrantless mass surveillance? One reason among many: The people who have access to your private communications may not have your—or your child’s—best interest at heart. NextGov reports that officials at a recent Intelligence and National...
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...
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...
There’s been a lot of misinformation about the FBI’s battle to force Apple to weaken its digital security. Here are the top four myths about the case, followed by the top four reasons we’ve got to support Apple. The top four myths...
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...
Ever since the FBI announced its plans to try to use the All Writs Act to force Apple to write new code, cryptographically sign it, and deliver it to the county government-owned phone used by the San Bernardino shooter, we at the...
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...
For years, the FBI has begged congress to address what it says is a “going dark” problem. In July 2015, FBI director James Comey told the Senate Judiciary Committee law enforcement needs broader powers to force companies to build “backdoors” into their encrypted systems....