Favorite What’s public for me is private for thee. At least that’s what Monroe County, N.Y. believes when it comes to where you drive your car. Monroe police have been using high-speed cameras to capture license plates in order to log vehicle whereabouts. As of July, the County’s database contained 3.7 million records, with the…
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Obama Knew Arming Rebels Was Useless, But Did It Anyway
Favorite What’s worse: Launching a disastrous military campaign under false pretenses to achieve goals you wrongly believe are attainable? Or launching a disastrous military campaign you know is doomed in order to help your party win an election? I ask in light of today’s New York Times story about how President Obama asked the CIA…
Blowing the Whistle on CIA Torture from Beyond the Grave
Favorite In the fall of 2006, Nathaniel Raymond, a researcher with the advocacy group Physicians for Human Rights, got a call from a man professing to be a CIA contractor. Scott Gerwehr was a behavioral science researcher who specialized in “deception detection,” or figuring out when someone was lying. Gerwehr told Raymond “practically in the…
The FBI Director’s Evidence Against Encryption Is Pathetic
Favorite FBI Director James Comey gave a speech Thursday about how cell-phone encryption could lead law enforcement to a “very dark place” where it “misses out” on crucial evidence to nail criminals. To make his case, he cited four real-life examples — examples that would be laughable if they weren’t so tragic. In the three…
Remembering Rick Piltz, Who Fought Government Suppression of Science
Favorite Rick Piltz, a climate change whistleblower, died this weekend of cancer. Piltz revealed in 2005 that the Bush administration was revising supposedly scientific reports to cast doubt on the existence of human-caused climate change. He leaked copies of the edited documents to The New York Times, after resigning from his job as a senior…
Top NSA Official Has a Lucrative Side-Business
Favorite A new report suggests that a high-ranking NSA official may have a profitable side-gig in the “electronics” business. Last month a Buzzfeed’s Aram Roston published a story documenting potential self-dealing by the head NSA’s Signals Intelligence Directorate, Teresa O’Shea. O’Shea happens to be married to the Vice President of DRS Signal Solutions – a company which circumstantial…
Russian Interest in Ukraine Now Includes Cyber Warfare
Favorite A hacker group in Russia exploited a security flaw in Microsoft Windows software to spy on NATO, the Ukraine, and a number of other targets, according to a report this week from a Texas cybersecurity firm. The hackers also launched attacks on a French telecommunications firm, a Polish energy firm, an unknown Western European…
How the UAE Tried to Silence a Popular Arab Spring Activist
Favorite Earlier this year, as a wave of counterrevolution and repression continued to roll back popular democratic uprisings across the Middle East, one of the Arab Spring’s most popular online activists found himself sitting in a jail cell. Iyad el-Baghdadi, a popular blogger and Twitter personality who first came to prominence during the revolutions in…
Blackwater Founder Remains Free and Rich While His Former Employees Go Down on Murder Charges
Favorite A federal jury in Washington, D.C., returned guilty verdicts against four Blackwater operatives charged with killing more than a dozen Iraqi civilians and wounding scores of others in Baghdad in 2007. The jury found one guard, Nicholas Slatten, guilty of first-degree murder, while three other guards were found guilty of voluntary manslaughter: Paul Slough,…
Surprise: U.S. Drug War In Afghanistan Not Going Well
Favorite A new report has found the war on drugs in Afghanistan remains colossally expensive, largely ineffective and likely to get worse. This is particularly true in the case of opium production, says the U.S. Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. In a damning report released Tuesday, the special inspector general, Justin…