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By Perry Anderson
$26.37
By David Kipen
$10.20
$19
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A look at the day’s political happenings, including a rosy economic forecast is released and the IRS scandal leads to at least one resignation.
Posted on May 15, 2013
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A look at the day’s political happenings, including the Justice Department is caught spying on The Associated Press and a new poll shows Sarah Palin’s U.S. Senate prospects.
Posted on May 13, 2013
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Michal Osmenda (CC BY-SA 2.0)
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The company’s first transparency report shows the U.S. and Turkish governments were nearly tied in 2012 for making the most requests for customer data, such as IP addresses, emails and photographs.
Posted on Mar 22, 2013
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Flickr/CSIS: Center for Strategic & International Studies
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By Ralph Nader —
Behind the public relations sheen, the photo opportunities with groups of poor people in the developing world, an increasingly militarized State Department operated under Hillary Clinton’s leadership.
Posted on Feb 8, 2013
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Official U.S. Navy Imagery (CC BY 2.0)
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Seoul is seeking four “advanced” surveillance drones priced at a total of $1.2 billion to gather intelligence on North Korea’s activities after the U.S. turns over wartime command of Korean troops—a legacy of the 1950s Korean War—later this decade.
Posted on Dec 26, 2012
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By David Sirota — Your chipper TV friend Flo, otherwise known as Progressive Insurance’s ubiquitous shill, wants you to be excited—very excited.
Posted on Sep 6, 2012
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Kate B. Harding (CC BY 2.0)
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New Jersey’s attorney general has assured a group of Muslim leaders that a New York City police unit that had surveilled Muslims in the Garden State is no longer operating there.
Posted on Sep 6, 2012
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Public Domain Photos (CC BY 2.0)
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Technical advancements and plunging costs for digital storage mean that government surveillance programs no longer have to be selective about the data they store. And with the average person leaving a trail of Web browsing, emails, text messages and more, there’s plenty of information that can be filed away on individuals.
Posted on Aug 24, 2012
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MITNewsOffice/YouTube
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Scientists funded by the Pentagon have created a robot for the purpose of looking into hard-to-reach places, from spaces trapped beneath earthquake rubble to the private quarters of state enemies.
Posted on Aug 11, 2012
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eflon (CC BY 2.0)
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The NYPD this week turned over an audio recording of a call between a confused New Jersey building superintendent and a 911 dispatcher, in which the caller reports discovering an apartment empty except for surveillance equipment. The room turned out to be a safe house for New York police officers spying on New Jersey’s Muslims.
Posted on Jul 25, 2012
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Democracy Now!
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Doctors and scientists working for the Food and Drug Administration became targets of surveillance and some lost their jobs after blowing the whistle on the agency’s approval of medical devices that they believed were not safe for public use.
Posted on Jul 21, 2012
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The Penguin Press
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Human rights lawyer Scott Horton, on the Harper’s Magazine website, asks career CIA counterterrorism agent Henry Crumpton what America can do to balance the need for secrecy with the people’s right to know what their government is doing. Crumpton is author of the new book “The Art of Intelligence.”
Posted on Jul 5, 2012
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YouTube
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Our picks for this week’s Truthdiggers are a little unusual in that we don’t really know who they are—at least not specifically. But we do know them by their collective, if faceless, alias: Anonymous.
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AP / IRIB TV
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Another story has emerged to further make the headline-ready case that tensions are ratcheting up between Tehran and Washington, this time from the espionage department. On Monday, news hit the wires that an Iranian court had sentenced 28-year-old Amir Mirzaei Hekmati to death for allegedly spying for the CIA.
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Flickr / FreeTheHikers
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Update: The Iranian Justice Ministry has contradicted Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and said the release of the two hikers who were sentenced to eight years in prison could be delayed.
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Enrique Dans (CC-BY)
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Remember, remember the fifth of November 2011. That’s the day hactivist collective Anonymous plans to “kill” the second-busiest website on the Internet “for the sake of your own privacy.” In a video message, Anonymous warns that “you are not safe from them [Facebook] nor from any government” to which the social networking website feeds information. (more)
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Flickr / espenmoe
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In a recent interview with Russia Today, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange had harsh words for Facebook, denouncing the company for enabling the U.S. government to keep close tabs on the behavior, relationships and personal details of its citizens.
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Flickr / FreeTheHikers
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Trial has begun in Tehran for two of three American hikers accused of espionage after blundering across the border into Iran. The third hiker, Sarah Shourd, was freed on bail last September and is back in the United States.
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Flickr / GuenterHH (CC-BY-ND)
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The supervising bureaucrats at the Justice Department acknowledged that the FBI should not have been spying on activists, although they decided that the bureau was not targeting anti-war and environmental groups for political reasons.
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Fake news by Andy Borowitz —
According to the head of the domestic spying operation, China decided to scrap its elaborate array of spy satellites, eavesdropping devices and closed-circuit surveillance cameras after recognizing that Facebook put them all to shame.
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presstv.ir
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American scientist Stewart David Nozette, who has worked for NASA, the Pentagon and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and even did a stint at the White House, could spend the rest of his life in jail after being charged with passing secrets to an undercover FBI agent posing as an Israeli intelligence officer.
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infowars.net
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A judge has rejected a challenge to FISA brought by activists abroad who fear that their communications may be tapped by the U.S. government. The judge said fear is not enough to warrant a change in the law, and that challenges need to make explicit claims of unlawful surveillance. The question remains: How does one know he is being surveilled?
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forward.com
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President Obama’s Justice Department has moved to drop all espionage charges against two former AIPAC lobbyists after they were accused of disseminating sensitive information to journalists and diplomats gleaned from conversations with senior Bush administration officials.
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a.abcnews.com
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In a move that strains the already delicate ties between Tehran and Washington, Iran has sentenced Iranian-American journalist Roxana Saberi to eight years in jail for allegedly spying for the U.S. government.
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aclu.org
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The Justice Department has released nine secret memos and opinions written by the Office of Legal Counsel that authorized some of the Bush administration’s unlawful national security policies.
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By Amy Goodman — Millions have served time in U.S. prisons for crimes that fall far short of those attributed to the Bush administration. Some criminals, it seems, are like banks judged too big to fail: too big to jail, too powerful to prosecute.
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George Stephanopoulos picked the president-elect’s brain Sunday in a wide-ranging interview. On Gaza, Obama defended his silence but he said to expect Mideast action on Day 1. On prosecuting Bushies for abuses such as torture or domestic spying, don’t hold your breath. On the economy, “Everybody’s going to have to give.”
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gizmodo.com
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With everybody’s eyeballs and earlobes focused on the economy and the election, the Justice Department pushed through rule changes that allow the FBI to go back to the bad old days of spying more aggressively on Americans. Civil libertarians and even some lawmakers are in an uproar. The Center for Investigative Reporting has a must-read report that explains why.
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Former Time correspondent Andrew Meier presents a riveting exhumation of the previously unknown story of Cy Oggins, an early American-Jewish communist who spied for the Soviets and was killed by them in 1947.
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antiwar.com
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What’s the big deal about the new FISA “compromise”? Simply put, it legitimizes warrantless spying on Americans while papering over one of George W. Bush’s worst abuses. Daniel Ellsberg would like your help in stopping it, provided you can set aside 60 seconds of your Monday.
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By Marie Cocco — The president and other fear mongers love to harangue Americans with the specter of terrorism when their pet projects (and our freedoms) are on the line, but when it comes to the basic programs that protect us from disaster, money talks louder than threats.
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Lawmakers who take a principled stand on the tough and often complex issues that face our nation typically struggle to condense the relevant intricacies into a comprehensible sound bite. Here, Sen. Russ Feingold bucks the trend as he explains the administration’s plan for spying on Americans.
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Rep. Pete Hoekstra, R-Mich., responding to closed testimony from the CIA’s acting general counsel, John Rizzo, said it appeared that the officer who destroyed evidence of “enhanced” interrogations was acting against orders. Jose Rodriguez, the official in question, is asking for immunity before he tells his side of the story to Congress.
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masternewmedia.org
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James Harris and Josh Scheer —
“Spying Blind” author Amy Zegart gives Truthdig a status report on America’s intelligence agencies and explains why our intelligence system is so broken and why our democracy may be to blame.
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By Ellen Goodman — Pretty soon, we’re going have to amend the favorite mom and dad moniker of the moment. Those much vaunted helicopter parents are turning into black-helicopter parents. The image of parents hovering over their kids is morphing into the darker image of parents spying on their kids.
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Under pressure from Congress, Verizon has provided some insight into the government’s domestic surveillance program. The telecommunications giant defended the legality of its actions, but admitted complying “as expeditiously as possible” when federal officials, without a subpoena, asked for telephone and Internet records.
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masternewmedia.org
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“Spying Blind” author Amy Zegart gives Truthdig a status report on America’s intelligence agencies and explains why our intelligence system is so broken and why our democracy may be to blame.
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By Amy Goodman — John Lennon would have turned 67 years old last week had he not been murdered in 1980 by a mentally disturbed fan. On his birthday, Oct. 9, his widow, peace activist and artist Yoko Ono, realized a dream they shared.
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guardian.co.uk
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It turns out that George Orwell, famed author of “1984” and originator of the term “Big Brother,” was spied on by his government for more than 10 years. Members of Britain’s MI5 suspected the writer of being a communist, until they bothered to read him, and were apparently baffled by his “bohemian” clothes.
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By Andy Borowitz — The satirist writes that just-resigned Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ motivation is that he wants to spend more time eavesdropping on his family.
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J. Michael McConnell, the director of national intelligence, has in part explained Congress’ hurry to revise domestic surveillance law. It seems that the FISA court, established three decades ago to keep the government from abusively spying on American citizens, decided that the administration’s warrantless wiretapping program was illegal—and that just wouldn’t do.
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The Bush administration’s domestic spying program has depended on the willing participation of America’s telecommunications giants, and all but one, Qwest, were willing to comply. Truthdig contributor Onnesha Roychoudhuri investigates the complex world of national security and regulation to find out whether Qwest’s extraordinary bad luck in recent years has been more than a coincidence—and what it means for what’s left of your privacy.
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By Eugene Robinson — It wasn’t so long ago that thinking the government was reading your mail, listening to your phone calls, tracking your movements and snapping photos along the way meant you were just paranoid. Ah, the good old days.
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gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/
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The National Security Archive at George Washington University has posted documents on its website that expose ugly activities by the CIA before reforms were made in the 1970s. The secrecy watchdog says the agency violated its charter for 25 years by spying on journalists and political dissidents, in addition to engaging in other nefarious activities.
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Former Deputy Attorney General James Comey reveals the circumstances surrounding the reauthorization of the domestic spying program, including then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales’ late-night visit to an ailing John Ashcroft in order to “take advantage of a very sick man who did not have the powers of the attorney general” at the time.
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An internal Justice Department investigation has documented multiple abuses by the FBI in obtaining the private records of U.S. residents. Even with the broad powers of the Patriot Act in place, the bureau is still required to certify that the phone, e-mail and financial documents it seeks are at least related to investigations of terrorism or intelligence activities.
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softvote.com
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President Bush has finally agreed to allow a secret court to oversee the NSA’s wiretapping program, which had been operating without warrants for years. The administration’s capitulation after 13 months of stubborn resistance might have something to do with pending congressional investigations and legal battles.
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washingtonpost.com
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The Justice Department will, at long last, examine the NSA’s domestic spying program, through which agents have eavesdropped on countless phone calls and e-mails. Unfortunately, the review will not explore the legality of the program and was described by one Democrat as an attempt at appeasement.
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Join Truthdig’s Robert Scheer, along with Arianna Huffington, Tony Blankley and Matt Miller, for a lively discussion on the week in politics, policy and culture. This week: the Bush-Republican detainee-interrogation deal, U.N. rants, midterm elections, corporate spying, upheaval at the Los Angeles Times and the furor surrounding the pope’s recent comments on Islam.
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Truthdigger of the Week: Sen. Angus King
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