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…
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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,…
Canada, At War For 13 Years, Shocked That ‘A Terrorist’ Attacked Its Soldiers
Favorite (updated below – Update II) TORONTO – In Quebec on Monday, two Canadian soldiers were hit by a car driven by Martin Couture-Rouleau, a 25-year-old Canadian who, as The Globe and Mail reported, “converted to Islam recently and called himself Ahmad Rouleau.” One of the soldiers died, as did Couture-Rouleau when he was shot by police…
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…
Ebola Fears Turn Into an Epidemic of Racism and Hysteria
Favorite Thus far, there have been just eight confirmed cases of Ebola in the United States following an outbreak in West Africa. Far more contagious here has been a new virus of hysteria — and of the sort of ignorant discrimination that immigrants in general and Africans specifically have endured for decades. People are being…
Is Obama Stalling Until Republicans Can Bury the CIA Torture Report?
Favorite Continued White House foot-dragging on the declassification of a much-anticipated Senate torture report is raising concerns that the administration is holding out until Republicans take over the chamber and kill the report themselves. Senator Dianne Feinstein’s intelligence committee sent a 480-page executive summary of its extensive report on the CIA’s abuse of detainees to…