Favorite The Federal Bureau of Investigation decided in 2007 that it didn’t need to be the Federal Bureau of Investigation to trick a teenager online. Instead, it acted as a local newspaper. At the time, the FBI wanted to identify the owner of an anonymous MySpace account connected to bomb threats against a high school…
All posts in The Intercept
Ed Snowden Taught Me To Smuggle Secrets Past Incredible Danger. Now I Teach You.
Favorite Late on the evening of January 11, 2013, someone sent me an interesting email. It was encrypted, and sent from the sort of anonymous email service that smart people use when they want to hide their identity. Sitting at the kitchen table in the small cottage where I lived in Berkeley with my wife and two…
Iraq War Now Being Fought By People Who Were Just Kids When It Started
Favorite Last week, the Pentagon announced the death of the first American serviceman in the war against ISIS. Marine Lance Cpl. Sean Neal was killed in what was described as a “non-combat incident” in Iraq, making him the first American to die in “Operation Inherent Resolve” – America’s latest military excursion into that country. Cpl. Neal…
Compare How U.S. Responds To The Killing Of American Kids Based On Identity Of The Killers
Favorite Last Wednesday in Jerusalem, a three-month-old American baby was killed, and eight other people injured, when a car plowed into a crowded sidewalk; the driver, a 20-year-old Palestinian named Abed a-Rahman a-Shaludi, was killed by police when he tried to flee the scene. The family of the driver insisted it was an accident, but Israeli officials…
Frustrated CIA Blames Torture Report Delays on Senators Who Want It To Be Intelligible
Favorite The CIA today hotly denied that it is intentionally holding up the release of a Senate report on its role in torturing detainees, charging instead that Senator Dianne Feinstein’s intelligence committee is responsible for dragging out the negotiations. “The suggestion that CIA is delaying or obstructing the negotiations over redactions is patently false,” agency…
All the NSA Will Say About Its Alarmingly Entrepreneurial Top Spy Is That She’s Resigning
Favorite Teresa O’Shea used to be the National Security Agency’s director of signals intelligence, plus the wife of an executive in the business of selling things to agencies like hers, plus the host of a home-based signals intelligence business, plus the owner, via yet another business, of a six-seat airplane and resort-town condo. She’s going…
Revisionist History 101: Bush Was Right About Iraq WMD!
Favorite Perhaps the most movingly pitiful exercise in American politics is the periodic attempt by Iraq War advocates to grasp at new developments that might somehow vindicate their disastrous, criminal support of that endeavor. The latest attempt came yesterday, when The New York Times published an explosive new story on American soldiers who were wounded while handling corroded munitions…
UN Report Finds Mass Surveillance Violates International Treaties and Privacy Rights
Favorite The United Nations’ top official for counter-terrorism and human rights (known as the “Special Rapporteur”) issued a formal report to the U.N. General Assembly today that condemns mass electronic surveillance as a clear violation of core privacy rights guaranteed by multiple treaties and conventions. “The hard truth is that the use of mass surveillance technology effectively…
What ‘Democracy’ Really Means in U.S. and New York Times Jargon: Latin America Edition
Favorite One of the most accidentally revealing media accounts highlighting the real meaning of “democracy” in U.S. discourse is a still-remarkable 2002 New York Times Editorial on the U.S.-backed military coup in Venezuela, which temporarily removed that country’s democratically elected (and very popular) president, Hugo Chávez. Rather than describe that coup as what it was by definition – a direct attack on democracy by…
Egypt’s U.S-Backed Military Regime is Brutalizing Student Protestors
Favorite Just a few short months after John Kerry disingenuously congratulated Egypt’s military junta for “transitioning to democracy”, the young students who helped galvanize the 2011 Egyptian Revolution are back protesting its increasingly draconian rule. Campus protests have broken out in several major cities calling for the release of imprisoned student activists and for the removal of new limits on academic freedom…