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Secrecy and Security News

Newer News: March 2014

February 2014

• Spy Chief James Clapper: We Can't Stop Another Snowden by Eli Lake, The Daily Beast, February 23. "President Obama's Director of National Intelligence spent his life protecting secrets. Then came the biggest leak of all."
• Live and Let Leak: State Secrets in the Snowden Era by Jack Shafer, Foreign Affairs, March/April. "The lesson of Snowden, a lesson Sagar points to but refuses to embrace, is that the United States' muddled system of leaks by lawbreakers to the press is an irreplaceable last resort."
• Rand Paul files lawsuit against NSA, President Obama over phone surveillance by James R. Carroll, The Courier-Journal, February 12. "Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul and a libertarian group Wednesday asked a federal court to halt the National Security Agency's collection of telephone data and to purge what already has been stored since 2006."
• Why Teaching How to Beat Polygraphs Can Land You in Jail by Joshua Swain, Reason, February 11. "Last September, Chad Dixon was sentenced to 8 months in a federal prison for teaching clients counter-measures for polygraph tests. Federal prosecutors charged Dixon with obstructing justice--they view his business as undermining an important tool used to check the credibility of government employees and prosecute criminals."
• Americans find swift stonewall on whether NSA vacuumed their data by Marisa Taylor and Jonathan S. Landay, McClatchy Newspapers, February 11. "Since last year's revelations about the National Security Agency's massive communications data dragnets, the spy agency has been inundated with requests from Americans and others wanting to know if it has files on them. All of them are being turned down."
• Ex-State Dept. adviser pleads guilty in leak to Fox News by Ann Marimow, Washington Post, February 7. "Stephen Jin-Woo Kim admitted sharing information from a top-secret intelligence report on North Korea with Fox chief Washington correspondent James Rosen."
• Statement of Defense Attorney Abbe Lowell on Stephen Kim Guilty Plea, February 7. "On June 11, 2009, Stephen Kim did what so many government officials do every day in Washington, DC: he talked to a reporter. Regrettably, the topic and some of the information that he discussed with a reporter was also contained in a classified report."
• CIA confirms agency obliged to follow federal surveillance law by Spencer Ackerman, The Guardian, February 7. "But neither the agency nor its Senate overseers will say what, if any, current, recent or desired activities the law prohibits the CIA from performing -- particularly since a section of the law explicitly carves out an exception for 'lawfully authorized' intelligence activities."
• Seattle judge will join super-secret spy court by Michael Doyle, McClatchy News, February 7. "Judge Richard C. Tallman's new appointment to the three-member Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review potentially gives him oversight of highly sensitive national security matters that may never see the light of day."
• MuckRock.com Requester's Voice: Interview with the Federation of American Scientists' Steven Aftergood, MuckRock, February 7. "What was your first request, and how did it go? Why did you try using public records in the first place?"
• Roberts names 2 new FISA court judges by Tal Kopan, Politico, February 7. "Chief Justice John Roberts has appointed two new judges to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act courts, the secretive courts that handle questions of national surveillance, the courts announced Friday."
• NSA nominee unknown to privacy advocates by Julian Hattem, The Hill, February 1. "The president's nominee to take over the helm of the National Security Agency (NSA) is mostly a stranger to privacy and civil liberties advocates."

Older News: January 2014

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Updated March 5, 2014