The FBI requires state and local police to keep quiet about the capabilities of a controversial type of surveillance gear that allows law enforcement to eavesdrop on cellphone calls and track individual people based on the signals emitted by their mobile devices, according to a bureau document released recently under a Freedom of Information Act request.
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Read More… from FBI gags state and local police on capabilities of cellphone spy gear
The US Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) has issued a lawsuit against the FBI, as it continues its push for more information about surveillance practices. EPIC has released a statement in which it explains that it has filed official papers in which it demands access to the results of internal FBI "privacy impact assessments".
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Read More… from EPIC sues the FBI over missing citizen-surveillance reports
Twenty. Years. Yesterday, July 16, 2014, the Justice Department Office of the Inspector General (OIG) released its third report of Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Lab misconduct first alleged twenty years ago – in 1994 – by Dr. Frederic Whitehurst.
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The FBI may be unfairly withholding its records on a photojournalist who worked an International Monetary Fund protest, a federal judge ruled.
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Read More… from Photog Wins Access to FBI’s Cache of Records
The Tribune used state records and trial transcripts to show how an undercover FBI agent, using the alias Carlos Vargas, formed a political committee while posing as a strip club manager in the Chicago suburb of Harvey.
The records list Vargas as providing about $140,000 to the committee, named The Harvey Good Government Group 2007. Fliers tied to the committee promoted the re-election of the suburb's controversial mayor.Continue>>>
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From PC World: The Federal Bureau of Investigation should make public a legal opinion it used to justify a past telephone records surveillance program because other agencies may still be relying on the document for surveillance justifications, the Electronic Frontier Foundation argued in court Tuesday.
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Read More… from EFF: FBI should release surveillance justification document
From Huffington Post: The FBI is going long to keep its secret files on animal rights activists a secret: It is fighting public records requests about why it keeps denying public records requests.
It’s a deeply meta strategy that’s also like the set-up for an Abbott and Costello routine — but to Ryan Shapiro, the MIT doctoral candidate profiled in Mother Jones on Wednesday as “the punk rocker who can liberate your FBI file,” it’s nothing new.
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Read More… from The FBI doesn’t want you to know why it won’t tell you its secrets
From RT: The Federal Bureau of Investigation spent years conducting surveillance on a prominent libertarian anti-war web site, in part because the agency mistakenly believed that the activist page had tried to hack the FBI's own site, according to a new report.
FBI documents viewed by the The Guardian reveal that an investigation into Antiwar.com was motivated by an examination of a “threat” that planned to “hack the FBI web site.” Yet the site never threatened any such thing.
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Read More… from Anti-war site, upon notifying FBI of cyber-threat, became surveillance target
From NJ.com: In 2008, the Federal Bureau of Investigation revised its operational guidelines known as the Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide. Under the new marching orders, the document allowed agents to engage in limited racial and ethnic profiling when assessing criminal and terroristic threats.
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Read More… from 3rd Circuit decision allows FBI to continue to withhold race data from ACLU
