Robyn Greene writes: Last week served as yet another reminder of the threats posed to Americans’ privacy by the post-Patriot Act surveillance state. According to the Department of Justice’s annual report, FISA applications to the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) in 2012 revealed a continued increase in the FBI’s surveillance of Americans. The report covers…
Category: Govt
White House picks Twitter lawyer as Internet privacy officer
Declan McCullagh reports: President Obama has picked Nicole Wong, Twitter’s legal director, to be the White House’s first chief privacy officer, CNET has learned. Wong previously was a vice president and deputy general counsel at Google at its Mountain View, Calif., headquarters, where she managed a team of lawyers that worked with the company’s engineers…
EPA Continues to Release Producers’ Personal Information
The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association (NCBA) is appalled to learn that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) continues to illegally release information on cattle operations to the activist groups Earth Justice, the Pew Charitable Trust and the Natural Resources Defense Council. In this latest action, the agency again admitted it had released too much information on…
Are all telephone calls recorded and accessible to the US government?
Glenn Greenwald’s piece in The Guardian is your must-read for this weekend. Here’s a snippet: On Wednesday night, Burnett interviewed Tim Clemente, a former FBI counterterrorism agent, about whether the FBI would be able to discover the contents of past telephone conversations between [Katherine Russell and her husband, deceased bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev]. He quite clearly insisted…