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…
Category: U.S.
NY: Walcott defends plan to release student records to private biz
Paula Katinas reports: Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott defended a controversial plan to allow private businesses to get a look at information about public school students, telling a town hall audience in Bensonhurst that pupil’s privacy would not be violated. Read more on the Brooklyn Eagle. The fact that the schools will be providing “names, addresses, test…
Secretive Spy Court Approved Nearly 2,000 Surveillance Requests in 2012
David Kravets reports: A secretive federal court last year approved all of the 1,856 requests to search or electronically surveil people within the United States “for foreign intelligence purposes,” the Justice Department reported this week. The report (.pdf), released Tuesday to Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader from Nevada, provides a brief glimpse into the caseload of…
Residents near music festival “required” to wear RFID armbands
The L.A. Times has reported that people who live anywhere within a mile of the site of the Coachella Valley Music Festival in Indio, California (and perhaps residents’ visitors, if any visitors were allowed?) were “required” to wear individually numbered RFID-chipped tracking bracelets throughout the two weekends of the festival: In 2011, the organization began using microchip-embedded…