FBI

The Trump Whistleblower Scandal Is Proving Edward Snowden Right

Snowden should’ve gone through “official channels,” his critics yelped. Here’s what happens when you do. By Nick Bauman HuffPost (9/24/19) Edward Snowden did it all wrong, his critics thundered. The former National Security Agency subcontractor should have used “other avenues available for somebody whose conscience was stirred and thought that they needed to question government actions,” then-President Barack Obama claimed in an August 2013 press conference, citing an executive order he had signed that — in theory at least — gave intelligence officers some whistleblower protections for the first time ever. “Snowden could have come to me,” George Ellard, then…

Read More

Bill McKibben Calls FBI Tracking Of Environmental Activists “Contemptible”

  By Steve Hanley Clean Technica (12/14/18) As the result of a Freedom of Information suit brought by The Guardian, the FBI has revealed it maintained an open investigation of 350.org — the climate activism group founded by Bill McKibben — and its members as part of an ongoing anti-terrorism campaign. “Trying to deal with the greatest crisis humans have stumbled into shouldn’t require being subjected to government surveillance,” McKibben says. “But when much of our government acts as a subsidiary of the fossil fuel industry, it may be par for the course.” He added the FBI’s apparent failure to distinguish between…


Government Documents Show FBI Cleared Filmmaker Laura Poitras After Six-Year Fishing Expedition & Harassment

  Press Freedom Tracker (12/6/17) The government recently revealed for the first time that federal agents maintained an open investigation of our client, Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras, for six years despite never finding any evidence that she committed a crime or was a threat to national security. Coming up empty handed after Poitras had been subjected to dozens of border searches, the FBI finally closed the investigation, according to agency documents we obtained. We’ve learned about this fishing expedition through documents we obtained in a Freedom of Information (FOIA) lawsuit filed on Poitras’s behalf to find out why she was constantly…


More Than 100 Federal Agencies Fail To Report Hate Crimes To The FBI’s National Database

  By A.C. Thompson & Ken Schwencke ProPublica (6/22/17) In violation of a longstanding legal mandate, scores of federal law enforcement agencies are failing to submit statistics to the FBI’s national hate crimes database, ProPublica has learned. The lack of participation by federal law enforcement represents a significant and largely unknown flaw in the database, which is supposed to be the nation’s most comprehensive source of information on hate crimes. The database is maintained by the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services Division, which uses it to tabulate the number of alleged hate crimes occurring around the nation each year. The FBI has identified…


New Book Makes The Case That FBI Obstructed Justice In Boston Bombing Investigation

By James Henery WhoWhatWhy (4/14/17) For almost four years, WhoWhatWhy has been a lone voice casting doubt on the FBI’s official narrative of the Boston marathon bombing. Now, investigative journalist and Boston-based ABC news producer Michele McPhee has raised many of the same questions we’ve been asking since two explosions and the subsequent manhunt traumatized New England’s largest metropolitan area. In her new book, Maximum Harm: The Tsarnaev Brothers, the FBI, and the Road to the Marathon Bombing, McPhee adds weight to WhoWhatWhy’s skepticism that the feds have fully disclosed  their dealings with the Tsarnaevs prior to the 2013 bombing….