As Josh Gerstein reports, Leonie Brinkema has unsealed her November 2010 ruling quashing the government’s subpoena of James Risen to testify before the grand jury. Gerstain describes several interesting details revealed in the ruling–including that the government withheld information, including details surrounding the 2005 testimony of, apparently, a Senate staffer. Go check out those details. [...]

Remember that GCHQ/MI6 agent, Gareth Williams, who was found dead in a duffel bag last year? At first, the narrative around his death centered on rumors he had been killed in a weird gay sex game. Amid such sensational reporting, other articles revealed Williams worked closely with the NSA on wiretapping Rashid Rauf, one of [...]

As bmaz reported while I was looking at flowers in Northern MI, POGO liberated via FOIA the Inspector General report central to the Thomas Drake case. While much of the report is redacted (except for, perhaps unsurprisingly, a number of comments about limitations to ThinThread that have been decontextualized by redactions), a few interesting details [...]

I’ll probably have several things to say about the James Risen filings of the past week. But for the moment, I wanted to focus on his assertions about the government’s access of his phone records. Remember, these assertions are not new: Josh Gerstein reported them in February. Risen said the government never notified him that [...]

Please join me, Firedoglake, Netroots Nation, and the progressive enterprise as Marcy Wheeler welcomes one of us: Senator Russell Feingold.

This exchange last Thursday between Senator Al Franken and FBI Director Robert Mueller was frustrating enough–Senator Franken’s questions were the only ones on civil liberties Mueller faced, and the Director seemed pretty miffed to be questioned on the subject in the first place. But I’m even more troubled by the exchange now that we’ve learned [...]

Over the weekend, I expressed some curiosity over who hacked the IMF. They at least say it was a state actor. Security experts said the source seemed to be a “nation state” aiming to gain a “digital insider presence” on the network of the IMF, the inter-governmental group that oversees the global financial system and [...]

There’s an interesting discussion at the end of Josh Gerstein’s article on the Drake plea agreement. He points out that after Judge Bennett ruled that the government needed more descriptive substitutions for some of its exhibits, DOJ did not appeal the decision. Experts said it was unlikely that Bennett’s rulings accounted entirely for the government’s [...]

There’s something that’s missing from the coverage of the Thomas Drake plea bargain. Yes, this is a huge victory for Drake. A huge victory for whistleblowers. Yes, it proves that William Welch is an even bigger hack than the failed Ted Stevens case showed him to be. But what about the two other charged documents? [...]

Thomas Drake just signed a plea agreement, admitting to Exceeding Authorized Use of a Computer. (h/t Steven Aftergood) The plea says: The defendant intentionally accessed a computer and exceeded his authorized access; by doing so, the defendant obtained information from any department of agency of the United States. [snip] From in or about February 2006 [...]