"Planning to make a joke on Twitter about bombing something? You might want to reconsider: According to a
report from Britain, two tourists were detained and denied entry into the U.S. recently after they joked about destroying America and digging up Marilyn Monroe. That the Homeland Security Dept. and other authorities—including the FBI—are monitoring such social media as Twitter and Facebook isn’t surprising. That these authorities are willing to detain people based on what is clearly a
harmless joke, however, raises questions about what the impact of all that monitoring will be."
* [more inside]
posted by ericb
on Jan 30, 2012 -
98 comments
The F.B.I
raided a data center in Reston, VA yesterday morning, seizing three racks of servers and disrupting service to the
Curbed Network,
Pinboard.in,
Instapaper,
altlabs.co.au, and
took the physical servers of tens of other clients. Curbed and AltLabs are currently still down. The F.B.I was reported in pursuit of one individual user, and agents took entire server racks,
perhaps because they mistakenly thought that “one enclosure is = to one server” according to DigitialOne, the Swiss hosting company.
posted by 2bucksplus
on Jun 22, 2011 -
64 comments
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is giving significant new powers to its roughly 14,000 agents, allowing them more leeway to search databases, go through household trash or use surveillance teams to scrutinize the lives of people who have attracted their attention.
posted by Trurl
on Jun 13, 2011 -
46 comments
Crime Magazine features
a rather matter-of-fact account of one of Leslie Ibsen Rogge's (
wiki) bank robberies. The article is an excerpt from a new book by Dane Batty, Rogge's nephew, called
Wanted: Gentleman bank robber: The True Story of Leslie Ibsen Rogge, One of the FBI’s Most Elusive Criminals. Rogge was once on the
FBI's Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list, and is apparently the first from that list brought in due to the Internet. He is due to be released in 2047.
posted by Harald74
on May 5, 2011 -
9 comments
Mining the Mother of all Data Dumps We now have a relatively massive haul of digital data from the OBL strike. There are several forensic toolkits in use by the private
(commercially available) and
public sector as well as
open-source.
Best practices include inventorying all the sources, cloning the sources so as to not damage pristine data, recovering any partial or damaged content, making the cloned sources read-only, adhering to legally-admissible tools standards, and documenting everything. There is an excellent source titled Digital Forensics and Born-Digital Content from the Council on Library and Information Resources [
pdf,
Resource Shelf]. But what to do next*?
[more inside]
posted by rzklkng
on May 4, 2011 -
40 comments
Bernard NotHaus has been
convicted of possessing and selling coins that resemble United States coins, violating
U.S.C. 18 § 486 and other US statutes. This follows three years after a raid on the Liberty Dollar offices. The trial took four days, the deliberation all of two hours. The US government is now pursuing a forfeiture case against Liberty Services for approximately $7 Million. (
previously)
[more inside]
posted by Hactar
on Mar 21, 2011 -
158 comments
Theo de Raadt:
I have received a mail regarding the early development of the OpenBSD IPSEC stack. It is alleged that some ex-developers (and the company they worked for) accepted US government money to put backdoors into our network stack, in particular the IPSEC stack. [more inside]
posted by These Premises Are Alarmed
on Dec 14, 2010 -
94 comments
ACLU launches "Spyfiles" to track domestic surveillance. "The American Civil Liberties Union launched a
new website Tuesday to track incidents of domestic political surveillance by the government along with a
report (PDF) claiming such incidents have increased steadily since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. According to the report there have been 111 incidents of illegal domestic political surveillance since 9/11 in 33 states and the District of Columbia. The website,
Spyfiles, will serve as the ACLU's online home for all news and reports of domestic spying."
posted by homunculus
on Jun 29, 2010 -
12 comments
The FBI has released their extensive files on US Senator Edward M. Kennedy to the public, covering their relationship with him between 1961 and 1985. The seven files, totaling more than 2,200 pages of documents
reveal (among other things,) the perhaps unsurprising news that the late Senator
received "scores" of
death threats from radical groups, including the Ku Klux Klan, “Minutemen” organizations, and the National Socialist White People’s Party. The release was initiated by a Freedom of Information Act Request from
Judicial Watch on May 3, 2010, (Complaint
pdf) but the FBI gave the Senator's family the
"rare opportunity" to raise objections before releasing the file.
posted by zarq
on Jun 14, 2010 -
20 comments
About 8 years ago,
U.S. Representative James Traficant (D-Ohio) was sentenced to 8 years in jail for kickbacks, fraud, bribery, and racketeering. He was tightly connected with the Youngstown Ohio Mafia. At the time, he was only the second Congressman since the Civil War to be expelled by his peers from the institution in a vote of 420:1. The fascinating story of the Youngstown Mafia - and Traficant's rise and fall - is told by
David Grann (of
Lost City of Z and
The New Yorker) in a 2000 article called
"Crimetown, U.S.A.". Traficant was released from prison on September 2, 2009 to a hometown hero
welcome. On February 23, 2010, Traficant
announced he will running for Congress as an Independent.
posted by stbalbach
on Feb 23, 2010 -
44 comments
The investigation into the 2001 anthrax attacks (dubbed "Amerithrax" by the FBI) is now closed. Yesterday, the Department of Justice released a 92-page
summary [pdf] of their investigation. Their conclusion -- that
USAMRIID scientist Bruce Ivins was the culprit -- was backed by an impressive amount of evidence, including microbiological detective work (p. 23 ff). But some of the investigation was downright bizarre....
[more inside]
posted by cgs06
on Feb 20, 2010 -
46 comments
The FBI has arrested James O'Keefe, one of the filmmakers behind the ACORN "pimp" video, and three others over an alleged plot to tap the phones in the office of Senator Mary Landrieu, D-La., according to
a report in the New Orleans Times-Picayune. (Previously:
1,
2,
3)
posted by ekroh
on Jan 26, 2010 -
263 comments
The FBI illegally collected more than 2,000 U.S. telephone call records between 2002 and 2006 by invoking terrorism emergencies that did not exist or simply persuading phone companies to provide records, according to internal bureau memos and interviews. FBI officials issued approvals after the fact to justify their actions. E-mails obtained by The Washington Post detail how counterterrorism officials inside FBI headquarters did not follow their own procedures that were put in place to protect civil liberties. The stream of urgent requests for phone records also overwhelmed the FBI communications analysis unit with work that ultimately was not connected to imminent threats.
A Justice Department inspector general's report due out this month is expected to conclude that the FBI frequently violated the law with its emergency requests, bureau officials confirmed.
Among those whose phone records were searched improperly were journalists for The Washington Post and the New York Times, according to interviews with government officials.
[more inside]
posted by VikingSword
on Jan 19, 2010 -
93 comments
For your perusal:
The New FBI Operations Manual. "
Agents may begin such assessments against a target without a particular factual justification. The basis for such an inquiry “cannot be arbitrary or groundless speculation,” the manual says, but the standard is “difficult to define.”
posted by Xurando
on Oct 29, 2009 -
16 comments
The movie adaptation of
Mark Whitacre's story, Steven Soderbergh's
The Informant, based on the book by
Kurt Eichenwald was released last month. Whitacre's life belies easy explanation: a hugely important corporate whistleblower, at some point during the five years he spent informing on agribusiness behemoth
Archer Daniels Midland Whitacre embarked on a massive embezzlement scheme that would see him imprisoned for nearly eight and a half years. To this day, the
FBI remain divided on whether he is more hero or villain.
[more inside]
posted by MuffinMan
on Oct 20, 2009 -
19 comments
Just released:
Saddam Hussein Talks to the FBI.
FBI special agents carried out 20 formal interviews and at least 5 "casual conversations" with former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein after his capture by U.S. troops in December 2003, according to secret FBI reports released as the result of Freedom of Information Act requests by the National Security Archive. Via
this Washington Post article.
posted by amyms
on Jul 2, 2009 -
25 comments
