SECRECY & THE SECURITY STATE - page 32

Major civil liberties advocates are asking President Obama to “publicly affirm” his support for online data encryption, even as the administration’s law enforcement organs work to cripple the information security technology. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, Demand Progress, the American Civil Liberties Union, Access, and others, including Twitter, have made the request in the form of a WhiteHouse.gov petition. If it garners 100,000 supporters, it will trigger an official response from the administration. “The government should not erode the security of our devices or applications, pressure…

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A government watchdog discovered several shortcomings in the Transportation Security Administration’s (TSA) screening operations at airports around the country, and has informed Congress about them in a classified report. Testifying before a Senate appropriations committee on Tuesday, Department of Homeland Security’s Inspector General John Roth publicly revealed a few details about his office’s classified TSA security audit—primarily that it yielded “disappointing and troubling” results. “The failures included failures in the technology, in TSA procedures, and in human error,” Roth told Senators in prepared remarks. “We…

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There was unanimous agreement among the nation’s top security and intelligence managers on Tuesday over the need for Congress to extend whistleblower protections to spies-for-hire. Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) used her time during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on cybersecurity to pitch legislation she introduced earlier his year that would shield contractors in the intelligence community from prosecution or retaliation for revealing waste, fraud, and abuse. An intelligence authorization bill last year afforded these protections exclusively to government employees working in spy agencies. “One…

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The Justice Department inspector general on Monday continued its documentation of allegations of Islamophobia in the federal prison system, noting in a regular department-wide report that nine new accusations of civil rights complaints were leveled against its employees. Most complaints involved Bureau of Prisons (BOP) guards; most were lodged by Muslims. Remarking that the sheer volume of complaints against DOJ employees makes it difficult for its office to pursue individual cases, the department IG said that all nine of the incidents were referred to the…

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In his address to Congress, Pope Francis touched on a number of divisive issues in American politics that excite passions in liberals, but his words encouraging the abolition of the death penalty in particular may have resonated most within the White House. Asked by reporters on Thursday to respond to the pontiff’s call on justice systems to “never exclude the dimension of hope and the goal of rehabilitation,” administration spokesman Josh Earnest said the President, too, shares concerns about capital punishment. “I think it’s fair…

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A Republican member of the Senate Judiciary Committee said that reforms being considered by the panel in the wake of nationwide protests against systemic racial inequality must include language to clarify what constitutes a criminal offense. Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) said that the importance of criminal intent—a judicial concept known in Latin as mens rea—has been underlooked in the writing and application of laws and regulations, and that the issue must be addressed by a legislative package currently being hashed out by the committee. “I…

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The Pentagon confirmed Thursday that it transferred a Guantanamo Bay prisoner to Morocco this week, however, the detainee’s legal team said it has no knowledge of his whereabouts and believes he is being illegally held captive. UK human rights group, Reprieve, released a statement expressing concern about their client, Younous Chekkouri, a Moroccan national who had been imprisoned at the US military facility in Cuba for 14 years until his Wednesday transfer. “[We] have been unable to meet or speak to him since the US…

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