SECRECY & THE SECURITY STATE - page 53

The recent spread of law enforcement-related malaise hasn’t eluded cops tasked with overseeing some of the more idyllic parts of the United States. According to details of a leaked Office of Personnel Management survey published this week, the US Forest Service police force is overseen by officials who have fostered a morale-sapping culture of fear that appears to be reinforcing itself. Almost fifty percent of Forest Service Law Enforcement and Investigations (LE) employees who responded to the survey complained of a “fear of reprisal” for…

Keep Reading

The highest ranking Democratic lawmaker overseeing the judicial branch described a Tuesday ruling striking down President Obama’s immigration executive order as being the result of a crooked procedure. The decision, which came from Pittsburgh-based US District Court Judge Arthur Schwab, was called into disrepute by outgoing Senate Judiciary Committee chair Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.). Leahy said the ruling was “very unusual.” “No party in the case raised such a challenge nor were there briefings or arguments on that issue,” he said in a statement. “I strongly…

Keep Reading

As Senate Democrats used the extended Congressional session to pass executive nominations, the body, without fanfare on Monday, approved of legislation to expand the War on Drugs. But opponents are hoping the bill will die as quietly as it was passed. The measure has not been taken up by the House, and runs counter to the spirit of recently passed laws that relax federal restrictions on drug use. The Transnational Drug Trafficking Act of 2013, a bill co-authored by Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Chuck…

Keep Reading

The federal government might lack significant data on veteran suicides for a program specifically designed to mitigate the psychological damage of war, according to a watchdog report released Friday. The Government Accountability Office said that the Department of Veterans Affairs has not been verifying the accuracy of some of its medical centers’ reporting on the number of veterans who take their own lives. The investigation, which probed records from five department facilities between fiscal years 2009 and 2013, led the report’s authors to posit that the…

Keep Reading

Court documents declassified by the Department of Justice and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) show how the government relied on fear and false promises to gain a top secret court’s approval for the post-9/11 surveillance dragnet program. “[They] seek to use our own communications infrastructure and laws against us, as they secrete agents into the United States, waiting to attack at a time of their choosing,” wrote then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) in December 2006,…

Keep Reading

Edward Snowden popped-up via video-link from an undisclosed location in Russia on Friday to talk surveillance reform efforts in Congress, the so-called Torture Report, and his chances of returning to the US. He spoke to a CATO conference on surveillance, privacy, and civil liberties, and he said Congress is mostly taking “baby steps” toward reform and that nothing so far “really solves the problem.” “We really need to think more broadly about the kind of society we want to live in,” he said during a…

Keep Reading

The Department of Justice has come under fire for aggressively investigating whistleblowers, journalists, and internet activists like Aaron Swartz, but a government watchdog said the agency lacks concern about actual malfeasance committed by its own. The Government Accountability Office said in a report released Thursday that the department’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), which collects, investigates, and punishes its misbehaving lawyers, lacks transparency and doesn’t “ensure that attorneys found to have engaged in misconduct serve the discipline imposed upon them.” The oversight agency discovered that…

Keep Reading

One of the authors of a transparency reform bill passed unanimously by the Senate took aim at House Republicans after the lower chamber recessed for the 113th Congress without acting on it. Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) issued a statement saying the legislation would have restricted the executive branch’s ability to withhold information from the public, and that should have made it congressional conservatives’ bread and butter. “I would think that members of the House Republican leadership, who have spent so much time on oversight of…

Keep Reading

Despite rhetoric about reining in the National Security Agency, privacy-minded Senators sat on their hands this week as a provision to dramatically expand the agency’s authority to spy on Americans was quietly ushered through Congress. The new provision gives Congressional approval, for the first time, to spying activities carried out under Executive Order 12333 – a breathtakingly broad authority to conduct foreign surveillance that’s also known to collect enormous amounts of data belonging to Americans. “Congress codified the status quo, which happens to be an…

Keep Reading

A special report issued Thursday by the Justice Department confirmed what is common knowledge among those who don’t think “feminist” is a derogatory term. Women—particularly those who live on college campuses—tend to report sexual assault to police at alarmingly low rates. The study, which looked at the experience of 18-24 year old women between 1995 and 2013, found that only 20 percent of sexually assaulted college students went to the police. The proportion of non-student survivors who report attacks was 32 percent. Non-students were also…

Keep Reading