I neglected some important points in this morning’s article on the NSA’s choreographed, confusing disclosures at Tuesday’s House Intelligence Committee Hearing. As many commenters rightly pointed out, listeners must evaluate whether intelligence and law enforcement officials can be taken at…
The headline story of Tuesday’s House Intelligence Committee hearing with NSA Director Keith Alexander was the disclosure of four terrorist plots, which his agency’s PRISM Internet data analysis program and sweeping phone metadata collection were credited with preventing. It was…
Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian has wrapped up an online question-and-answer session with NSA leaker Edward Snowden. He answered questions about his backstory, motivations, contact with the Chinese government (none, he said), and claims of awesome, universal surveillance power as…
Saying he “could not be more proud” of the people working with him, NSA Director Keith Alexander clarified questions surrounding his agency’s surveillance activities in a hearing with the Senate Appropriations Committee. Alexander, an army general, was technically appearing in…
A quick note about the NSA leak story as the big red machine that is AmSpec’s Washington Bureau (also its only bureau — Ed.) fires up for a busy news week. Yesterday morning The Guardian’s scooping savant Glenn Greenwald tweeted: Clapper:…
The greatest fear that I have regarding the outcome for America of these disclosures is that nothing will change. People will see in the media all of these disclosures. They’ll know the lengths that the government is going to grant…
With his fourth scoop (however broadly defined) in as many days, The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald reports along with Ewan MacAskill on a third NSA program. Meet “Boundless Informant”: The focus of the internal NSA tool is on counting and categorizing…
In plain English, 175,000 jobs were added last month but unemployment actually rose a tenth of a percent because more of the population was looking for work. The unemployment rate ticked up to 7.6%, driven by an equal increase in…
With his third major scoop in as many days, The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald reports that the president has aggressively solicited targets for cyber-attack from his intelligence chiefs in an effort to advance American interests worldwide: Barack Obama has ordered his…
President Obama responds to concerns that the NSA trampled civil liberties on his watch: Around the same time Republican lawmakers, including Utah Tea Party Senator Mike Lee, held a press conference to say that they had not been briefed on the…