President Barack Obama has issued a directive that appears to finally provide whistleblower protections for intelligence agency employees in government. The directive declares employees able to access classified information “can effectively report waste, fraud and abuse while protecting classified national security information.” It also includes a “prohibition” against retaliation against employees, who report “waste, fraud [...]

A congressional committee held a hearing on the security failures that led to the killings of four Americans at a US consulate in Benghazi, Libya, on September 11. The hearing included two witnesses from the State Department that agreed to begin to share key details on what occurred. Rep. Darrell Issa, chairman of the House Oversight & [...]

A report from the Congressional Research Service was recently released and it looked at how law enforcement had been cracking down on animal rights and environmental activists. It highlighted how the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act is used against activists. Will Potter of GreenistheNewRed.com covered the report in a post on October 2. The report, as [...]

A scathing report released days ago by a Senate subcommittee concluded Department of Homeland Security fusion centers at the state and local level had not “produced useful intelligence to support federal counterterrorism efforts.” It also found “DHS-assigned detailees” have “forwarded ‘intelligence’ of uneven quality—oftentimes shoddy, rarely timely, sometimes endangering citizens’ civil liberties and Privacy Act [...]

The House of Representatives passed a whistleblower protection bill by unanimous consent on September 28. It expanded protection for disclosures of government wrongdoing and reformed certain government processes for review of whistleblower retaliation claims. But, the House removed an entire section of the legislation that would have provided some degree of protection for intelligence officials. [...]

Newly released documents from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) show warrantless surveillance of Americans’ electronic communications by federal law enforcement agencies through pen register and trap devices sharply increased. Notably, because of how easy it is for government to intercept communications, government now regularly exercises the authority to intercept “to” and “from” addresses of email messages, [...]

(update below) The Senate Intelligence Committee, chaired by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, has proposed multiple measures that the committee believes will go a long way toward preventing future leaks. However, the proposals, which have been included in an intelligence authorization bill for the next fiscal year, should be striking to people who have listened to hysterical [...]

A congressional subcommittee heard statements from investigators and members of the US military who had observed shocking conditions at the Dawood military hospital in Afghanistan. One colonel, Mark Fassl, described how he had observed “open vats of blood draining out of wounds,” along with “many family members” taking care of their loved ones instead of [...]

A United States judge ruled on Monday the whistleblower provisions passed in the Dodd-Frank law in 2010 could be applied retroactively to protect not only people employed by parent companies but also those working for subsidiaries of parent companies. The court held that Dodd Frank merely clarified Congress’s original intent in the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley statute.  [...]

A survey reported yesterday indicates opposition to the United States has risen among Pakistanis in the last couple of years. More Pakistanis now view the US as “the enemy” than in past years. This is largely a result of the presence of US personnel in the country and how opposed Pakistanis are to drone strikes. [...]