New Report: US Cannot Comply with International Torture Treaty without Transparency

A report from Open the Government argues that we cannot comply with our obligations under the Convention Against Torture unless we stop hiding all our torture.

Condi Rice Asked Jill Abramson to Stop Jim Risen from Reporting on Merlin

Last week, the Nation published ExposeFacts’ Norman Solomon and Marcy Wheeler story on the Government’s War on James Risen. The story described how people complicit in the programs Risen described had tried to convince the New York Times not to publish Risen’s stories. Shortly before the 2004 presidential election, Risen and his colleague Eric Lichtblau […]

James Bamford Story Reveals Similarity between Reagan-Era Efforts to Thwart NSA Reporting and Today’s

Some of the tactics James Bamford had to use to get his book, the Puzzle Palace, published are still being used today to expose the NSA’s activities.

White House Edits Pool Reports — But Not Station Chief Name

The Washington Post has a story on the petty edits that the White House Press Office makes to pool reports. In pool reports, White House beat reporters take turns to serve as the one journalist recording more mundane events. Their report gets distributed to all journalists on the White House press list and other reporters […]

Partial Victory for Whistleblower Jeffrey Scudder

In July, ExposeFacts shared the story of Jeffrey Scudder, a CIA project manager who lost his job over an effort to FOIA old copies of CIA’s internal journal, Studies of Intelligence, that had been cleared for release but then withheld. The other day, Scudder won a partial victory in his fight to get the CIA to […]

New Email Release Shows: Peter King Demanded an Investigation To Find Journalist’s Sources Like Peter King

On May 7, 2012, then Associated Press reporters Adam Goldman and Matt Apuzzo broke the story of a thwarted al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) underwear bomb plot. Within a day, several news outlets — including ABC News, Los Angeles Times, and New York Times — reported that the culprit was actually a Saudi agent. On May 9, 2012, […]

A Tale of Two Alleged Iran Nuke Leakers

While we wait to see whether DOJ sends James Risen to jail for exposing one dumb Iran op, what is happening with the StuxNet leak case?

FBI Hides Its Use of NSLs from Congress

The FBI refuses to let DOJ’s Inspector General share some of the same information the office has shared on past reports, citing attorney-client privilege.

Pulitzer Prize Winners Call on DOJ to Withdraw James Risen’s Subpoena

The Department of Justice has been pursuing James Risen and his sources for over 8 years. 14 Pulitzer prize winning journalists think it’s time DOJ stopped.

The Government’s Insistence that Chefs Might Be Spooks Is Holding Up the Cafeteria Line

It started when Secrecy News observed Sodexo, the food service company, looking for a chef with security clearance. Though it may seem ridiculous, the requirement for a chef with a Top Secret clearance exemplifies a significant policy problem, namely the use of the security clearance process as an employee screening tool.