The social media giant misleads the American people using tactics ripped straight from the surveillance agency

By Trevor Timm – Medium

Once again, Facebook is embroiled in a scandal where it was caught violating millions of people’s privacy. A blockbuster story published by the New York Times before the holidays revealed that Facebook had entered into secret “partnerships” with various technology companies — Amazon, Microsoft, Netflix, Spotify, and others — that gave hundreds of internet giants vast access to private information for years without Facebook users’ consent.

On Thursday night Justice Department prosecutors inadvertently published court documents that strongly suggest that the Trump administration has secretly filed charges against WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange. Shortly afterwards, the Washington Post confirmed that charges have indeed been filed against Assange.

Dear Speaker Ryan, Minority Leader Pelosi, and members of the House of Representatives:

We write to express our concerns about congressional oversight of intelligence activities. As you know, Congress is responsible for authorizing and overseeing these programs. In recent years, experts and policymakers have expressed concern that congressional oversight efforts are falling short.

US whistle-blower Edward Snowden yesterday claimed that Saudi Arabia used Israeli spyware to target murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

Addressing a conference in Tel Aviv via a video link, Snowden claimed that software made by an Israeli cyber intelligence firm was used by Saudi Arabia to track and target Khashoggi in the lead up to his murder on 2 October inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul.

A year or so ago, a reporter asked me for a comment on what I expected from the Trump administration vis-à-vis the treatment of whistleblowers. I was so down on the recently-departed Obama administration at the time that I said I expected Trump would see whistleblowers differently from Obama, who saw them as leakers and malcontents. I said nobody could be as bad as Obama was on whistleblowing and that I thought Trump and his administration might be easier to deal with.

The Custom and Border Protection (CBP) agency’s powers to carry out warrantless searches of electronic devices has serious press freedom implications, including weakening the ability of the media to protect source privacy, the Committee to Protect Journalists found in its report, “Nothing to declare: Why U.S. border agency’s vast stop and search powers undermine press freedom.”

Today, we are revealing—for the first time—the Justice Department’s rules for targeting journalists with secret FISA court orders. The documents were obtained as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by Freedom of the Press Foundation and Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University.

GCHQ’s methods for bulk interception of online communications violated privacy and failed to provide sufficient surveillance safeguards, the European court of human rights has ruled.

But the ECHR found that GCHQ’s regime for sharing sensitive digital intelligence with foreign governments was not illegal, and it explicitly confirmed that bulk interception with tighter safeguards was permissible.

Whistleblower Reality Winner was officially sentenced to 63 months in prison on Thursday, after a federal judge rubber-stamped a plea deal already agreed to by the prosecution and Winner’s lawyers. As the prosecution acknowledged, it is the longest sentence for a journalist’s source in federal court history.