In an Al Jazeera report, in vivid detail, Jason Leopold describes daily life for both the detainees and guards at the Guantánamo detention facility in Cuba.

On October 6, 2020, Donald Trump tweeted that he wanted all documents related to the various Russia investigations and everything Hillary Clinton has ever done to be total declassified, "No redactions!"

In early September 2019, President Donald J. Trump tweeted something dumb. Specifically, this time it was about the encroaching Hurricane Dorian, and the places that it would or would not hit.

In addition to Florida – South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama, will most likely be hit (much) harder than anticipated.

After news broke last week that Google's latest head of national security policy engagement was Miles Taylor, former chief of staff to DHS undersecretary Kirstjen Nielsen, Google tried to calm its outraged staff by insisting that Taylor had nothing to do with Trump's Kids in Cages policy that shattered families forever and murdered innocent children, nor with Trump's racist ethnic cleansing Muslim Ban.

A new version of Robert Mueller's report on Russian interference in the 2016 elections has just been made public in response to a BuzzFeed News lawsuit.

Trump received 10 personal updates from Michael Cohen and encouraged a planned meeting with Vladimir Putin. “Make it happen,” Trump said of the Putin meeting.

The 2016 plans for Trump Tower Moscow 2016 included giving Russian President Vladimir Putin a $50 million penthouse.

Donald Trump's failed 2016 scheme to open a Trump Tower in Moscow is at the center of a charge unveiled Thursday against the president's former personal attorney Michael Cohen. — Read the rest

Today is the Fifth Annual Aaron Swartz Day and International Hackathon Weekend, and for the first time, the speakers will be webcast, starting at 1PM Pacific:

Jason Leopold (previously — Buzzfeed's public records activist, once branded a "FOIA terrorist" by the US government — has secured records of an investigation into gross offenses by an unnamed employee of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, detailing the employee's incredible workplace conduct, from playing video games all day to moonlight for 15 separate employers while working for ODNI, to violating confidentiality rules to dig up dirt on Edward Snowden.

The FBI has always been hostile to Freedom of Information Act requests: it habitually violates the law by allowing these requests to go more than 30 days without a response, and maintains a lab full of 1980s-vintage computers that it uses to (badly) fulfill public records request, so that it can reject requests on the basis that it lacks the technology to respond to them. — Read the rest

I just saw Oliver Stone's Snowden. It's an excellent film, no doubt, and also an important rebuttal to ongoing efforts by propagandists to limit America's conversation to who Edward Snowden is, rather than what this whistleblower revealed. — Read the rest

I'm speaking at Politicon, the "Non-Partisan Politics and Entertainment Fan-Fest," June 25-26 in Pasadena. It's gonna be fun AND totally weird in the best way.

Sessions include an "Ann Coulter vs. Van Jones" smackdown, and Jon Ronson asking the timeless question, "Is Donald Trump a Psychopath." — Read the rest

Since the earliest days of the Snowden revelations, apologists for the NSA's criminal spying program have said that Snowden should have gone "through channels" to report his concerns, rather than giving evidence to journalists and going public.

The Obama administration declared itself to be the "most transparent administration in history," but a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act reveals that Obama's Justice Department worked tirelessly behind the scenes to kill any chance of increased Freedom of Information Act access to governments at all levels, from lobbying Congress to kill FOIA reform to urging other administrative agencies to obstruct FOIA requests.

Securedrop is a robust, secure, anonymous system for whistleblowers to convey documents to news organizations, created by Aaron Swartz and taken up by the Freedom of the Press Foundation after his death.

"We regret that we briefly showed images of photographs and identification cards that should not have been aired without review," said MSNBC after doing precisely that earlier today in San Bernardino. — Read the rest

At the Black Hat hacker convention in 2013, Former NSA director Keith Alexander asked hackers to help the NSA come up with ways to protect Americans' privacy and civil liberties.

"How do we start this discussion on defending our nation and protecting our civil liberties and privacy?" — Read the rest

“The CIA accidentally released a document to me under FOIA and then asked that I refrain from posting it,” says VICE reporter Jason Leopold. He declined their request.

CIA interrogator of "high-value detainees" filed a complaint with the agency's internal watchdog in which he sought "whistleblower protection," claiming the CIA punished him as a "reprisal" for him cooperating with investigations into the treatment of detainees.

VICE News has obtained and published 39 pages of redacted documents from the CIA that shed new light on the treatment of CIA detainees after 9/11.