NPR reporters poked around in Maria Butina's social media world, looking at the accused Russian agent's thousands of social media friends and reaching out to over 200 individuals. The resulting investigative report paints a portrait of Butina's life, from Siberia, to the tight-knit Moscow pro-guns shooting community, to D.C, Las Vegas, Washington state, and South Dakota. Read the rest

The next Trump book you need to read, which I will as soon as it drops, is The Apprentice, by Washington Post Pulitzer winning natsec reporter Greg Miller. Read the rest

Freedom of the Press Foundation recently filed a huge brief in the organization's case demanding that the Justice Department release its secret rules for targeting journalists with National Security Letters. And in related news, a coalition of 37 news organizations - including the New York Times, The Associated Press, USA Today, Buzzfeed, and tons more - filed an amicus brief in support of the Freedom of the Press Foundation case, demanding that the Department of Justice do the same. Read the rest

The FBI used to publish excellent advice about encrypting your devices to keep your data secure when your stuff is lost or stolen; this advice has been silently dropped now that FBI Director James Comey is trying to stop manufacturers from using crypto by default. Read the rest

Michael Isikoff at NBC News reports that the FBI has "dramatically increased its use of a controversial provision of the Patriot Act to secretly obtain a vast store of business records of U.S. citizens under President Barack Obama." The FBI filed 212 requests for this kind of data in a national security court last year, which represents a 1,000-percent increase from the number of similar requests four years prior. Read the rest

At Freedom of the Press Foundation, Jason Leopold writes about this video he shot at the section of Guantánamo where the hunger strikers are being held. What you hear around 3 minutes in is the a Muslim call to prayer being led by the leader of the hunger striking detainees, from inside his cell. Read the rest

According to Marc Ambinder and D.B. Grady's new book Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry, the secretive National Security Agency spying programs have become institutionalized, and have grown, since 9/11.

Shane Harris at the Washingtonian read through the book's account of these sweeping and controversial surveillance programs, conducted under the code name "Ragtime":

Ragtime, which appears in official reports by the abbreviation RT, consists of four parts.

Ragtime-A involves US-based interception of all foreign-to-foreign counterterrorism-related data; Ragtime-B deals with data from foreign governments that transits through the US; Ragtime-C deals with counterproliferation actvities; and then there's Ragtime-P, which will probably be of greatest interest to those who continue to demand more information from the NSA about what it does in the United States.

P stands for Patriot Act. Ragtime-P is the remnant of the original President’s Surveillance Program, the name given to so-called "warrantless wiretapping" activities after 9/11, in which one end of a phone call or an e-mail terminated inside the United States. That collection has since been brought under law, but civil liberties groups, journalists, and legal scholars continue to seek more information about what it entailed, who was targeted, and what authorities exist today for domestic intelligence-gathering.

Harris, who is an experienced national security reporter, analyzes some of those findings in his Washingtonian item. You can buy a copy of the book here (released Feb. 14, 2013).

(HT: Laura Poitras/Freedom of the Press Foundation) Read the rest