By Justin Elliott/ProPublica

In defending the NSA’s sweeping collection of Americans’ phone call records, Obama administration officials have repeatedly pointed out how it could have helped thwart the 9/11 attacks: If only the surveillance program been in place before Sept. 11, 2001, U.S. authorities would have been able to identify one of the future hijackers who was living in San Diego.
Last weekend, former Vice President Dick Cheney invoked the same argument.
It is impossible to know for certain whether screening phone records would have stopped the attacks – the program didn’t exist at the time. It’s also not clear whether the program would have given the NSA abilities it didn’t already possess with respect to the case. Details of the current program and as well as NSA’s role in intelligence gathering around the 9/11 plots remain secret.
But one thing we do know: Those making the argument have ignored a key aspect of historical record.

Read More

Posted on June 20, 2013

By Justin Elliott/ProPublica

In the months following the October 200 passage of the Patriot Act, there was a heated public debate about the very provision of the law that we now know the government is using to vacuum up phone records of American citizens on a massive scale.
“A chilling intrusion” declared one Op-Ed in the Baltimore Sun.
But the consternation didn’t focus on anything like the mass collection of phone records. Instead, the debate centered on something else: library records.
Salon ran a picture of a virtual Uncle Sam gazing at a startled library patron under the headline, “He knows what you’ve been checking out.”
In one of many similar stories, the San Francisco Chronicle warned, “FBI checking out Americans’ reading habits.”
The concern stemmed from the Patriot Act’s Section 215, which, in the case of a terrorism investigation, allows the FBI to ask a secret court to order production of “any tangible things” from a third party like a person or business. The law said this could include records, papers, documents, or books.
Civil liberties groups and librarians’ associations, which have long been fiercely protective of reader privacy, quickly raised fears of the FBI using that authority to snoop on circulation records. The section even became known as the “library provision.”
Yet as the Guardian and others revealed this month, the government has invoked the same provision to collect metadata on phone traffic of the majority of all Americans – a far larger intrusion than anything civil libertarians warned about in their initial response.
“A person might uncharitably think of us as lacking in imagination,” says Lee Tien, a longtime attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Read More

Posted on June 18, 2013

By Paul Kiel/ProPublica

Bank of America employees regularly lied to homeowners seeking loan modifications, denied their applications for made-up reasons, and were rewarded for sending homeowners to foreclosure, according to sworn statements by former bank employees.
The employee statements were filed in federal court in Boston as part of a multi-state class action suit brought on behalf of homeowners who sought to avoid foreclosure through the government’s Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) but say they had their cases botched by Bank of America.
In a statement, a Bank of America spokesman said that each of the former employees’ statements is “rife with factual inaccuracies” and that the bank will respond more fully in court next month. He said that Bank of America had modified more loans than any other bank and continues to “demonstrate our commitment to assisting customers who are at risk of foreclosure.”
Six of the former employees worked for the bank, while one worked for a contractor. They range from former managers to front-line employees, and all dealt with homeowners seeking to avoid foreclosure through the government’s program.

Read More

Posted on June 17, 2013

By Sebastian Rotella/ProPublica

Defending a vast program to sweep up phone and Internet data under antiterror laws, senior U.S. officials in recent days have cited the case of David Coleman Headley, a key plotter in the deadly 2008 Mumbai attacks.
James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, said a data collection program by the National Security Agency helped stop an attack on a Danish newspaper for which Headley did surveillance. And Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., the Senate intelligence chairwoman, also called Headley’s capture a success.
But a closer examination of the case, drawn from extensive reporting by ProPublica, shows that the government surveillance only caught up with Headley after the U.S. had been tipped by British intelligence. And even that victory came after seven years in which U.S. intelligence failed to stop Headley as he roamed the globe on missions for Islamic terror networks and Pakistan’s spy agency.

Read More

Posted on June 13, 2013

By Nikole Hannah-Jones/ProPublica

The results of Tuesday’s U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development national study on the persistence of housing discrimination are unlikely to shock: Racial and ethnic minorities continue to find themselves locked out of many housing opportunities.
No, the more startling thing may be what HUD intends to do with its findings.
HUD spent $9 million to contract with the Urban Institute to conduct 8,000 undercover tests in 28 metropolitan areas in order to expose illegal housing discrimination. Yet the federal agency has no plans to use these tests to actually enforce the law and punish the offenders.

Read More

Posted on June 12, 2013

By Justin Elliott and Theodoric Meyer/ProPublica

Last week saw revelations that the FBI and the National Security Agency have been collecting Americans’ phone records en masse and that the agencies have access to data from nine tech companies.
But secrecy around the programs has meant even basic questions are still unanswered. Here’s what we still don’t know:

Read More

Posted on June 11, 2013

By Christie Thompson

On Wednesday, the Guardian published documents revealing the government has been collecting months’ worth of telephone “metadata” on millions of Verizon customers. The Washington Post and the Guardian followed with news that both the National Security Agency and the FBI have been pulling Americans’ data from major web companies like Facebook and Google.
Since 9/11, the government has been collecting enormous amounts of information on citizens. But most of the data grabbing is done in secret. What do we know about what the government knows? Here’s our reading guide to the government’s growing surveillance.

Read More

Posted on June 10, 2013

By Cora Currier/ProPublica

In his first year in office, President Barack Obama pledged to “collect the facts” on the death of hundreds, possibly thousands, of Taliban prisoners of war at the hands of U.S.-allied Afghan forces in late 2001.
Almost four years later, there’s no sign of progress.
When asked by ProPublica about the state of the investigation, the White House says it is still “looking into” the apparent massacre. Yet no facts have been released and it’s far from clear what, if any, facts have been collected.
Human rights researchers who originally uncovered the case say they’ve seen no evidence of an active investigation.

Read More

Posted on June 4, 2013

By The Beachwood Bookmaking Bureau

Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel has made the usual boring bet – Eli’s cheesecake, big surprise! – with Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa over the current playoff series between the Blackhawks and Kings, with Villaraigosa responding in kind.
We have our own ideas about what would constitute a fine wager.

Read More

Posted on June 3, 2013

By Helene Smith

there was no Memorial Service for my school.
no mourners in
black.
nor any Memorial Services for the other
49 schools.
all of the schools,
elementary.
elementary years–they say they are
our formative years.
i don’t know about that. but i know that my school was most of my
world at 6 years old.
and when most of your world just goes away when you’re 6–even if most of your friends–yeah, you got to see again–
i don’t know. but i couldn’t wrap my young mind around my school
going away.

Read More

Posted on May 29, 2013