By Julia Angwin/ProPublica
(ENLARGE)
Click here to explore a hand-drawn graphic, made by the East German secret police, that appears to show the social connections the Stasi gleaned about a poet they were spying on.
The East German secret police, known as the Stasi, were an infamously intrusive secret police force. They amassed dossiers on about one quarter of the population of the country during the Communist regime.
But their spycraft – while incredibly invasive – was also technologically primitive by today’s standards. While researching my book Dragnet Nation, I obtained the above hand-drawn social network graph and other files from the Stasi Archive in Berlin, where German citizens can see files kept about them and media can access some files, with the names of the people who were monitored removed.

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Posted on February 12, 2014

By The Electronic Frontier Foundation

Mass surveillance of electronic communications is a vast, new, government intrusion on the privacy of innocent people worldwide. It is a violation of International human rights law. Without checks and balances, its use will continue to spread from country to country, corrupting democracies and empowering dictators.
That’s why, today, on February 11th, around the world, from Argentina to Uganda, from Colombia to the Philippines, the people of the Internet have united to fight back.
The Day We Fight Back’s main global action is to sign and promote the 13 Principles, a set of fundamental rules that, in clear language, tells lawmakers and governments how to apply existing human rights law to these new forms of surveillance. With the support of thousands of Net users, we’ll use your voice to demand that all governments comply with their obligation to protect privacy against unchecked surveillance.
But there’s more to today’s global action than the Principles. Hundreds of digital rights and privacy groups, thousands of individual Net users, in dozens of countries, have come together to protest surveillance by governments at home and abroad. Here’s just a sampling of the campaigns and events happening today.

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Posted on February 11, 2014

By The Day We Fight Back

A broad coalition of activist groups, companies, and online platforms will hold a worldwide day of activism in opposition to the NSA’s mass spying regime on Tuesday.
Dubbed “The Day We Fight Back,” the day of activism was announced on the eve of the anniversary of the tragic passing of activist and technologist Aaron Swartz. The protest is both in his honor and in celebration of the victory over the Stop Online Piracy Act two years ago this month, which he helped spur.
Participants including Access, Demand Progress, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Fight for the Future, Free Press, BoingBoing, Reddit, Mozilla, ThoughtWorks, and more to come, will join potentially millions of Internet users to pressure lawmakers to end mass surveillance – of both Americans and the citizens of the whole world.

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Posted on February 10, 2014

By Steve Rhodes

The most ubiquitous headline in the wake of the Koschman report’s release on Tuesday seems to have been variations on the theme that “Daley, Family Did Not Try To Influence Koschman Case.”
At least in that last example, from the Tribune, the second paragraph noted that “[Special prosecutor Dan] Webb’s exhaustive examination of the April 2004 death of David Koschman found that the involvement of Daley’s nephew, Richard ‘R.J.’ Vanecko, colored the initial investigation and a later probe by Chicago police and Cook County prosecutors.”
And the third paragraph noted that “There was evidence of city officials closely monitoring the progress of the investigation even as Koschman lay comatose in a hospital and – seven years later – scrambling to exercise damage control when the Chicago Sun-Times started asking questions.”
In other words, what the report really shows is that the very reason the Koschman case was bungled almost beyond belief was because of R.J. Vanecko’s family – the Daleys.
“What’s very clear as you read this report is that no phone call needed to be made,” Koschman lawyer Locke Bowman told reporters after the report’s release. “Very early on, the Chicago Police Department, whether by intuition or by experience of the realities of life in Cook County and the city of Chicago, got the message that this was no ordinary case.”
An examination of the report – and I’m only halfway through it – bears out Bowman’s sentiment, and makes mincemeat of the notion that Daley didn’t influence the case. He may not have made a phone call – did he ever “make the phone call” while presiding over a City Hall where corruption was encoded in its very DNA? – but he (and his family) created a culture that, in the least, made it very clear that protecting the Daleys was Job 1 in this town, and anyone who violated that premise would face their wrath.

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Posted on February 6, 2014

By Lois Beckett/ProPublica

Chicago’s Cook County Hospital has one of the busiest trauma centers in the nation, treating about 2,000 patients a year for gunshots, stabbings and other violent injuries.
So when researchers started screening patients there for post-traumatic stress disorder in 2011, they assumed they would find cases.
They just didn’t know how many: Fully 43 percent of the patients they examined – and more than half of gunshot-wound victims – had signs of PTSD.
“We knew these people were going to have PTSD symptoms,” said Kimberly Joseph, a trauma surgeon at the hospital. “We didn’t know it was going to be as extensive.”
What the work showed, Joseph said, is, “This is a much more urgent problem than you think.”

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Posted on February 4, 2014

By Julia Angwin and Jeff Larson/ProPublica

As we detailed on Monday, documents show the NSA and its British counterpart have been probing advertiser data on smartphone apps, which can include your gender, income, and even whether you’re a “swinger.”
Do you have questions? Post them in comments or tweet us.

What’s new here?

This article reveals how U.S. and British spy agencies have sought to intercept the information transmitted by the games and other apps that users download onto their smartphones. Previous stories have detailed how U.S. and British spies have been intercepting massive quantities of cellphone text messages and gathering the location of cellphones around the world.

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Posted on January 29, 2014

By Charles Ornstein/ProPublica

When California pharmacist Kevin Kingma received a letter last fall notifying him that his high-deductible health plan was being canceled because of the Affordable Care Act, he logged into his state’s health insurance exchange and chose another plan beginning Jan. 1.
Thanks to a subsidy, Kingma’s monthly premium went down, from about $300 to $175, and his benefits improved.
But this month, Kingma logged into his bank’s website and saw that his old insurer, Anthem Blue Cross, had deducted $587.40 from his account and had enrolled him in another of its insurance products for this year – he says without permission.
Hundreds of other consumers are caught in the same predicament, insurers acknowledge. And the California Department of Insurance said it is exploring whether any laws were broken when insurance companies withdrew money from consumers’ accounts for plans they didn’t select.

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Posted on January 27, 2014

Unicorn Burgers And Leprechaun Juice

We will totally follow the rules until we determine such time when we will no longer follow the rules. In two parts.

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Posted on January 25, 2014

By Charles Ornstein/ProPublica

After months of hype and hysteria, insurance policies purchased under the Affordable Care Act went into effect on New Year’s Day, and journalists have largely pivoted from writing about the problems of HealthCare.gov to how the law is actually working for consumers.
Some journalists don’t have to look very far. That’s because they are the story, too.
Back in December, I wrote about Missouri public radio reporter Harum Helmy, who earned too much for her state’s Medicaid program and too little to qualify for a subsidy that would have offset the cost of an insurance policy on Healthcare.gov.
“I know – an uninsured health reporter,” she wrote to me. “The joke’s not lost on me.”

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Posted on January 23, 2014

By Kara Brandeisky/ProPublica

Today President Obama plans to announce some reportedly limited reforms to National Security Agency surveillance programs.

Since the first disclosures based on documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, Obama has offered his own defenses of the programs. But not all of the president’s claims have stood up to scrutiny. Here are some of the misleading assertions he has made.

1. There have been no abuses.

And I think it’s important to note that in all the reviews of this program [Section 215] that have been done, in fact, there have not been actual instances where it’s been alleged that the NSA in some ways acted inappropriately in the use of this data 2026 There had not been evidence and there continues not to be evidence that the particular program had been abused in how it was used. – Dec. 20, 2013

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Posted on January 17, 2014