Government Corruption News Stories

Excerpts of Key Government Corruption News Stories in Major Media

Below are key excerpts of revealing news articles on government corruption from reliable news media sources. If any link fails to function, a paywall blocks full access, or the article is no longer available, try these digital tools.

Note: This comprehensive list of news stories is usually updated once a week. Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key major media news stories on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.

In what may be the biggest such scandal in Air Force history, 34 officers entrusted with land-based nuclear missiles have been pulled off the job for alleged involvement in a cheating ring that officials say was uncovered during a drug probe. The 34 are suspected of cheating several months ago on a routine proficiency test that includes checking missile launch officers' knowledge of how to handle an "emergency war order," which is the term for the authorization required to launch a nuclear weapon. The cheating scandal is the latest in a series of Air Force nuclear stumbles ... including deliberate violations of safety rules, failures of inspections, breakdowns in training and evidence that the men and women who operate the missiles from underground command posts are suffering burnout. In October the general who commands the nuclear missile force was fired for engaging in embarrassing behavior, including drunkenness, while leading a U.S. delegation to a nuclear exercise in Russia. The AP disclosed in May an internal Air Force email in which a missile operations officer complained that his force was infested with "rot" bad attitudes and disregard for discipline. The Air Force's nuclear mission includes operation of 450 Minuteman 3 intercontinental ballistic missiles. The Malmstrom unit failed a nuclear safety and security inspection in August but succeeded on a redo in October.

Note: Some are speculating about a purge of high-level U.S. military officers. For evidence of this, click here. And is it just a coincidence that the Malmstrom unit is mentioned? That is the base where several officers testified that a UFO shut down all nuclear warheads several decades ago. For more, click here. And for more on military corruption, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.

New York City has agreed to pay $18 million to settle dozens of lawsuits filed by protesters, journalists and bystanders who said they were wrongly arrested at the 2004 Republican National Convention and held for hours in makeshift holding cells. The settlement, which must be approved by a federal judge, would end nearly a decade of legal wrangling over more than 1,800 arrests, mostly on charges of disorderly conduct or parading without a permit. Hundreds sued, saying they were illegally arrested by an overzealous police department. Nearly all the arrests were dismissed by the court or the defendants acquitted. Lawyers with the New York Civil Liberties Union had previously asked the judge hearing case to conclude that police didn't have probable cause to make mass arrests during the convention, at which President George W. Bush was nominated for another term. "This historic settlement sends a clear message," said NYCLU attorney Chris Dunn. "We will not allow the police to trample on the First Amendment rights of protesters." Sarah Coburn, 30, said her arrest at the convention inspired her to become an attorney to fight for the civil rights of others. She was 20 at the time, and was held for 30 hours before she was released. She's now a public defender. "It was awful to be subjected to those conditions," she said. "I want to make sure no one else has to be."

Note: For more on government assaults on civil liberties, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.

The National Security Agency has collected almost 200 million text messages a day from across the globe, using them to extract data including location, contact networks and credit card details, according to top-secret documents. The NSA program, codenamed Dishfire, collects “pretty much everything it can”, according to GCHQ documents, rather than merely storing the communications of existing surveillance targets. The NSA has made extensive use of its vast text message database to extract information on people’s travel plans, contact books, financial transactions and more – including of individuals under no suspicion of illegal activity. On average, each day the NSA was able to extract: • More than 5 million missed-call alerts, for use in contact-chaining analysis (working out someone’s social network from who they contact and when) • Details of 1.6 million border crossings a day, from network roaming alerts • More than 110,000 names, from electronic business cards, which also included the ability to extract and save images. • Over 800,000 financial transactions, either through text-to-text payments or linking credit cards to phone users The agency was also able to extract geolocation data from more than 76,000 text messages a day, including from “requests by people for route info” and “setting up meetings”.

Note: For more on government surveillance, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.

The National Security Agency has implanted software in nearly 100,000 computers around the world that allows the United States to conduct surveillance on those machines and can also create a digital highway for launching cyberattacks. While most of the software is inserted by gaining access to computer networks, the N.S.A. has increasingly made use of a secret technology that enables it to enter and alter data in computers even if they are not connected to the Internet, according to N.S.A. documents, computer experts and American officials. The technology, which the agency has used since at least 2008, relies on a covert channel of radio waves that can be transmitted from tiny circuit boards and USB cards inserted surreptitiously into the computers. In some cases, they are sent to a briefcase-size relay station that intelligence agencies can set up miles away from the target. In most cases, the radio frequency hardware must be physically inserted by a spy, a manufacturer or an unwitting user. Among the most frequent targets of the N.S.A. and its Pentagon partner, United States Cyber Command, have been units of the Chinese Army, which the United States has accused of launching regular digital probes and attacks on American industrial and military targets, usually to steal secrets or intellectual property. But the program, code-named Quantum, has also been successful in inserting software into Russian military networks and systems used by the Mexican police and drug cartels, trade institutions inside the European Union, and sometime partners against terrorism like Saudi Arabia, India and Pakistan.

Note: For more on government surveillance, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.

To have a genuinely constructive debate, data must be compiled, evidence must be amassed and verifiable truths must be presented. This truism is particularly significant when it comes to debates about security and liberty. Without facts, we get the counterproductive discourse we are being treated to right now - the one hijacked by National Security Administration defenders throwing temper tantrums, tossing out fear-mongering platitudes and trying to prevent any scrutiny of the agency. Tune into a national news program and you inevitably will hear pundits who have spent the last decade mindlessly cheering on wars and warrantless wiretapping now echoing the talking points emanating from surveillance-state apparatchiks like Reps. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., and Dutch Ruppersberger, D-Md. This week, these two lawmakers, who head the House Intelligence Committee, summarized all the bluster in a press release that should be enshrined for posterity. In an attempt to defend the NSA, the bipartisan duo breathlessly claimed that whistle-blower Edward Snowden ended up "endangering each and every American" by exposing the government's mass surveillance (i.e., metadata) programs. They indicted Snowden's patriotism and said his disclosures of the NSA's unlawful and unconstitutional programs "aligned him with our enemy." But the facts now leaking out of the government's national security apparatus are doing the opposite. They are debunking - rather than confirming - the NSA defenders' platitudes.

Note: For more on government surveillance, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.

On a night nearly 43 years ago, while Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier bludgeoned each other over 15 rounds in a televised title bout viewed by millions around the world, burglars took a lock pick and a crowbar and broke into a Federal Bureau of Investigation office in a suburb of Philadelphia, making off with nearly every document inside. They were never caught, and the stolen documents that they mailed anonymously to newspaper reporters ... would become a flood of revelations about extensive spying and dirty-tricks operations by the F.B.I. against dissident groups. Perhaps the most damning document from the cache [was] a 1970 memorandum that ... urged agents to step up their interviews of antiwar activists and members of dissident student groups. “It will enhance the paranoia endemic in these circles and will further serve to get the point across there is an F.B.I. agent behind every mailbox.” Another document, signed by Hoover himself, revealed widespread F.B.I. surveillance of black student groups on college campuses. But the document that would have the biggest impact on reining in the F.B.I.’s domestic spying activities [included] a mysterious word: Cointelpro ... shorthand for Counterintelligence Program. Since 1956, the F.B.I. had carried out an expansive campaign to spy on civil rights leaders, political organizers and suspected Communists, and had tried to sow distrust among protest groups. Among the grim litany of revelations was a blackmail letter F.B.I. agents had sent anonymously to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., threatening to expose his extramarital affairs if he did not commit suicide. The intent of Cointelpro was to destroy lives and ruin reputations.

Note: To learn about the brave citizen burglars who have now revealed themselves and watch the engaging video covering this story, click on the link given above. For more on the realities of intelligence agency activities, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.

The FBI gave its informants permission to break the law at least 5,658 times in a single year, according to newly disclosed documents that show just how often the nation's top law enforcement agency enlists criminals to help it battle crime. The U.S. Justice Department ordered the FBI to begin tracking crimes by its informants more than a decade ago, after the agency admitted that its agents had allowed Boston mobster James "Whitey" Bulger to operate a brutal crime ring in exchange for information about the Mafia. The FBI submits that tally to top Justice Department officials each year, but has never before made it public. Agents authorized 15 crimes a day, on average, including everything from buying and selling illegal drugs to bribing government officials and plotting robberies. FBI officials have said in the past that permitting their informants — who are often criminals themselves — to break the law is an indispensable, if sometimes distasteful, part of investigating criminal organizations. USA TODAY obtained a copy of the FBI's 2011 report under the Freedom of Information Act. The report does not spell out what types of crimes its agents authorized, or how serious they were. It also did not include any information about crimes the bureau's sources were known to have committed without the government's permission. Crimes authorized by the FBI almost certainly make up a tiny fraction of the total number of offenses committed by informants for local, state and federal agencies each year.

Note: As reported in this USA Today article, the DEA and ATF don't even track crimes committed by their informants. For more on the realities of intelligence agency activities, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.

A federal agent who exposed the Justice Departments flawed gun-trafficking investigation known as Operation Fast and Furious says the FBI played a key role in events leading to the 2010 murder near Nogales, Ariz., of U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry. John Dodson, a special agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, contends that the bandits who killed Terry were working for FBI operatives and were sent to the border to do a drug rip-off using intelligence from the federal Drug Enforcement Administration. I dont think the (FBI) assets were part of the rip-off crew, Dodson said. I think they were directing the rip crew. Dodsons comments to The Arizona Republic amplify assertions he made in his recently released book, The Unarmed Truth, about his role as a whistle-blower in the Fast and Furious debacle. In his book, Dodson uses cautious language to characterize his account of circumstances surrounding Terrys death, saying the information is based on firsthand knowledge, personal opinion and press reports. He asserts that the DEA had information about, and may have orchestrated, a large drug shipment through Peck Canyon that December night. He alleges that DEA agents shared that intelligence with FBI counterparts, who advised criminal informants from another cartel that the load would be theirs for the taking. Stealing such a shipment would increase the clout of the FBI informants in the cartel organization they had penetrated, Dodson wrote, and thus lead to better intel for them in the future.

Note: For more on the realities of intelligence agency activities, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.

Sigurdur "Siggi" Thordarson, [is a] cherubic, blond 21-year-old who has been called everything in the [Icelandic] press from "attention seeker" to "traitor" to "psychopath". Four years ago, just as WikiLeaks was winning international notoriety, the then-17-year-old hacking prodigy became Assange's youngest and most trusted sidekick. But as Assange became more embattled and besieged, the protégé turned on his mentor in the most shocking of ways: becoming the first FBI informant inside the group. His tale reveals not only the paranoia and strife within WikiLeaks, but just how far the feds were willing to go to get Assange. The revelation of Siggi's role as an FBI snitch has polarized WikiLeaks insiders. WikiLeaks spokesman Kristinn Hrafnsson [dismissed] Siggi as "a pathological liar." While other WikiLeaks insiders also question Siggi's credibility, they insist that his story can't be discounted, and there's more to it than the organization is letting on. The truth, it seems, may be held in the leaks. Siggi has provided Rolling Stone with more than a terabyte of secret files he claims to have taken from WikiLeaks before he left in November 2011 and gave to the FBI: thousands of pages of chat logs, videos, tapped phone calls, government documents and more than a few bombshells from the organization's most heated years. Whatever their origins, the SiggiLeaks are a deep and revealing portal into one of the most guarded and influential organizations of the 21st century – and the extreme measures its embattled leader is willing to take.

Note: For more on the realities of intelligence agency activities, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.

After a tumultuous year at the war-on-terror detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where the U.S. military's motto is "Safe, Humane, Legal, Transparent," operations are cloaked in secrecy. The prison approaches the start of its 13th year next week with a new reclusive regime that no longer discloses what was once routinely released information. The daily tally of hunger striking detainees — the protest that engulfed more than 100 prisoners at its peak this summer — stopped in December. Guards and other prison camp troops are under orders to withhold their names when talking to reporters. On the witness stand in the war court recently, a lawyer in the uniform of an Air Force officer gave sworn testimony under a curious, unexplained fake name — "Major Krueger." Guantanamo is remote, and what is happening there in this new era has mostly gone unnoticed. The government controls access to everything pertaining to Guantanamo. Journalists have to get the military's permission to go there, navigate censorship of their pictures, wait 40 seconds to hear what happens in court and then wait weeks to see court filings. The current crackdown on information can range from the mildly curious to the outright comedic. At times it seems to signify a gratuitous use of power by troops on rotation with sudden power to [wield] a censor's scissors. At times, it suggests a government bureaucracy whose default is knee-jerk secrecy.

Note: For more on government secrecy, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.

[Many questions] have dogged the [CIA] for years. This secret body [is] known to have overthrown governments and installed others, raised armies, staged an invasion of Cuba, spied and counterspied, established airlines, radio stations and schools. Was it in fact damaging, while it sought to advance, the national interest? Former President Truman, whose administration established the CIA in 1947, said In 1963 that by then he saw "something about the way the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historic positions." President Kennedy, as the enormity of the Bay of Pigs disaster came home to him, said to one of the highest officials of his administration that he wanted "to splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds." In the 19 years that the CIA has been in existence, 150 resolutions for tighter congressional control have been introduced - and put aside. Few persons in or out of the American Government know much about its work, its organization, its supervision or its relationship to the other arms of the executive branch. In 1960, CIA agents in Laos, disguised as "military advisers," stuffed ballot boxes and engineered local uprisings to help a hand-picked strongman ... set up a "pro-American" government. It was the CIA that built up Ngo Dinh Diem as the pro-American head of South Vietnam after the French ... had found him in a monastery cell in Belgium and brought him back to Saigon as Premier. The revelation that CIA agents served among Michigan State University scholars in South Vietnam from 1955 to 1959 has contributed to the fear [of infiltration of universities].

Note: For a longer, even more revealing summary of this very lengthy article, click here. To see a full copy of this article, click here. For more on the secret and illegal activities of major intelligence agencies, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.

Despite the hoopla over the approval of the Volcker rule, which restricts banks from making certain types of speculative investments, our financial system isn't much safer than it was before 2008. A major reason for the continued complexity and risk in the financial system is lobbying power. The Volcker rule as it stands now has been turned into Swiss cheese by bank lobbyists, who represent the second biggest corporate special-interest bloc after the health care complex, spending nearly half a billion dollars a year on lobbying, according to the nonprofit, nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. So while the rule limits federally insured banks from trading for its own sake, they are still allowed to hedge their portfolios, which opens up a lot of gray territory for trading. Certainly having more lenders rather than fewer would help other kinds of businesses, and having trading walled off from lending would encourage that. The fact that the five largest U.S. financial holding companies control 55% of industry assets--compared with 20% in 1990--keeps competition low and credit constrained. In the next two to five years, there will likely be another crisis or trading loss of the kind that reignites the debate over closing trading loopholes and creating a truly safer financial system. Right now, banks complain about rules that would require them to hold a mere 5% of their assets in high-quality, low-risk capital (known as Tier 1 capital), despite the fact that in any other industry, doing business with less than 50% of your own cash would be considered extreme.

Note: For more on government collusion with the biggest banks, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.

Whenever I read comments by politicians defending the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Predator and Reaper program – aka drones – I wish I could ask them a few questions. I'd start with: "How many women and children have you seen incinerated by a Hellfire missile?" Few of these politicians who so brazenly proclaim the benefits of drones have a real clue of what actually goes on. I, on the other hand, have seen these awful sights first hand. What the public needs to understand is that the video provided by a drone is not usually clear enough to detect someone carrying a weapon, even on a crystal-clear day. This makes it incredibly difficult for the best analysts to identify if someone has weapons for sure. One example comes to mind: "The feed is so pixelated, what if it's a shovel, and not a weapon?" I felt this confusion constantly, as did my fellow UAV analysts. We always wonder if ... we destroyed an innocent civilian's life all because of a bad image or angle. I know the feeling you experience when you see someone die. Horrifying barely covers it. When you are exposed to it over and over again it becomes like a small video, embedded in your head, forever on repeat, causing psychological pain and suffering. UAV troops are victim to not only the haunting memories of this work that they carry with them, but also the guilt of always being a little unsure of how accurate their confirmations of weapons or identification of hostile individuals were. The UAVs in the Middle East are used as a weapon, not as protection, and as long as our public remains ignorant to this, this serious threat to the sanctity of human life – at home and abroad – will continue.

Note: For more on war crimes committed by the US and UK in the illegal "global war on terror", see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.

On December 4th it [was exactly] 44 years since a select unit of 14 Chicago Police officers, on special assignment to Cook County State's Attorney Edward Hanrahan, executed a pre-dawn raid on a west side apartment that left Illinois Black Panther Party leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark dead, several other young Panthers wounded, and the seven raid survivors arrested on bogus attempted murder charges. The physical evidence soon exposed the claims of a "shootout" that were made by Hanrahan and his men to be blatant lies, and that the murderous reality was that the police fired nearly 100 shots while the Panthers fired but one. But those lies were only the first layer of a massive cover-up that was dismantled and exposed over the next eight years -- a cover-up designed to suppress the central role of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and its COINTELPRO program in the assassination. The first documentation [of the operation and its cover-up] surfaced in March of 1971 when the Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI broke into a small FBI office in Media Pennsylvania and expropriated over 1000 FBI documents. These documents exposed the FBI's super-secret and profoundly illegal COINTELPRO program and its focus in the 1960s on the black liberation movement and its leaders. Citing the assassinated Malcolm X as an example, Hoover directed all of the Bureau's Offices to "expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, and otherwise neutralize" African American organizations and leaders.

Note: For more on the realities of intelligence agency activity, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.

The battle between the U.S. and the Soviet Union during the Cold War, for technological and scientific one-upmanship, included a costly effort that involved the two superpowers' attempts to develop mind-control weapons, according to a new study. A blog post at the Physics arXiv Blog, citing a new paper by researcher Serge Kernbach, said that both the U.S. and the Soviet Union experimented with parapsychology, mind control and remote influence. And, while some of the work conducted by the U.S. on these topics is now public, much less is known about the Soviet body of knowledge, which reportedly cost about a billion dollars to gather. “The Soviets had a similar program. This included experiments in parapsychology, which the Soviets called psychotronics,” the blogpost said. “The work built on a long-standing idea in Soviet science that the human brain could receive and transmit a certain kind of high frequency electromagnetic radiation and that this could influence other objects too.” Kernbach provided an overview of the Soviet Union’s efforts in unconventional research between 1917 and 2003, [based] on publications in Russian technical journals and recently declassified documents. The U.S. developed a 20-year CIA program, called Project MKULTRA, which began in the early 1950s to study ways of manipulating people’s minds and altering their brain functions. The Soviets too focused on a similar program and developed a device called a "cerpan" that could generate and store high-frequency electromagnetic radiation produced by the human brain in hopes of influencing other objects.

Note: For an excellent two-page summary of reliable information on secret government mind control programs, click here. For more on mind control research and operations by the CIA, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.

In the world of thoroughbred racing, the ruler of Dubai, Sheikh Mohamed, has spared no expense in making himself a big man. The sheikh's taking the same no expense spared approach to promoting Dubai around the world. Prominent figures, including former President Bill Clinton, have been paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to speak, or act as consultants. President Bush's brother Neil was a guest of the royal family last year. And as Dubai grows from desert town to boomtown, again, no expense is being spared. Just putting up the world's tallest building isn't enough. The building will be twice this height when completed next year. One hundred sixty floors of the most luxurious apartments and offices the world has ever seen. All being built, it turns out, by workers who on average make less than a dollar an hour. Behind the glitzy world of Dubai are some 500,000 foreign workers who human rights groups say live in virtual enslavement. A report out just this week from the group Human Rights Watch concludes workers putting up Dubai's soaring towers are being systematically cheated and abused, with the sheikh's government looking the other way.

Note: If you want to see how deep this ugly hole goes, don't miss the eye-opening ABC News video at this link.

On Dec. 23, 1913, President Woodrow Wilson signed the Owen Glass Act, creating the Federal Reserve. As we note its centennial, what has the Fed accomplished during the last 100 years? The stated original purposes were to protect the soundness of the dollar and banks and also to lessen the jarring ups and downs of the business cycle. Oops. Under the Fed’s supervision, boom and bust cycles have continued. Three of them have been severe: the Great Depression, the stagflationary period of 1974-82, and the current “Great Recession.” Bank failures have occurred in alarmingly high numbers. Depending on what measurements are used, the dollar has lost between 95 and 98 percent of its purchasing power. (Amazingly, the Fed’s official position today is that inflation is not high enough, so the erosion of the dollar continues as a matter of policy.) Having failed to achieve its original goals, the Fed also has had a miserable record in accomplishing later goals. The 1970 amendments to the Federal Reserve Act stipulated that the Fed should “promote effectively the goals of maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates.” In baseball parlance, the Fed has been “0-for-three.” So, what has the Fed accomplished during its century of existence? Well, it has become adept at bailing out mismanaged banks. In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, the Fed orchestrated the big bailout of Wall Street. Politically, the Fed is repugnant. Its chairman is commonly referred to as the second most powerful person in the country. In a democratic republic, should the second most powerful policymaker be unelected?

Note: How remarkable for Forbes to publish an article chastising the Fed! The times are a changin'! For an essay by noted financial researcher Ellen Brown on this occasion, click here. For more on the collusion between government and the biggest banks, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.

The White House's expert NSA panel may have made headlines ... for telling President Barack Obama to knock off the collection of Americans' meta-data, but surveillance experts said they were surprised that the panel also took to task some controversial non-NSA-related spy tactics as well. One recommendation was to impose much stricter oversight on the FBI's ability to issue National Security Letters (NSLs), which have been used to obtain telephone call records and credit reports in terrorism and espionage cases. Another even more peculiar recommendation by the five national security experts ... was their advice that "governments" shouldn't hack into bank accounts and drain funds. "Governments should not use their offensive cyber capabilities to change the amounts held in financial accounts or otherwise manipulate the financial systems," the unanimous Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies report warned Obama. "That was a strangely specific recommendation for something nobody was talking about," Kel McClanahan, executive director of government transparency group National Security Counselors, told ABC News. Michelle Richardson, the American Civil Liberties Union's legislative council in Washington, also said the findings on "NSLs" and government hacking were unexpected -- but welcomed.

Note: The fact that this expert panel would even mention governments manipulating financial accounts suggests that if it hasn't already happened, some were seriously considering this. For lots more on this strange news, click here. For more on the realities of intelligence agency activities, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.

Taken together, the [Edward Snowden] revelations have brought to light a global surveillance system that cast off many of its historical restraints after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Secret legal authorities empowered the NSA to sweep in the telephone, Internet and location records of whole populations. Six months after the first revelations ... Snowden agreed to reflect at length on the roots and repercussions of his choice. He was relaxed and animated over two days of nearly unbroken conversation. Snowden offered vignettes from his intelligence career and from his recent life as “an indoor cat” in Russia. But he consistently steered the conversation back to surveillance, democracy and the meaning of the documents he exposed. “For me, in terms of personal satisfaction, the mission’s already accomplished,” he said. “I already won. As soon as the journalists were able to work, everything that I had been trying to do was validated. Because, remember, I didn’t want to change society. I wanted to give society a chance to determine if it should change itself. All I wanted was for the public to be able to have a say in how they are governed,” he said. Snowden ... had come to believe that a dangerous machine of mass surveillance was growing unchecked. Closed-door oversight by Congress and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court was a “graveyard of judgment,” he said, manipulated by the agency it was supposed to keep in check. The NSA’s business is “information dominance,” the use of other people’s secrets to shape events. At 29, Snowden upended the agency on its own turf.

Note: For more on the realities of intelligence agency activities, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.

British and American intelligence agencies had a comprehensive list of surveillance targets that included the EU's competition commissioner, German government buildings in Berlin and overseas, and the heads of institutions that provide humanitarian and financial help to Africa, top-secret documents reveal. The papers show GCHQ [and the NSA were] targeting organisations such as the United Nations development programme, the UN's children's charity Unicef and Médecins du Monde, a French organisation that provides doctors and medical volunteers to conflict zones. The head of the Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas) also appears in the documents, along with text messages he sent to colleagues. One GCHQ document, drafted in January 2009, makes clear that the agencies were targeting an email address listed as belonging to another important American ally – the "Israeli prime minister". Ehud Olmert was in office at the time. Three further Israeli targets appeared on GCHQ documents, including another email address understood to have been used to send messages between the then Israeli defence minister, Ehud Barak, and his chief of staff, Yoni Koren. The names and details are the latest revelations to come from documents leaked by the whistleblower Edward Snowden. They provoked a furious reaction. The disclosures reflect the breadth of targets sought by the agencies, which goes far beyond the desire to intercept the communications of potential terrorists and criminals, or diplomats and officials from hostile countries.

Note: Later reports revealed that GHCQ also targeted the global human rights organization Amnesty International. For more on the realities of intelligence agency activities, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.

Important Note: Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key major media news stories on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.