Intelligence Agency Corruption Media Articles

Excerpts of Key Intelligence Agency Corruption Media Articles in Major Media

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Project Gunrunner [was] a nationwide initiative launched in Laredo, Texas, in 2005, which sought to reduce the smuggling of firearms across the U.S. southern border. But while the primary tactic of Gunrunner was the interdiction of buyers and sellers who were violating the laws, [ATF] agents in Phoenix had other plans. They wanted to see where the guns went if they were allowed to cross the border – to follow the small fish until they caught bigger ones. Agents named their operation "Fast and Furious," after the popular movie about car racing. Between September 2009 and December 2010, a joint task force comprised of federal officials from ATF, FBI, DEA, and ICE, working under the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Arizona, let over two thousand guns "walk" to Mexico. The murder that made the flawed operation public and political in the United States was of an American citizen on US soil: the killing of US Border Patrol agent Brian Terry. Though the investigators could not identify the specific gun that fired the bullet, two AK-47 style WASR-10 rifles were recovered at the scene. Both were traced to ... one of the straw purchasers the agents were monitoring under the Fast and Furious operation. ATF agents who shared their experiences during interviews conducted by a congressional committee admitted they knew that the only way they would learn the whereabouts of the guns they let go would be when Mexican law enforcement recovered them at crime scenes.

Note: Read more about the thousands of illegal guns American officials allowed into Mexico during Operation Fast and Furious. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption from reliable major media sources.

The House of Representatives voted on Friday to extend Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) for two years. Section 702 permits the US government to wiretap communications between Americans and foreigners overseas. Hundreds of millions of calls, texts, and emails are intercepted by government spies each with the "compelled assistance" of US communications providers. The government argues that Americans are not themselves being targeted and thus the wiretaps are legal. Nevertheless, their calls, texts, and emails may be stored by the government for years, and can later be accessed by law enforcement without a judge's permission. The House bill also dramatically expands the statutory definition for communication service providers. "They're pushing for a major expansion of warrantless spying on Americans," US senator Ron Wyden tells WIRED. "Their amendment would force your cable guy to be a government spy and assist in monitoring Americans' communications without a warrant." "Section 702 has been abused under presidents from both political parties, and it has been used to unlawfully surveil the communications of Americans across the political spectrum," says Kia Hamadanchy, senior policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union. "The Senate must add a warrant requirement and rein in this out-of-control government spying."

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of important news articles on government corruption and the disappearance of privacy from reliable major media sources.

Nearly 25 years ago, a group of suicide bombers attacked the U.S.S. Cole off Aden, Yemen, with the loss of 17 U.S. sailors. A Saudi, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, believed to be the mastermind of the attack, was captured in 2002, and was officially charged in 2011 with leading the attack. He has become the longest-running capital murder case at Guantanamo. Al-Nashiri, like so many captives at Guantanamo, was subjected to secret imprisonment by the CIA as well as waterboarding, rectal abuse, and prolonged sleep deprivation. A previous judge at Guantanamo excluded the confessions of al-Nashiri and others because of CIA's torture and abuse. The al-Nashiri case was particularly egregious because his interrogators found him to be compliant, but a senior CIA official ordered the reinstatement of torture and abuse to include waterboarding. The CIA has always maintained that secret memoranda of George W. Bush's Department of Justice permitted the use of "enhanced interrogation techniques" to include waterboarding in order to break the will of the captives. The CIA also had the support of psychologists and the American Psychological Association (APA) in conducting the coercive interrogation of terror suspects in Guantanamo and its secret prisons in East Europe and Southeast Asia. Two former military psychologists developed the CIA's sadistic techniques, which were based on Chinese efforts to obtain false confessions from American prisoners in the 1950s.

Note: Read more about how the American Psychological Association supported CIA torture operations. Learn more about US torture programs in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on intelligence agency corruption from reliable major media sources.

A devastating new Defense Department inspector general report finds that ... the Army, the primary Defense Department proponent for battlefield influence and deception, has failed to staff its own psyops units. Recent revelations about the Pentagon's psyops call into question just how effective these programs really are. In 2022, an extensive report by the Washington Post revealed widespread concern inside DOD that psychological operations were being waged both recklessly and ineffectively by the armed services. The report was spurred by research from the Stanford Internet Observatory which detailed over 150 instances of Facebook and Twitter removing accounts linked to U.S. military influence campaigns. The 2019 National Defense Authorization Act gave the Defense Department a green light to engage in offensive psyops campaigns, including clandestine operations that align with the same definition as covert, meaning that the armed forces can carry out influence operations that deny an American connection. After the congressional authorization, an unnamed defense official said, "Combatant commanders got really excited" and were "eager to utilize these new authorities. The defense contractors were equally eager to land lucrative classified contracts to enable clandestine influence operations." Researchers at Stanford ultimately found that despite the dozens of Defense Department obscured accounts spreading misinformation, the effect on foreign populations was far less than information conveyed overtly from self-identified U.S. sources.

Note: Read about the Pentagon's secret army of 60,000 undercover operatives that manipulate public perception. Learn more about the history of military-intelligence influence on the media in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center.

Hardware that breaks into your phone; software that monitors you on the internet; systems that can recognize your face and track your car: The New York State Police are drowning in surveillance tech. Last year alone, the Troopers signed at least $15 million in contracts for powerful new surveillance tools. Surveillance technology has far outpaced traditional privacy laws. In New York, lawmakers launched a years-in-the-making legislative campaign last year to rein in police intrusion. None of their bills have made it out of committee. A report from the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence, put it succinctly: "The government would never have been permitted to compel billions of people to carry location tracking devices on their persons at all times, to log and track most of their social interactions, or to keep flawless records of all their reading habits." That report called specific attention to the "data broker loophole": law enforcement's practice of obtaining data for which they'd otherwise have to obtain a warrant by buying it from brokers. The New York State Police have taken greater and greater advantage of the loophole in recent years. They've also spent millions on mobile device forensic tools, or MDFTs, powerful hacking hardware and software that allow users to download full, searchable copies of a cellphone's data, including social media messages, emails, web and search histories, and minute-by-minute location information.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on police corruption and the disappearance of privacy from reliable major media sources.

The FBI spends "every day, all day long" interrogating people over their Facebook posts. At least, that's what agents told Stillwater, Oklahoma, resident Rolla Abdeljawad when they showed up at her house to ask her about her social media activity. Three FBI agents came to Abdeljawad's house and said that they had been given "screenshots" of her posts by Facebook. Her lawyer Hassan Shibly posted a video of the incident. "Facebook gave us a couple of screenshots of your account," one agent in a gray shirt said in the video. "So we no longer live in a free country and we can't say what we want?" replied Abdeljawad. "No, we totally do. That's why we're not here to arrest you or anything," a second agent in a red shirt added. "We do this every day, all day long. It's just an effort to keep everybody safe and make sure nobody has any ill will." Shibly says that he doesn't know which Facebook post caught the agents' attention, and that it was the first time he had heard of Facebook's parent company, Meta, preemptively reporting posts to law enforcement. [Abdeljawad] made multiple angry posts per day about the war in Gaza, referring to Israel as "Israhell." But none of the posts on her feed call for violence. Ironically, Abdeljawad had also posted a warning about exactly the kind of government monitoring she was later subjected to. "Don't fall for their games. Our community is being watched & they are just waiting for any reason to round us up," Abdeljawad wrote.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption and the erosion of civil liberties from reliable major media sources.

The Haitian Bald Headed Party (PHTK) has tyrannically ruled Haiti since 2011. The U.S. State Department, who unilaterally picked Ariel Henry to be Haiti's prime minister in July of 2021, has now decided Henry no longer fits their interests and has forced him to step down. Henry was prevented from returning to Haiti on March 5 by paramilitary gangs who attempted to take the Toussaint Louverture International Airport, opening fire and hitting a plane bound for Cuba. The imperial forces responsible for over half a million illegal U.S. guns in Haiti that fuel this unparalleled violence are now preparing their next move to keep Haiti subdued. For the past 18 months, the Biden administration has sought to facilitate what will be the fourth U.S.-led foreign invasion and occupation of Haiti in the last 100 years by deputizing Kenya, Benin, the Bahamas, and other western neocolonies to carry out the occupation. The CIA remains active as well seeking a neocolony the U.S. can deputize to carry out this invasion. The only Haitian representatives that can be considered for the U.S.-led transitional government have to agree to the occupation. U.S. policy empowers and works with corrupt political leadership in Haiti because they can be relied upon to do the U.S.'s bidding. Meanwhile, those leaders who refuse to sell out to imperial interests are repressed and murdered. The ruling PHTK [has] bragged about being "legal bandits" above the law and employing ... government death squads armed with hundreds of thousands of U.S. weapons.

Note: The US government wants Ariel Henry out to purportedly prevent a full scale civil war. Is the US now trying to address Haitian stability and violence that US policies have helped create? Read about US involvement in the assassination of Haitian President Jovenel MoĂŻse. Learn more about the role the arms industry plays in global conflicts in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center.

Billionaire Elon Musk's brain-computer interface (BCI) company Neuralink made headlines earlier this year for inserting its first brain implant into a human being. Such implants ... are described as "fully implantable, cosmetically invisible, and designed to let you control a computer or mobile device anywhere you go." They can help people regain abilities lost due to aging, ailments, accidents or injuries, thus improving quality of life. Yet, great ethical concerns arise with such advancements, and the tech is already being used for questionable purposes. Some Chinese employers have started using "emotional surveillance technology" to monitor workers' brainwaves. Governments and militaries are already ... describing the human body and brain as war's next domain. On this new "battlefield," an era of neuroweapons ... has begun. The Pentagon's research arm DARPA directly or indirectly funds about half of invasive neural interface technology companies in the US. DARPA has initiated at least 40 neurotechnology-related programs over the past 24 years. As a 2024 RAND report speculates, if BCI technologies are hacked or compromised, "a malicious adversary could potentially inject fear, confusion, or anger into [a BCI] commander's brain and cause them to make decisions that result in serious harm." Academic Nicholas Evans speculates, further, that neuroimplants could "control an individual's mental functions," perhaps to manipulate memories, emotions, or even to torture the wearer. In a [military research paper] on neurowarfare: "Microbiologists have recently discovered mind-controlling parasites that can manipulate the behavior of their hosts according to their needs by switching genes on or off. Since human behavior is at least partially influenced by their genetics, nonlethal behavior modifying genetic bioweapons that spread through a highly contagious virus could thus be, in principle, possible.

Note: The CIA once used brain surgery to make six remote controlled dogs. For more, see important information on microchip implants and CIA mind control programs from reliable major media sources.

Haiti was born in 1804 out of a 13-year revolution in which the enslaved people of the then French colony of Saint-Domingue dismantled their chains, defeated, in succession, the armies of France, Britain and Spain, and established a new nation. Elites in Europe and America, meanwhile, fearful that the Haitian example might embolden others struggling for freedom, sought to isolate the new nation, refusing for decades even to recognise it. In 1825, France demanded, as the price of recognition, reparations of 150m francs. France was compelling enslaved people and their descendants to pay their former masters ... forcing [Haiti] to take out loans from French banks at exorbitant rates. By 1914, 80% of the government budget went to repaying the debt. Western nations have not only impoverished Haiti, they have also constantly intervened. Jean-Bertrand Aristide [was] a leftwing priest with mass support among Haiti's working class and poor. Twice, in 1990 and 2001, waves of public support propelled Aristide to the presidency. And twice, in 1991 and 2004, he was ousted in bloody coups. After the first coup, Aristide returned to power with US support. Nevertheless, many of the coup leaders were on the CIA payroll and the agency did not hide its hostility. A decade later, opposition to Aristide's economic and social policies led America to force him out of office. Today, the Haitian state barely exists.

Note: In 2021, Colombian mercenaries who had received training in the US assassinated Haitian President Jovenel MoĂŻse. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of important news articles on intelligence agency corruption from reliable major media sources.

SpaceX is building a network of hundreds of spy satellites under a classified contract with a U.S. intelligence agency, five sources familiar with the program said. The network is being built by SpaceX's Starshield business unit under a $1.8 billion contract signed in 2021 with the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), an intelligence agency that manages spy satellites. The plans show the extent of SpaceX's involvement in U.S. intelligence and military projects and illustrate a deeper Pentagon investment into vast, low-Earth orbiting satellite systems aimed at supporting ground forces. If successful, the sources said the program would significantly advance the ability of the U.S. government and military to quickly spot potential targets almost anywhere on the globe. Reuters reporting discloses for the first time that the SpaceX contract is for a powerful new spy system with hundreds of satellites bearing Earth-imaging capabilities that can operate as a swarm in low orbits. The planned Starshield network is separate from Starlink, SpaceX's growing commercial broadband constellation that has about 5,500 satellites in space. The classified constellation of spy satellites represents one of the U.S. government's most sought-after capabilities in space because it is designed to offer the most persistent, pervasive and rapid coverage of activities on Earth. "No one can hide," one of the sources said of the system's potential capability, when describing the network's reach.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on intelligence agency corruption and the disappearance of privacy from reliable major media sources.

On March 8, the Department of Defense published the most significant report on UFOs in at least two generations – a congressionally mandated historical review of U.S. government involvement with unidentified anomalous phenomena or UAP. Unfortunately, the report from the Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) contains an array of striking omissions and one particularly egregious misrepresentation. The result is a misleading report which, like so much government UFO-related propaganda over seven decades, tells the reader just to move on, nothing to see here. AARO has not provided a plausible explanation for naval aviators' more recent encounters – including one harrowing near-collision – with spherical objects exhibiting extraordinary flight characteristics. Worst of all, AARO's review misrepresents the most exhaustive, comprehensive historical analysis of UFO incidents, conducted on behalf of the Air Force by the Battelle Memorial Institute in the early 1950s. According to AARO, the resulting report found that "all cases that had enough data were resolved and explainable." But this is not what Battelle's analysis found at all, and AARO's misrepresentation of its conclusions speaks volumes. According to the Battelle analysis ... of the UFO cases considered "Excellent" and with sufficient data to draw a conclusion, 33 percent were categorized as having "unknown" origin.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on UFOs from reliable major media sources. Then explore the excellent, reliable resources provided in our new UFO Information Center.

Last year, the Republican chairman of the US House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) presented an image of Americans protesting the war in Gaza while implying possible ties between the protesters and Hamas, an allegation that was used to illustrate why surveillance reforms may prove detrimental to national security. In December, as many as 200 Republican staffers gathered behind closed doors to hear a presentation ... aimed at shoring up support for a US surveillance program known as Section 702. Section 702 authorizes the government to surveil foreigners located physically overseas ... but not Americans or individuals on US soil. While eavesdropping on foreigners is permitted, doing so for the explicit purpose of gaining access to an American's communications–a practice commonly referred to as "reverse targeting"–is strictly forbidden. "Yes, it's true, you cannot ‘target' protesters under 702," one aide, a legislative director for a Republican lawmaker, says. "But that doesn't mean the FBI doesn't still have the power to access those emails or listen to their calls if it wants." Between 2020 and early 2021, the FBI conducted "tens of thousands" of queries related to "civil unrest" in the United States. "Political protest is literally how America was founded. It's in our DNA," says Jason Pye, senior policy analyst at the nonprofit FreedomWorks. "Whether you agree with these protesters or not is irrelevant."

Note: The FBI has a long history of spying on political activists. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption and the disappearance of privacy from reliable major media sources.

The United States Defense Department announced Friday that it found no evidence that the government is covering up contact with extraterrestrials. The report was issued by the Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), the unit created and tasked in recent years with studying UAP sightings. The report in its own way raises as many new questions as it answers. AARO investigators, for instance, dug through the claims of witnesses and whistleblowers and successfully traced back the underlying research projects, Special Access Programs (SAPs), and classified compartments. As the report says, "AARO investigated numerous named, and described, but unnamed programs alleged to involve UAP exploitation conveyed to AARO through official interviews," and ultimately, "conclude[d] many of these programs represent authentic, current and former sensitive, national security programs, but none of these programs have been involved with capturing, recovering, or reverse-engineering off-world technology or material." What exactly are the secret compartmentalized programs that the whistleblowers and government witnesses misidentified as being related to UAP technology? What, exactly, are the Pentagon, intelligence community, or defense contractors working on that ... looks and sounds like reverse-engineering out-of-this-world technology or even studying so-called "non-human biologics"?

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on UFOs from reliable major media sources. Then explore the excellent, reliable resources provided in our new UFO Information Center.

The New York Times on February 25 published an explosive story of what purports to be the history of the CIA in Ukraine from the Maidan coup of 2014 to the present. The story, "The Spy War: How the CIA Secretly Helps Ukraine Fight Putin" ... relied on more than 200 interviews in Ukraine, the US, and "several European countries." There is a CIA listening post in the forest along the Russian border, one of 12 "secret" bases the US maintains there. Beginning in 2016, the CIA trained an "elite Ukrainian commando force known as Unit 2245, which captured Russian drones and communications gear so that CIA technicians could reverse-engineer them." One of the reasons that I believe the Times article was "authorized" by the intelligence community is because of what isn't in it. There's no mention, for example, that the United Nations has deemed Ukraine to be one of the most corrupt countries in the world, where money just seems to disappear into foreign accounts and the pockets of Ukrainian government officials. There's no mention that Ukraine has become a "supermarket" for black market weapons and that western weapons meant for the war effort have popped up all over the world. And there is no mention at all that it was the CIA and the State Department that were responsible for the 2014 overthrow of the Ukrainian government in the first place, an action that resulted in Russia's decision to invade eight years later.

Note: John Kiriakou is a whistleblower, former CIA counter-terrorism officer, and former senior investigator on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In our War Failures and Lies section in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center, we discuss how the CIA has supported Neo-Nazis in Ukraine since at least 2014, the year of the far-right coup that incorporated the Nazi group Azov Battalion into the country's National Guard. Since then, declassified government documents show that Ukraine was systematically developed as a proxy for US war against Russia. In 2016, Congress removed a ban on funding Ukrainian neo-fascist groups, effectively paving the way for American arms and weapons to fall in the hands of Ukraine's Nazi organizations.

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, as of this writing, faces a final attempt to appeal his extradition from the U.K. to the U.S. If he fails, he faces Espionage Act charges that could lead to living out the remainder of his life in federal prison. If Assange is extradited and successfully prosecuted for espionage, it would create a dangerous precedent for the government to suppress future reporting. The New York Times has a long and storied record of publishing classified materials going back to the 1971 Pentagon Papers, which showed the true history of the Vietnam War. More recently, the Washington Post and other outlets reported on the Discord intelligence leaks, revealing that Pentagon officials had suspected that the Ukrainian counter-offensive against Russia would fail ... among many other revelations. In 2013, DOJ officials noted that the legal theory used to prosecute Assange would apply almost equally to most major newspapers with a history of reporting on government secrets, such as the many news outlets that covered Edward Snowden's disclosures about warrantless NSA mass surveillance of Americans. It's not hard to see how the U.S. views Assange as an enemy of the state. He has exposed secrets and hypocrisy of American policymakers on the highest level. Diplomatic cables show the extent to which the State Department often acts as an extension of narrow multinational corporate interests. Wikileaks has published many documents that go well beyond the diplomatic cables and Democratic emails. The Afghanistan war documents disclosed by Wikileaks show extensive civilian deaths and Taliban militancy, far beyond what the Pentagon had previously acknowledged.

Note: The US prosecution of Assange undermines press freedom. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption and media manipulation from reliable sources.

Unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) have not only fueled public curiosity but have underscored the urgency for enhanced transparency from our government and its agencies. There is [a] need for Congress to initiate thorough public hearings on UAP, following explosive testimony last summer from intelligence officer-turned-whistleblower David Grusch regarding above top-secret crash retrieval and reverse engineering programs of technologies of unknown origin and nonhuman intelligence. Drawing inspiration from the historic U.S. Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, commonly known as the Church Committee, Congress could adopt a similar, no-nonsense approach, which would unearth government secrets about UAP, establish unprecedented transparency and instill unwavering accountability in the process. The Church Committee, led by then-Senator Frank Church (D-ID) in 1975, was pivotal in investigating and exposing US intelligence agency abuses. Taking a cue from this historic success, a Church-style Select Committee on UAP is not just advisable but imperative. Such a committee would compel government agencies and officials to testify openly about their knowledge of UAP encounters. The committee would unearth the extent to which the intelligence community engaged in a disinformation campaign against the American people to keep its UAP secrets buried.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on UFOs from reliable major media sources. Then explore the excellent, reliable resources provided in our new UFO Information Center.

There are three basic problems with the CIA: its objectives, methods, and unaccountability. In effect, the CIA is a secret army of the U.S., capable of creating mayhem across the world with no accountability whatsoever. When President Dwight Eisenhower decided that Africa's rising political star, democratically elected Patrice Lumumba of Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo), was the "enemy," the CIA conspired in his 1961 assassination, thus undermining the democratic hopes for Africa. The CIA has been held to serious public account just once, in 1975. In that year, Idaho Senator Frank Church led a Senate investigation that exposed the CIA's shocking rampage of assassinations, coups, destabilization, surveillance, and Mengele-style torture and medical "experiments." Since 1975, the CIA has run secretive operations backing Islamic jihadists in Afghanistan that utterly wrecked Afghanistan while giving rise to al-Qaeda. The CIA has likely run secretive operations in the Balkans against Serbia, in the Caucuses against Russia, and in Central Asia targeting China, all deploying CIA-backed jihadists. In the 2010s, the CIA ran deadly operations to topple Syria's Bashir al-Assad, again with Islamic jihadists. For at least 20 years, the CIA has been deeply involved in fomenting the growing catastrophe in Ukraine, including the violent overthrow of Ukraine's President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014 that triggered the devastating war now engulfing Ukraine.

Note: Learn more about the rise of the CIA in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on intelligence agency corruption from reliable major media sources.

A disturbing trend of undercover federal agents engaging minors online to plan acts related to terrorism abroad, then arresting them shortly after they turn 18, ought to raise eyebrows as well as outrage, given that many of these targets are teens who have significant cognitive and intellectual disabilities. The most recent case in Colorado involves Humzah Mashkoor, an 18-year-old from Westminster charged with "attempting to provide material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization," according to a U.S. Department of Justice December 2023 press release. Months earlier, in July last year, FBI agents arrested Davin Daniel Meyer, 18, of Castle Rock, charged with the same crime, which can carry a stiff penalty of decades in prison. And in June, 18-year-old Mateo Ventura of Massachusetts was charged with a similar crime of intention after being in contact not with terrorists but with undercover FBI agents. A fourth case occurred last year in Philadelphia. When you look at the striking similarities of these cases, it's not unreasonable to conclude that federal agents are failing morally and ethically by seemingly coaxing and cajoling minors – including two Colorado children with limited intellectual capacity and no history of harming anyone – to cross a line. The FBI agents then "get their man" – even before these individuals are in fact men. Enough time has gone by to show the human element to this story, but no reporters seem to be interested.

Note: Read more about the FBI's manufacture of terrorist plots. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on law enforcement corruption and terrorism from reliable major media sources.

United States officials fought to conceal details of arrangements between US spy agencies and private companies tracking the whereabouts of Americans. Obtaining location data from US phones normally requires a warrant, but police and intelligence agencies routinely pay companies instead for the data, effectively circumventing the courts. Ron Wyden, the US senator from Oregon, informed the nation's intelligence chief, Avril Haines, on Thursday that the Pentagon only agreed to release details about the data purchases, which had always been unclassified, after Wyden hindered the Senate's efforts to appoint a new director of the National Security Agency. "The secrecy around data purchases was amplified," Wyden wrote, "because intelligence agencies have sought to keep the American people in the dark." Pentagon offices known to have purchased location data from these companies include the Defense Intelligence Agency and the NSA, among others. Wyden's letter ... indicates that the NSA is also "buying Americans' domestic internet metadata." Wyden's disclosure comes amid a fight in the US House of Representatives over efforts to outlaw the purchases. Members of the House Judiciary Committee attached legislation doing so ... to a bill reauthorizing a contentious surveillance program known as Section 702. Biden administration officials and members of the intelligence committee staged a campaign against the privacy-enhancing measures.

Note: Learn more about mission creep in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on military corruption and the disappearance of privacy from reliable major media sources.

American Amara Majeed was accused of terrorism by the Sri Lankan police in 2019. Robert Williams was arrested outside his house in Detroit and detained in jail for 18 hours for allegedly stealing watches in 2020. Randal Reid spent six days in jail in 2022 for supposedly using stolen credit cards in a state he'd never even visited. In all three cases, the authorities had the wrong people. In all three, it was face recognition technology that told them they were right. Law enforcement officers in many U.S. states are not required to reveal that they used face recognition technology to identify suspects. Surveillance is predicated on the idea that people need to be tracked and their movements limited and controlled in a trade-off between privacy and security. The assumption that less privacy leads to more security is built in. That may be the case for some, but not for the people disproportionately targeted by face recognition technology. As of 2019, face recognition technology misidentified Black and Asian people at up to 100 times the rate of white people. In 2018 ... 28 members of the U.S. Congress ... were falsely matched with mug shots on file using Amazon's Rekognition tool. Much early research into face recognition software was funded by the CIA for the purposes of border surveillance. More recently, private companies have adopted data harvesting techniques, including face recognition, as part of a long practice of leveraging personal data for profit.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on police corruption and the disappearance of privacy from reliable major media sources.

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