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Whistleblower Chelsea Manning, who is currently serving an unjust thirty-five year jail sentence and who has already been tortured under US military supervision, is now being threatened with "indefinite solitary confinement" for alleged infractions that are so minor it's actually hard to believe.
Last week, the German government informed the popular news site Netzpolitik that two of its journalists were under investigation for treason for reporting on their government's mass surveillance programs - in other words they were being investigated for doing their job.
Today we filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the Justice Department over their unpublished rules for using National Security Letters and so-called informal “exigent letters” to conduct surveillance of journalists.
Today we’re proud to announce a major new crowd-funding campaign in support of whistleblower Chelsea Manning to help pay for her important legal appeal. Chelsea is currently in the process challenging of her unjust Espionage Act conviction and draconian 35-year jail sentence at the Army Court of Appeals.
Awarding-winning filmmaker and journalist Laura Poitras sued the Department of Homeland Security and several other federal agencies under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) yesterday, demanding an explanation for the dozens of times the US government detained and questioned her traveling over the border from 2006-2012.
For years, computer security experts have bemoaned the poor security of popular browser plugins like Adobe Flash. Whether you realize it or not, your web browser uses these plug-ins all the time to play video on countless popular sites on the Internet - yet cybercriminals regularly exploit security holes in these same plugins to phish and defraud millions of ordinary computer users.
The risk is even greater for journalists: the recent Hacking Team leak shows that Flash exploits were an important component of their hacking tools, which have been used by authoritarian governments around the world that are known to target reporters, activists, and dissidents. The leak includes several previously unknown ("0-day") Flash exploits, which are already being incorporated into widely used exploit kits so anybody will be able to use them, not just Hacking Team and their customers. As of this writing, two of the Hacking Team Flash exploits remain unpatched - and there may be more yet to come as researchers continue to explore the dataset.
Today we’re announcing SecureDrop 0.3.4, the latest release of SecureDrop, and publishing the results of the accompanying security audit by iSEC Partners. This is our fourth audit of SecureDrop and you can read the results of the previous three audits here.
The UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression, David Kaye, recently called for outside comments on the protection of sources and whistleblowers around the world and will be presenting a report on the subject to the UN General Assembly in October 2015. Freedom of the Press Foundation submitted our comments to the Special Rapporteur yesterday, which you can read in full below.
It was great to read this Edward Snowden New York Times op-ed—great because the piece is as thoughtful and informative as you’d expect, and even better because it’s an example of Snowden’s continuing ability to raise awareness of the dangers of an unchecked surveillance state.
