The New York Times and the George Polk Awards held an excellent one-day conference two weeks ago entitled "Sources and Secrets," in which a number of all-star panelists discussed issues related to secrecy, national security, whistleblowers, and the state of journalism in the age of mass surveillance. The videos have …
Privacy-conscious Internet users were aghast last week when court documents showed that Microsoft looked at the content of a blogger’s Hotmail account without a warrant—or any legal process whatsoever—in an attempt to root out a employee within Microsoft who was allegedly leaking the source code of Windows 8. The move …
The nonpartisan organization Cause of Action has a new report out for Sunshine Week, "Grading the Government: How the White House Targets Document Requesters." The report includes an April 15, 2009 email Cause of Action obtained last year from the Justice Department written by then White House counsel Greg Craig. …
The House last month, by an overwhelming majority, passed a bipartisan-sponsored Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) reform bill that received strong support from more than two-dozen news organizations and public interest groups. But, as Federal News Radio reported this morning, government FOIA officers are now complaining that the legislation …
At the center of the controversy between the Senate Intelligence Committee and the CIA is a report known as the “Panetta review” that apparently matches up with the findings and conclusions of the Senate panel’s own report on the CIA’s detention and interrogation program. Last December, after Sen. Mark Udall …
Last week, as she does every year around Sunshine Week, Melanie Pustay went to The Hill and testified before a congressional committee about how great government agencies haven been doing responding to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and providing requesters with responsive records. Pustay, the head of the Department …
In a win for press freedom, the US government moved to dismiss 11 of the 12 charges in their criminal indictment against journalist Barrett Brown today. The charges against Brown had been widely criticized for potentially criminalizing routine journalistic behavior and could have had far reaching effects on the rights …
On The Media dedicated its whole program this week to addressing a growing and disturbing problem: the suspension of constitutional rights at the US border, where Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) can detain US citizens for hours and seize their electronic devices without any suspicion of wrong doing. Perhaps worse, …
We’ve been crowd-funding donations for several open-source encryption tools for two months now. We've discussed before why these tools are so important from a press freedom perspective, but we’ve also repeatedly heard one question from readers who have come across the campaign for the first time: “why should I …
In a disturbing ruling for democracy, a lower court in United Kingdom announced today that the detainment of journalist Glenn Greenwald’s partner David Miranda was lawful under the Terrorism Act, despite the fact that the UK government knew Miranda never was a terrorist. This disgraceful opinion equates acts of journalism …
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