Josh Wieder

The vile letter above speaks for itself. The letter you see above, published for the first time fully unredacted by the New York Times yesterday , was sent by the FBI to Martin Luther King Jr, in order to compel him to commit suicide. The letter was apparently enclosed with a recording that the FBI believed could provide King was cheating on his wife; the impetus for their suicide demand. The sections that have for decades remained redacted explicitly reference the tape - it becomes apparent that the only possible reason for censoring this material is that it contains proof that the FBI was conducting warrantless surveillance of US citizens for purely political reasons. Fortunately we live in an enlightened age where such warrantless eavesdropping is merely a curio of the distant past. Oh, wait ...

For the last few days I've had great fun watching James Comey and his pack of Keystone Cyber Cops failing to convince the world that they should be CC'd on everyone's calls, tweets and texts and generally exposing himself as the incompetent, braying ass that he is. Keep in mind the camera adds 10 pounds Dan Froomkin and Natasha Vargas-Cooper over at The Intercept  exposing each of the examples that Comey used to indicate the necessity for breaking cell phone encryption as fabricated - the cases were real, but none of them relied on cell phones or computers to obtain a conviction. In one case of infanticide, the parents who were eventually found guilty had been previously convicted of child cruelty and had the deceased child previously taken from their custody for neglect. Not only did the state not need to read the parents' phones for evidence, if they had read their own files  and demonstrated some inter-agency cooperation they could very likely have prevent...

Congress appears to have abandoned FBI Director James Comey's bungled attacks on consumer adoption of encryption . Its a rare glimmer of sanity from Capitol Hill; press reports quoting congressional officials using language not ripped from the pages of an Orwell novel. Readers may remember that in a recent post we mentioned some danger signs indicating that the executive wanted to take some more aggressive action to ensure that the commoners and foreign-folk don't have access to encryption tools that would help keep their data free from snooping. Top brass from the FBI and the Attorney Generals Office were telling anyone who would listen that unless tech companies stopped trying to protect their customer's data, law enforcement would be powerless in the face of modern "cyber" criminals. Congress has refused to jump on this alarmist bandwagon. Darrell Issa, a member of that rarest of species - California Republicans - had this to say about federal law enforcem...