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After nearly a week of increasing public protests in Turkey, ostensibly over government plans to turn a last bit of green space in Istanbul into another shopping mall, matters became far more serious on Friday. Riot police descended on the protestors with various forms of tear gas (and possibly worse chemical and biological agents -- raw sewage?) and water cannon, blasting everyone and everything in sight including non-participants. When they caught protestors, they beat them violently and brutally, as can be seen in this video. Photographs show that police fired tear gas into crowded underground metro stations, leading to panic and worse. Istanbul looks like a war zone. Today indications are that protests have only increased in number and fury in response to the violence with which they were met yesterday.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has come under increased criticism at home over his enthusiastic support for those fighting to overthrow the government in neighboring Syria. Turkish government support for the rebels came early and has included providing safe havens for the Islamist insurgents and safe passage into Syria from Libya, Yemen, and other countries of the insurgents' origin. Erdogan's stated policy of "zero problems with neighbors" has been turned on its head by his support for the rebels fighting next door. Public dissatisfaction with the Turkish government's policy of encouraging an Islamist insurgency next door has steadily increased. The insurgents fighting the Syrian government were still unsatisfied by the level of support they received from their Turkish hosts and they took to false flag attacks in places like Reyhanli and a planned false-flag sarin gas attack on southern Turkey in Adana in attempt to provoke a Turkish (and NATO) military response against Syria.

Suddenly the tables are turned at home. Faced with a nascent but growing protest movement of his own, Erdogan expresses a very different view toward the people in the street. The Prime Minister strongly supported the "Arab Spring" overthrow in Egypt and supports the overthrow of Assad next door because he said the leaders of these countries did not listen to their people. Just last week he met with President Obama and agreed that "Assad must go." Now with protesters in Turkey chanting "Erdogan must go" he is singing a different tune. Now "the people" he claimed to speak for -- on the streets in Egypt and Syria, at least -- were, in Turkey, "with terror, have dark ties," in his words. Suddenly "the people" are not so noble when they are calling for his ouster. With the tables turned on Erdogan, he can only demand order! "I call on the protesters to stop their demonstrations immediately," he thundered yesterday. Erdogan caught the tiger by the tail and thought he would become a new Ottoman Sultan. Reality bites back hard on the streets of Istanbul and elsewhere. This is far from over.

The 29-year-old former NSA contractor and source of the Guardian's NSA files coverage will – with the help of Glenn Greenwald – take your questions today on why he revealed the NSA's top-secret surveillance of US citizens, the international storm that has ensued, and the uncertain future he now faces. Ask him anything.

I did not reveal any US operations against legitimate military targets. I pointed out where the NSA has hacked civilian infrastructure such as universities, hospitals, and private businesses because it is dangerous. These nakedly, aggressively criminal acts are wrong no matter the target. Not only that, when NSA makes a technical mistake during an exploitation operation, critical systems crash. Congress hasn't declared war on the countries - the majority of them are our allies - but without asking for public permission, NSA is running network operations against them that affect millions of innocent people. And for what? So we can have secret access to a computer in a country we're not even fighting? So we can potentially reveal a potential terrorist with the potential to kill fewer Americans than our own Police? No, the public needs to know the kinds of things a government does in its name, or the "consent of the governed" is meaningless.

I was debriefed by Glenn and his peers over a number of days, and not all of those conversations were recorded. The statement I made about earnings was that $200,000 was my "career high" salary. I had to take pay cuts in the course of pursuing specific work. Booz was not the most I've been paid.

Texans are having nightmares of a Niger Delta nature, and while they have always been the friends of Big Oil, TransCanada is changing the rules of the game in a legally-aided land grab that will test just how tough Texans are.

The lawsuits against TransCanada are piling up to the dismay of the Keystone XL pipeline project, which has been beleaguered by political, socio-economic, environmental and legal woes at every step from its US origins in Montana to its final destination point in south Texas. No one thought Texas would be part of the problem: Texans love their pipelines. Why the change of heart, then? The simplest answer is that Texans love their pipelines because Big Oil has been paying big bucks for the privilege of running them through Texas farmland, but TransCanada is bullying them out of their fair share. This is how it works: TransCanada makes an unacceptably low offer for the land it needs; the landowner rejects the offer; TransCanada gets the land condemned in court; then it legally acquires the land for a fraction of its original offer. Condemning land is not a new tactic by Big Oil, but while US oil companies have traditionally kept this to a minimum, TransCanada has taken far too much advantage of this legal loophole to get what it wants. According to CNBC.com, the Canadian company has so far condemned over 100 tracts of land out of the 800 tracts it has acquired for the pipeline in Texas.

Since Texans are being forced to give up their land for peanuts for the bigger picture “common good”, let’s look at why they aren’t buying it and why they don’t feel any less patriotic for their opinion. (Common good in this case meaning “national interest”)

A bipartisan pair of lawmakers is expressing alarm at reported changes at the National Security Agency that would allow the intelligence service’s information to be used for policing efforts in the United States.“If media accounts are true, this radical policy shift by the NSA would be unconstitutional, and dangerous,” Reps. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) and Blake FarentholdBlake FarentholdLawmakers warn of 'radical' move by NSA to share information Overnight Tech: Netflix scores win over Postal Service Lawmakers go green for St. Patrick's Day MORE (R-Texas) wrote in a letter to the spy agency this week. “The proposed shift in the relationship between our intelligence agencies and the American people should not be done in secret.ADVERTISEMENT“NSA’s mission has never been, and should never be, domestic policing or domestic spying.”The NSA has yet to publicly announce the change, but The New York Times reported last month that the administration was poised to expand the agency's ability to share information that it picks up about people’s communications with other intelligence agencies.The modification would open the door for the NSA to give the FBI and other federal agencies uncensored communications of foreigners and Americans picked up incidentally — but without a warrant — during sweeps.  

Robert Litt, the general counsel at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, told the Times that it was finalizing a 21-page draft of procedures to allow the expanded sharing.  Separately, the Guardian reported earlier this month that the FBI had quietly changed its internal privacy rules to allow direct access to the NSA’s massive storehouse of communication data picked up on Internet service providers and websites.The revelations unnerved civil liberties advocates, who encouraged lawmakers to demand answers of the spy agency.“Under a policy like this, information collected by the NSA would be available to a host of federal agencies that may use it to investigate and prosecute domestic crimes,” said Neema Singh Guliani, legislative counsel and the American Civil Liberties Union. “Making such a change without authorization from Congress or the opportunity for debate would ignore public demands for greater transparency and oversight over intelligence activities.”In their letter this week, Lieu and Farenthold warned that the NSA’s changes would undermine Congress and unconstitutionally violate people’s privacy rights.   

“The executive branch would be violating the separation of powers by unilaterally transferring warrantless data collected under the NSA’s extraordinary authority to domestic agencies, which do not have such authority,” they wrote.“Domestic law enforcement agencies — which need a warrant supported by probable cause to search or seize — cannot do an end run around the Fourth Amendment by searching warrantless information collected by the NSA.”

For more than six months, Edward Snowden’s revelations about the National Security Agency (NSA) have been pouring out from the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Guardian, Germany’s Der Spiegel, and Brazil’s O Globo, among other places.  Yet no one has pointed out the combination of factors that made the NSA’s expanding programs to monitor the world seem like such a slam-dunk development in Washington.  The answer is remarkably simple.  For an imperial power losing its economic grip on the planet and heading into more austere times, the NSA’s latest technological breakthroughs look like a bargain basement deal when it comes to projecting power and keeping subordinate allies in line -- like, in fact, the steal of the century.  Even when disaster turned out to be attached to them, the NSA’s surveillance programs have come with such a discounted price tag that no Washington elite was going to reject them.

What exactly was the aim of such an unprecedented program of massive domestic and planetary spying, which clearly carried the risk of controversy at home and abroad? Here, an awareness of the more than century-long history of U.S. surveillance can guide us through the billions of bytes swept up by the NSA to the strategic significance of such a program for the planet’s last superpower. What the past reveals is a long-term relationship between American state surveillance and political scandal that helps illuminate the unacknowledged reason why the NSA monitors America’s closest allies. Not only does such surveillance help gain intelligence advantageous to U.S. diplomacy, trade relations, and war-making, but it also scoops up intimate information that can provide leverage -- akin to blackmail -- in sensitive global dealings and negotiations of every sort. The NSA’s global panopticon thus fulfills an ancient dream of empire. With a few computer key strokes, the agency has solved the problem that has bedeviled world powers since at least the time of Caesar Augustus: how to control unruly local leaders, who are the foundation for imperial rule, by ferreting out crucial, often scurrilous, information to make them more malleable.

Once upon a time, such surveillance was both expensive and labor intensive. Today, however, unlike the U.S. Army’s shoe-leather surveillance during World War I or the FBI’s break-ins and phone bugs in the Cold War years, the NSA can monitor the entire world and its leaders with only 100-plus probes into the Internet’s fiber optic cables. This new technology is both omniscient and omnipresent beyond anything those lacking top-secret clearance could have imagined before the Edward Snowden revelations began.  Not only is it unimaginably pervasive, but NSA surveillance is also a particularly cost-effective strategy compared to just about any other form of global power projection. And better yet, it fulfills the greatest imperial dream of all: to be omniscient not just for a few islands, as in the Philippines a century ago, or a couple of countries, as in the Cold War era, but on a truly global scale. In a time of increasing imperial austerity and exceptional technological capability, everything about the NSA’s surveillance told Washington to just “go for it.”  This cut-rate mechanism for both projecting force and preserving U.S. global power surely looked like a no-brainer, a must-have bargain for any American president in the twenty-first century -- before new NSA documents started hitting front pages weekly, thanks to Snowden, and the whole world began returning the favor.

In a significant win for the privacy rights of anyone who has ever gotten a drug prescription, a federal judge in Oregon ruled yesterday that the DEA needs a warrant to search confidential prescription records. Oregon, like 48 other states, has a Prescription Drug Monitoring Program (PDMP), which tracks patients’ prescriptions for medications used to treat a long list of sensitive medical conditions. Although Oregon law requires police to get a warrant from a judge before searching prescription records in the database, the DEA has been requesting records using administrative subpoenas, which do not involve judicial authorization or probable cause. After the State of Oregon sued the DEA over this practice, the ACLU and ACLU of Oregon joined the suit on behalf of four patients and a doctor in the state. Last month, we argued in court that the DEA is violating the Fourth Amendment by bypassing the Constitution’s warrant requirement when seeking private prescription records. Yesterday, the court agreed. The court’s ruling is the first time a judge has held that law enforcement must get a probable cause warrant to access confidential prescription records from a state database in a criminal investigation. The opinion is significant for several reasons.

First, the court soundly rejected the DEA’s extreme argument that people lose their Fourth Amendment privacy rights in their medical information when they engage in confidential discussions with their doctor and pharmacist about their illnesses and treatment decisions. The federal government had argued that the “third party doctrine” applied, comparing confidential prescription records to electricity consumption records, bank records, and other categories of information held by third-party companies, for which courts have said police don’t need a warrant. The judge batted this argument aside, explaining that prescription records are “more inherently personal or private than bank records, and are entitled to and treated with a heightened expectation of privacy.” As the court held: “Although there is not an absolute right to privacy in prescription information, as patients must expect that physicians, pharmacists, and other medical personnel can and must access their records, it is more than reasonable for patients to believe that law enforcement agencies will not have unfettered access to their records.” More importantly, this ruling fits into a series of recent opinions calling into question the continuing vitality of the third party doctrine in modern society. As Justice Sotomayor wrote in United States v. Jonestwo years ago, “it may be necessary to reconsider the premise that an individual has no reasonable expectation of privacy in information voluntarily disclosed to third parties. This approach is ill suited to the digital age, in which people reveal a great deal of information about themselves to third parties in the course of carrying out mundane tasks.” This sentiment was echoed by the federal judge who ruled last year that the NSA’s bulk telephone metadata program violates the Fourth Amendment. The Oregon case is another blow to the third party doctrine’s shaky foundation.

In addition, although yesterday’s ruling is only binding within Oregon, it will be persuasive precedent for courts evaluating law enforcement’s use of subpoenas to obtain private prescription records—and similar information—around the country. The case is a reminder to the DEA and other law enforcement agencies that they are not above the law, and that they must comply with the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement when seeking sensitive information in criminal investigations. Finally, the case should add momentum to a movement within state legislatures to amend PDMP statutes to require police to get a warrant for prescription records. Ten states currently require a warrant as a matter of state law (Rhode Island was the most recent state to add this requirement, last year). The Pennsylvania House has passed legislation creating a warrant requirement for that state’s PDMP, and is waiting for the state senate to act. The Florida legislature may update the privacy protections for its PDMP this year. Action by state legislatures will send a strong message to the DEA that it should be getting warrants everywhere, not just in Oregon.

Hélène Flautre, the co-chairwoman of the EU-Turkey Joint Parliamentary Committee, released a statement on Saturday in which she criticized Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan with being “irresponsible” for accusing those who investigate the recent corruption probe. "I observe the recent developments in Turkey with extreme vigilance, which greatly affect the credit of Prime Minister. In his statements, he accuses those who investigating the probe rather than require light on serious allegations of corruption involving his family is irresponsible. Allegations are certainly not findings, and justice must now continue its work in serenity and independence,” Flautre said. Flautre's statement came after the Council of State's decision on Friday to cancel the Erdoğan government's executive order requiring police and prosecutors to notify their superiors of all investigations, effectively giving the government advance warning of what should be secret investigations.

“This is a serious political crisis and the European Union must stand firmly on the side of the defense of the rule of law, avoiding any exploitation of the situation,” her statement added. After the cancellation of the order by the Council of State on Friday, Erdoğan said he would prosecute Turkey's top judicial body if he had the authority because it “committed a crime.” Erdoğan claimed the Supreme Board of Judges and Prosecutors (HSYK) has committed a crime by issuing a statement about a judicial police regulation while it was being assessed at the Council of State. On Thursday, the HSYK has harshly criticized the new judicial police regulation, saying that it is in violation of the Turkish Constitution. The Erdoğan government's interference into and pressure on the judiciary was met with a huge backlash from opposition parties, bar associations, advocacy groups and the media. It has raised concerns of an attempted government cover-up of the corruption probe that has implicated prominent people in the business community and government.

We've written repeatedly in this space over the past two weeks about how much Americans (and Congress) don't want to get involved in what's going on in Syria. This much is clear. But Americans' hesitation isn't really about Syria; it's more about their increasingly non-interventionist attitude toward foreign policy.

Case in point: opposition to military action in Syria tracks very closely to overall opposition to foreign intervention. Take two new polls. A newly released CBS News/New York Times poll asked people whether they felt the United States should "take the leading role ... in trying to solve international conflicts."

A CNN/Opinion Research poll, meanwhile, asked: "As a general rule, do you think the United States should be ready and willing to use military force around the world, or the United States should be very reluctant to use military force?" In each case, just 34 percent of Americans said they wanted a more involved foreign policy, while more than six in 10 Americans wanted to be more non-interventionist. The CBS/NYT poll also asked whether the United States should seek to remove dictators where it can. Americans opposed this resoundingly, 72-15.

The recent revelations by the whistleblower Edward Snowden were fascinating. But they - and all the reactions to them - had one enormous assumption at their heart.That the spies know what they are doing.It is a belief that has been central to much of the journalism about spying and spies over the past fifty years. That the anonymous figures in the intelligence world have a dark omniscience. That they know what's going on in ways that we don't.It doesn't matter whether you hate the spies and believe they are corroding democracy, or if you think they are the noble guardians of the state. In both cases the assumption is that the secret agents know more than we do.

But the strange fact is that often when you look into the history of spies what you discover is something very different.It is not the story of men and women who have a better and deeper understanding of the world than we do. In fact in many cases it is the story of weirdos who have created a completely mad version of the world that they then impose on the rest of us.I want to tell some stories about MI5 - and the very strange people who worked there. They are often funny, sometimes rather sad - but always very odd.The stories also show how elites in Britain have used the aura of secret knowledge as a way of maintaining their power. But as their power waned the "secrets" became weirder and weirder.They were helped in this by another group who also felt their power was waning - journalists. And together the journalists and spies concocted a strange, dark world of treachery and deceit which bore very little relationship to what was really going on. And still doesn't.

Here is Chapman Pincher being interviewed on the Wogan programme about what then happened. Up to this point Pincher had been the Defence correspondent on the Daily Express. He was successful for getting "scoops" from "inside sources" - although the historian EP Thompson said that really Chapman Pincher was:"A kind of official urinal in which ministers and intelligence and defence chiefs could stand patiently leaking."What the dissident MI5 agents now told Pincher was like super high-grade piss. Or, as he puts it in the Wogan interview, "it was like walking into an Aladdin's Cave". But what Pincher wrote was going to open the floodgates to a new kind of conspiracy journalism that still holds sway over large parts of the media imagination.Have a look at him and decide yourself - high grade toilet or investigative journalist? Or maybe often they are the same thing?

Officer Rush's arguments were ultimately rejected: Karla Rush, an officer based in East Oakland, faced especially severe charges. Of the 40 search warrants she had filed between March of 2007 and August 2008, 39 were fraudulent. Rush claimed that her misconduct was the result of poor training, but an arbitrator rejected her assertion, saying, "telling the truth is not a matter of training," according to court documents.

But isn't this America? Isn't Karla Rush an American? Isn't America a place where people like Carlos Danger get second chances? Yes. Yes it is. So Karla Rush — fired for multiple fraudulent search warrant applications — is employed as a law enforcement officer again. Maybe this isn't a shock to you. The criminal justice system decides to rely upon (and often conceal the misconduct of) dirty cops all the time. Just look at cops like Armando Saldate, Jr. in Arizona. Karla Rush probably got re-hired by some ultra-conservative small town department in some red state, right?

Yep. That's right. UC Berkeley — the hobgoblin of conservatives, the famously nutty liberal enclave — re-hired a police officer fired for filing fraudulent search warrants. After all, what's important in hiring a police officer?

Cellphones are the spies in our pockets, gathering information about whom we befriend, what we say, where we go, and what we read. That’s why Sen. Edward Markey, D-Mass., recently asked the nation’s major cellphone companies to disclose how frequently they receive requests from law enforcement for customer call records—including the content of communications, numbers dialed, websites visited, and location data. Sometimes police have a warrant, sometimes they don’t. Seven companies provided information in response to the inqury. The letters Markey received, which were covered today in the Boston Globe, Washington Post, and New York Times, show that the quantity of requests for these records is staggering. T-Mobile and AT&T together received nearly 600,000 requests for customer information in 2012. AT&T has to employ more than 100 full-time workers to process them. And police demand for our call records is growing rapidly, with requests to Verizon doubling in the last five years.

he companies keep records of where you have traveled in the past and can track you in real time—so law enforcement can do it, too. In some ways having a police officer track you in real time electronically is even worse, because you never know when it’s happening. Historical records can be even more sensitive than real-time tracking, stretching back for months or even years, and reveal your daily routine and every deviation from it.

Unfortunately, according to the companies’ letters, some of them appear to be handing over the content of our digital communications without a warrant. AT&T discloses stored texts or voicemails that are older than 180 days old with a subpoena—no court supervision or probable cause required. In one bright spot, T-Mobile requires a warrant for texts and voicemails. The letters also show that in its search for evidence about a handful of guilty people, law enforcement often obtains the data of hundreds or thousands of innocent people. For example, through a technique known as “tower dumps,” law enforcement agents can see all of the cellphones using a particular tower in a given time range. There were approximately 9,000 tower dumps reported in 2012 (with not all companies reporting). What happens to that data? Could it be used for future investigations? No one really knows, because there are no clear policies in place, and the people whose data is turned over are never notified.

The number of no-knock raids has increased from 3,000 in 1981 to more than 50,000 last year, according to Peter Kraska, a criminologist at Eastern Kentucky University in Richmond.

The legal precept for knocking before entering goes back to the Middle Ages. But US courts have allowed no-knock raids, with some limits. In June, the Supreme Court upheld a previous no-knock decision that said police should wait at least 15 seconds for an occupant to answer before bursting through the door. (A longer wait might give a drug dealer time to flush evidence down the toilet.) But in the same decision, the court decided by a 5-to-4 vote to allow evidence gained in raids that used less time than that.The upshot, says Mr. Moran, who argued that case for the plaintiff in front of the Supreme Court, is that "we'll see a lot more of these [no-knock] raids in the future."

OPERATION: Fax Big Brother Congress is rushing toward a vote on CISA, the worst spying bill yet. CISA would grant sweeping legal immunity to giant companies like Facebook and Google, allowing them to do almost anything they want with your data. In exchange, they'll share even more of your personal information with the government, all in the name of "cybersecurity." CISA won't stop hackers — Congress is stuck in 1984 and doesn't understand modern technology. So this week we're sending them thousands of faxes — technology that is hopefully old enough for them to understand. Stop CISA. Send a fax now!

(Any tweet w/ #faxbigbrother will get faxed too!) Your email is only shown in your fax to Congress. We won't add you to any mailing lists.

CISA: the dirty deal between government and corporate giants. It's the dirty deal that lets much of government from the NSA to local police get your private data from your favorite websites and lets them use it without due process. The government is proposing a massive bribe—they will give corporations immunity for breaking virtually any law if they do so while providing the NSA, DHS, DEA, and local police surveillance access to everyone's data in exchange for getting away with crimes, like fraud, money laundering, or illegal wiretapping. Specifically it incentivizes companies to automatically and simultaneously transfer your data to the DHS, NSA, FBI, and local police with all of your personally-indentifying information by giving companies legal immunity (notwithstanding any law), and on top of that, you can't use the Freedom of Information Act to find out what has been shared.

The Justice Department will regularly require federal agents to seek warrants before using secretive equipment that can locate and track cellphones, the agency announced Thursday, the first regulations on an increasingly controversial technology.The new policy, which also limits what information may be collected and how long it can be stored, puts a measure of judicial oversight on a technology that was designed to hunt terrorists overseas but has become a popular tool among federal agents and local police officers for fighting crime.Civil libertarians have expressed grave privacy concerns about the technology’s proliferation, but the new Justice Department policies do not apply to local police forces.

The device, commonly called a cell-site simulator or StingRay, tricks cellphones into connecting with it by acting like a cell tower, allowing the authorities to determine the location of a tracked phone. In doing so, however, the equipment also connects with all other phones in the area, allowing investigators to collect information on people not suspected of any crime.The device is also capable of capturing calls, text messages, emails and other data. Until Thursday’s regulations, the rules for the use of that information and the duration it could be kept had not been detailed and varied across the department’s offices and agencies.

Conflict between Israel and Palestine escalates as youth throughout Palestine vent their frustrations over decades of illegal occupation and an escalation of Israeli oppression and violence. The renewed round of violence takes its toll on both Israelis and Palestinians.  

Violent clashes between Israeli occupation forces, settlers and Palestinians have escalated throughout Palestine since the beginning of the intensified Israeli crackdown against Palestinians at the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, last month. On Sunday Israeli troops carried out a raid against the International Middle East Media Center (IMEMC). The center disseminates a lot of regional and local news coverage that otherwise only is available in Arab to English-speaking listeners and readers. The raid was carried out Sunday morning at 4.00 o’clock. Over the weekend a rocket was fired into Israeli territory from the Gaza Strip. The rocket landed without causing damage. Sunday at dawn Israel responded by launching air strikes against targets in the Gaza Strip. Israeli military and government sources say that the strikes aimed at targeting militants.

One of these air strikes struck a family home in the Zeitoun neighborhood of Gaza City. The air raid killed a five months pregnant Palestinian mother along with her two-year-old child while several other family members were injured. The husband of the deceased 30-year-old Nour Rasmi Hassan told that a “knock on the roof rocket” woke the family from their sleep but that they were confused, shocked and that there was no time to respond and flee their home before the house was struck. Frustrated Palestinian youth are confronting Palestinian police and military in occupied East Jerusalem and other occupied Palestinian territories. Clashes in the interim Palestinian capital Ramallah turned deadly on Sunday evening when a 13-year-old boy succumbed to the his injuries. The 13-year-old Ahmad had been struck in the head by a rubber-coated steel bullet fired by Israeli occupation forces earlier that day. The fatal shooting occurred close to the Beit El settlement northeast of al-Biereh.

Yesterday the United States gave the U.N. Human Rights Committee its one year follow-up report on progress made to implement four priority recommendations made by the committee a year ago. The independent human rights experts had reviewed the United States' compliance with a major human rights treaty, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). They found the U.S. coming up short in many areas, including accountability for torture, privacy and surveillance, Guantánamo, and gun violence. Yesterday’s disappointing 15-page submission does provide some information on Justice Department investigations regarding police misconduct, including the recent Ferguson report. But, there was nothing on accountability measures taken in the aftermath of the release of the Senate report on the CIA torture program. The need for Attorney General Eric Holder to appoint a special prosecutor remains as glaring as ever.

The submission notes that the Senate report’s 500-page executive summary was “declassified with minimal redactions to protect national security,” but it failed to commit to release the entire report (which the ACLU is currently fighting for in a FOIA lawsuit). And while the submission states that the U.S. “supports transparency and has taken steps to ensure that it never resorts to the use of those [harsh interrogation] techniques again,” there is no mention of any concrete actions taken to criminally investigate CIA torture, especially in light of the new information made public in the report about the brutality of the CIA’s methods, and its lies to Congress, the media, and the public about its torture program. Under the ICCPR and the Convention Against Torture, the U.S. has an obligation to effectively, independently, and impartially investigate all cases of unlawful killing or torture, as well as arbitrary detention or enforced disappearance. The U.S. also has an international legal obligation to appropriately prosecute perpetrators – including high-level policymakers.

The U.S. submission mentions the investigation by Justice Department prosecutor John Durham, which he closed in 2012 without any charges being filed. But, the submission fails to provide detailed information on the precise scope of Durham’s mandate. We remain concerned that the investigation may have focused on instances in which interrogators overstepped limits set by senior officials, rather than on the culpability of senior officials themselves. It also remains unclear whether investigators interviewed any prisoners who were subjected to the CIA torture program. During the November 2014 review of the United States before the U.N. Committee Against Torture in Geneva, the committee raised concerns, based on letters and accounts from torture victims or their attorneys, indicating that Durham had never interviewed any detainees. The U.S. delegation responded that it had interviewed 96 persons as part of the investigation, but it did not indicate whether any of the prisoners who were subjected to abuse and torture were amongst those interviewed.

When Apple and Google unveiled new encryption schemes last month, law enforcement officials complained that they wouldn’t be able to unlock evidence on criminals’ digital devices. What they didn’t say is that there are already methods to bypass encryption, thanks to off-the-shelf digital implants readily available to the smallest national agencies and the largest city police forces — easy-to-use software that takes over and monitors digital devices in real time, according to documents obtained by The Intercept. We’re publishing in full, for the first time, manuals explaining the prominent commercial implant software “Remote Control System,” manufactured by the Italian company Hacking Team. Despite FBI director James Comey’s dire warnings about the impact of widespread data scrambling — “criminals and terrorists would like nothing more,” he declared — Hacking Team explicitly promises on its website that its software can “defeat encryption.”

The manuals describe Hacking Team’s software for government technicians and analysts, showing how it can activate cameras, exfiltrate emails, record Skype calls, log typing, and collect passwords on targeted devices. They also catalog a range of pre-bottled techniques for infecting those devices using wifi networks, USB sticks, streaming video, and email attachments to deliver viral installers. With a few clicks of a mouse, even a lightly trained technician can build a software agent that can infect and monitor a device, then upload captured data at unobtrusive times using a stealthy network of proxy servers, all without leaving a trace. That, at least, is what Hacking Team’s manuals claim as the company tries to distinguish its offerings in the global marketplace for government hacking software. Hacking Team’s efforts include a visible push into the U.S. Though Remote Control System is sold around the world — suspected clients include small governments in dozens of countries, from Ethiopia to Kazakhstan to Saudi Arabia to Mexico to Oman — the company keeps one of its three listed worldwide offices in Annapolis, Maryland, on the edge of the federal intelligence and law-enforcement cluster around the nation’s capital; has sent representatives to American homeland security trade shows and conferences, where it has led training seminars like “Cyber Intelligence Solutions to Data Encryption” for police; and has even taken an investment from a firm headed by America’s former ambassador to Italy. The United States is also, according to two separate research teams, far and away Hacking Team’s top nexus for servers, hosting upwards of 100 such systems, roughly a fifth of all its servers globally.

A number of extremist Israeli settlers hurled stones at cars of an American diplomatic delegation who drove along with Israeli police vehicles to an area near the central West Bank city of Ramallah on Friday. The delegation was on its way to inspect vandalism by Israeli settlers that had targeted hundreds of Palestinian olive trees.

The police confirmed that the attackers are from the illegal settlements, and that an investigation is underway; no arrests were made. According to Reuters, an Israeli settler told its correspondent that the US delegates, in two cars, came within some 50 yards from the settlement, accompanied by Palestinian civilians, and alleged that a member of the delegation also withdrew his weapon. The settler told the reporter that he and other settlers then began attacking the delegation. But the Israeli police challenged that account, saying that no one from the U.S. delegation had drawn a weapon, and the consular representatives were attacked by the settlers without provocation. The settlement in question, Adi-Ad, is known as a site of frequent attacks by Israeli settlers against Palestinian civilians. It was established by armed Israeli militias on stolen Palestinian land, and is now home to 40 Israeli families, who live under the protection of armed Israeli soldiers and militias, and frequently invade the surrounding Palestinian villages to attack the unarmed Palestinian civilians who live there.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is taking the position that court warrants are not required when deploying cell-site simulators in public places. Nicknamed "stingrays," the devices are decoy cell towers that capture locations and identities of mobile phone users and can intercept calls and texts. The FBI made its position known during private briefings with staff members of Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa). In response, the two lawmakers wrote Attorney General Eric Holder and Homeland Security chief Jeh Johnson, maintaining they were "concerned about whether the FBI and other law enforcement agencies have adequately considered the privacy interests" of Americans. According to the letter, which was released last week: For example, we understand that the FBI’s new policy requires FBI agents to obtain a search warrant whenever a cell-site simulator is used as part of a FBI investigation or operation, unless one of several exceptions apply, including (among others): (1) cases that pose an imminent danger to public safety, (2) cases that involve a fugitive, or (3) cases in which the technology is used in public places or other locations at which the FBI deems there is no reasonable expectation of privacy.

The letter was prompted in part by a Wall Street Journal report in November that said the Justice Department was deploying small airplanes equipped with cell-site simulators that enabled "investigators to scoop data from tens of thousands of cellphones in a single flight, collecting their identifying information and general location." The bureau's position on Americans' privacy isn't surprising. The Obama Administration has repeatedly maintained that the public has no privacy in public places. It began making that argument as early as 2010, when it told a federal appeals court that the authorities should be allowed to affix GPS devices on vehicles and track a suspect's every move without court authorization. The Supreme Court, however, eventually ruled that warrants are required. What's more, the administration has argued that placing a webcam with pan-and-zoom capabilities on a utility pole to spy on a suspect at his or her residence was no different from a police officer's observation from the public right-of-way. A federal judge last month disagreed with the government's position, tossing evidence gathered by the webcam that was operated from afar.

In their letter, Leahy and Grassley complained that little is known about how stingrays, also known as ISMI catchers, are used by law enforcement agencies. The Harris Corp., a maker of the devices from Florida, includes non-disclosure clauses with buyers. Baltimore authorities cited a non-disclosure agreement to a judge in November as their grounds for refusing to say how they tracked a suspect's mobile phone. They eventually dropped charges rather than disclose their techniques. Further, sometimes the authorities simply lie to judges about their use or undertake other underhanded methods to prevent the public from knowing that the cell-site simulators are being used.