The FBI has files from a phone-monitoring company whose notorious software was on iPhones, Android phones, Nokias and BlackBerries. But since the files are being used "for law enforcement purposes," the feds won't talk about their contents. So you can't know what secrets the feds have gleaned from your phone, because that's a secret.
By the spring, the entire federal government will have new standards for counterterrorism training, the result of a White House push to scrap instructions that called mainstream Muslims violent and likened Islam to the Death Star.
No law enforcement agency in the world is better than our own FBI when it comes to thwarting terror plots that never would have come to fruition anyhow, because they consisted mainly of pitiful people sitting around boasting to FBI informants. The latest triumph by our domestic anti-terror heroes: saving America from a bunch of old Georgia loons who sat around the Waffle House talking about their big assassination ideas.
Some of the internet's sleaziest users must be freaking out today, having been outed by Anonymous as visitors to child porn forums. Vigilante Anonymous hackers are taking their war on underground kiddie porn to a new level by posting the IP addresses of people they claim are pedophiles.
You might think Insane Clown Posse's people—known as the Juggalos—are just a group of face-painting teenagers who wonder how magnets work. Not so, says the FBI's 2011 National Gang Threat Assessment. To the feds, Juggalos are a "loosely-organized hybrid gang" that are "forming more organized subsets and engaging in more gang-like criminal activity."
The Occupy Wall Street protests have been going on for a month. And it seems the FBI and NYPD have had help tracking protesters' moves thanks to a conservative computer security expert who gained access to one of the group's internal mailing lists, and then handed over information on the group's plans to authorities and corporations targeted by protesters.
Last year, the FBI admitted to using large portions of a random Spanish politician's campaign photograph for an age-progressed mockup of Osama bin Laden, which happened to look a lot like the random Spanish politician. Now he's suing.
Rezwan Ferdaus, a 26-year-old Massachusetts resident was arrested in an FBI sting on Wednesday after allegedly plotting to use a large remote controlled aircraft packed with C-4 plastic explosives to attack the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol.
Did you know that a Saudi family living in Sarasota, Fla., that met with 9/11 mastermind Mohammed Atta disappeared without a trace—leaving behind their cars, food, and furniture—two weeks before the attacks? Neither did Congress, or the 9/11 Commission! The FBI didn't think to tell them.
It is important for everyone to express their creativity and sense of humor. But does asserting your individuality really need to involve giving your wifi network a wacky name? And do you really need to call it "FBI SURVEILLANCE VAN?" You're freaking me out.
Claude Levi-Strauss is familiar to anyone who took Anthropology 101 as the most important anthropologist of the 20th century and a father of structuralism, the theoretical forebear to post-structuralism, post-modernism, deconstruction and all that weird subversive French philosophy your parents warned you about. Which may explain why the FBI spent close to a decade spying on him in the 1940s.
As recently as January 2009, the FBI thought its agents ought to know the following crucial information about Muslims:
We've always wondered what would happen if a cybercrime dragnet collided with artsy Brooklynites. Earlier this week, denizens of one Williamsburg loft complex found out as the feds raided their weed-laced bohemian paradise.
We spoke too soon. Today's raids of at least 14 homes throughout the country by the FBI weren't part of just another intelligence-gathering move in an ongoing investigation targeting the hacking group Anonymous. The feds have arrested 14 people—in states including Florida, Washington, California and New York—on suspicion of being involved with the group, according to according to CNN.
The FBI investigation into the hacking collective Anonymous is still plodding along. Ten FBI agents raided three New York guys and took away their computer stuff.
In your lawless Thursday media column: the FBI's investigating News Corp, the Murdochs agree to talk to the Brits after all, a model journalism apology, a CNN reporter escapes a gunfight, and layoffs at PBS.
