Culture of Resistance -

EPIC Obtains New Details on PATRIOT Act

As the result of a Freedom of Information Act request, EPIC has obtained more than 650 pages of documents related to the PATRIOT Act. EPIC had requested information related to the FBI’s abuse of PATRIOT Act authorities and documents concerning the 2009 sunset of the PATRIOT Act. The documents disclosed by the FBI include training presentations, answers to questions from Senators Leahy and Specter, and a list of reporting requirements. In an answer to Senator Leahy, the FBI stated that while it would discontinue the use of exigent letters, which the Inspector General had previously noted as a frequent source of abuse, the agency planned to continue its use of the emergency disclosures provision of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act. For more information, see EPIC: USA PATRIOT Act.

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Anonymiss Express

DHS Monitoring OWS: The FOIA Docs

The first in a long series of Freedom of Information Act Requests (FOIA) was responded to by the Department of Homeland Security. Truthout was the first news organization to receive and post the information it received.

From DHS Turns Over Occupy Wall Street Documents to Truthout:

Click here to go to the documents.

This report has been updated with new information gleaned from the cache of documents.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) closely monitored the Occupy Wall Street movement, providing agency officials with threat assessments, regular updates about protests taking place throughout the country, responding to internal requests for intelligence on the group and mining Twitter and other social media for information about Occupy’s activities, according to hundreds of pages of internal documents DHS released to Truthout in response to our Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.

Eric Neuschaefer, a DHS FOIA program specialist, said the agency expects to release a second set of OWS-related documents to Truthout, the first news organization to file a FOIA request with DHS for OWS records, sometime in mid-April. He added that DHS will release files on a “rolling” basis once they are processed and cleared by DHS component offices.