Category: Uncategorized

Back in December 2020, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board completed a report on the National Security Agency’s XKEYSCORE system, whose existence had come to light as part of the Snowden leaks. XKEYSCORE is a software program that N.S.A. analysts use to query the vast repository of stuff that the agency has sucked up, […]

I wrote in the New York Times Magazine (gift link) about my weird connection to the experience of listening to Pink Floyd’s “The Dark Side of the Moon” while watching “The Wizard of Oz,” which is sometimes called “The Dark Side of the Rainbow.” I didn’t invent this idea, but an article about it I […]

As Alberto Ibargüen — the head of the Knight Foundation and former publisher of The Miami Herald — retires, I would like to add a public note of personal appreciation to the encomiums. https://www.philanthropy.com/article/knight-foundation-leader-to-retire-leaving-a-powerful-legacy In 1999, when I went to work for The Miami Herald as a cub reporter just out of college and he […]

Judge Beryl Howell, the chief judge of the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia, has decided not to unseal filings and rulings ancillary to the material presented to the grand jury investigating Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election and the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. The New York Times and I […]

Norma Thiele, my journalism teacher at North Side High School in Fort Wayne, Indiana, died on Monday at age 92. For more than four decades, “Miss Thiele” was a great writing teacher and adviser to the then-weekly student newspaper, The Northerner. After each issue of the paper, she would mark up everything that was wrong […]

Chancellor Kathaleen St. Jude McCormick, a judge in Delaware, has ordered a previously heavily redacted court document to largely be made public, partly at my request. It is a complaint that Rodney Joffe filed against his former company, Neustar, in a lawsuit over whether Neustar has to pay his legal bills for matters arising from […]

I accompanied a military-escorted congressional fact-finding trip organized by @LindseyGrahamSC to look at detention of ISIS men & wives & children operated by a Kurdish-led militia that is the main US partner in northeastern Syria. Story has just posted: This is what Al Hol — the vast camp for refugees and others displaced by war […]

This interesting 130-page report from July 2021 was included in a tranche of otherwise much older documents related to the government’s investigations into links between the 9/11 hijackers and various Saudi officials and agencies, which have been declassified as a result of Biden’s Executive Order 14040. Ahead of the 20th anniversary of the terrorist attacks […]

Good morning again from the E. Barrett Prettyman courthouse in downtown Washington, DC. The Sussmann-Durham trial will at least start to wrap up today with closing arguments. /1 Jury deliberations should start this afternoon. But because the judge is leaving at 2:30 p.m. for his planned Memorial Day weekend vacation, deliberations would have to go […]

Good morning from the E. Barrett Prettyman courthouse in Washington DC, where the Sussmann-Durham trial is set to resume. Yesterday the prosecution wrapped and defense witnesses began. As of last evening, defense had not decided whether Sussmann himself will take the stand./1 The defense will NOT be calling Sussmann to testify./2 Judge makes sure Sussmann […]