foia

An internal U.S. Department of Homeland Security document indicates that a controversial program designed to predict whether a person will commit a crime is already being tested on some members of the public voluntarily, CNET has learned.

If this sounds a bit like the Tom Cruise movie called "Minority Report," or the CBS drama "Person of Interest," it is. But where "Minority Report" author Philip K. Dick enlisted psychics to predict crimes, DHS is betting on algorithms: it's building a "prototype screening facility" that it hopes will use factors such … Read more

A gritty video released by Wikileaks on Monday shows U.S. troops in Iraq destroying a vehicle that was preparing to rush a wounded Reuters journalist to the hospital.

The secret black-and-white video, recorded by at least one Apache helicopter that was shooting at a group of about a dozen people, appears to show the death of a Reuters photographer and his assistant, who were unarmed.

The U.S. Army had rejected Reuters' earlier requests, including ones made under the Freedom of Information Act, to disclose the July 2007 video. Government sources told both Reuters and the Associated Press on … Read more

The Electronic Frontier Foundation obtained a copy of Apple's iPhone developer license agreement and posted the 28-page document on its Web site on Tuesday.

The digital rights watchdog group used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain the document (PDF) from NASA after it noticed the NASA App for the iPhone.

The EFF has also listed what it describes as "a few troubling highlights" from the agreement.

In order to be eligible to sell an application on Apple's App Store, for example, developers must agree to the license agreement, part of which forbids public statements about … Read more

Editors' note: Declan responds to critiques of this post in a subsequent piece he wrote in his Taking Liberties blog at CBSNews.com: "Cap And Trade Redux: $1,761 Annually Per Family? Or Not?"

The Obama administration has privately concluded that a cap and trade law would cost American taxpayers up to $200 billion a year, the equivalent of hiking personal income taxes by about 15 percent.

A previously unreleased analysis prepared by the U.S. Department of Treasury says the total in new taxes would be between $100 billion to $200 billion a year. At the upper … Read more

Last September, the Bush administration defended the unusual secrecy over an anti-counterfeiting treaty being negotiated by the U.S. government, which some liberal groups worry could criminalize some peer-to-peer file sharing that infringes copyrights.

Now President Obama's White House has tightened the cloak of government secrecy still further, saying in a letter this week that a discussion draft of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement and related materials are "classified in the interest of national security pursuant to Executive Order 12958."

The 1995 Executive Order 12958 allows material to be classified only if disclosure would do "damage to … Read more

Read all about it. The CIA posts hundreds of pages of internal documents, plus another 11,000 pages of research. This giant cache represents some of the agency's records from 1953 to 1973.

All of these documents can be found through this CIA Web page. First, be aware there still are censored sections, even after more than 30 years.

We already know about the CIA's attempts to hire Mafia hit men to kill Cuba's Fidel Castro. We already know that President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered the CIA to illegally spy on American journalists and peace groups, and … Read more