Recently I have started blogging occasionally over at Expose Facts — an entity serving whistleblowers and transparency. There’s even a SecureDrop, if you want to drop me secret documents to read!

Things will remain the same over here; I just hope to broaden my readership and support an important cause. I post links here to the more interesting posts over there.

Today, I’ve got a second post on the DOJ IG Report on FBI’s use of National Security Letters. It examines the extent to which FBI and the President’s Intelligence Oversight Board, which reviews legal violations of intelligence agencies, have classified information about FBI’s use of NSLs, even information that had been public in prior DOJ IG reports.

That is, both in the unclassified and the classified reports, FBI and President’ Obama’s oversight board demanded Horowitz hide information that had been released in some form in the 3 earlier reports DOJ’s IG did on NSLs.

FBI or PIAB are hiding:

• What kind of information FBI collects using NSLs
• What kind of violations FBI reports (or doesn’t report) to its overseers
• PIAB’s judgements about FBI’s compliance with NSL statute

This information is, of course, central to Congress and the public’s understanding of whether FBI continues to abuse the NSL statute, as it did for the first 5 years after 9/11 (this report only covers NSL use until 2009; FBI’s more current use remains unexamined).

FBI’s suppression of this information is all the more troublesome given that the USA Freedom Act currently being debated in the Senate addresses some of the FBI’s use of NSLs.

Go read the rest!