Intelligence Agency Corruption News Articles

Excerpts of key news articles on

Below are key excerpts of revealing news articles on intelligence agency corruption from reliable news media sources. If any link fails to function, a paywall blocks full access, or the article is no longer available, try these digital tools.

For further exploration, delve into our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center.

Note: Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key major media news articles on dozens of engaging topics. And read excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.

The United States is stepping up digital incursions into Russia’s electric power grid in a warning to President Vladimir V. Putin and a demonstration of how the Trump administration is using new authorities to deploy cybertools more aggressively, current and former government officials said. In interviews over the past three months, the officials described the previously unreported deployment of American computer code inside Russia’s grid and other targets as a classified companion to more publicly discussed action directed at Moscow’s disinformation and hacking units around the 2018 midterm elections. In August of 2018, President Trump signed [an] executive order ... called National Security Presidential Memorandum 13. Its contents are still classified, but essentially it allows the Cyber Command to go ahead and conduct all kinds of operations inside foreign networks without going back to the president for prior approval. The first thing it did was go after those units in Russia that were responsible for a lot of the election-hacking. They went after the G.R.U., the Russian military intelligence unit that had been responsible for breaking into the D.N.C.. A lot of that ... was made public. What wasn’t made public was a parallel effort to go inside the Russian power grid, to put some code in places where the Russians ... wouldn’t see it, in case the U.S. ever needed to act against Russia’s utilities as the Russians were putting malware in our systems.

Note: A 2007 New York Times article describes the formation of the Air Force Cyberspace Command to arm the US military in anticipation of widespread computer-based warfare. A more recent Guardian article says, "we might already be living through the first world cyberwar." For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on intelligence agency corruption from reliable major media sources.

The CIA's chief technology officer outlined the agency's endless appetite for data in a far-ranging speech. Ira "Gus" Hunt said that the world is increasingly awash in information from text messages, tweets, and videos - and that the agency wants all of it. "The value of any piece of information is only known when you can connect it with something else that arrives at a future point in time," Hunt said. "Since you can't connect dots you don't have, it drives us into a mode of, we fundamentally try to collect everything and hang on to it forever." Hunt's comments come two days after Federal Computer Week reported that the CIA has committed to a massive, $600 million, 10-year deal with Amazon for cloud computing services. "It is really very nearly within our grasp to be able to compute on all human generated information," Hunt said. After that mark is reached, Hunt said, the agency would also like to be able to save and analyze all of the digital breadcrumbs people don't even know they are creating. "You're already a walking sensor platform," he said, noting that mobiles, smartphones and iPads come with cameras, accelerometers, light detectors and geolocation capabilities. "Somebody can know where you are at all times, because you carry a mobile device, even if that mobile device is turned off," he said. Hunt also spoke of mobile apps that will be able to control pacemakers - even involuntarily - and joked about a "dystopian" future. Hunt's speech barely touched on privacy concerns.

Note: The Internet of Things makes mass surveillance even easier. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on intelligence agency corruption and the disappearance of privacy from reliable major media sources.

Some consider Henry Kissinger a master statesman who advanced American interests. Others argue that his achievements were exaggerated, preferring to highlight his violations of international law and his complicity in war crimes. Tom Wells' The Kissinger Tapes: Inside His Secretly Recorded Phone Conversations ... is a collection of selections from more than 15,000 of Kissinger's secretly recorded telephone conversations from his time as President Richard Nixon's national security adviser (1969–1974) and secretary of state (1973–1974). For Kissinger, lies weren't a strategic tool limited to selective uses in international statecraft. They appear to have been part of his personal makeup. Wells notes that he was "a habitual and easy liar." During the clandestine bombings of Cambodia in 1969 and Laos in 1970, for example, Kissinger and Nixon implemented a false-reporting system to hide the strikes from both the State Department and the public. Kissinger claimed to Secretary of State William P. Rogers that he was unaware of the Pentagon Papers, the classified government study, leaked in 1971, that revealed the U.S. government had systematically deceived the public about the Vietnam War; in fact, he knew of the study from the outset. Kissinger repeatedly denied knowledge of wiretaps on officials and journalists, but the FBI later noted that he instituted much of the surveillance himself. For Kissinger, issues of human rights and self-determination were secondary at best.

Note: Read more revealing details from Kissenger's history. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on corruption in government and in the intelligence community.

The Pentagon is building a new team of investment bankers steeped in private equity to invest $200 billion over three years in defense deals, aiming to counter China's rise, according to a document reviewed by Semafor. The Defense department is specifically going after Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, and Bank of America as prime recruiting targets for the 30-person team, the headhunter brief outlines, explaining that "this is not a career move, but a two-to-three-year secondment program." The document, prepared by search firm Heidrick & Struggles, pitches a chance to "serve your country" and deploy "more capital than most investors deploy in their entire careers" (and, ostensibly, an opportunity to sell a bunch of stock tax-deferred). Wall Street ... employs thousands of "coverage bankers" who stay close to companies in specific industries. Forming its own "Sponsor Coverage" unit inside the Pentagon would allow the defense department to have a team of its own bankers that service private-equity firms and pitch deals critical to national security, provide advice, and arrange loans. As part of the agency's pitch to lure more heavy hitters from Wall Street, it's deriding the "peak neoliberalism" of the 1990s that invited China into the global economic order, prioritized outsourcing, and, in the Pentagon's view, left the US vulnerable ... according to the document. "The mission: helping deter our largest adversary from gaining military superiority."

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on corruption in the financial industry and in the intelligence community.

A confidential informant told the FBI in 2017 that Jeffrey Epstein had a "personal hacker," according to a document released by the Department of Justice on Friday. The document, which was released as part of the Justice Department's legally required effort to publish documents related to its investigation into the late sex offender, does not identify who the alleged hacker was, but does include several details about them. According to the informant, the hacker was an Italian born in the southern region of Calabria and specialized in finding vulnerabilities in iOS, BlackBerry devices, and the Firefox browser. The hacker allegedly developed zero-day exploits and offensive cyber tools and sold them to several countries, including an unnamed central African government, the U.K., and the United States. The informant told the FBI that Epstein's hacker sold a zero-day to Hezbollah, which paid him with "a trunk of cash." Per the informant, the hacker "was very good at finding vulnerabilities." It's important to note that this document contains allegations from only the informant, not from the FBI directly, so it's unclear how trustworthy the information and allegations are.

Note: A zero-day hack is when attackers secretly exploit a software flaw before the company even knows the flaw exists or has time to fix it. Don't miss Part 1 and Part 2 of our in-depth investigative series on this massive elite crime ring now coming to light in the documents being made public. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Jeffrey Epstein's trafficking ring.

The relatively small Somali community in the U.S., estimated at 260,000, has lately been receiving national attention thanks to a massive fraud scandal in Minnesota. A central theme of Trump's anti-Somali rancor is that they come from a war-torn country without an effective centralized state, which in Trump's reasoning speaks to their quality as a people, and therefore, their ability to contribute to American society. It is worth reminding ourselves, however, that Somalia's state collapse and political instability is as much a result of imperial interventions, including from the U.S., as anything else. Cold War geopolitical machinations partly created the contextual background to the 1977-78 Somalia-Ethiopia war. Somalia's defeat in this war set the stage for the disintegration of the state in 1991. This threw the country into a prolonged state of conflict, resulting in mass displacement and migration. U.S. drone strikes in Somalia have continued over the past two decades with varying degrees of intensity at different times. Since Trump returned to office, his administration has dramatically increased the drone campaign, while the transparency of the decision-making process and consequences of these strikes have become more opaque. Recent scholarship has noted the link between U.S. militarism in Somalia and the policing and surveillance of Somali immigrants in the U.S. Trump's xenophobic rhetoric ... conveniently omits the U.S role in fomenting instability.

Note: Read about the terrible consequences of US policy in Somalia. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on military corruption.

In 1993, 60 Minutes aired a report detailing how the CIA recruited Venezuelan military officer Gen. RamĂłn GuillĂ©n Dávila, enabling the shipment of roughly 22 tons of cocaine into U.S. cities under the guise of an intelligence operation. Once the so-called "Cartel of the Suns" outlived its usefulness to U.S. intelligence, it quietly vanished–only to be revived years later by the U.S. government as a political weapon in its campaign against Venezuela. The Trump administration has accused Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro of leading the long-defunct "Cartel of the Suns." But as journalist Diego Sequera explains, the cartel's origins trace back to the early 1990s, when the CIA allegedly directed one of its top Venezuelan military assets to facilitate the shipment of tons of cocaine into U.S. cities. The "Cartel of the Suns" functions less as a criminal organization than as a political fiction–one born from a U.S. intelligence operation, buried when it became inconvenient, and resurrected decades later to justify coercive measures against a government Washington seeks to remove. What remains consistent is not the evidence, but the utility of the accusation. And in the end, the "Cartel of the Suns" tells us far less about Venezuela than it does about U.S. power: how an intelligence-linked drug operation can be erased from history when it implicates Washington, then revived as propaganda when regime change again becomes the goal. The cartel never needed to exist–only the narrative did.

Note: Read our in-depth Substack investigation and timeline exploring how the deep state won the war on drugs. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on the war on drugs.

A military contractor with a lineage going back to the notorious mercenary firm Blackwater will help U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement track down a list of 1.5 million targeted immigrants across the country. ICE inked a deal with Constellis Holdings to provide "skip tracing" services, tasking the company with hunting immigrants down and relaying their locations to ICE's Enforcement and Removal Operations wing for apprehension. Contractors will receive monetary bounties in exchange for turning over the whereabouts of specified immigrants as quickly as possible, using whatever physical and digital surveillance tools they see fit. Constellis was formed in 2014 through the merger of Academi, previously known as Blackwater, and Triple Canopy, a rival mercenary contractor. The combined companies and their subsidiaries have reaped billions from contracts for guarding foreign military installations, embassies, and domestic properties, along with work for the Department of Homeland Security and U.S. spy agencies. In 2007, Blackwater mercenaries massacred 14 civilians in Baghdad; several of its contractors serving prison sentences for the killings were pardoned by President Donald Trump in 2020. The government has so far paid Constellis $1.5 million, with the potential for the total to grow to more than $113 million by the contract's end in 2027. Constellis ... secured a $250 million construction contract at the U.S. military base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, earlier this year.

Note: Erik Prince's Blackwater got caught systematically defrauding the government. Then Blackwater changed its name to Academi and made over $300 million off the Afghan drug trade. More recently, Prince was recruiting ex spies to infiltrate progressive activist groups. Furthermore, the bounty-based approach mirrors a core tactic of the War on Terror, when US forces offered cash rewards for tips that fueled mass detentions in Afghanistan and beyond. This swept up thousands of people who posed no threat and had no ties to terrorism.

An FBI investigation into an alleged terror plot in Southern California bears the familiar hallmarks of the bureau's long-running use of informants and undercover agents to advance plots that might not otherwise have materialized. The limited details available suggest an investigation that leaned heavily on a paid informant and at least one undercover FBI agent [who] were involved in nearly every stage of the case, including discussions of operational security and transporting members of the group to the site in the Mojave Desert where federal agents ultimately made the arrests. It is still unclear how the FBI first identified the group or how long the informant had been embedded before the bomb plot emerged – a period defense attorneys say is central to any serious examination of entrapment, whereby defendants are coerced into crimes they would not otherwise commit, a frequent criticism of stings involving paid informants and undercover agents. Despite comments from Attorney General Pam Bondi, Patel, and others characterizing the Turtle Island Liberation Front as a coherent group ... there's little evidence that any group by that name exists beyond a small digital footprint and a handful of attempts at organizing community events, including a self-defense workshop and a punk rock benefit show. A previous sting operation [involved] the so-called Newburgh Four, in which an aggressive and prolific FBI informant steered four poor Black men into a scheme to bomb synagogues and attack an Air Force base. Years later, a federal judge granted the men compassionate release, describing the case as an "FBI-orchestrated conspiracy."

Note: The FBI has had a notorious history of manufacturing terrorist plots, often targeting vulnerable minors who have significant cognitive and intellectual disabilities yet no history of harming anyone. Read more about terrorism plots hatched by the US government, including cases in which alleged terrorists were acting on behalf of the CIA. This process not only pads arrest and prosecution statistics but also helps justify big budgets by misrepresenting the threat of terrorism.

The AI surveillance platform provider Palantir is no stranger to controversy. It brings in billions each year from controversial partnerships with groups like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Israeli Defense Forces, something CEO Alex Karp isn't keen on changing anytime soon. In an interview ... this week, Karp even took it a step further, arguing that legalizing US war crimes would open up a whole new market for Palantir. Unlike other moguls profiting off the military industrial complex who hide behind concepts like "democracy" and "national security," the Palantir CEO isn't afraid to put his mouth where his money is with disarmingly bombastic language. In a letter to shareholders earlier this year, for instance, Karp quoted hawkish political scholar Samuel Huntington in arguing that the "rise of the West was not made possible ‘by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion… but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence.'" While this could be seen as a damning indictment of Western civilization and its violent stranglehold over the world economy, Karp instead positions it as a source of inspiration. In another part of his interview ... the Palantir CEO reaffirmed his commitment to ICE, emphasizing the important role he plays in making immigrants lives worse. "I'm going to use my whole influence to make sure this country stays skeptical on migration and has a deterrent capacity that it only uses selectively," Karp said.

Note: Listen to an audio clip of Jeffrey Epstein promoting Palantir to Ehud Barak. Read how Palantir helped the NSA spy on the entire planet. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Tech and the disappearance of privacy.

During the Cold War, the first implants showing that we could control animal minds sparked panic. The C.I.A. had its own clandestine experimental mind-control program. People warned of brain warfare. Those fears [are] back, along with a conversation about what it means to have freedom of thought at a time when technology is literally being implanted in our brains. Brain computer interface, or B.C.I. ... are very small devices that go right on the surface of your brain, where they can pick up neural activity. The data is transmitted via Bluetooth to a computer program, which decodes the information. In a sense, they're hooked up to an artificial intelligence. So the neural network inside your mind communicates with a neural network outside. And through that, we are able to reconstruct people's intentions. For people with degenerative diseases, or who are paralyzed, or who otherwise have lost important abilities, these implants have been totally revolutionary. These patients can move their hands, type and in some cases, speak again. Optogenetics, a technique for turning isolated neurons on and off, has been used to implant false memories in mice, raising the possibility that, in the distant future, something similar could be done in humans. Neuroprivacy is the idea that we should have to give consent to anyone who wants access to our innermost selves. But there's a question: Does neuroprivacy apply only to my unspoken thoughts? Or does it apply to the electrical activity in my brain?

Note: Read about the Pentagon's plans to use our brains as warfare, describing how the human body is war's next domain. Learn more about biotech dangers. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Tech and microchip implants.

The White House under Gerald Ford tried to block a landmark Senate report that disclosed the CIA's role in assassination attempts against foreign leaders and ultimately led to a radical overhaul in how the agency was held to account, documents released to mark the 50th anniversary of the report's publication reveal. The documents, dating from 1975, were posted on Thursday by the National Security Archive, an independent research group, as it sought to highlight the report's significance amid conjecture that Donald Trump may have authorized the agency to assassinate Venezuela's president, Nicolás Maduro, amid a massive US military build-up against the country. Among the documents posted by the National Security Archive is a "secret/sensitive" options paper addressed to Dick Cheney, then chief of staff to Ford, that included a recommendation of outright opposition to publication of the report. Peter Kornbluh, senior analyst with the National Security Archive, said highlighting the Church report's historical significance had become more urgent. "Fifty years after the scandal of the revelations of the Church committee report, we've come a long way in the wrong direction, where we have US presidents who now seem to feel they can openly discuss assassination plots against foreign leaders," he said. At least 83 people have been killed in 21 US drone strikes against alleged drug-trafficking boats in the Caribbean and Pacific since early September.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on assassinations and intelligence agency corruption.

Fifty years ago today, a special Senate Committee led by Idaho Senator Frank Church lifted the veil of secrecy on the clandestine efforts of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to target specific foreign leaders for assassination. The Church Committee overcame intense pressure from the Gerald Ford White House to withhold publication of the report, which exposed CIA operations to "neutralize" leaders such as Fidel Castro in Cuba, Patrice Lumumba in Congo, and General Rene Schneider in Chile. "The evidence establishes that the United States was implicated in several assassination plots," states the introduction of the 285-page report, officially titled Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders. "The Committee believes that, short of war, assassination is incompatible with American principles, international order, and morality. It should be rejected as a tool of foreign policy." To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Church Committee report, the National Security Archive is posting a small selection of documents on efforts by the Ford Administration to keep the report secret. Public outrage forced the CIA and the White House to retreat on the use of assassination as a tool of covert operations. In response to the report, on February 18, 1976, President Ford signed Executive Order 11905, which stated: "No employee of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination."

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on assassinations and intelligence agency corruption.

Covert action refers to secret operations to influence governments, organizations, or persons in support of a foreign policy in a manner that is not attributable to the United States. Donald Trump has gone a step further than all other presidents by ignoring plausible denial; he announced the "secret" authorization to allow the CIA to conduct covert action in Venezuela against President Nicolas Maduro. This represents the latest attempt to apply pressure on Venezuela. It follows authorization for the U.S. military to target boats that may or may not be carrying drugs. Thus far, five boats have been destroyed and 29 Venezuelans (and some Colombians) have been killed. U.S. covert action, which began under the Eisenhower administration, has been marked by incredible and often predictable failure. The worst failures were in Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), the Congo 1959, and Chile (1973), where leftist leaders were overthrown only to be followed by the accession to power of authoritarians and tyrants such as the Shah, Julio Alpirez, Mobutu, and Pinochet. These authoritarians introduced brutal regimes and repressive military forces, many of whom received military training from the CIA. When U.S. ambassadors in Central America protested this activity, they were ordered to stop reporting on such criminal activity. The CIA also trained and supported abusive internal security organizations throughout Central America, particularly in Nicaragua, Honduras, and El Salvador.

Note: Learn more about the rise of the CIA in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more, read our concise summaries of news articles on intelligence agency corruption.

A new Pentagon report offers the grimmest assessment yet of the results of the last 10 years of U.S. military efforts [in Africa]. It corroborates years of reporting on catastrophes that U.S. Africa Command has long attempted to ignore or cover up. Fatalities from militant Islamist violence spiked over the years of America's most vigorous counterterrorism efforts on the continent, with the areas of greatest U.S. involvement – Somalia and the West African Sahel – suffering the worst outcomes. "Africa has experienced roughly 155,000 militant Islamist group-linked deaths over the past decade," reads a new report by the Africa Center for Strategic Studies. "What many people don't know is that the United States' post-9/11 counterterrorism operations actually contributed to and intensified the present-day crisis," [said] Stephanie Savell, director of the Costs of War Project at Brown University. The U.S. provided tens of millions of dollars in weapons and training to the governments of countries like Burkina Faso and Niger, which are experiencing the worst spikes in violent deaths today, she said. In 2002 and 2003 ... the State Department counted a total of just nine terrorist attacks, resulting in a combined 23 casualties across the entire continent. Last year, there were 22,307 fatalities from militant Islamist violence in Africa. At least 15 officers who benefited from U.S. security assistance were key leaders in a dozen coups in West Africa and the greater Sahel.

Note: Read more about the Pentagon's recent military failures in Africa. Learn more about how war is a tool for hidden agendas in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more, read our concise summaries of news articles on military corruption.

Palantir has long been connected to government surveillance. It was founded in part with CIA money, it has served as an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) contractor since 2011, and it's been used for everything from local law enforcement to COVID-19 efforts. But the prominence of Palantir tools in federal agencies seems to be growing under President Trump. "The company has received more than $113 million in federal government spending since Mr. Trump took office, according to public records, including additional funds from existing contracts as well as new contracts with the Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon," reports The New York Times, noting that this figure "does not include a $795 million contract that the Department of Defense awarded the company last week, which has not been spent." Palantir technology has largely been used by the military, the intelligence agencies, the immigration enforcers, and the police. But its uses could be expanding. Representatives of Palantir are also speaking to at least two other agencies–the Social Security Administration and the Internal Revenue Service. Along with the Trump administration's efforts to share more data across federal agencies, this signals that Palantir's huge data analysis capabilities could wind up being wielded against all Americans. Right now, the Trump administration is using Palantir tools for immigration enforcement, but those tools could easily be applied to other ... targets.

Note: Read about Palantir's recent, first-ever AI warfare conference. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Tech and intelligence agency corruption.

New chat logs released by the House Judiciary Committee this week show the extraordinary lengths the FBI went to behind the scenes to shut down any discussion of Hunter Biden's laptop in October 2020 after the New York Post broke the story. The conversations, withheld by the FBI under Director Chris Wray, show that senior leadership issued an internal "gag order" on the laptop. The FBI had been in possession of the abandoned MacBook Pro for 10 months by that stage, after computer repair shop owner John Paul Mac Isaac handed it over. The FBI's forensic analysts quickly determined the laptop belonged to Hunter, had not been tampered with or altered in any way, and was suitable to be used in court. Yet the chat logs show that senior FBI officials instructed agents to say "No comment" when asked about the laptop during regular meetings with social media companies before the 2020 election. The FBI had spent weeks warning Facebook and Twitter about election interference in the form of Russian disinformation and had told Twitter to be on guard for a "hack and leak" operation "likely" involving Hunter Biden. In other words, the FBI "prebunked" The Post's story so that the social media companies immediately censored it. The FBI knew The Post had received a hard-drive copy of the laptop from Donald Trump's lawyer Rudy Giuliani because it had a covert surveillance warrant on the former mayor's iCloud.

Note: It took more than a year for New York Times and Washington Post to finally admit that the laptop was genuine. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on censorship and intelligence agency corruption.

When the final, declassified records from the John F. Kennedy assassination files were posted on the National Archives' website last week, the first document researchers and reporters searched for was White House adviser Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s June 1961 memorandum to the president titled "CIA Reorganization." "How could I have been so stupid as to let them proceed?" President John Kennedy asked his advisers following the CIA's infamous fiasco at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961. Beyond the fact that the U.S. invasion of Cuba was an egregious act of aggression – violating international law and Cuba's sovereignty – its failure was a catastrophic embarrassment for JFK, only weeks into his White House tenure. Kennedy held CIA director Allen Dulles, and his deputy for covert operations Richard Bissell, personally responsible for deceiving him on the prospects for success of the ill-planned paramilitary assault. Indeed, as he processed the implications of the failed invasion, Kennedy vented his desire to "splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds." That concept was more than angry rhetoric; the president actually set in motion a secret set of deliberations on breaking up the intelligence, espionage and covert action functions of the CIA and subordinating its operations to the State Department. The CIA's operational branches would be "reconstituted" under a new agency.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on intelligence agency corruption and the JFK assassination.

Former US congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard's ascendance to director of national intelligence last month signaled a major shift in views toward government surveillance at the highest rung of the US intelligence community. Major privacy groups this week urged Gabbard to declassify information concerning Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)–the nation's cornerstone wiretap authority ... known to vacuum up large quantities of calls, texts, and emails belonging to Americans. The groups privately urged Gabbard this week to declassify information regarding the types of US businesses that can now be secretly compelled to install wiretaps on the US National Security Agency's (NSA) behalf. While it's no secret that the government routinely compels phone and email service providers like AT&T and Google into conducting wiretaps, Congress passed a new provision last year expanding the range of businesses that can receive such orders. Legal experts had warned in advance that the provision was far too ambiguous and likely to vastly increase the number of Americans whose communications are wiretapped. But their warnings were not heeded. In response to questions from the US Senate ... Gabbard backed the idea of requiring the Federal Bureau of Investigation to obtain warrants before accessing the communications of Americans swept up by the 702 program.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of intelligence agency corruption and the disappearance of privacy.

A United States judge dismissed a lawsuit pursued by four American attorneys and journalists, who alleged that the CIA and former CIA Director Mike Pompeo spied on them while they were visiting WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in Ecuador's London embassy. The lawsuit claimed that the plaintiffs, like all visitors, were required to "surrender" their electronic devices to employees of Undercover Global, a Spanish security company managed by David Morales that was hired by Ecuador to handle embassy security. They were unaware that UC Global had allegedly "copied the information stored on the devices" and shared the information with the CIA. Pompeo allegedly approved the copying of visitors' passports, "including pages with stamps and visas." He ensured that all "computers, laptops, mobile phones, recording devices, and other electronics brought into the embassy," were "seized, dismantled, imaged, photographed, and digitized." In September 2021, Yahoo News published an investigation "based on conversations with more than 30 former U.S. officials–eight of whom described details of the CIA's proposals to abduct Assange." Pompeo allegedly "championed" proposals to abduct Assange after WikiLeaks published the Vault 7 materials in 2017. Pompeo favored a rendition operation that would involve breaking into the Ecuador embassy to drag Assange out and bring him to the U.S. "via a third country."

Note: Read about the CIA plots to kidnap or assassinate Assange. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on intelligence agency corruption.

Important Note: Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key major media news articles on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.