China :: Exposé

In 2011, the US Government submitted 1,745 applications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for authorization to conduct electronic surveillance or physical searches under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), according to a new annual report to Congress. Of these, 1,676 included requests for authority for perform electronic surveillance, the report said. That compares to 1,579 such applications in 2010 (including 1,511 for electronic surveillance). As is usually the case, the FIS Court did not deny any electronic surveillance applications in whole or in part last year, though it made modifications to 30 of them. The new report says that the government filed 205 applications for business records (including tangible things) for foreign intelligence purposes last year, compared to 96 in the previous year. But the number of national security letters (a type of administrative subpoena) declined last year. In 2011, the FBI requested 16,511 national security lette...

More than a thousand boxes of classified government records are believed to be missing from the Washington National Records Center (WNRC) of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), a three-year Inspector General investigation found . But there are no indications of theft or espionage, an official said. An inventory of the holdings at the Records Center determined that 81 boxes containing Top Secret information or Restricted Data (nuclear weapons information) were missing. As of March 2011, an additional 1,540 boxes of material classified at the Secret or Confidential level also could not be located or accounted for, the Inspector General report on the matter said. Each box can hold approximately 1.1 cubic feet or 2000 to 2500 sheets of paper. The missing records represent an ongoing failure at WNRC to protect some of the most sensitive information produced by the Federal Government, wrote NARA Inspector General Paul Brachfeld in a 2009 letter to the Acting Archivist....

Sunday, April 29 marked the 44th anniversary of the death of Lin Zhao, a talented Peking University student who was secretly executed for speaking out against the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) during the notorious Hundred Flowers Movement of 1957 launched by Mao Zedong. More than 100 people paid homage to her tomb without encountering interference, and the many memorials commemorating her on the Internet have not been censored. The usual Baidu search engine ban was lifted and even searching, Lin Zhaos letter in blood could be accessed. On Sina Weibo, Chinas largest microblog, the well-known blogger Han Han posted, On April 29, 1968, Lin Zhao was secretly shot to death. Most of my young friends do not even know her name. Life is short but freedom is priceless. History has exonerated her, but history has received her 5-cent bullet fee. Let the bullet fly on. The message was forwarded more than 30,000 times. Hong Kong author Wu Yisan said in an interview with Radio Free Asia that...