In The News

Foreign Policy: Erdoğan’s International Network of Muslim Cleric Spies

Paul Hockenos March 29, 2017
A diplomatic incident involving Germany and the Netherlands on one side and Turkey on the other revealed deep fault lines between Turkish immigrants and the nations where they reside. Members of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party, or AKP, wanted to campaign in the two countries for a constitutional referendum transforming Turkey’s parliamentary system into a...

The Wall Street Journal: A President’s Credibility

March 23, 2017
Donald Trump’s presidency has been marked with a series of claims, including a suggestion that British intelligence officials assisted former President Barack Obama in spying on Trump Tower. A Wall Street Journal editorial describes “the damage that Mr. Trump is doing to his Presidency with his seemingly endless stream of exaggerations, evidence-free accusations, implausible denials and other...

Time: The Comey Hearing

Sam Frizell March 21, 2017
The director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation publicly confirmed an investigation into links between the Trump campaign and Russian interference in the November election. “Comey then contradicted several statements by the White House, including the president's incendiary claim that former President Obama had ‘tapped’ Trump's phone,” reports Sam Frizell for Time magazine. Democrats...

The Telegraph: US Makes Formal Apology to Britain After White House Accuses GCHQ of Wiretapping Trump Tower

Steven Swinford March 17, 2017
The United States issued a formal apology to Great Britain after the White House press secretary repeated a Fox News source suggesting that former US President Barack Obama spied on Trump Tower with the help of British intelligence. GCHQ described the allegations as “nonsense” and “utterly ridiculous.” The diplomatic uproar came on the same day that the Trump administration released a proposed...

BBC: WikiLeaks Claims CIA Has Tools to Snoop Via TVs, Phones

Leo Kelion March 8, 2017
WikiLeaks reports that the US Central Intelligence Agency has amassed a wide range of hacking tools for televisions, phones and consumer products that rely on the internet. “The alleged cyber-weapons are said to include malware that targets Windows, Android, iOS, OSX and Linux computers as well as internet routers,” reports Leo Kelion for BBC News. “Some of the software is reported to have been...

Bloomberg: Trump's Obama-Wiretap Claim

Ben Brody, Jennifer Jacobs, and Justin Sink March 7, 2017
The essence of good surveillance requires those under observation not realizing an operation is underway. US President Donald Trump released social-media messages maintaining, without offering evidence, that he had just learned former President Barack Obama had ordered surveillance of Trump Tower in New York City. The messages force the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other security officials...

Vanity Fair: The Curious Case of Paul Manafort

Abigail Tracy February 24, 2017
Questions continue about alleged connections between Russia and the US election. A report suggests that a Ukrainian official had tried to alert Paul Manafort, a former chairman of the Trump campaign, about compromising information, later revealed after a phone of Manafort’s daughter was hacked. The Ukrainian official denies that he was the source of the messages. “Manafort, however, confirmed the...