FBI

The outrage over massive, pervasive surveillance has put the NSA in the spotlight, somewhere its officials are obviously uncomfortable being. The administration's minimal efforts to address domestic surveillance have also focused on the agency. But there's an agency doing just as much privacy-invading as the NSA and its efforts are now going largely unnoticed, as Emily Berman points out at Just Security.

The U.S. last week brought charges against two Arkansas men for operating an e-mail hacking website, needapassword.com, which offered to obtain passwords to any e-mail account for a fee. The scheme, operated by Mark Anthony Townsend of Cedarville, Ark., and Joshua Alan Tabor of Prairie Grove, affected some 6,000 accounts, according to a Jan. 24 press release from the Federal Bureau of Investigations. Cedarville and Prairie Grove have a combined population of less than 6,000 people. Yet the investigation into the website stretched around the globe.

 The Federal Bureau of Investigation should make public a legal opinion it used to justify a past telephone records surveillance program because other agencies may still be relying on the document for surveillance justifications, the Electronic Frontier Foundation argued in court Tuesday.