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MuckRock Podcast: The spy who stayed in the cold
On August 9, 1990, two U.S. Embassy employees trying to enjoy a beer at the Mezhdunarodnaya Hotel in Moscow were interrupted by a stranger. What wouldn’t come out until much later: This stranger was Edward Lee Howard, who slipped past federal agents to defect to the Soviet Union years before. This is the story of how.
MuckRock Podcast: A Cold War case of mistaken identity
What’s in a name? Potentially, quite a lot of trouble, particularly in the 1940s when the Red Scare was at its height. This is the story of two men, both named Irving Adler, which were investigated by the FBI, and how MuckRock accidentally got its hands on their files.
MuckRock Podcast: FOIA by Numbers
Feel like your public records request is taking forever? You’re not alone: MuckRock contributor Anais Vaillant crunches the numbers to look at just how much of a waiting game public records have become. Listen in to this week’s episode.
So what if the government tracks my phone calls?
It’s a phrase I heard at a party in the wake of former National Security Agency analyst Edward Snowden’s document leaks. And it’s a question that will no doubt reappear at Christmas parties this year, no matter the country you live in. The NSA is global. And this question brings us to, of all people, Senator Dianne Feinstein of California.
Senator Feinstein: give us your ‘metadata’
California Senator Dianne Feinstein has recently opined that the NSA’s call record collection does not fit the definition of surveillance, and that Americans don’t have a right to privacy for this kind of information. So we’ve asked the NSA for hers.