We know you don't blaze up. But you've got this friend who does, and he seriously wonders whether that endangers his chances to code and hack for the top federal law enforcement bureau. You know what? Tell your friend the boss cop says it's cool.
Rev. Al Sharpton speaks during a news conference in New York on Tuesday. He says a report that he spied on New York Mafia figures for the FBI in the 1980s is old news. Image via Seth Wenig/AP.
Eric Holder "told me that he will leave office sometime this year," Jeffrey Toobin writes in the latest issue of The New Yorker. Holder, the first African-American attorney general in U.S. history and a favorite punching-bag of conservatives, has long been rumored to be on his way out at the Justice Department.
Dennis "Slick" Lilly put on a prison guard's uniform and walked out of jail in December 1986, and that's the last the cops ever saw him alive. Despite being on the FBI's list of Most Wanted Criminals, Lilly was so slick that he disappeared into the life of a law-abiding small businessman in a woodsy town near Seattle.
Long before Edward Snowden, there were the eight burglars who, in the spring of 1971, stole an entire office's worth of secret documents in an attempt to take down J. Edgar Hoover's FBI. Now, nearly 43 years later, five of them have come forward.
Operational security, ladies and gentlemen. We have secrets, and we need to keep them! We also need to log them all. Now... where do I register this unredacted treatise on how to interrogate an Arab?
So here’s a mystery. In response to a recent Freedom of Information Act request, the Federal Bureau of Investigation provided Gawker with a curious case file, dated May 2002, indicating the bureau’s acquisition of three photos of 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta. The photos, which remain classified, were “recovered from a passenger who was on board Spirit Airlines Flight 460 on August 23, 2001” — that is, on a flight between Fort Lauderdale and Newark, nearly three weeks before September 11. As far as we can tell, the existence of the photographs has never been publicized.
The FBI has admitted to keeping files on working-class poet and middle-aged postal worker Charles Bukowski, because he wrote half-fiction columns for the Los Angeles underground newspaper Open City. The Bureau was particularly fascinated by the story of a drunken lady who liberated $5,000 worth of pet birds.
William T. Vollman, pictured left, is not the Unabomber. He's a National Book-Award winning novelist, and a certified weirdo, but he's not the Unabomber. Or, for that matter, the Anthrax mailer. And yet the FBI thought he might be.
As a standard part of hiring new workers, lots of businesses run background checks on applicants using the FBI's criminal databases. But those databases have serious problems.
