Derek Purdy/Flickr An armored personnel carrier bought by a sheriff’s office in Washington state with anti-terrorism dollars was used to pull over a suspected drunk driver. A $21 fish tank, a hog catcher and a $24,000 “latrine on wheels” were purchased with homeland security funds in Texas. A counter-terrorism summit was held on an island […]
G.W. Schulz
Reporter
G.W. Schulz is a reporter for Reveal, covering security, privacy, technology and criminal justice. Since joining The Center for Investigative Reporting in 2008, he's reported stories for NPR, KQED, Wired.com, The Dallas Morning News, the Chicago Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle, Mother Jones and more. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Francisco Bay Guardian and was an early contributor to The Chauncey Bailey Project, which won a Tom Renner Award from Investigative Reporters and Editors in 2008. Schulz also has won awards from the California Newspaper Publishers Association and the Society of Professional Journalists’ Northern California Chapter. He graduated from the University of Kansas and is based in Austin, Texas.
Posted inBorder Patrol, Immigration, National Security
Immigrant busts fall, but is border enforcement the reason?
Flickr/Brian Auer When the Department of Homeland Security trudged up to Capitol Hill this year and asked lawmakers for another 365 days worth of funding, as every federal agency does each year, officials ticked off a list of accomplishments they presented as evidence of the agency’s ongoing success. The department pointed to a marked decrease in […]
Posted inNational Security
Homeland Security office OKs efforts to monitor threats via social media
Surfing the InternetBrian Lane Winfield Moore/Flickr A little-known privacy office in the Department of Homeland Security has given its stamp of approval to an ongoing initiative aimed at monitoring social media sites for emerging threats. Congress created the department’s privacy office in 2003 to review major initiatives and databases and make certain those initiatives respected […]
Posted inSurveillance and Privacy
Rare case sheds light on cellphone surveillance device
Flickr/jtrout FBI investigators used a court order authorizing access to cellphone customer data to quietly deploy a powerful surveillance technology known as “stingrays,” privacy groups contend in a new court filing [PDF] that claims the devices are overly invasive. Your cellphone can be singled out by its international mobile subscriber identity, or IMSI, which then makes […]
Posted inCriminal Justice
Trying to predict mass shootings is wrong approach, experts say
A vigil held at Fort Hood in 2009 for victims of a shooting tragedy in which 13 people were killed.Flickr/U.S. Army/Tony Lindback There is no effective formula for predicting when a mass shooter will strike, concludes a recent study [PDF] commissioned by the Department of Defense in the wake of the 2009 Fort Hood attack […]
Posted inCriminal Justice, Local Law Enforcement, Surveillance and Privacy
Amid drone debate, police spend millions on spy planes
A Pilatus PC-12 NG Spectre in flight.Pilatus Aircraft Ltd. While the nation disputes if, when and where the government should use drones over U.S. soil, Texas state police are taking their surveillance efforts to the next level. In a little-noticed July purchase, officials at the Texas Department of Public Safety inked a $7.4 million contract […]
Posted inNational Security
Report savages terrorism ‘fusion centers’ for high cost, low value
Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick looks through a microscope to see how bullet casings are matched at the Commonwealth Fusion Center and State Police Crime Lab on July 15, 2011. A new U.S. Senate report has criticized fusion centers for failing to produce meaningful results. Office of Gov. Deval Patrick The nation’s vast network of anti-terrorism “fusion centers” […]
Posted inNational Security
More Americans support torture to fight terrorism, poll finds
Former President George W. Bush speaks to reporters about the war in Iraq after meeting with senior Pentagon officials in 2007.Air Force Staff Sgt. D. Myles Cullen A surprising number of Americans are supportive of controversial Bush-era tactics used to undermine terrorism, and are even open to more extreme measures like using nuclear weapons. That’s what […]
Posted inNational Security
$245M program under way for new type of airport body scanners
San Francisco International AirportFlickr/Trodel Airports in California could soon see the second generation of full-body scanners used to detect nonmetallic weapons and improvised explosive devices after earlier machines raised privacy and health concerns. Following a solicitation process that began in February, the Transportation Security Administration last week selected two contractors as part of a $245 […]
Posted inCybersecurity, National Security
Plugins to kill Facebook Timeline come with security headaches
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg shows off his profile page using Facebook Timeline.Niall Kennedy/Flickr Not all of Facebook’s 900 million global users are pleased with the mega-site’s slow lurch toward what it calls Timeline, a new profile format that displays photos, updates, wall messages and more based on when the material was posted over the lifetime […]