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Thordarson was long time volunteer for WikiLeaks with direct access to Assange and a key position as an organizer in the group. With his cold war-style embassy walk-in, he became something else: the first known FBI informant inside WikiLeaks. For the next three months, Thordarson served two masters, working for the secret-spilling website and simultaneously spilling its secrets to the U.S. government in exchange, he says, for a total of about $5,000. The FBI flew him internationally four times for debriefings, including one trip to Washington D.C., and on the last meeting obtained from Thordarson eight hard drives packed with chat logs, video and other data from WikiLeaks.

The relationship provides a rare window into the U.S. law enforcement investigation into WikiLeaks, the transparency group newly thrust back into international prominence with its assistance to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. Thordarson’s double-life illustrates the lengths to which the government was willing to go in its pursuit of Julian Assange, approaching WikiLeaks with the tactics honed during the FBI’s work against organized crime and computer hacking — or, more darkly, the bureau’s Hoover-era infiltration of civil rights groups.

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Rich died of a stroke in a hospital in Lucerne, Switzerland, near to his longtime home, according to the Marc Rich Group. His Israel-based spokesman, Avner Azulay, said Rich would be buried in Israel on Thursday.

Rich fled from the United States to Switzerland in 1983 after he was indicted by a U.S. federal grand jury on more than 50 counts of fraud, racketeering, trading with Iran during the U.S. Embassy hostage crisis and evading more than $48 million in income taxes — crimes that could have earned him more than 300 years in prison.

Rich remained on the FBI's Most Wanted List, narrowly escaping capture in Finland, Germany, Britain and Jamaica, until Clinton granted him a pardon on Jan. 20, 2001 — the day he handed over the keys to the White House to George W. Bush.

Rich's pardon catapulted him into the headlines once again.

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There is some sad irony, then, that the journalist's tragic death has been followed by a storm of wild speculation -- conspiracy theories about car bombs and government assassinations abound through cyberspace. It is the sort of knee-jerk speculation -- concerns expounded based on threadbare evidence and assumptions -- that sits quite at odds with Hastings' legacy of thorough reporting and serious probing.

So here's what we know: At around 4:15 a.m. Tuesday witnesses say a vehicle, later identified as belonging to Hastings, collided with a tree in the Hancock Park neighborhood of Los Angeles. Authorities reported that the explosive crash killed a man, but coroner's officials could not immediately confirm whether Hastings was the victim given the charred state of the body. "It sounded like a bomb went off in the middle of the night," a witness told the local news. "I couldn't have written a scene like this for a movie, where the engine flies from the car." A video also appears to show Hastings' Mercedes Benz running a red light at a high speed minutes before the crash.

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Once again, the search was futile.

"Certainly, we're disappointed," Detroit FBI chief Robert Foley told reporters Wednesday as federal and local authorities wrapped up another excavation that failed to turn up anything that could be linked to Hoffa, who has been missing since 1975.

Many people interested in the mystery assume Hoffa ran afoul of the mob and was whacked.

"Right now the case remains open," Foley said. "At this point, if we do get logical leads and enough probable cause that warrant the resources to do an investigation, then we'll continue to do so."

The latest search for Hoffa's remains was prompted by a tip from reputed ex-Mafia captain Tony Zerilli. About 40 FBI agents searched a small field surrounded by trees and a gravel road in Oakland Township. With the aid of a backhoe, they spent about 10 hours in the field Monday and another 10 Tuesday before calling it quits about 10:30 a.m. Wednesday.

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I write to you about the idea of identity, particularly my identity as an American in the wake of the NSA warrantless wiretapping and PRISM program. Growing up, perhaps naively, I have carried this ideal of America, freedom, liberty and the right to privacy as absolutes. The First Amendment of free speech and the Fourth Amendment against unreasonable searches provided a base that shaped my understanding of my place and role in society. As a citizen I could anonymously say within reason almost any idea or thought without repercussions from the government. As a citizen I expected my communications and personal life free of government intrusion and inspection. If a government action or program started to run afoul of these rights the judiciary would step in and make the necessary corrections.

The recent revelations about widespread government warrantless spying including recording phone conversations, email, and Internet traffic -- programs that have been blessed by secret courts created by secret laws -- have shaken my belief in what it means to live in a free society, about the basic ideals of America.

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Tony Zerilli told his lawyer that Hoffa was buried beneath a concrete slab in a barn in a field in suburban Detroit in 1975. The barn no longer exists, and a full day of digging Monday turned up no sign of Hoffa. Federal agents resumed the search Tuesday morning.

Zerilli, 85, told Detroit television station WDIV in February that he knew the location of the remains, and his lawyer, David Chasnick, said Zerilli was "thrilled" that investigators were acting on the information.

"This has finally come to an end. It has been an arduous project to get to this point," Chasnick said. "Hoffa's body is somewhere in that field, no doubt about it."

Detroit FBI chief Robert Foley made no mention of Zerilli's claims, merely saying investigators had obtained a warrant to search the field in Oakland Township, 25 miles north of Detroit.

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Had the program been in place at the time, Mueller said, counterterrorism officials may have been able to connect the dots and could have "derailed" the plot entirely. He pointed to one specific case: There was an al-Qaida safe house in Yemen that was in contact with a house in San Diego where plotter Khalid Almihdhar was staying, and:

If we had this program in pace at the time, we would have had been able to identify that particular telephone number in San Diego... If we had the telephone number from Yemen, we would have matched it up to that telephone number in San Diego, got further legal process, identified Almihdhar... The 9/11 Commission itself indicated that investigations or interrogations of Almihdhar once he was identified could have yielded evidence of connections to other participants in the 9/11 plot. The simple fact of their detention could have derailed the plan. In any case, the opportunity was not there.

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Mounting domestic and international pressure against the PRISM surveillance program has forced the Obama administration to concede that the revelations have sparked “an appropriate debate.” Concern – and in some cases, outrage -- at these measures has been expressed by general members of the public and politicians, many of whom made no secret of their anger or mistrust toward them. Given the seriousness of the allegations, the outrage expressed at such a situation is obviously justified; the courage of the leaker and those taking the fight to government, commendable.

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Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., explained on ABC’s "This Week" Sunday that in one of the signature uses of the dragnet collection of every American’s phone records, the NSA managed to track one of our own informants, David Headley, as he helped Islamic terrorists plan attacks. She did not mention that it did nothing to prevent the 2008 terrorist attack in Mumbai, which killed 166 -- and in which Headley had a role in planning.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper called the effort to track Headley – which did manage to thwart Headley’s 2009 plans to attack a Danish newspaper – a success, in an interview with Andrea Mitchell. Such is the value of these programs, it appears, that top proponents of the program celebrate the tracking of a DEA informant gone bad as their main talking point.

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“I’m cooperating and look forward to continuing to cooperate 100 percent,” Ramadan said.

From the Washington Post:

The Washington Post has previously reported that the FBI has been conducting interviews about the relationship between McDonnell (R) and his wife and the chief executive of a dietary supplement company who paid for the catering at the 2011 wedding of the governor’s daughter. The agents are exploring whether McDonnell assisted the company in exchange for gifts.

Ramadan’s subpoena, however, is the first public indication of the impaneling of a grand jury to review evidence in the McDonnells’ case — a significant escalation in the investigation.

The hearing will take place in July.

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Recently released National Security Agency documents indicate the U.S. government is “tapping directly into the central servers” of your favorite Internet services as part of a secret program called PRISM.

So much for those privacy policies, huh?

The Guardian and Washington Post revealed the stunning extent of the PRISM snooping operation: the NSA and FBI are monitoring Microsoft, Google, YouTube, Yahoo, Facebook, Skype, Apple, and others.

Those companies have largely denied the reports, saying they never allowed the government direct access to their servers. Government officials have admitted the program exists, however, and President Obama himself defended it as legal in a Friday morning press conference.

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President Obama wants America to know that the PRISM scandal, which revealed the NSA and FBI have unfettered access to the data centers of companies like Google, Facebook, and Yahoo, actually only targets foreigners.

Needless to say, Europe is not happy.

News of PRISM, a program previously unknown to the public, broke Thursday evening in reports from the Guardian and the Washington Post.

Obama gave a prompt, awkward press conference Friday morning to address PRISM. Unknown to the public until this week, PRISM has almost unbelievable access to nine major tech companies' data, and uses that access to track emails, chats, and file transfers, according to a leaked NSA slideshow.

The President promised that "This does not apply to U.S. citizens and it does not apply to people living in the United States."

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BUZZARDS BAY, Mass. — The sensational disclosure that the US government’s National Security Agency has been scooping up phone and internet records of millions of Americans might have surprised ordinary citizens in Topeka or Milwaukee, but it did little to excite politicians in Washington, DC.

“As far as I know, this is the exact three-month renewal of what has been the case for the past seven years,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif, said of the news about Verizon telephone and mobile log monitoring.

In an uncommon show of bipartisanship, Georgia Republican Sen. Saxby Chambliss supported Feinstein, his colleague on the Senate Intelligence Committee.

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1. The government collects data on millions of phone calls in the U.S. The National Security Agency and the FBI have access to the "metadata" on every call that passes through Verizon's systems, the Guardian's Glenn Greenwald (formerly of Salon) reported, thanks to authorization from a secret FISA court. It's important to note that the government cannot listen to or access the content of any of these calls without a separate court order, but merely collects data like call time and length and the phone numbers involved.

2. The government may be collecting info on all calls in the U.S. While Greenwald's scoop dealt exclusively with Verizon, there's every reason to believe that the government has similar ongoing deals with the other major telecom providers. As Marc Ambinder wrote, "the document suggests that the U.S. government regularly collects and stores all domestic telephone records."

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The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents and connection logs that enable analysts to track a person’s movements and contacts over time.

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The 65-page lawsuit claims that after Kelley filed a complaint about threatening emails she had received -- eventually revealed to have been sent by Broadwell, and eventually leading to revelations about Broadwell's affair with Petraeus -- the FBI and Defense Department violated the Kelleys' privacy rights, leaked false and defamatory information, and generally engaged in "damaging leaks, cavalier sexual innuendo, old-fashioned “blame the victim” discrimination, and other privacy violations and slander of the Kelleys by government officials [that] were not authorized conduct within the scope of those officials’ employment."

"If Defendants can wreak such emotional, reputational, and financial havoc on a couple as educated, intelligent, successful, and public-spirited as the Kelleys," the lawsuit continues, "they could certainly do so to anyone. Accordingly, this suit seeks not only to vindicate Plaintiffs’ legal rights, help restore their reputations, champion the truth, and otherwise attempt to make them whole, but also to deter Defendants from such egregious violations of privacy in the future."

The complaint asks for a formal apology and unspecified damages.

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In March federal Judge Susan Illston ruled that so-called National Security Letters violated the First Amendment and she also ruled against the FBI's practice of attaching gag clauses to NSLs, preventing recipients from disclosing their existence or contents. The March ruling was part of a lawsuit brought by the Electronic Frontier Foundation on behalf of telecom firm Credo Mobile. Illston's decision was celebrated by civil liberties advocates as a watershed moment in the battle against the government's secret procurement of citizens' private data. At the time, Michael Kieschnick, CEO of Credo Mobile, said, “This decision is notable for its clarity and depth. From this day forward, the U.S. government’s unconstitutional practice of using National Security Letters to obtain private information without court oversight and its denial of the First Amendment rights of National Security Letter recipients have finally been stopped by our courts.”

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I leaked the recording to Mother Jones, which published it with a transcript and analysis in April, and over the days that followed, blogs and cable news shows lit up with the revelations from that one meeting. At the time, McConnell was prepping for a race against the actress Ashley Judd -- it was “the Whac-a-Mole stage of the campaign,” McConnell said smugly -- and the recording captures his team in some Grade-A jackassery, including plans to use Judd’s history of depression against her.

But also up for debate was the the ethics of the audio recording itself. Here's the latest: An assistant U.S. attorney, Bryan Calhoun, telephoned my attorney yesterday, asking to meet with him next Friday as charges against me are being presented to a grand jury.

In a technology age marked by vigilante heroes like Julian Assange and Anonymous, the line between journalism and espionage has grown thin. McConnell was quick to frame himself as the victim of a crime, which was to be expected. It was the guilty repositioning of a politician who has been caught being craven.

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