By Julia Angwin and Jeff Larson/ProPublica

As we detailed on Monday, documents show the NSA and its British counterpart have been probing advertiser data on smartphone apps, which can include your gender, income, and even whether you’re a “swinger.”
Do you have questions? Post them in comments or tweet us.

What’s new here?

This article reveals how U.S. and British spy agencies have sought to intercept the information transmitted by the games and other apps that users download onto their smartphones. Previous stories have detailed how U.S. and British spies have been intercepting massive quantities of cellphone text messages and gathering the location of cellphones around the world.

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Posted on January 29, 2014

By Charles Ornstein/ProPublica

When California pharmacist Kevin Kingma received a letter last fall notifying him that his high-deductible health plan was being canceled because of the Affordable Care Act, he logged into his state’s health insurance exchange and chose another plan beginning Jan. 1.
Thanks to a subsidy, Kingma’s monthly premium went down, from about $300 to $175, and his benefits improved.
But this month, Kingma logged into his bank’s website and saw that his old insurer, Anthem Blue Cross, had deducted $587.40 from his account and had enrolled him in another of its insurance products for this year – he says without permission.
Hundreds of other consumers are caught in the same predicament, insurers acknowledge. And the California Department of Insurance said it is exploring whether any laws were broken when insurance companies withdrew money from consumers’ accounts for plans they didn’t select.

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Posted on January 27, 2014

Unicorn Burgers And Leprechaun Juice

We will totally follow the rules until we determine such time when we will no longer follow the rules. In two parts.

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Posted on January 25, 2014

By Charles Ornstein/ProPublica

After months of hype and hysteria, insurance policies purchased under the Affordable Care Act went into effect on New Year’s Day, and journalists have largely pivoted from writing about the problems of HealthCare.gov to how the law is actually working for consumers.
Some journalists don’t have to look very far. That’s because they are the story, too.
Back in December, I wrote about Missouri public radio reporter Harum Helmy, who earned too much for her state’s Medicaid program and too little to qualify for a subsidy that would have offset the cost of an insurance policy on Healthcare.gov.
“I know – an uninsured health reporter,” she wrote to me. “The joke’s not lost on me.”

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Posted on January 23, 2014

By Kara Brandeisky/ProPublica

Today President Obama plans to announce some reportedly limited reforms to National Security Agency surveillance programs.

Since the first disclosures based on documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, Obama has offered his own defenses of the programs. But not all of the president’s claims have stood up to scrutiny. Here are some of the misleading assertions he has made.

1. There have been no abuses.

And I think it’s important to note that in all the reviews of this program [Section 215] that have been done, in fact, there have not been actual instances where it’s been alleged that the NSA in some ways acted inappropriately in the use of this data 2026 There had not been evidence and there continues not to be evidence that the particular program had been abused in how it was used. – Dec. 20, 2013

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Posted on January 17, 2014

By Steve Rhodes

“Convicted ex-Streets and Sanitation Commissioner Alfred ‘Al’ Sanchez’s political comeback hit a major roadblock Thursday: an elections board kicked him off the Cook County ballot because he’s not done with his parole,” the Tribune reports.

(For some reason, the Tribune felt it was important to use Sanchez’s full legal name in this article for the first time since 2005; it has done so only 11 times dating back to what appears to be his first mention in the paper in 1986.)

“State law allows convicted felons to run for County Board, but Sanchez was on supervised release stemming from a city hiring fraud conviction when he filed his paperwork to secure a spot on the March 18 Democratic primary ballot.

“Sanchez attorney Dan Johnson argued that state law only required Sanchez to be finished serving his sentence by the time he would take office Dec. 1. Johnson argued Sanchez was eligible to ask to have his parole terminated in July, and the elections board should err on his side.

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Posted on January 17, 2014

By Roger Wallenstein

Andy Velez got it right.

In the spring of 2005, I was the junior varsity baseball coach at Kelvyn Park High School. I used to live a few blocks west of the school and passed by it many times. Aside from thinking it was a typical, fortress-like building housing an urban high school, I never gave the school much thought.

Andy was a sophomore. He played left field. Couldn’t hit much but he could go after a fly ball with dexterity, and as my leadoff man, he walked frequently and could steal a base. He also lived right across the street from the school in the 4500 block of West Wrightwood. If Andy was late to a game or practice, which was infrequently, I could always knock on his front door to jump start him.

Andy also was a bright kid. In a school which “did not meet federal education standards,” according to the 2013 CPS report card, Andy ranked third in his class and talked about going to college.

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Posted on January 15, 2014

By The Electronic Frontier Foundation

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) asked a federal court on Friday to order the Department of Justice (DOJ) to release more thorough information about the dragnet electronic surveillance being conducted by the National Security Agency (NSA). The filing in EFF’s long-standing case, Jewel v. NSA, also argues that the DOJ must stop pretending that information revealed and publicly acknowledged about government surveillance over the last seven months is still secret.

“The government has now publicly admitted much about its mass spying, but its filings before the court still try to claim broad secrecy about some of those same admissions,” EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn said. “It’s long past time for the Department of Justice to stop using overblown secrecy claims to try to prevent an open, adversarial court from deciding whether the NSA’s spying is constitutional.”

Since the Jewel case was first filed in 2008, the government has used claims of state secrets to fight court review. Last year, documents revealed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden confirmed many of the case’s allegations. As a result of the Snowden disclosures, Judge Jeffrey White of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California ordered the government to review all of its filings and release everything that was no longer secret. The court also ordered the government to explain the effects of the disclosures on the case.

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Posted on January 14, 2014

By Steve Rhodes

How did UNO get so clouty and corrupt? They had Democrats Rahm Emanuel, Michael Madigan and Ed Burke at their side.

Chicago magazine and the Better Government Association have the details in their new investigation.

Among the major findings, as summarized by the BGA:

• UNO has received more than $280 million in public money over the past five years but neither Chicago Public Schools nor the Illinois State Board of Education closely monitored how those funds were spent.

• A good chunk of the public money UNO collects never touches the classroom. In 2012, for example, it received $49 million from local, state and federal sources. Of that amount, more than $5 million went to management fees, nearly $3.5 million to debt interest payments, nearly $1 million to consultants and $68,200 to promotional materials.
• According to state law, charter school networks are supposed to conduct and videotape blind admissions lotteries. But two sources with direct knowledge of the process say UNO never held a “real” lottery and instead cherry-picked students based on where they live in order to build up coalitions in certain Latino neighborhoods.
• UNO has co-developed at least five senior housing developments in and around Chicago, signaling its growing business prowess, and push to diversify its interests. As is the case with its schools, taxpayers helped foot the bill. UNO and its business partner have received loans, grants and housing tax credits worth $78 million from the governments of the State of Illinois, Cook County and City of Chicago.

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Posted on January 10, 2014

The U.S. Has Bombed At Least Eight Wedding Parties Since 2001

“The Obama administration has launched an internal investigation into a Dec. 12 drone strike in Yemen that targeted an al-Qaeda militant but which local villagers say ended up hitting a wedding party, killing 12 and injuring 14 others, U.S. officials tell NBC News.

“NBC News has obtained exclusive videos and photos taken in the aftermath of the strike. The graphic images show the scorched bodies of young men who villagers say were part of a convoy on their way to the wedding celebration when they were killed in their pickups by two Hellfire missiles fired by a U.S. drone.”

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The Atlantic: If A Drone Strike Hit an American Wedding, We’d Ground Our Fleet.

The Nation: The U.S. Has Bombed At Least Eight Wedding Parties Since 2001.

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Posted on January 8, 2014