In Boro Park, Brooklyn, there are two police forces. One drives cars with flashing lights, is dispatched over walkie-talkies, and has a blue-and-black shield for a logo. The other is the New York City Police Department. The Shomrim security patrol, as the local civilian force is known, is in part a pastime for traditionally observant…
On the Jewish holiday of Purim, ultra-Orthodox big shots in Brooklyn invite police officials over for holiday meals. Then, they share the pictures on social media in an implicit contest over who drew the highest-ranking officer. Now, those cozy relationships are drawing scrutiny amid a reported federal corruption investigation involving Orthodox businessmen and a raft…
An Israeli tech company named “Cellebrite” is reportedly helping the FBI hack into the iPhone of San Bernadino mass killer Syed Rizwan Farook. Apple has refused to help the feds unlock an iPhone 5c belonging to Farook, who killed 14 people. IPhone data gets wiped after multiple failed logins. Apple contends that writing the program…
When it comes to religious hate crimes, Jews and Jewish institutions were the biggest targets in America again last year, hands down. But when it comes to hate crimes overall, the single biggest motivation by far was not religion at all; it was race—a situation that has prevailed for years. Those are two of the…
The FBI helped arrange a ransom payment from the family of Warren Weinstein, the Jewish-American government contractor who had been held hostage by al-Qaida from 2011. News of the unsuccessful ransom attempt for Weinstein, who was accidentally killed in January by a U.S. drone strike, was first reported by The Wall Street Journal. The family…
Poland’s Foreign Ministry protested remarks by FBI director James Comey in which he said the Poles were the Nazis’ accomplices during the Holocaust. “In their minds, the murderers and accomplices of Germany, and Poland, and Hungary, and so many, many other places didn’t do something evil. They convinced themselves it was the right thing to…
FBI director James Comey called the Holocaust the most significant event in history and said that’s why a U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum program on its lessons is mandatory for new agents. Speaking Wednesday at the museum’s National Tribute dinner in Washington, Comey made a point of noting that new special agents and intelligence analysts must…
Few people speak the language of government transparency more fluently than Lisette Garcia. When she was growing up as the daughter of Cuban exiles in Miami, she says, the idea of “the government sort of owning all the information” was ever present. She later became a reporter for the Miami Herald, Kansas City Star and…
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