Simone Gordon, who worked at the bank from 2007 until early 2012 as a senior collector, told ProPublica that she and other workers “were told to lie to customers and claim that Bank of America had not received documents it had requested.” “We were told that admitting that the Bank received documents ‘would open a can of worms,’” she added. Bank employees “who placed ten or more accounts into foreclosure in a given month received a $500 bonus.”   Read More

The government is relying on Section 215 [of the Patriot Act] to collect “metadata” about every phone call made or received by residents of the United States. The practice is akin to snatching every American’s address book—with annotations detailing whom we spoke to, when we talked, for how long, and from where. It gives the government a comprehensive record of our associations and public movements, revealing a wealth of detail about our intimate associations.   Read More

Appearing on C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal,” Loretta Sanchez said, “I don't know if there are other leaks, if there's more information somewhere, if somebody else is going to step up, but I will tell you that I believe it's the tip of the iceberg,” She added that she was “astounded” by what she heard and that NSA’s surveillance system is “just broader than most people even realize.”   Read More

Not only is the Pentagon wasting taxpayer dollars on overpriced contractors, the contractors’ role in running PPBS makes them, in the words of Defense contracting expert Chuck Spinney, “privy to—and in some cases deeply involved in—shaping the detailed decisions concerning how the Pentagon intends to spend its money over the next five or six years. That means, to put it charitably, there are conflicts of interest between the buyer and the sellers.”   Read More

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported this month that wages in the U.S. declined 4.3% during the first quarter of this year. The drop was the steepest on record, going back to 1947. But the first three months of 2013 were fantastic for banks, which posted a record $40.3-billion profit, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.   Read More

Zions received a cut of the fee received by Modern Payments for each person whose account was accessed. Between 2007 and 2009, Zions allowed about $39 million to be withdrawn from hundreds of thousands of its accounts, much of which was transferred to other bank accounts in India, Canada and the Caribbean. This enabled Zions to charge $20 million worth of insufficient funds fees to its customers who had been scammed.   Read More

In 2003, as President George W. Bush prepared to invade Iraq, his administration used the NSA’s capabilities to spy on diplomats from countries undecided about voting to support the United Nations’ authorization for the American-led attack against Saddam Hussein’s regime. The NSA intercepted the home and office telephone and email communications of the U.N. delegates   Read More

The nations with the most technically recoverable shale gas resources are said to be China, Argentina, Algeria, the United States, Canada and Mexico. The nations with the most technically recoverable shale oil resources are Russia, the United States, China, Argentina and Libya.   Read More

In Germany, the issue of government snooping is especially sensitive, given the decades of domestic spying by the East German Stasi during the Cold War. Britain’s Foreign Secretary William Hague informed Parliament that British intelligence services have not colluded with the U.S. to circumvent the country’s laws. Some observers suspect that the leaders of foreign allies have known all along what the U.S. government was up to and are just posturing publically for domestic consumption.   Read More