Department of Justice (DoJ)

Lotus sold to IBM. Lotus was the go-to communications and collaboration platform of the C.I.A. By the late 1990's, the government bagan to discover that Lotus Notes could not handle the large scale collaboration requirements of the Internet. That is when IBM advisor James P. Chandler met Michael McKibben and Leader Technologies who had invented what is now called 'social networking' in 2000. Chandler and IBM ...

The first World Trade Center bombing was provocateured by the government. In 1993 the FBI planted their informant, Egyptian Intelligence Emad A. Salem, within a radical Arab group in New York led by Ramzi Yousef. Salem was ordered to encourage the group to carry out a bombing targeting the World Trade Center's twin towers. Under the illusion that the project was a sting operation, Salem asked ...

In his book, Called to Serve, former U.S. Army Colonel James “Bo” Gritz described his several meetings in May 1987 with Khun Sa, the head of the largest heroin-producing region in Southeast Asia. Gritz had been on a team mission called LAZARUS trying to locate missing prisoners of war when he found evidence of massive heroin production involving the CIA and the military. Col. Bo Gritz ...

Danny Casolaro (June 16, 1947 – August 10, 1991) was an investigative reporter investigating Mena Airport, the Arkansas Development Finance Authority, Iran-Contra, the Inslaw case, and the BCCI scandal. Casolaro was nearing the end of his project and told friends he was about to publish something really big, a book that tied together the scandals surrounding the presidency of George H. W. Bush. He told his ...

Michael Riconosciuto, a computer expert, filed an affidavit before a House judiciary committee investigating the bankruptcy case of Inslaw Inc. v. US Government (see 1974 entry for INSLAW). Riconosciuto testified that he was working under the direction of CEO Earl Brian of Hadron Inc., a government consulting firm and Inslaw competitor, and that Peter Videnieks, the contract manager overseeing the Inslaw contract for the DoJ, had ...

First Lieutenant Alan David Standorf worked with, if not directly for, the National Security Agency at Vint Hill Farms Station, then a U.S. Army/NSA listening post. In 1990, he became a whistleblower and made contact with Danny Casolaro, an investigative journalist. Standorf gave Casolaro information and copies of classified documents to help expose illegal activities including money laundering, bulk data collection and a list of dissidents to be rounded ...

Pan Am Flight 103 was destroyed by a bomb that detonated in the baggage compartment as the plane made its climb out from London passing over Lockerbie, Scotland en route to New York.  A total of 270 people died including 11 residents of the Scottish town.  According to investigators, the bomb was built into a Toshiba radio cassette player and packed in a brown hard-case Samsonite suitcase that ...

Ray Buckey, an employee of Virginia McMartin's Pre-School, was arrested after Judy Johnson, mother of one of the Manhattan Beach, California, preschool's young students, reported to the police that her son had been sodomized by her estranged husband and by McMartin teacher Ray Buckey, grandson of school founder Virginia McMartin and son of administrator Peggy McMartin Buckey. Mary A. Fischer in an article in Los Angeles magazine said the case was ...

James Bamford, having gathered extensive information on the NSA, wrote the "The Puzzle Palace", a nickname for the agency, and it was published on September 19, 1982. Before the book's publication, the Reagan administration claimed that unclassified source documents were released to Bamford in error, and threatened him with prosecution if he did not return 250 pages of documents he had obtained through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) ...

In 1972, the ATF was officially established as an independent bureau within the Treasury Department on July 1, 1972, this transferred the responsibilities of the ATF division of the IRS to the new Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. Rex D. Davis oversaw the transition, becoming the bureau’s first director, having headed the division since 1970. During his tenure, Davis shepherded the organization into a new ...