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A panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court’s decision dismissing a 2011 lawsuit filed by Mahmoud Hegab of Alexandria. Hegab lost his top security clearance when he got married because the secretive government security agency he worked for was concerned about his wife’s religious and political activities.

Hegab worked as a budget analyst at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency at Fort Belvoir. That clearance was revoked in November 2010 after his marriage because NGA officials told him they were concerned about his wife’s schooling at the Islamic Saudi Academy, a private school in northern Virginia, according to his lawsuit.

NGA officials also cited her employment with an Islamic charity, Alexandria-based Islamic Relief USA, as a reason for revoking the clearance, the lawsuit alleges.

Also identified as cause for concern was his wife’s participation in a 2003 anti-war rally in Washington sponsored by the ANSWER coalition, a left-wing group that has worked at times in conjunction with Palestinian activists. NGA also cited her time at George Mason University, when she served as president of a student group called Students for Justice in Palestine.

Officials at NGA — which employs 16,000 workers supplying satellite data and other imagery to the military — did not respond to an email seeking comment. All of its employees are required to have a top secret clearance due to the nature of the agency’s work.

In the lawsuit, Hegab’s lawyer, Sheldon Cohen, wrote that “the revocation of plaintiff’s security clearance … was based solely on plaintiff’s wife’s religion, Islam, her constitutionally protected speech, and her association with … an Islamic faith-based organization.”

The Justice Department agree to grant internet service providers that participated in a new cybersecurity monitoring program legal authorization to monitor and intercept communications traffic, according to documents obtained by the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

The documents show that the Justice Department secretly agreed to provide AT&T and other participating providers with so-called “2511 letters” that granted them immunity for activity that might otherwise have violated federal wiretapping laws.

“The Pentagon once paid $435 for a hammer, after all. But at least in that case it got a hammer.”

— from Feds spend at least $890,000 on fees for empty accounts (via govtoversight)

A privacy watchdog group is suing the FBI over the agency’s failure to fulfill Freedom of Information Act requests for documents involving a secretive and expansive database that could be used to track down anyone, anywhere and at any time.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) filed the complaint [PDF] in United States District Court for the District of Columbia on Monday, suing the Federal Bureau of Investigation for failing to comply with a pair of FOIA request placed more than six months ago.

Last September, EPIC asked the FBI to explain their “Next Generation Identification,” or “NGI” program, a system that’s been building a database of biometric data such as DNA profiles, mug shots and iris scans in order to give law enforcement the ability to track down suspects without relying on more archaic methods. In 2012 the FBI said NGI is already more than 60 percent complete, and Assistant Director Tom Bush of the agency’s Criminal Justice Information Services Division said it will be “bigger, faster, and better” than the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS) currently in place.

“Bigger,” the FBI wrote on their website in 2009, “because it will increase the capacity of our fingerprint storage plus house multimodal biometrics records like palm prints and iris scans,” all the while leaving room to accommodate for tracking methods that have yet to be perfected, such as voice analysis. Once the program is fully rolled out, the FBI says they should be able to narrow in on suspects in a matter of only 10 minutes.

The FBI doesn’t want NGI to pull data from just criminal databases, though. Because the agency wants NGI to work with public and private surveillance cameras around the country — of which EPIC estimates there are around 30 million in use at this time — the targets of investigation might not necessarily be the bad guys.

“The Department of Homeland Security has expended hundreds of millions of dollars to establish state and local surveillance systems, including CCTV [closed-circuit television] cameras that record the routine activities of millions of individuals,” EPIC writes. “The NGI system could be integrated with other surveillance technology, such as Trapwire, that would enable real-time image-matching of live feeds from CCTV surveillance cameras.”

Trapwire, a spy system uncovered by RT last year while analyzing emails hacked emails obtained from the Stratfor private intelligence firm, has already been sold to cities across the US including Washington, DC and New York, and lets customers scan the faces of people caught on surveillance cameras in only seconds. “TrapWire is a technology solution predicated upon behavior patterns in red zones to identify surveillance. It helps you connect the dots over time and distance,” the company said.

And although the FBI publically disclosed their NGI program for the first time nearly a decade ago, the agency has been unwilling this far to honor EPIC’s request for information. The NGI system will include facial recognition capabilities and will include photographs and biometric identified of millions of individuals who are neither criminals nor suspects, EPIC says, and the FBI has already been attempting to import human statistics pulled from the driver’s license profiles of residents in a number of states.