The FOIA request reads in part: "The people of the United States have an urgent need for disclosure of the requested information regarding what appears to be the largest covert surveillance program directed against them in U.S. history. The U.S. government and its agencies that are carrying out these unprecedented surveillance programs are not entitled to hide these programs from the public."

Mara Verheyden-Hilliard discusses the newly revealed NSA surveillance program, how it ties into other domestic spying projects, and what the PCJF is doing in response.

Since the 2008 economic crash, security agencies have increasingly spied on political activists, especially environmental groups, on behalf of corporate interests.

Last evening, The Guardian newspaper published a document classified by the U.S. government as Top Secret, revealing that the Obama administration is engaged in a domestic surveillance program involving the phone records of tens of millions of Americans.

The U.S. State Department has illegally refused to release documents from 1998 to 2002 related to the covert propaganda operation run by the U.S. government that secretly paid Miami-based journalists who conducted a media campaign against the Cuban Five.

In the fall of 2011, a key Boston police counterterror intelligence unit -- funded with millions of dollars in U.S. homeland security grants -- was closely monitoring anti-Wall Street demonstrations, including tracking the Facebook pages and websites of the protesters and writing reports on the potential impact on "commercial and financial sector assets" in downtown areas, according to internal police documents.

The CIA will neither confirm nor deny whether it had knowledge of, or involvement in, a plot to poison or otherwise assassinate the late President of Venezuela Hugo Chavez.

he Partnership for Civil Justice Fund has spent years investigating this mass surveillance grid put in place without public awareness, scrutiny, debate or oversight.

Within hours of the announced death of President Hugo Chavez, civil rights groups in the United States filed Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) demands with federal agencies seeking information and documents that "relate to or reference or discuss any information regarding or plans to poison or otherwise assassinate the President of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez."

A sample of the extensive news coverage of the documents, released to PCJF in late December 2012, showing that the FBI and DHS extensively monitored and communicated about the Occupy movement.