Larry Abramson
Larry Abramson is NPR's National Security Correspondent. He covers the Pentagon, as well as issues relating to the thousands of vets returning home from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Prior to his current role, Abramson was NPR's Education Correspondent covering a wide variety of issues related to education, from federal policy to testing to instructional techniques in the classroom. His reporting focused on the impact of for-profit colleges and universities, and on the role of technology in the classroom. He made a number of trips to New Orleans to chart the progress of school reform there since Hurricane Katrina. Abramson also covers a variety of news stories beyond the education beat.
In 2006, Abramson returned to the education beat after spending nine years covering national security and technology issues for NPR. Since 9/11, Abramson has covered telecommunications regulation, computer privacy, legal issues in cyberspace, and legal issues related to the war on terrorism.
During the late 1990s, Abramson was involved in several special projects related to education. He followed the efforts of a school in Fairfax County, Virginia, to include severely disabled students in regular classroom settings. He joined the National Desk reporting staff in 1997.
For seven years prior to his position as a reporter on the National Desk, Abramson was senior editor for NPR's National Desk. His department was responsible for approximately 25 staff reporters across the United States, five editors in Washington, and news bureaus in Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago. The National Desk also coordinated domestic news coverage with news departments at many of NPR's member stations. The desk doubled in size during Abramson's tenure. He oversaw the development of specialized beats in general business, high-technology, workplace issues, small business, education, and criminal justice.
Abramson joined NPR in 1985 as a production assistant with Morning Edition. He moved to the National Desk, where he served for two years as Western editor. From there, he became the deputy science editor with NPR's Science Unit, where he helped win a duPont-Columbia Award as editor of a special series on Black Americans and AIDS.
Prior to his work at NPR, Abramson was a freelance reporter in San Francisco and worked with Voice of America in California and in Washington, D.C.
He has a master's degree in comparative literature from the University of California at Berkeley. Abramson also studied overseas at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, and at the Free University in Berlin, Germany.
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After the Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act, the Pentagon said it would offer military IDs and extend the benefits that come with them to same-sex partners. But some states that don't recognize gay marriages have refused to issue the IDs to same-sex spouses of National Guard members. -
The head of the NSA testified on Capitol Hill Tuesday. General Keith Alexander disputed news reports that the NSA collected the phone call data of citizens in France and Spain. The NSA is facing tough criticism over its extensive surveillance efforts, including the apparent monitoring of phone calls of the leaders of countries that are close U.S. allies. The NSA controversy has also prompted legislators to change the way the agency conducts surveillance. Two reforms aim to limit the NSA's ability to collect the phone records of U.S. persons in bulk.
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Republican Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner and Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy are sponsoring the legislation. There has been anger from both major parties about how the National Security Agency vacuumed up data from Americans' phone calls and emails.
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Law enforcement agencies across the country subpoena cellphone location data regularly. But civil liberties groups hope a series of state-level legal victories will usher in stronger protections for that often-revealing digital information.
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Since 1980, the percentage of women at the U.S. Military Academy has stayed largely the same, leading some to conclude that the school has set an artificial cap on the number of female cadets it accepts. Now, West Point has been told it must raise those numbers to meet the demand for more female leaders. -
But, the secret court explained in a letter, it demanded changes to many requests during meetings with U.S. government lawyers.
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A service called Tor makes it possible to communicate and surf the web anonymously. It sounds like a plot by privacy-minded rebels, but in fact the service receives most of its funding from the government and was started by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory. Despite recent revelations of government email snooping, the U.S. government supports anonymous communication so foreign dissidents can work undetected, and so government agents can pursue bad guys without giving away their identities. But now the service faces new accusations that it might be serving NSA surveillance efforts.
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Pentagon lawyers are still tinkering with funds and legal interpretations to figure out what services they can offer. One of the challenges for military families is figuring out what's open and closed.
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During a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander would not say. -
Documents leaked by former contractor Edward Snowden indicate the NSA may have installed backdoors on encryption products. It's not clear exactly what's going on but the stories have unleashed plenty of fear and loathing in the closed world of encryption researchers.
