Nearly five years ago, FBI agent Robert Levinson disappeared in Iran. Over the weekend a hostage video of Levinson was given to his family. "I am not in very good health," Levinson says on the video. "I am running out of diabetes medicine. I have been treated well, but I need the help of the United States government." It was the first sign his family had that Levinson was alive.

On Tuesday, federal agents arrested four men ranging from ages 65 to 73 from the north Georgia towns of Cleveland and Toccoa on charges of an ambitiously designed domestic terror plot. The men are accused of trying to procure 10 pounds of ricin — an extremely lethal biological toxin — as well as explosive devices and illegal firearms. Kim Severson, Atlanta bureau chief for The New York Times, reports on the latest.

Last year, according to The New York Times, the city of Chicago recorded nearly 1,400 rapes. But none of these appeared in the FBI's annual federal crime report. That’s because the FBI doesn’t accept Chicago’s definition of what constitutes "rape." And it’s not just Chicago. The annual figures from cities and municipalities across the country are understated every year in the FBI's yearly Uniform Crime Report due to how the Bureau defines the crime.

Since FBI translator Shamai Leibowitz was sentenced to 20 months in prison after pleading guilty to leaking information to a blogger, the case has been shrouded in mystery. Even the judge trial didn't know what information Leibowitz had divulged. Over a year later, it is now known that Leibowitz acquired secret transcript of wiretapped conversation from the Israeli Embassy and passed them on to a blogger named Richard Silverstein. The case is the Obama administration's first successful prosecution over the leaking of classified information to the media.

According to newly unsealed FBI documents, the Pakistani military and its spy agency, the ISI, has spent $4 million over two decades to influence U.S. policy against India. The FBI has also indicted two U.S. citizens in connection with illegally lobbying members of Congress and presidential candidates. Syed Fai, who lives in Virginia, was arrested on Tuesday for failing to register with the Justice Department as an agent of Pakistan. The other man, Zaheer Ahmad, is at large in Pakistan.

The arrest of fugitive mob boss James "Whitey" Bulger leaves yet another spot open on the top 10 Most Wanted list. Another spot disappeared early this year; Osama bin Laden’s death left a spot that hasn’t yet been filled.

The FBI has amended its guidelines, giving significant new powers to its roughly 14,000 agents, allowing them to do investigations without oversight. The new guidelines allow FBI agents to go through household trash, use surveillance and search databases. Former FBI agent, Michael German, who is now a lawyer for the ACLU in Washington DC says that the new guidelines are very concerning. "At the same time the FBI is using more and more secret powers, they're removing the standards and the oversight necessary to make sure that they're only focused on people who are doing bad things rather than people that they don't like for some other reason," says German.

In the first major case of homegrown terrorism in this post-Osama bin Laden era, six people were indicted by the FBI for funneling around $50,000 to terrorists in Pakistan. Two of those arrested were imams from south Florida. Nearly ten years out from the terrorist attack on Sept. 11, we evaluate how the relationship between federal law enforcement officials and Muslim communities has evolved in order to more effectively work together to prevent homegrown terrorism. Asad Ba-Yunus, a former Miami-Dade assistant state attorney who now serves as legal adviser for the Coalition of South Florida Muslim Organizations.

President Barack Obama is asking Congress to extend the term of Federal Bureau of Investigations Director Robert S. Mueller III for two years. Mueller was sworn in as the head of the F.B.I. just seven days before the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2011 — an event that marked the greatest challenge ever for the nation and the bureau's 93-year history. Mueller has led the FBI in preventing attacks like the Christmas Day shoe-bomber and stopping al-Qaida operative Najibullah Zazi who was headed for New York City in 2009 to blow himself up. For more on how Mueller changed the FBI and who might be qualified to replace him, we talk with Barton Gellman, contributing editor at large for Time Magazine, a research fellow at NYU's Center on Law and Security, and author of “Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency.” He wrote an article on Mueller and the future of the FBI for this week's Time Magazine.

Last week, the Justice Department indicted top executives at online poker companies based abroad for money laundering and wire fraud. It's a major blow that could put the industry in jeopardy. Professional online poker players, some with millions of dollars in accounts associated with these online poker sites, are waiting to see if they’ll be able to gain access to their money.

In 1999, the body of 41-year-old, high school dropout Ricky McCormick was discovered in a St. Charles County, Missouri cornfield. There were no weapons, no motives, no suspects in the case. The only clue investigators had were two hand-written documents found in the pockets of the victim's pants, a scrambling of letters that read like an encoded message.

A dead body found in a Missouri field, murdered, apparently, by a blow to the head. No witnesses, no murder weapon, and no apparent motive. The only evidence: two notes in the victim's pocket with a mysterious code scrawled upon them. Twelve years later, the case remains unsolved.

It's not the description of the opening scene from latest episode of "Cold Case," it's the true story of the murder of Ricky McCormick. An eccentric 41-year-old high school drop-out who had a passion for making encrypted notes, McCormick had last been seen five days before his murder in St. Louis, where he was undergoing treatment for heart and lung problems in June 1999. Investigators came to believe that the coded messages found in McCormick's pocket would point them in the direction of his murderer. But McCormick's code has proven to be too indecipherable for even the FBI, so after twelve years, the Bureau's Cryptanalysis and Racketerring Unit, in collaboration with the American Cryptogram Association, is turning to the internet for the answers.

The American South caught political fire in 1964. Activism by local African-American organizations and college students from the North led to brutal murders at the hands of white Southerners. But many of the victims of the Civil Rights Movement were not members of political organizations or student committees. Louisiana native, Frank Morris, a Black shoe store owner who was burned alive by two white men in 1964, suffered simply because he was independent and served a racially mixed clientele.

A new story in The Washington Post details a vast expansion of the United States' monitoring of its citizens for the purpose of fighting domestic terrorism threats. Reportedly the largest and most technologically sophisticated system of data-gathering in U.S. History, the new apparatus uses techniques developed in wars overseas to scrutinize the activities of Americans. Dana Priest, who helped report the story, which covered several months and used over 1000 documents, joins us now to talk about the new apparatus, which is part of an exploding national security market around the country. 

Ernest Withers was a civil rights-era photojournalist who had access to some of the highest levels of the movement; over the weekend, we learned that Withers may have used his extraordinary access to sell information to the FBI, perceived enemies of the movement’s leaders.  

In February 2007, the FBI and the Department of Justice announced that they would "do everything we can" to prosecute Civil Rights-era hate crimes. The Civil Rights-Era Cold Case Initiative was an attempt to put federal dollars and manpower into closing unsolved murder cases. However, these crimes are more than 40 years old. Few of the cases have been solved and key suspects are dying.

One of the accused in an apparent Russian spy ring arrested earlier this week by the F.B.I. has confessed to working for that country's secret intelligence service. Federal prosecutors say the confession from a man who called himself Juan Lazaro is the first. The case has captured the country's attention, not only for the number of people involved, but the Cold War era techniques used in passing off information. Why did this man choose to confess? 

The FBI announced yesterday the arrests of 11 people associated with an alleged Russian spy ring. The arrests were made on Sunday in Massachusetts, Virginia, New Jersey and New York. Details coming out of the FBI reports read like a Russian spy novel — if not stranger.  Authorities worked for at least seven years to gather information about the suspects, who were all charged with conspiracy to commit money laundering and failing to register as guests of a foreign government. The maximum sentences for these crimes are five to 20 years.

Thousands of pages of Senator Ted Kennedy’s FBI file were released yesterday, 9 months after he died. This is just the first installment of the file, but it covers some of the most interesting years of Kennedy’s life, from 1961, when his brother was president, to 1985, five years after Kennedy’s own failed run for the White House. There are all sorts of gems in the file: unverified claims and documentation of countless threats — some more serious than others — made against the last surviving Kennedy brother.

Could the FBI have prevented a murder?

When Joran van der Sloot was arrested this week for killing a 21-year-old woman in Peru, details of Natalee Holloway's murder rose to the surface. Although he was never charged for Holloway's murder, Van der Sloot was the main suspect in that case, and before he left Aruba to Peru, he tried to extort money from Holloway’s mother.