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I rarely partake in either political discussions or mob rage, but what has transpired with the Palin “hacker,” and Gawker, is to my mind the very dead end, the very suicide, of the media cogniscenti, of anybody who touches it with a bargepole, or pretends it is anything short of a lynching of everything this country aims to stand for. This is not “hacking.” Hacking sounds kind of cute, like surfing, like something faintly nerdy and ingenious. No — the word is “surveillance,” and the cultures that invented it and perfected it were dictatorships, most of which have crumbled and...

WASHINGTON — A White House plan to broaden the National Security Agency’s wiretapping powers won a key procedural victory in the Senate on Thursday, as backers defeated a more restrictive plan by Senate Democrats that would have imposed more court oversight on government spying. The vote moves the Bush administration a step closer toward the twin goals it has pursued for months: strengthening the N.S.A.’s ability to eavesdrop without court approval, while securing legal immunity for the phone companies that have helped the agency in its wiretapping operations. At the same time, the White House agreed Thursday after months of...

"Tony McDonald, a member of the University of Texas Young Conservatives, sets up a protest anti- American Civil Liberties Union nativity scene, dubbed a 'solstice barn,' on the university's campus in Austin December 4, 2006. The display features a 'Nancy Pelosi' angel, a 'suicide bomber' shepherd, and Marx, Lenin and Stalin as the Three Wise Men." "Josh Perry, a member of the University of Texas Young Conservatives, spreads hay as he sets up a protest anti-American Civil Liberties Union nativity scene, dubbed a 'solstice barn,' on the university's campus in Austin, Texas December 4, 2006. The display features a...

WASHINGTON - The Justice Department has reopened a long-dormant inquiry into the government's warrantless wiretapping program, a major policy shift only days into the tenure of new Attorney General Michael Mukasey. The investigation by the department's Office of Professional Responsibility was shut down after the previous attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, refused to grant security clearances to investigators. "We recently received the necessary security clearances and are now able to proceed with our investigation," H. Marshall Jarrett, counsel for the OPR, wrote to New York Rep. Maurice Hinchey. A copy of the letter, dated Tuesday, was obtained by The Associated Press....

It appears that the very methods of phone call monitoring the Democrats have made their life's mission to impede have once again saved the day. A plot to destroy American targets in Germany by a terror cell linked to the Islamic Jihad Group was foiled on Tuesday and opponents of the NSA's Terrorist Surveillance Program would do well to bear in mind just how this untold carnage was avoided. Unfortunately, there's no reason to believe that Democrat leaders the likes of Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Pat Leahy will be any less likely to rebuke the use of "secret" (is there...

SAN FRANCISCO - Lawyers for Guantanamo Bay detainees asked a federal judge Thursday to invalidate a days-old law that lets government agents eavesdrop on suspected terrorists without first getting court-approved warrants. They said the measure signed into law Sunday by President Bush is illegal because it gives the national intelligence director and the U.S. attorney general too much power to intercept communications of suspected terrorists overseas — even when they are talking to someone in the United States. The New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights' lawsuit, along with about 50 others, are all being considered by U.S. District Court Judge...

CAMP DAVID, Md. - President Bush on Sunday signed into law an expansion of the government's power to eavesdrop on foreign terror suspects without the need for warrants. The law, approved by the Senate and the House just before Congress adjourned for its summer break, was deemed a priority by Bush and his chief intelligence officials. Bush signed the bill into law on Sunday afternoon at his retreat at Camp David, Md. "When our intelligence professionals have the legal tools to gather information about the intentions of our enemies, America is safer," Bush said. "And when these same legal tools...

WASHINGTON - The House handed President Bush a victory Saturday, voting to expand the government's abilities to eavesdrop without warrants on foreign suspects whose communications pass through the United States. The 227-183 vote, which followed the Senate's approval Friday, sends the bill to Bush for his signature. He had urged Congress to approve it, saying Saturday, "Protecting America is our most solemn obligation." The administration said the measure is needed to speed the National Security Agency's ability to intercept phone calls, e-mails and other communications involving foreign nationals "reasonably believed to be outside the United States." Civil liberties groups and...

WASHINGTON - In a high-stakes showdown over national security, the Senate voted late Friday to temporarily give President Bush expanded authority to eavesdrop on foreign terrorists without court warrants. The House, meanwhile, rejected a Democratic version of the bill. Democratic leaders there were working on a plan to bring up the Senate-passed measure and vote on it Saturday in response to Bush's demand that Congress give him the expanded surveillance authority before leaving for vacation this weekend. The White House applauded the Senate vote and urged the House to quickly follow suit. The bill "will give our intelligence professionals the...

Corporate PCs 'riddled with spyware' By John Leyden Published Thursday 2nd December 2004 17:23 GMT Corporate systems are riddled with spyware, according to a study by an anti-spyware firm. Companies voluntarily using Webroot's Corporate SpyAudit tool had an average of 20 nasties per PC, Webroot reports.Most of the items found were harmless cookies. But average five per cent of the PCs scanned had system monitors and 5.5 per cent had Trojan horse programs, the two most nefarious and potentially malicious forms of spyware. The audit - based on scans of more than 10,000 systems, used by more than 4,100 companies...

Bloomberg is link only. Story

After having finally acquired IBM’s ThinkPad division, Lenovo has not really had an impressive ride thus far, and not without reason. There was a reason why ThinkPad was so successful (legendary reliability with support from one of the world’s largest technology companies). Users trusted IBM. In fact, they still do and that is one of the prime reasons that even though Lenovo has bought over the brand, nowhere on a ThinkPad does it say Lenovo. Despite the overall poor performance, Lenovo has still not gained the mindshare or the respect that the ThinkPads command. In fact, it has, to some...

"...These machines must go. There is no way to know if one's vote is accurately accounted for..."

The USCC launched a probe against Lenovo, but many wonder if the accusations are warranted The United States government is planning to spend roughly $13M USD on computers from Lenovo. The company, famous for buying up IBM's PC manufacturing arm, is working on a deal with the US government to produce roughly 16,000 computers. Just recently, the U.S.-China Economic Security Review Commission (USCC) has requested that Lenovo be probed for any concerns about possible spying, eavesdropping or worse. The supposed problem presented by the USCC is that the 16,000 computers are being built by a Chinese-mainland company. The USCC argues...

WASHINGTON - As a senior member of the House ethics committee, Rep. Jim McDermott (news, bio, voting record) had an obligation not to disclose the contents of an illegally taped telephone call involving House Republican leaders, a lawyer for one of the House Republicans said Thursday. Just as a federal judge should not reveal confidential information about a case, McDermott should not have given reporters access to the taped telephone call, regardless of how it was obtained, said lawyer Michael Carvin. "He had a duty not to disclose, therefore he can't claim First Amendment rights" allowing him to make the...

VIENNA: The CIA, using a double-agent Russian scientist, may have handed a blueprint for a nuclear bomb to Iran. State of War by James Risen, the New York Times reporter who exposed the Bush administration's controversial domestic spying operation, claims the plans contained fatal flaws designed to derail Tehran's nuclear drive. But the deliberate errors were so rudimentary they would have been easily fixed by sophisticated Russian nuclear scientists, the book said. The operation, which took place during the Clinton administration in early 2000, was codenamed Operation Merlin and "may have been one of the most reckless operations in...

Astronomers have proposed an improved method of searching for intelligent extraterrestrial life using instruments like one now under construction in Australia. The Low Frequency Demonstrator (LFD) of the Mileura Wide-Field Array (MWA), a facility for radio astronomy, theoretically could detect Earth-like civilizations around any of the 1,000 nearest stars. "Soon, we may be eavesdropping on signals from Galactic civilizations," says theorist Avi Loeb of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA). "This is the first time in history that humans will be capable of finding a civilization like ours among the stars." Loeb will present his findings on Wednesday, January 10,...

Testimony in the trial of Chicago resident Muhammad Salah and Abdelhaleem al-Ashqar of Northern Virginia, continued yesterday. FBI Agents gave testimony focusing on items found in Ashqar's home during a search of his Oxford Mississippi residence on December 26, 1993, in addition to wiretaps of his phone and fax lines. Special Agent Bradley Benabidez testified that the FBI acquired over 2400 hours of audio during the year that they maintained a wiretap. Benabidez further described the December 1993 search of Ashqar’s home where a team of agents from the FBI photographed over 1600 documents. A few of those documents which...

The Fourth Amendment to our Constitution protects Americans against "unreasonable searches and seizures" and against warrants being issued without "probable cause" that they have done something wrong. While most Americans who might be familiar with this portion of our Bill of Rights probably consider its protections to apply only to criminals and therefore of little consequence to them, the Fourth Amendment actually provides vital protection to all Americans, not just "criminals." In fact, its prefatory language makes this clear, explicitly providing that its goal is to assure that the "right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses,...

See for example this thread first. Over the course of the past couple of weeks, a large scandal has broken concerning the efforts of unscrupulous, highly-placed individuals to gain access to the private phone records and conversations of dissenters. The rights of these dissenters are guaranteed by law. Does this sound familiar? Are you thinking of the words “NSA interecpt / wiretap program?” If you are, then we are not connecting here. I am speaking of the recent controversy regarding some of the corporate executives at Hewlett-Packard, and their attempts to unearth the source of leaks of corporate secrets (or...

The first thing that came out of our mouths when we heard that Google is working on a system that listens to what's on your TV playing in the background, and then serves you relevant adverts, was "that's cool, but dangerous". The idea appeared in Technology Review citing Peter Norvig, director of research at Google, who says these ideas will show up eventually in real Google products - sooner rather than later. The idea is to use the existing PC microphone to listen to whatever is heard in the background, be it music, your phone going off or the TV...

A chance arrest in the city of Rotterdam and tapped telephone conversations were both key factors behind the move to the heightened terrorist alert that has been in place in the Netherlands since 9 July. On Wednesday, the Dutch Public Prosecution Service and Ministry of Internal Affairs announced that a 17-year-old Dutch Muslim youth had been arrested on 30 June on suspicion of involvement in a raid on a supermarket. A subsequent search of his home allegedly led to the discovery of a number of items which, while they had nothing to do with "ordinary" crime, could be connected with...

SCATTERED AMONG the loose papers and bound files unearthed last week at the Iraqi Foreign Ministry in Baghdad was "letter no. 140/4/5," labeled "Confidential and Personal" and addressed to "The President's Office--Secretariat." The letter concerns George Galloway, a pro-Saddam member of the British Parliament, who founded a charity known as the Mariam Appeal, ostensibly to aid Iraqi children suffering under U.N. sanctions. The missive, from the Iraqi Intelligence Service, is a request that money be funneled directly to Galloway. It reads in part: His projects and future plans for the benefit of [Iraq] need financial support to become a motive...

Will the New York Times write stories on how eavesdropping is what alerted U.S. authorities to the terrorist airplane attack? Time magazine reported in an exclusive that the "U.S. picked up the suspects' chatter and shared it with British authorities." The operation involved cooperation between British and American authorities. Britain's MI-5 intelligence service and Scotland Yard had been tracking the plot for several months, but only in the past two weeks had the plotters' planning begun to crystallize, senior U.S. officials tell TIME. In the two or three days before the arrests, the cell was going operational, and authorities were...

Homegrown terrorist Jeffrey Leon Battle considered America the “land of the kaffirs,” or unbelievers, and the American people “pigs.” He once lamented to an acquaintance—who happened to be a government informant—that the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks did not sufficiently damage the U.S. economy. “This is the land of the enemy,” he said of his own country in a May 8, 2002, conversation secretly recorded by the government. He explained to a friend how his “burning desire” to become an Islamic martyr had inspired his aborted quest to join forces with al Qaeda in Afghanistan, where he could kill American...

ALEXANDRIA, Va. - The Bush administration's post-Sept. 11 eavesdropping program did not compromise its prosecution of an American Muslim cleric convicted of soliciting treason and convincing some of his followers to join the Taliban, prosecutors said. But defense lawyers are not satisfied with the government's claim, and on Friday a federal judge held a closed-door hearing and allowed attorneys for Ali al-Timimi some latitude to investigate the government's conduct. Al-Timimi, of Fairfax, a U.S.-born Muslim who studied under prominent fundamentalist clerics in Saudi Arabia, was convicted and sentenced to life in prison last year for soliciting treason and urging some...

DETROIT (Reuters) - The Bush administration on Monday asked a federal judge to dismiss a lawsuit challenging the National Security Agency's domestic eavesdropping program, arguing that defending the four-year-old wiretapping program in open court would risk national security. In arguments before U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor in Detroit, the American Civil Liberties Union on Monday renewed its call for a court order that would force the government to suspend its program of intercepting without a court order the international phone calls and e-mails of U.S. citizens. But the U.S. Justice Department has asked federal judges in Detroit and New...

The FBI has drafted sweeping legislation that would require Internet service providers to create wiretapping hubs for police surveillance and force makers of networking gear to build in backdoors for eavesdropping, CNET News.com has learned. FBI Agent Barry Smith distributed the proposal at a private meeting last Friday with industry representatives and indicated it would be introduced by Sen. Mike DeWine, an Ohio Republican, according to two sources familiar with the meeting. The draft bill would place the FBI's Net-surveillance push on solid legal footing. At the moment, it's ensnared in a legal challenge from universities and some technology companies...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Vice President Dick Cheney defended himself on Thursday against accusations by a leading Republican senator that he worked to thwart Senate plans to make telephone executives testify at a hearing about a U.S. domestic spying program. A day after Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter rebuked Cheney for trying to head off subpoenas of the phone company executives, Cheney acknowledged that he had spoken to Senate leaders and members of Specter's committee. He said in a letter to Specter that he acted when the administration became concerned about a "compulsory process to force testimony" in a matter...

Valerie Plame should be the next Director of Central Intelligence, not Gen. Mike Hayden. Now that the CIA's Praetorian Guard has -- with the connivance of National Intelligence Director John Negroponte -- rid itself of Porter Goss, the CIA is confidently preparing to march back into the intelligence dark ages that preceded 9/11. Gen. Hayden -- former head of the National Intelligence Agency and most famous for his strong defense of the NSA terrorist surveillance program -- is slated to be nominated for the DCI post today. Hayden, now Negroponte's deputy and choice for DCI, will face tough questioning in...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The general considered the Bush administration's likely choice to become CIA director would be the "wrong person at the wrong place at the wrong time," the Republican head of the U.S. House of Representatives Intelligence Committee said on Sunday. Gen. Michael Hayden, former director of the National Security Agency, has been widely cited in the media as the President George W. Bush's expected pick to lead the CIA following the ouster of CIA director Porter Goss. "We should not have a military person leading a civilian agency at this time," Rep. Pete Hoekstra of Michigan, told "Fox...

McDermott Files Appeal in Taped Call Case By MATTHEW DALY, Associated Press Writer 8 minutes ago Rep. Jim McDermott (news, bio, voting record) on Wednesday asked a full nine-member appeals court to hear an appeal of a case involving an illegally taped telephone call that was leaked to reporters nearly a decade ago. A three-judge appeals court panel ruled last month that McDermott, D-Wash., violated federal law by giving the news media a tape recording of a 1996 call involving then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga. The 2-1 opinion, by judges from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of...

Dateline: 15 March 2006 A respected Senator places a motion before the Senate. Immediately, dark forces conspire to ensure this motion shall never be voted on. It is not that anyone expects the resolution to pass, but so dangerous is it, that people should not even be obliged to take a position one way or the other. Preferably, it should not even be discussed. One party, of course, wants the motion voted on, and has proposed to set aside time for the purpose. The other is using every procedural wrangle you can imagine to prevent the vote, or even the...

It’s Legal The solid legal basis for the administration’s surveillance program. EDITOR’S NOTE: On Monday, when Wisconsin Democratic Sen. Russ Feingold introduced a resolution to censure President Bush, he said, "When the President of the United States breaks the law, he must be held accountable." Bush, Feingold continued, "authorized an illegal program to spy on American citizens on American soil and then misled the Congress and the public about the existence and the legality of that program." Although few Democrats have joined Feingold's call for censure, nearly all of them agree with Feingold's contention that the surveillance program is illegal....

See for example this thread first. Now Senator Feingold is trying to censure the Pres'dent for spying He hasn't a clue The charge isn't true But that don't keep moonbats from trying!

(2006-03-08) — In the wake of the NSA eavesdropping scandal and the Dubai Ports deal that threatened to cut short President George Bush’s second term, the Washington Post revealed today that a former Clinton Administration political operative and a foreign-born global financier have teamed up in a for-profit venture to build an unprecedented comprehensive database of American Democrats. President Bill Clinton’s former deputy chief of staff, Harold Ickes, has already raised $7.5 million to start the venture, Data Warehouse, with major funding from Hungarian-born billionaire George Soros. The formerly-clandestine firm has already sparked serious questions about privacy, political profiling and...

Window treatment could protect Wi-Fi from eavesdroppers Dan Ilett CNET News.com Wireless hackers in the United Kingdom could soon face a new obstacle to stealing information. The British government has endorsed a transparent film that can block Wi-Fi transmissions and other wireless signals from traveling through windows. The film, called SpyGuard, can be laminated or fitted inside windows to prevent remote eavesdroppers from penetrating rooms with infrared or Wi-Fi signals to steal information or access private networks. To stop Wi-Fi signals "leaking" from a room, the walls are also covered with a layer of paint that contains the same metals...

I’ll begin by stating for the record that I am not an expert on counter-terrorism, intelligence operations or national security, which makes me just like 99.9% of those speaking out on these topics today, including too many purely partisan politicians eager to politicize all of it in search of recently elusive political power. Let me also establish the fact that few in America are more concerned with the rate at which we are certainly losing our freedoms and liberties than I am. I write about it all the time. But the American people are now being told that the current...

Cambridge, Md. -- The eavesdropping tables were turned on President Bush on Friday. The president apparently believed he was speaking privately when he talked about listening in without a warrant on domestic communications with suspected al-Qaida terrorists overseas. But reporters were the ones doing the listening in this time. The incident happened at a House Republican retreat. After six minutes of public remarks by the president, reporters were ushered out. "I support the free press, let's just get them out of the room," Bush said,

I attended a panel session at the Heritage Foundation yesterday featuring Paul Lettow, author of Ronald Reagan and His Quest to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, published in hardcover last year and now out in paperback. Paul is a recent graduate of Princeton who earned a Ph.D. at Oxford and a J.D. at Harvard. Several years ago, he worked for me as a research assistant — a classic case of hiring someone who's smarter than you. His book is an expanded version of his Ph.D. thesis, but it doesn't read like one. Paul interviewed almost all the living veterans of the Reagan...

WASHINGTON - After weeks of insisting it would not reveal details of its domestic eavesdropping, the White House reversed course Wednesday and provided a House committee with highly classified information about the program. The White House has been under heavy pressure from lawmakers who wanted more information about the National Security Agency's monitoring. Democrats and many Republicans rejected the administration's implicit suggestion that they could not be trusted with national security secrets. The shift came after Rep. Heather Wilson (news, bio, voting record), R-N.M., chairwoman of a House Intelligence Committee subcommittee, broke with the Bush administration and called for a...

During the Revolutionary War, Continental officers were forced to tie hay around the left feet of recruits and straw around the right because many did not know left from right and were therefore unable to follow the necessary commands for the proper order of drill.

Looking back at the history of tragic times often reveals that many -- or most -- of the people of those times were often preoccupied with things that look trivial, or even pathetic, in view of the catastrophe looming over them. Will later generations looking back at our times see a similar blindness, and even frivolousness, in the face of mortal dangers?

I hereby expressly consent to the NSA eavesdropping on any telephonic, Internet or other electronic forms of communications I may have -- whether I initiate or am on the receiving end of the communication -- with any person or persons the government has reasonable basis to conclude is a member of al Qaeda, affiliated with al Qaeda or a member of an organization affiliated with al Qaeda.

E-mail Author Author Archive Send to a Friend Version February 06, 2006, 7:31 a.m. Times Change Remember when scholars thought presidents were “above the law�? "The President has enhanced responsibility to resist unconstitutional provisions that encroach upon the constitutional powers of the Presidency." That sure sounds like it could have been written by John Ashcroft. Or Alberto Gonzales. Or one of the many Bush-administration officials vigorously defending the NSA's warrantless monitoring of enemy communications into and out of the homeland. After all, it succinctly states the best explanation for why President Bush was empowered to go beyond the strictures...

Dateline 25 January 2006 Conspiracy theories are everywhere. They have always been a feature of American politics, but the Internet gives voice to people who, in previous generations, would have been able to sound off only to a few friends in a bar. You can choose to be concerned by the astonishing range of theories that exist, or just be amused by them. For example, it is taken as an article of faith on the left of American politics that Karl Rove was behind every criticism of John Kerry during the 2004 election. It seems beyond the imagination of some...

Former Vice President Al Gore gave another one of his famous anti-Bush speeches(1) last week before an enthusiastic audience of left-wing extremists called the 'Liberty Coalition' at the Daughters of the American Revolution Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C., and a more annoying compilation of unsubstantiated accusations I've not heard in recent times.

Imagine for a moment that we are at war. (For many of us, that will not require a very active imagination.) Our military-theater commanders in western Afghanistan and central Iraq sketch out operations against the enemy. They account for the various contingencies that might arise when confronting stealthy terrorists who shun the laws of civilized warfare. They pore over the latest intelligence estimates one last time. They position their land and air forces accordingly, and ensure that they are properly armed and ready. And then they go ... straight to court. Where's the Probably [sic]Cause? Why? Well, to make...

President Bush plans to thumb his nose at critics next week by visiting the National Security Agency to defend its practice of eavesdropping on conversations between overseas al Qaeda suspects and Americans. >snip "We are stepping up our efforts to educate the American people," said White House spokesman Scott McClellan. "This is a critical tool that helps us save lives and prevent attacks." >snip "The executive power of our country is not an imperial power," said Caroline Fredrickson, director of the ACLU legislative office in Washington. "The president has demonstrated a dangerous disregard for our Constitution and our laws with...

TORONTO: Like many Canadians, Ghazanfar Khan feels his country is far too much under US influence. The 24-year-old man of Pakistani origin, standing for next week's general election, wants to do something to change things. A debut candidate in the January 23 ballot, Khan has a definite agenda for Canada and feels that his country should carve out its own identity that is separate from its superpower neighbour to the south. Instead of jumping on the bandwagon of major parties like the Liberals or the Conservatives, Khan is with the Canadian Action Party, a little-known entity but one he believes...