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Communications firms are being asked to record all internet contacts between people as part of a modernisation in UK police surveillance tactics. The home secretary scrapped plans for a database but wants details to be held and organised for security services. The new system would track all e-mails, phone calls and internet use, including visits to social network sites. The Tories said the Home Office had "buckled under Conservative pressure" in deciding against a giant database. Announcing a consultation on a new strategy for communications data and its use in law enforcement, Jacqui Smith said there would be no single...

Excerpts: As you all know, Skyewriter recently wrote about the dangerous incitement to violence and direct threats at Free Republic. I also posted and directed you to Skywriter’s blog. Skyewriter and I were deluged with gun bloggers and other right wingnuts (and just nuts) who denied that this was a direct threat. ~~snip~~ One week after Skywriter posted and I directed those on my blog to the post, the Daily Kos posted on the same topic. They detailed a thread in which the wingnuts were ranting, no doubt with white froth at the mouth, about our duly elected President who...

Also in the News: White House abandons YouTube Mar 02, 2009 Privacy complaints force a change in plans With complaints by privacy activists stacking up, the White House has quietly dropped YouTube as the supplier of embedded videos on the White House home page, according to CNET news. Instead, the Obama administration will use its own Flash-based solution. The decision came following growing criticism of Google-owned YouTube's use of tracking cookies. The White House counsel recently issued a waiver to the long-held no-cookie presumption of privacy for visitors to the White House Web site, a decision challenged by privacy groups...

WASHINGTON — A federal intelligence court, in a rare public opinion, is expected to issue a major ruling validating the power of the president and Congress to wiretap international phone calls and intercept e-mail messages without a court order, even when Americans’ private communications may be involved, according to a person with knowledge of the opinion.

Republicans Making Concessions on FISA Surveillance RulesBy Pamela Hess, Associated Press May 23, 2008 Washington (AP) - A months-long logjam over a new government surveillance bill may be coming to an end, with Republicans offering a compromise that would let people who think they were illegally spied on by the government have their day in court -- albeit a secret one. House and Senate Republicans on Thursday unveiled their latest proposal aimed at resolving the roughly 40 civil lawsuits filed against telecommunications companies that allegedly cooperated in the so-called warrantless wiretapping program. The Republican proposal makes other concessions. It would:...

A massive government database holding details of every phone call, e-mail and time spent on the internet by the public is being planned as part of the fight against crime and terrorism. Internet service providers (ISPs) and telecoms companies would hand over the records to the Home Office under plans put forward by officials. The information would be held for at least 12 months and the police and security services would be able to access it if given permission from the courts. The proposal will raise further alarm about a “Big Brother” society, as it follows plans for vast databases...

Sacramento -- Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon are scheduled to spend part of today at a San Jose networking company in which the governor has an indirect financial stake. The company, Echelon Corp., manufacturers energy-saving control systems and will host the governor and the U.N. chief for a morning tour and press conference where both leaders are expected to praise California companies and their efforts to address global warming issues. But Schwarzenegger, who has a personal fortune estimated at more than $100 million, also has a holding of at least $1 million in an investment fund that...

Household computers are under threat from a UK government scheme. But the programme, which involves trading in personal computers for low-tech access points and relying on network-based applications for everything from playing video games to doctoring holiday snaps, could help to save the planet in return. The UK government has announced that it will be launching a pilot project for the scheme in Manchester in 2008. Details are still fuzzy, but the basic idea is to replace PCs in tens or hundreds of households with simple access points, perhaps in TV-top boxes, and establish a system of central servers to...

2008 presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton said Thursday that she was "deeply disturbed" to learn that the National Security Agency was data-mining phone records to track down terrorists. "Like many Americans, I am deeply disturbed" over the NSA program, she said in a statement posted to her Senate web site. "We all deserve to know why the NSA has blocked the Department of Justice from investigating the NSA’s domestic surveillance program and why it has created an enormous database of Americans’ phone records," she complained. Mrs. Clinton suggested that using phone records to track down terrorists was unconstitutional, saying the latest...

SMITH SAYS- The latest bogus debate between our Republican and Democratic leaders is over the supposed Freedom to Phone. This is not a phone debate, it’s a phony one. There is no phone privacy right written into our Constitution or any where else for that matter. And, more to the point, thanks to the wonders of electronics, it could never be. Simply stated, the Founding Fathers lacked access to a cell, satellite or any other derivative of Mr. Bell’s miraculous invention. Hence, they had no reason to incorporate Freedom to Phone in the Bill of Rights, or any other of...

WASHINGTON - President Bush did not confirm or deny a newspaper report Thursday that the National Security Agency was collecting records of tens of millions of ordinary Americans' phone calls. "Our intelligence activities strictly target al-Qaida and their known affiliates," Bush said. "We're not mining or trolling through the personal lives of millions of innocent Americans." USA Today, based on anonymous sources it said had direct knowledge of the arrangement, reported that AT&T Corp., Verizon Communications Inc., and BellSouth Corp. began turning over records of Americans' phone calls to the NSA shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Bush...

THE PRESIDENT: After September the 11th, I vowed to the American people that our government would do everything within the law to protect them against another terrorist attack. As part of this effort, I authorized the National Security Agency to intercept the international communications of people with known links to al Qaeda and related terrorist organizations. In other words, if al Qaeda or their associates are making calls into the United States or out of the United States, we want to know what they're saying. Today there are new claims about other ways we are tracking down al Qaeda to...

Washington is agog today with the disclosure that appeared in USA Today that Verizon, AT&T and Bell South have been providing domestic phone call information to the National Security Agency on millions of residential and business phone calls made by Americans. It’s all part of the spy agency’s quest to create a huge database of caller information it could data mine in order to find patterns that might reveal terrorist communications. But it has raised enormous privacy concerns in the minds of many. The USA Today report, coming after last year’s disclosure in the New York Times of the NSA’s...

WASHINGTON - The agency in charge of a domestic spying program has been secretly collecting phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, including calls made within the United States, USA Today reported on Thursday. It said the National Security Agency has been building up the database using records provided by three major phone companies -- AT&T Inc., Verizon Communications Inc. and BellSouth Corp. -- but that the program “does not involve the NSA listening to or recording conversations.”

DOJ Will Assert Military and State Secrets Privilege and Request Dismissal of Lawsuit San Francisco - The United States government filed a "Statement of Interest" Friday in the Electronic Frontier Foundation's (EFF's) class-action lawsuit against AT&T, announcing that the government would "assert the military and state secrets privilege" and "intervene to seek dismissal" of the case. EFF's lawsuit accuses AT&T of collaborating with the National Security Agency in its massive surveillance program. EFF's evidence regarding AT&T's dragnet surveillance of its networks, currently filed under seal, includes a declaration by Mark Klein, a retired AT&T telecommunications technician, and several internal AT&T...

Yes i know this will probably be zotted within 2 minutes of posting, but freepers watch out.. The admins monitor your PM's. The absolutely most disgusting abuse of power i've ever seen.. Now i know there are 400 of you morons ready to hit me with your ZOT pictures, go for it.. it just proves how pathetic you are. Keep on blaming the Clinton administration for this president's mistakes, keep making excuses.. You are comic relief. See you on DU :)) (and watch what you say in your PM's, they are under heavy watch) later ho's.

Liberals are whipping themselves into a frenzy over "Bush's domestic spying." But the left's outrage is new. During the Clinton era, they found government surveillance just peachy. In 1999, in fact, The New York Times itself had no problem with the Clinton NSA's Echelon project, which - without warrants - monitored millions of phone calls between U.S. citizens: "Few dispute the necessity of a system like Echelon," assured The Times, "to apprehend foreign spies, drug traffickers, and terrorists." That was then. Now the antique press is too busy getting its panties in a wad about Bush Administration security measures to...

Hypocrisy, thy name is . . . Not an easy call in the first month of 2006. If you thought 2005 was a banner year for political hypocrisy — if you thought watching Democrats berate President Bush for lying about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction after they cited the same intel was one for the record books — well, get ready. Two old Democratic warhorses — OK, anti-warhorses — are in a red-hot race for this year's Golden Globe for Political Hypocrisy after this last week. First, there was Sen. Ted Kennedy's double-barreled offering in the hearings for Judge Samuel...

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said Monday that he saw no reason to appoint a special counsel to investigate President Bush's decision to authorize the National Security Agency to monitor the phone calls from suspected terrorists operating abroad. Asked about former Vice President Al Gore's demand yesterday that the Justice Department appoint a "Spygate" special counsel, Gonzales told the Fox News Channel's "Hannity & Colmes" that there was no basis to believe any laws were broken by the NSA program. "We firmly believe that this program is perfectly lawful," Gonzales explained. "The president has legal authority to authorize these kinds of...

The ACLU had announced on Tuesday, November 16, 1999 that it will create a website called "www.echelonwatch.org". This website would chronicle all uses of the Planetary Evesdropping system used by the United States to monitor Phone Calls, Cell Phones, Satellite Communications around the world. This is the "NSA Evesdropping" system that's in the news today. The ACLU had an extensive Library of documents, archives, news articles, links to congressional testimony and was the place to go for this information. That is until now. The ACLU is deleting all this information off the website. It had chronicled all this information and...

Very long article, here's a sample: The Clinton administration has repeatedly attempted to play down the significance of the warrant clause. In fact, President Clinton has asserted the power to conduct warrantless searches, warrantless drug testing of public school students, and warrantless wiretapping. Warrantless "National Security" Searches The Clinton administration claims that it can bypass the warrant clause for "national security" purposes. In July 1994 Deputy Attorney General Jamie S. Gorelick told the House Select Committee on Intelligence that the president "has inherent authority to conduct warrantless searches for foreign intelligence purposes." [51] According to Gorelick, the president (or his...

For eight years, Bill Clinton saturated the news media with his exploits in the White House. And now that he's no longer president -- and unlike most former presidents -- he's still getting major press coverage on a daily basis. It's understandable since without the adulation and love poured on the man known as Slick Willie, he'd be left alone with himself. And the reality would set in that beneath all the bluster and verbal gymnastics lay a man who's basically an empty suit. But for now, that is a non-problem for Clinton. For example, Thursday night Bill appeared on...

Friday, Jan. 6, 2006 11:10 a.m. EST Clinton NSA Wiretapped Top Republican During the 1990's under President Bill Clinton, the National Security Agency conducted random telecommunications surveillance of millions of phone calls daily under a top secret program known as Echelon. But according to at least two people familiar with the spy operation at the time, some of the surveillance was far from indiscriminate. In a February 2000 interview with CBS's "60 Minutes," NSA operator Margaret Newsham revealed that the agency's listening post in Great Britain was involved in monitoring the phone calls of at least one top Republican on...

National Security: Charles Schumer thinks that whoever disclosed that we were eavesdropping on al-Qaida is a whistle-blower who deserves praise. And maybe he'd like to see Benedict Arnold's face on Mount Rushmore.Time was in American history when revealing classified information to the enemy would have meant the firing squad. Today, it garners praise from a U.S. senator. Speaking on Fox News Sunday, Schumer said the investigation into who leaked the fact that the National Security Agency was eavesdropping on calls between overseas terrorists and U.S. residents should focus on the leaker's motivation. "There are differences," he explained, "between felons and...

In fact, has Bush ever listened to one of your phone conversations? Unless you have spoken to a terrorist, the answer is no. Do you speak to terrorists? If you do, the answer is yes. Here is how it works. Every president for decades has had the ability to do it. The technology has changed with the advent of cell phones and the advances in computers, but the point is the same. It used to be done with people doing the listening. Then, a clever geek came up with voice recognition software. After that, a computer could do the listening....

The White House Social Office needs to note right now, before anybody has a chance to forget, that it really must send flowers, chocolates and wall-sized Christmas cards (um, holiday cards) next year to James Risen and Eric Lichtblau of The New York Times. The intrepid duo saved the Bush presidency recently by breaking news that the National Security Agency has been conducting surveillance of al-Qaida operatives abroad and their minions in the United States. The reporters noted that the agency monitored phone calls, e-mails and other electronic communications by means of sophisticated eavesdropping devices and even more sophisticated computers...

Ever since The New York Times broke the story that President Bush had directed the National Security Agency to bypass the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act for certain domestic monitoring duties, commentators and members of Congress have been batting the word "wiretap" around in a way that fundamentally muddies the waters. If we're going to rationally debate FISA limits, we need to clarify the distinction between law enforcement wiretapping and broadband signals intelligence. A wiretap is a specific monitoring program placed on a circuit-switched line of an individual person, or on a trunk group that may be part of a central...

WASHINGTON, Dec. 23 - The National Security Agency has traced and analyzed large volumes of telephone and Internet communications flowing into and out of the United States as part of the eavesdropping program that President Bush approved after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to hunt for evidence of terrorist activity, according to current and former government officials. The volume of information harvested from telecommunication data and voice networks, without court-approved warrants, is much larger than the White House has acknowledged, the officials said. It was collected by tapping directly into some of the American telecommunication system's main arteries, they said....

NEW YORK - The National Security Agency has conducted much broader surveillance of e-mails and phone calls — without court orders — than the Bush administration has acknowledged, The New York Times reported on its Web site. The NSA, with help from American telecommunications companies, obtained access to streams of domestic and international communications, said the Times in the report late Friday, citing unidentified current and former government officials.

WASHINGTON -- The National Security Agency, in carrying out President Bush's order to intercept the international phone calls and e-mails of Americans suspected of links to Al Qaeda, has probably been using computers to monitor all other Americans' international communications as well, according to specialists familiar with the workings of the NSA. The Bush administration and the NSA have declined to provide details about the program the president authorized in 2001, but specialists said the agency serves as a vast data collection and sorting operation. It captures reams of data from satellites, fiberoptic lines, and Internet switching stations, and then...

The late Ron Brown was not particularly paranoid. In fact, for most of his career, he conducted his business dealings cavalierly, smug in the knowledge that as a splendidly well-connected, black Democrat he was all but immune to criticism from either the media or the law. That began to change when he assumed his job as Bill Clinton's secretary of commerce in early 1993, and it changed absolutely when he ran afoul of the Clintons nearly three years later. As Brown learned upon taking office, the Department of Commerce was home to the Office of Intelligence Liaison. This sub-department received...

Bush's Spying: Scandalous, or Echo of Clinton-Era "Echelon"?        Friday's big scoop by James Risen and Eric Lichtblau on domestic spying by the National Security Agency, "Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts," no doubt had the effect the paper intended, throwing the White House on the defensive and causing the renewal of the Patriot Act to be thwarted, a long-time goal of the Times editorial page.      But is this sort of terrorist surveillance truly a new and troubling thing? The government's Echelon spy program was reported on during the Clinton administration, in a 2000 report on...

NEW YORK, May 7 — Newly unearthed documents, mostly letters from the CIA to Congress, lay out evidence of an intensive intelligence effort to help U.S. corporations win contracts overseas. The documents, all published during the Clinton administration, appear to confirm reports that America’s electronic eavesdropping apparatus was involved in commercial espionage.

During the 1990's under President Clinton, the National Security Agency monitored millions of private phone calls placed by U.S. citizens and citizens of other countries under a super secret program code-named Echelon. On Friday, the New York Times suggested that the Bush administration has instituted "a major shift in American intelligence-gathering practices" when it "secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without [obtaining] court-approved warrants." But in fact, the NSA had been monitoring private domestic telephone conversations on a much larger scale throughout the...

Somehow the geeky Wired News managed to scoop the vaunted New York Times by more than four years: Bush Submits His Laws for WarBy Declan McCullagh 10:15 AM Sep. 20, 2001 PT WASHINGTON -- President Bush sent his anti-terrorism bill to Congress late Wednesday, launching an emotional debate that will force U.S. politicians to choose between continued freedom for Americans or greater security. Created in response to last week's bloody attacks, the draft "Mobilization Against Terrorism Act" (MATA) rewrites laws dealing with wiretapping, eavesdropping and immigration. The draft, intended to increase prosecutors' courtroom authority, also unleashes the government's Echelon and...

Television Broadcast February 27, 2000 If you made a phone call today or sent an e-mail to a friend, there's a good chance what you said or wrote was captured and screened by the country's largest intelligence agency. The top-secret Global Surveillance Network is called Echelon, and it's run by the National Security Agency and four English-speaking allies: Canada, Great Britain, Australia and New Zealand. The mission is to eavesdrop on enemies of the state: foreign countries, terrorist groups and drug cartels. But in the process, Echelon's computers capture virtually every electronic conversation around the world. How does it work,...

Executive Summary In the greatest surveillance effort ever established, the US National Security Agency (NSA) has created a global spy system, codename ECHELON, which captures and analyzes virtually every phone call, fax, email and telex message sent anywhere in the world. ECHELON is controlled by the NSA and is operated in conjunction with the Government Communications Head Quarters (GCHQ) of England, the Communications Security Establishment (CSE) of Canada, the Australian Defense Security Directorate (DSD), and the General Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) of New Zealand. These organizations are bound together under a secret 1948 agreement, UKUSA, whose terms and text remain...

Fact Sheet Details Secretive Agency's Growth From Focus on Policy to Counterterrorism By Walter Pincus Washington Post Staff Writer Monday, December 19, 2005; Page A10 The Pentagon's newest counterterrorism agency, charged with protecting military facilities and personnel wherever they are, is carrying out intelligence collection, analysis and operations within the United States and abroad, according to a Pentagon fact sheet on the Counterintelligence Field Activity, or CIFA, provided to The Washington Post. CIFA is a three-year-old agency whose size and budget remain secret. It has grown from an agency that coordinated policy and oversaw the counterintelligence activities of units within...

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Clinton NSA Eavesdropped on U.S. Calls During the 1990's under President Clinton, the National Security Agency monitored millions of private phone calls placed by U.S. citizens and citizens of other countries under a super secret program code-named Echelon. On Friday, the New York Times suggested that the Bush administration has instituted "a major shift in American intelligence-gathering practices" when it "secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without [obtaining] court-approved warrants." But in fact, the NSA had been monitoring private telephone conversations on a...

NEW YORK - President Bush authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States — without getting search warrants — following the Sept. 11 attacks, the New York Times reports. The presidential order, which Bush signed in 2002, has allowed the agency to monitor the international phone calls and international e-mails of hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States, according to a story posted Thursday on the Times' Web site. Before the new program began, the NSA typically limited its domestic surveillance to foreign embassies and missions and obtained court orders...

ISLAMABAD: The US and Pakistan have established a project to check internet traffic, including e-mails as part of a counter-terrorism measure. The document-monitoring project has been set up by the joint counter-terrorism working group of the two countries. The project would identify and disseminate pieces of intelligence gleaned from its review of a number of confiscated materials, The Dawn reported on Monday. The paper also quoted an official as saying that a number of recent arrests in Pakistan were facilitated by the project’s working group which analyses and reviews a large volume of seized paper documents, electronic and digital media...

SPY NETWORK INSIDE AMERICA click here to read the SOFTWAR article on NEWSMAX.COM MAGIC LANTERN - FBI v. CIA BATTLE IN CYBERSPACE FBI CARNIVORE PROJECT