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Bill Maher is throwing some shade on President Obama's credentials as a supposed champion of freedom of the press. The host of HBO's "Real Time" sat down Friday to discuss media coverage of secret government work with documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras, one of the journalists centrally involved in bringing revelations from former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden to light. "I don't understand why he is perhaps the worst president we've had on clamping down on the press," Maher said. "He's used the Espionage Act more than any other president, right?" Maher added. Other members of the media have blasted...

Apple's iPhone has "special software" that authorities can activate remotely to be able to gather information about the user.

A top EU official wants internet and telecommunication companies to hand over encryption keys to police and spy agencies as part of a wider crackdown on terrorism. The EU’s counter-terrorism coordinator, Gilles de Kerchove, in a document leaked by London-based civil liberties group Statewatch, says the European Commission should come up with rules that require the firms to help national governments snoop on possible suspects. “Since the Snowden revelations, internet and telecommunications companies have started to use often decentralized encryption, which increasingly makes lawful interception by the relevant national authorities technically difficult or even impossible,” notes de Kerchove in the...

UPDATE 3:11 P.M.: Copenhaver has also opposed the Pledge of Allegiance because it was “developed by Francis Bellamy, a socialist” as a way to “sell more issues of [the] magazine Youth’s Companion.” “The pledge was conceived as a way to promote nationalism in order to sell flags to schools as a premium to solicit subscriptions,” says an image she posted to her Facebook page. “I posted a picture and story explaining this when I first started my page but this sums it up beautifully,” wrote Copenhaver. In another post, she wrote, “The pledge of allegiance and the ‘roman salute’ was...

Revealed: Hamas-Backing Qatar, Also Funding Brookings Institute, Home of Former U.S. MidEast Envoy Indyk‏ Questions are emerging over possible conflicts-of-interest after The New York Times highlighted Qatari funding for U.S. think tanks, including the Brookings Institute, employer of former U.S. envoy Martin Indyk, who was directly involved in recent negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. “Qatar, the small but wealthy Middle East nation, agreed last year to make a $14.8 million, four-year donation to Brookings, which has helped fund a Brookings affiliate in Qatar and a project on United States relations with the Islamic world,” according to The Times. The...

A confrontation broke out between security personnel from the American consulate and settlers from the Adei Ad outpost in the West Bank on Friday, after settlers hurled stones at two vehicles from the consulate. According to both Palestinian and settler sources, the American security guards drew their weapons at the settlers. A preliminary police investigation of the clashes between American security personnel and Israeli settlers discovered the consulate employees had arrived at the Adei Ad outpost in Samaria without coordination with the appropriate defense officials. An official from the village of Turmus Ayya, near the scene of the incident, said...

Jerusalem - Jewish settlers attacked American consular officials Friday during a visit the officials made to the West Bank as part of an investigation into claims of damage to Palestinian agricultural property, Israeli police and Palestinian witnesses say. Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said that a small number of settlers threw rocks at officials who had come to an area near the Jewish settlement outpost of Adi Ad in two consular vehicles to look into Palestinian claims that settlers uprooted scores of Palestinian olive trees the day before. He said that after the rock barrage began, the vehicles left the area,...

Palestinian source says Hamas, Islamic Jihad willing to risk counter-suit should Israel be investigated Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has asked the International Criminal Court to investigate Israel for war crimes allegedly committed during the 50-day war with Hamas and other Gaza terror groups last summer. In the request filed with the Dutch Embassy Thursday morning, Abbas asked the court in The Hague to investigate Israel retroactively for alleged war crimes starting from June 13, 2014 — a day after three Israeli teenagers were kidnapped and murdered by a Hamas cell in the West Bank, an unnamed NGO worker told...

The Hague - The Palestinian Authority on Friday took further steps towards joining the International Criminal Court and has asked the court to investigate crimes Israel has committed on Palestinian territories since June 13, 2014,according to ICC sources. (VIDEO-AT-LINK)A US senior State Department official told Reuters that the move could have implications for US aid to Palestine saying: “It should come as no surprise that there will be implications for this step, but we continue to review. U.S. assistance to the Palestinian Authority has played a valuable role in promoting stability and prosperity not just for the Palestinians, but also...

Imposing deadlines for resolving the Palestinian-Israeli conflict on Palestinian terms, including full Israeli withdrawal from all “occupied” territories within three years The United Nations Security Council was called into a special session on December 30, 2014 at the behest of the Palestinian Authority and its Arab Group supporters. The intent was for the Security Council to approve a resolution, submitted by the non-permanent Council member Jordan, imposing deadlines for resolving the Palestinian-Israeli conflict on Palestinian terms, including full Israeli withdrawal from all “occupied” territories within three years. The Palestinians thought they had the necessary nine-vote majority to pass the resolution,...

By Joel Leyden Israel News AgencyJerusalem — January 1, 2015 … Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu held a discussion this afternoon on the Palestinian Authority’s application to various international treaties, and made the following remarks at the end of the meeting: “We expect the International Criminal Court to reject outright the Palestinian Authority’s hypocritical act because the Palestinian Authority is not a state,” said Netanyahu. “It is an entity in alliance with a terrorist organization, Hamas, which perpetuates war crimes. The State of Israel is a nation of laws with a moral army that upholds international law. We will defend...

Ecuador's government has ordered everyone in the US Embassy's military group, about 20 Defense Department employees, to leave the country by month's end. The group was ordered to halt operations in Ecuador in a letter dated April 7, embassy spokesman Jeffrey Weinshenker said Thursday. The Associated Press was alerted to the expulsions by a senior Ecuadorean official who refused to be identified by name due to the information's sensitive nature.

Acting Head of the Samaria Regional Council, Yossi Dagan, has filed a request to the Minister of the Interior Gilad Erdan demanding he immediately expel the American Consulate staff members who entered the Samaria village of Adei Ad Friday and threatened Israeli Jews with an M-16. "As revealed through Wikileaks few years ago, these supposed 'officials' are intelligence agents and spies in every respect," said Dagan, adding "this time, they went too far and participated in a provocative tour with the Palestinians in the southern Samaria and north Binyamin, without any coordination as required with the IDF and police, and...

The Palestinian Authority (PA) has decided to join the International Criminal Police Organization (Interpol), an official told the Ma’an news agency on Saturday. […] Ahmad al-Rabie said that the PA submitted a request to join the Interpol in 2011 but that it was only accepted as an observer and not as a full member because it had not been recognized as a state at the time and did not have control over its borders. This time, however, the PA is sure that 128 countries will vote in favor of the state joining Interpol, four above the required threshold, al-Rabie told...

If you want a truly anonymous life, then maybe it's time you learned about Tor, CSpace and ZRTP. These three technologies could help people hide their activities from the National Security Agency, according to NSA documents newly obtained from the archive of former contractor Edward Snowden by the German magazine Der Spiegel. The combination of Tor, CSpace and ZRTP (plus another anonymizing technology for good measure) results in levels of protection that the NSA deems "catastrophic" -- meaning the organization has "near-total loss/lack of insight to target communications," according to Der Spiegel. "Although the documents are around two years old,...

Regardless of whether you are enthusiastic about conspiracy theories or not, Global Research's claim that 'former National Security Agency (NSA) systems analyst Edward Snowden recently revealed that the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) leader Abu Bakr al Baghdadi was trained by the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence and spy agency' is a topic worthy of debate.

Edward Snowden's in-depth interview with James Bamford of Wired offers details about his last job as a contractor for the NSA in Honolulu, which raise disconcerting questions about the motives of the former systems administrator. While working at two consecutive jobs in Hawaii from March 2012 to May 2013, the 31-year-old allegedly stole about 200,000 "tier 1 and 2" documents, which mostly detailed the NSA's global surveillance apparatus and were given to American journalists Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras in June 2013. The government believes Snowden also took up to 1.5 million "tier 3" documents potentially detailing U.S. capabilities and...

The NSA cyberwarfare program, called MonsterMind, uses software to look for traffic patterns indicating possible foreign cyberattacks, according to Snowden, quoted in a lengthy profile in Wired. MonsterMind could automatically block a cyberattack from entering the U.S., then retaliate against the attackers, according to the Wired story. Snowden, when he was working as an NSA contractor, was concerned that MonsterMind could lead to misdirected counterattacks. "These attacks can be spoofed," he told Wired. "You could have someone sitting in China, for example, making it appear that one of these attacks is originating in Russia. And then we end up shooting...

It’s been a busy month on the privacy front.For starters, word got out on August 5 that Russian hackers stole 1.2 billion user names and passwords across several kinds of websites. Then Facebook got into hot water — again — when it decided to force its risky Messenger app on unwilling users. Meanwhile, a U.S. senator warned that users of wearable fitness-tracking devices are unprotected by any privacy law, putting them at serious risk. And the European Union is poised to counter a U.S. court order demanding Microsoft hand over data stored inside its Irish servers.Meanwhile, hackers and snoops...

PARIS -- A newly leaked document stolen by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden last year reveals that one of the NSA's partner agencies within the "Five Eyes" Anglo-intelligence network -- Britain's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), responsible for signals intelligence -- dedicated vast resources to fooling around on the Internet, according to journalist Glenn Greenwald. The GCHQ has reportedly developed tools capable of playing with the results of online polls; sending out spoof emails and Microsoft Office documents that, once opened, can grab and transmit files and info from a user's computer; collecting data from public profiles on...