Free Republic

Nothing pisses off progressives more, than a perceived infringement on people's rights especially if it has the potential of saving thousands of lives. To those progressive the FISA bill (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) was the definition of evil. The bill prescribed prescribes for the physical and electronic surveillance and collection of "foreign intelligence information" between "foreign powers" and "agents of foreign powers." This is the bill that was made famous because it allowed for "warrantless wiretaps" under certain conditions. Last summer, after much debate. FISA was renewed. The debate centered around a provision which granted immunity from prosecution for the...

On Tuesday, Najibullah Zazi, a 24-year-old Afghan immigrant who was a teenager in Queens during the Sept. 11 attacks, pleaded not guilty to federal terrorism conspiracy charges in New York. This is a scary story. Police stopped and searched Zazi's rented car on the George Washington Bridge on Sept. 10, as the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks loomed and President Obama was about to join world leaders at a U.N. confab. According to the U.S. attorney's office, Zazi flew to Pakistan in August 2008 to receive bombmaking instructions, returned to use the Internet and nine pages of handwritten bombmaking...

Recently declassified documents obtained by Wired magazine reveal a massive Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) data mining operation. It already possesses over 1.5 billion records from government and private-sector sources. That figure is expected by the FBI to balloon to over 6 billion within a few years. And it is not just terrorists they are after.  According to the documents, the National Security Branch Analysis Center (NSAC) is being used to pursue multiple types of non-terrorism domestic investigations. It is also meant to be able to sort through the data — everything from health and travel records to credit card...

By Jeremy Pelofsky Jeremy Pelofsky – 2 hrs 8 mins ago WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Obama administration has asked the U.S. Congress to extend three surveillance techniques for intelligence agencies tracking suspected militants that expire this year, according to a letter to lawmakers. Approved after the September 11 attacks in 2001 at the request of the Bush administration, techniques such as roving wiretaps and accessing all kinds of personal records drew criticism from civil liberties groups and some lawmakers who said they were unconstitutional and violated privacy rights...

Edward Moore Kennedy, whose memory was endlessly praised in the mainstream media over the weekend, conspired with our Cold War enemy, the Soviet Union, against the interests of the United States Government. The effort was to thwart the national security goals being championed by the President of the United States, Ronald Reagan, as historian Paul Kengor reviews today on AT. What is not generally known is that Kennedy collaborated with the Soviets well before Reagan was elected, and had a direct hand in crafting the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. As a result of his efforts -- which appear in retrospect to have...

RALEIGH, N.C. — A North Carolina father who led an unobtrusive rural life as a drywall contractor had militant roots dating back to 1980s Afghanistan and Pakistan and secretly led a U.S. group plotting international terrorism, federal prosecutors said. Daniel Patrick Boyd, 39, was arrested Monday with his two sons and four other North Carolina men. Prosecutors accused them of military-style training at home and plotting "violent jihad" through a series of terror attacks abroad.... It is unclear when Boyd and his family returned to the U.S., but in March 2006, Boyd traveled to Gaza and attempted to introduce his...

It was instantly clear after Sept. 11, 2001, that our security agencies knew little about al Qaeda's inner workings, could not detect its operatives' entry into the country, nor predict where it might strike next. Suppose an al Qaeda cell in New York, Chicago or Los Angeles was planning a second attack using small arms, conventional explosives or even biological, chemical or nuclear weapons. Our intelligence and law enforcement agencies faced a near impossible task locating them. Now suppose the National Security Agency (NSA), which collects signals intelligence, threw up a virtual net to intercept all electronic communications leaving and...

Report: Bush-era surveillance went beyond wiretaps A government report raises new questions about how the Bush White House kept key Justice officials in the dark about the post-Sept. 11 program. By Josh Meyer July 11, 2009 Reporting from Washington -- The Bush administration's post-Sept. 11 surveillance efforts went beyond the widely publicized warrantless wiretapping program, a government report disclosed Friday, encompassing additional secretive activities that created "unprecedented" spying powers. The report also raised new questions about how the Bush White House kept key Justice Department officials in the dark as it launched the surveillance program. In a move that it...

The Bush administration authorized secret surveillance activities that still have not been made public, according to a new government report that questions the legal basis for the unprecedented anti-terrorism program. It's unclear how much valuable intelligence was yielded by the surveillance program started after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, according to the unclassified summary of reports by five inspectors general. The reports mandated by Congress last year were delivered to lawmakers Friday. President George W. Bush authorized other secret intelligence activities — which have yet to become public — even as he was launching the massive warrentless wiretapping program,...

WASHINGTON – The Bush administration built an unprecedented surveillance operation to pull in mountains of information far beyond the warrantless wiretapping previously acknowledged, a team of federal inspectors general reported Friday, questioning the legal basis for the effort but shielding almost all details on grounds they're still too secret to reveal. The report, compiled by five inspectors general, refers to "unprecedented collection activities" by U.S. intelligence agencies under an executive order signed by President George W. Bush after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. Just what those activities involved remains classified, but the IGs pointedly say that any continued use...

The Bush White House so strictly controlled access to its warrantless eavesdropping program that only three Justice Department lawyers were aware of the plan, which nearly ignited mass resignations and a constitutional crisis when a wider circle of administration officials began to question its legality, according to a watchdog report released today.

(WSWS) -- Several current and former agents within the National Security Agency (NSA), speaking on condition of anonymity, have told the New York Times that the spy agency likely monitors millions of e-mail communications and telephone calls made by Americans. The new revelations follow the disclosure in April that the NSA’s monitoring of domestic e-mail traffic broke the law in 2008 and 2009. Last year, Congress passed legislation providing the NSA greater latitude to spy on the communications of Americans, so long as it resulted inadvertently from the agency’s efforts to spy on foreigners or those it “reasonably believed” to...

San Francisco, CA (AP) -- A federal judge is threatening to severely sanction the Obama Administration for withholding a top secret document he ordered turned over to lawyers suing the government over its warrantless wiretapping program. U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker in San Francisco has ordered Justice Department lawyers to court June 3 to tell him why he shouldn't award damages to the now-defunct Oregon arm of the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation.

During his presidential campaign, a solemn pledge by Barack Obama that almost made me vote for him (but I'm pro-life, and he's a pro-choice extremist) was that his administration would be the most open and transparent in our history, in contrast to the deeply, darkly secret George W. Bush-Dick Cheney administration. But, as with some of his other broken promises to restore the Constitution, I increasingly have less hope for a reason to believe in the Obama presidency. For a glaring example, with regard to the pervasive secrecy of his predecessors, President Obama has stunningly not only continued to invoke...

The National Security Agency intercepted private e-mail messages and phone calls of Americans in recent months on a scale that went beyond the broad legal limits established by Congress last year, government officials said in recent interviews. Several intelligence officials, as well as lawyers briefed about the matter, said the N.S.A. had been engaged in "overcollection" of domestic communications of Americans. They described the practice as significant and systemic, although one official said it was believed to have been unintentional. The legal and operational problems surrounding the N.S.A.'s surveillance activities have come under scrutiny from the Obama administration, Congressional intelligence...

It’s not just Paul Krugman anymore. A growing chorus on the legal left is cooling toward President Barack Obama as a result of recent actions by the Justice Department vigorously defending the Bush administration in what it termed the war on terror. “Obama Position on Illegal Spying: Worse Than Bush,” a large graphic declared over the weekend on the home page of a respected group advocating freedom on the Internet, Electronic Frontier Foundation. Obama has been pilloried by a liberal TV icon who was one of President George W. Bush’s most vociferous critics, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann. “During his run for...

The Bush administration got excoriated by the Left for its expansive use of the state-secrets doctrine. Barack Obama and other Democratic presidential hopefuls pounded Bush for its use. In fact, that was one of the principal components of Hope and Change — a shift away from secrecy and back to the “rule of law,” although no one has shown how Bush actually broke any laws in the first place. Apparently, Obama agrees, and as Jake Tapper reports, has decided to expand the Bush practice on state secrets:

On 'State Secrets,' Meet Barack W. Obama April 10, 2009 9:20 AM In February, President Obama's Justice Department quietly argued in a San Francisco court that it was maintaining the same position as President Bush's Justice Department on a case involving detainees trying to sue a private company for its role in their (allegedly) extraordinary renditions. The Obama administration pushed the status quo administration argument by invoking the "state secrets" argument, also a Bush-era fave. "It is the policy of this administration to invoke the state secrets privilege only when necessary and in the most appropriate cases," said DOJ spox...

I cannot stand Keith Olbermann. He’s a self-righteous putz that spews sanctimonious liberal garbage. Well, until now. As Olbermann points out, during Obama’s campaign he constantly spouted he was against wiretaps. For example, on election day last year, Obama slammed President Bush’s warrantless wiretap program while speaking at Dartmouth College in his last public appearance before the polls closed in New Hampshire. “For one thing, under an Obama presidency, Americans will be able to leave behind the era of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and “wiretaps without warrants.”

Turley on MSNBC says Obama is trampling on US Civil Liberties by going further than Bush on wiretapping.

April 7th, 2009 In Warrantless Wiretapping Case, Obama DOJ's New Arguments Are Worse Than Bush's Commentary by Tim Jones We had hoped this would go differently. Friday evening, in a motion to dismiss Jewel v. NSA, EFF's litigation against the National Security Agency for the warrantless wiretapping of countless Americans, the Obama Administration's made two deeply troubling arguments. First, they argued, exactly as the Bush Administration did on countless occasions, that the state secrets privilege requires the court to dismiss the issue out of hand. They argue that simply allowing the case to continue "would cause exceptionally grave harm to...

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...

The Obama Administration this week released its predecessor's post-9/11 legal memoranda in the name of "transparency," producing another round of feel-good Bush criticism. Anyone interested in President Obama's actual executive-power policies, however, should look at his position on warrantless wiretapping. Dick Cheney must be smiling. In a federal lawsuit, the Obama legal team is arguing that judges lack the authority to enforce their own rulings in classified matters of national security. The standoff concerns the Oregon chapter of the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, a Saudi Arabian charity that was shut down in 2004 on evidence that it was financing al Qaeda....

The Obama DOJ's embrace of Bush's state secrets privilege in the Jeppesen (torture/rendition) case generated substantial outrage, and rightly so. But it's now safe to say that far worse is the Obama DOJ's conduct in the Al-Haramain case -- the only remaining case against the Government with any real chance of resulting in a judicial ruling on the legality of Bush's NSA warrantless eavesdropping program. Here's the first paragraph from the Wired report on Friday's appellate ruling, which refused the Obama DOJ's request to block a federal court from considering key evidence when deciding whether Bush broke the law in...

A special appeals court for the first time has upheld a Bush administration program of warrantless surveillance. In a ruling released Thursday, the court embraced the Protect America Act of 2007, which required telecommunications providers to assist the government for national security purposes in intercepting international phone calls and e-mails to and from points overseas. The decision, which involves the gathering of foreign intelligence, was made last August but only released Thursday after it had been edited to omit classified information. An unidentified telecommunications company had challenged the law. The U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review said the time...

Ever since the Bush Administration's warrantless wiretapping program was exposed in 2005, critics have denounced it as illegal and unconstitutional. Those allegations rested solely on the fact that the Administration did not first get permission from the special court created by the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Well, as it happens, the same FISA court would beg to differ. In a major August 2008 decision released yesterday in redacted form, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, the FISA appellate panel, affirmed the government's Constitutional authority to collect national-security intelligence without judicial approval. -excerpt- For all the political hysteria and...

Anyone who has ever entered the United States after traveling abroad knows that the federal government does not always need a warrant to conduct a reasonable search of a person’s belongings. The federal government has a myriad of interests, including national security, that outweigh a person’s right to privacy at the border (which if you’re flying from Cancun to St.Louis, includes the St. Louis airport). Following that same logic, the government also has an interest in monitoring international communications between persons inside the United States and persons abroad.

Secret FISA Court Approves Specific Application of Expired Law For Warrantless Wiretapping The FISA Court of Review (FISCR) today released a public version of an opinion concerning warrantless wiretapping. An unnamed telecommunications carrier stood up for its customers' privacy by fighting the case through an initial decision by a FISA court and the appeal to the FISCR. The Court approved the specific application of the expired Protect America Act (PAA) and expressly rejected arguments that the law was unconstitutionally applied in the case before it. What does that mean for cases in the public, nonsecret courts challenging dragnet surveillance? Legally:...

Your inaccurate swipe at my record ("President Gulliver's Lawyer," Review & Outlook, Jan. 10) demands a response. First, the March 1995 memo I wrote about the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act did not set policy for the Justice Department. It resolved a particular problem in the WorId Trade Center bombing case, which was that the U.S. Attorney wanted to use a FISA warrant to tap individuals who had already been the subject of criminal wiretaps -- something that had never been done before and which the Justice Department's Office of Intelligence Policy feared the FISA court would not permit. I was...

A U.S. Foreign Intelligence court released a ruling Thursday upholding the right of the president and Congress to wiretap private international phone conversations and intercept e-mail messages without a court-issued warrant. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Appeals Court released an unclassified version of an August 2008 ruling that seems to validate President George W. Bush's claim that the government can act without court orders in gathering foreign intelligence. The Bush administration came under heated criticism three years ago when a National Security Agency's program for warrantless eavesdropping was revealed. In 2007, Congress passed the Protect America Act, which authorized the executive...

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.

In between meaningful football games yesterday, I saw clips of Vice President Cheney with Chris Wallace and read some comments on the interview. Frequent readers of my blog understands that I am far from a Bush / Cheney apologist. In fact, I am pretty close to a non-entity in conservative Republican circles because of my early public support for Obama last January. However, in this case, I have to agree with the Vice President (almost) in his opinion that the Congress is equally culpable in both the breach of civil liberties but also the Constitutional idea of checks and balances....

Dick Cheney's interview yesterday with Fox's Chris Wallace was filled with significant claims, but certainly among the most significant was his detailed narration of how the administration, and Cheney personally, told numerous Democratic Congressional leaders -- repeatedly and in detail -- about the NSA warrantless eavesdropping program. And, according to Cheney, every one of those Democrats -- every last one -- not only urged its continuation, but insisted that it be kept secret: WALLACE: Let's drill down into some of the specific measures that you pushed — first of all, the warrantless surveillance on a massive scale, without telling the...

Two leading civil rights groups plan to file lawsuits Tuesday against the Bush administration over its domestic spying program.... The Center for Constitutional Rights plans to sue on behalf of four lawyers at the center and a legal assistant there who work on terrorism-related cases at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba,... Similarly, the plaintiffs in the A.C.L.U. lawsuit include five Americans who work in international policy and terrorism, along with the A.C.L.U. and three other groups.... One of the A.C.L.U. plaintiffs, Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute, ... Also named as plaintiffs in the A.C.L.U. lawsuit are the journalist...

Since your historic victory in the primary, there have been troubling signs that you are moving away from the core commitments shared by many who have supported your campaign, toward a more cautious and centrist stance--including, most notably, your vote for the FISA legislation granting telecom companies immunity from prosecution for illegal wiretapping, which angered and dismayed so many of your supporters.

The online activists are angry with Barack Obama. But only a bit IT WAS summer and it was Austin, where keeping things weird is a popular civic pastime. But for the 2,000 bloggers and readers at last weekend’s Netroots Nation, the mood was more wonkish than wild. The “netroots”—the online version of “grassroots” political activists—spent hours in panels on policy and technology, and kept up running analyses via blogs and Twitter. They allowed themselves to be plied with margaritas of an evening, but made it back for a morning question session with Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House of...

The Dark Knight has no use for FISA By Sharon McGovern This is not a review, though I submit The Dark Knight kicks a** so very hard. Instead, this will be a brief look at themes employed in TDK; a sequel to Batman is a NeoCon. If you haven’t already contributed to the movie’s astonishing opening weekend take, you might want to decide right now if you want to read something that gives away a number of its plot points. The Dark Knight begins with “the bat man� having become a fixture in Gotham. He inspires resentment for the toll...

If we had no armed central state to seize money from people against their will and fund the government schools, we'd have no tax-funded government schools. Which means your public school teacher had a fatal conflict of interest when he or she taught you "why we need to have a central state, with the power to shoot or jail people who don't pay up." I'll bet he or she never mentioned, as one of the reasons, "Because otherwise my paychecks would stop coming." Be deeply suspicious therefore of most of the reasons you've been given for "why we need a...

Ship sponsored in part by Carter Center to challenge Israeli blockade of Gaza Port http://www.imra.org.il/story.php3?id=39984 "Free Gaza" initiative to try and enter Gaza by sea and open port Date: 19 / 07 / 2008 Time: 14:58 www.maannews.net/en/index.php?opr=ShowDetails&ID=30657 Bethlehem - Ma'an - A small shipping vessel will set sail for Gaza from Cyprus on 5 August expecting to be illegally detained as it enters Gazan waters. The waters off the Gaza Strip are patrolled by Israeli naval vessels, and Israel enforces a "Fishing Limit" that is 6 nautical miles (11.1 km) from the Gaza shore. These restrictions on access and borders...

Thursday, July 17, 2008 The Real Reasons: Things are not always what they appear to be.....particularly in Washington. Sometimes, the real reason that a bill is changed, or shelved, or amended is not what the spin and press reports say. Two such instances have occurred here recently. The first has to do with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) which was finally passed by the Senate and was signed into law by President Bush last week. This bill has been held up in negotiations and partisan fighting all year. Most people believe that the hold up was because civil libertarians...

Obama, FISA and My Revised Thinking By Nathan Donarum - June 22, 2008, 2:08AM I originally wrote this as a response to Pangaea's post. He quoted my original post concerning the FISA bill. I thought it deserved its own post to clear some things up, and clear up the air. I wrote to Senator Obama and said it was "inexcusable" that he would vote for such a bill. I have had time to think, ruminate, read and research since then, and here I present my revised thoughts concerning this. Do I believe it inexcusable for Obama to vote for the...

Hey, it's politics. In the primary, when Barack Obama wanted to connect with his party's disaffected left, he said that he would support a filibuster to stop a reauthorization of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act if it granted retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies that had cooperated with the federal government after the 9/11 attacks. Now Obama has those voters in the bag. So he is reaching out to the majority of Americans who want aggressive international surveillance to prevent another terrorist attack. And the average voter certainly isn't going to lose sleep if the price of that security is that...

Great post at Protein Wisdom pointing out the contrast between the rhetoric of “domestic spying” and the reality of FISA–that tapped phones on international calls can save lives, stop terrorists, and rescue hostages: The stunning rescue of Ingrid Betancourt and three U.S. military contractors owed its success not just to artful deception, but also to a five-year U.S.-Colombian operation that choked their captors’ ability to communicate. Known as “Alliance,” it began with a satellite phone call in 2003, just weeks after the Americans’ surveillance plane crashed in the southern Colombian jungle, according to U.S. and Colombian investigators and court documents....

I guess Obama's suddenly politics-as-usual campaign honchos, who've engineered a new "let's become like every other spineless Dem" strategy for their candidate over the past few weeks, have caused Obama to lose ground nationally, not gain it. According to the latest Newsweek poll, Obama is now beating McCain by only 3 points at 44-41%, down from the 15-point lead he held in last month's Newsweek survey, when he was up 51-36%. And keep in mind, Obama's numbers have gone down during a period when McCain's campaign has been stumbling, unraveling and producing negative news almost every day. Wow, Obama's so-called...

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Sen. Barack Obama's vote for a federal surveillance law that he had previously opposed has sparked a backlash from his online advocates, who had energized his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. In October, Obama had vowed to help filibuster an update of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) that gave telecommunication companies that had cooperated with President Bush's warrantless wiretapping program immunity from lawsuits. ~~~~ Many of the liberal blogs who touted the Illinois Democrat early on have blasted Obama for changing his position. One post on the blog DailyKos.com called Obama's decisions to vote for...

'WIRE' LAW FAILED LOST GI 10-HOUR DELAY AS FEDS SOUGHT TAP TO TRACK JIMENEZ CAPTORS IN IRAQ By CHARLES HURT, Bureau Chief October 15, 2007 WASHINGTON - U.S. intelligence officials got mired for nearly 10 hours seeking approval to use wiretaps against al Qaeda terrorists suspected of kidnapping Queens soldier Alex Jimenez in Iraq earlier this year, The Post has learned. This week, Congress plans to vote on a bill that leaves in place the legal hurdles in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act - problems that were highlighted during the May search for a group of kidnapped U.S. soldiers. A...

I just couldn't help thinking about the Von Trapp family fleeing over the mountains to freedom when I read the hilariously melodramatic account by DUmmie Oregone of how his family is now fleeing from the clutches of FISA. Yeah, the FISA bill passes and now the dark cloud of totalitarianism is forcing his family, like the Von Trapp family, to sneak out in the middle of the night to freedom on the other side of the mountains as you can see in his Drama Queen THREAD titled, "A Good Day to say 'Goodbye'." So let us now watch the...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President George W. Bush signed a law on Thursday overhauling the rules for eavesdropping on terrorism suspects but immediately met a civil liberties challenge calling it a threat to Americans' privacy. "This law will protect the liberties of our citizens while maintaining the vital flow of intelligence," Bush said at a White House ceremony to mark a rare legislative victory for the president during his last year in office. The American Civil Liberties Union filed suit in Manhattan federal court as Bush signed the measure and called for the law to be voided as a violation of...

War On Terror: After keeping the homeland vulnerable for months, the Democratic Congress finally restored surveillance powers against terrorists. The supposedly "failed" Bush presidency wins big again.The extraordinary nature of the White House victory this week in passing the overhaul of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) is unlikely to be fully appreciated this election year. Some forget that when the National Security Agency's terrorist surveillance program was revealed in late 2005 by The New York Times, it was seen as yet another death knell for George W. Bush. Secretly bypassing the FISA court to monitor domestic communications involving suspected...

The day Andrew Sullivan found out Santa Claus does not exist: A few things have unsettled me these past couple of weeks about the Obama campaign. It is not the small adjustments to previously-held positions - FISA, the Second Amendment, Iraq. It's a sense that Obama's ample self-regard is lapsing into hubris. The signs of this are pretty trivial on the surface, but they are troubling nonetheless. That simulated faux-presidential seal was both tacky, silly and presumptive - a small version of "Mission Accomplished" Obama could well do without. The decision to give his acceptance speech in a stadium, rather...