Free Republic

It was sad last week to wake up to news of the passing of former New York Democratic congressman Otis G. Pike. During the fierce debates of 1975, known as the “Year of Intelligence” (because the controversies of the day led to the first significant investigations of the actions of U.S. intelligence agencies) Representative Pike held to a steady course in the face of a concerted effort by the Ford administration -- and the CIA, NSA, and FBI of the day -- to head off any public inquiry. Sound familiar? Like the current controversy, ignited by leaks from NSA contract...

Sen. Patrick Leahy says the American people are at risk of being controlled by their government due to the expansive surveillance powers of the National Security Agency. Speaking on “Fox News Sunday,” the Vermont Democrat and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee told host Chris Wallace that the nation’s lawmakers must act to return control of the government to the people.

So Benghazi finally claims another victim. The knife sticking out of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s back was stuck there slowly by fellow pantsuiter, Sen. Diane Fienstein, (D-Kalf.) who chairs the Senate Intelligence committee for the gentleman’s club also known as the United States Senate. That knife means that Hillary is probably dead. At least as a presidential candidate. Oh, yes, the New York Times won’t give it up quite yet. But for Hillary, it’s o-v-e-r. The Senate report on Benghazi released by Feinstein’s office is largely a compendium of what you, I and everyone outside of the...

The president’s hand-picked intelligence review panel has submitted a list of recommendations that would politicize the leadership and the routine operations of the nation’s leading military intelligence agency. The 46 recommendations urge the federal government to treat foreign enemies as courtroom-protected citizens, and to would require the soldiers working at the National Security Agency to negotiate day-to-day decisions with an array of private-sector lawyers. President Barack Obama met Wednesday with his five appointees on the Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies, whose report was released late Wednesday afternoon. Obama is expected to announce his preferred policies next month, but...

Obama's National Intelligence Director, James Clapper, blatantly lied to Congress last Spring when in response to a question stated the NSA does not "not wittingly" collect information on Americans in bulk. The lie was revealed thanks to American hero and true patriot, Edward Snowden. Proven a liar, Clapper now freely admits he gave the "least untruthful" answer he could without revealing classified information. The Hill reports Patriot Act author says "Obama’s intel czar should be prosecuted" Rep. James Sensenbrenner Jr., the original author of the Patriot Act, says Director of National Intelligence James Clapper should be prosecuted for lying to...

Psychologists have shown humans are poor judges of their own abilities, from sense of humour to grammar. Those worst at it are the worst judges of all. You're pretty smart right? Clever, and funny too. Of course you are, just like me. But wouldn't it be terrible if we were mistaken? Psychologists have shown that we are more likely to be blind to our own failings than perhaps we realise. This could explain why some incompetent people are so annoying, and also inject a healthy dose of humility into our own sense of self-regard.

On the morning of December 7, 1941 American forces were surprised by a sneak attack launched by the Imperial Japanese Navy. This attack killed 2,402 Americans. The attack was an attempt to shut down the U.S. Navy to prevent it from interfering with the Empire’s plan to invade South East Asia and Western held territories. There were simultaneous Japanese attacks on the Philippine Islands and on British forces in Malaya, Singapore, and Hong Kong. This was, as President Franklin D. Roosevelt described it, “a date which will live in infamy.” Historians have blamed this attack on the failure of America’s...

One evening in January last year, Joel Eriksson, a 34-year-old computer analyst from Uppsala in Sweden, was trawling the web, looking for distraction, when he came across a message on an internet forum. The message was in stark white type, against a black background.

The U.S. Supreme Court said on Monday it would not review a ruling by a secretive intelligence court that authorized government access to millions of Verizon Communications Inc (VZ.N) phone-call records.

I doubt they'll pass it, if they're dumb enough to pursue such a policy they'll probably be too dumb to figure out that this graphic means it's not working.A former colleague from a job I had years ago (even before TLS) posted this to their Facebook wall...obviously they're unhappy about this.Even though I received permission to share this the name and any indicator of where they're from has been redacted to respect privacy.

The head of US intelligence has told lawmakers that discerning foreign leaders' intentions is a key goal of the nation's spying operations. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said such efforts were a "top tenet" of US intelligence policy. But he told the intelligence panel of the House of Representatives the US did not "indiscriminately" spy on nations. Mr Clapper was reacting to a growing international row over reports the US eavesdropped on foreign allies. "Leadership intentions is kind of a basic tenet of what we collect and analyse," Mr Clapper said, adding that foreign allies spy on US officials...

Via the Independent Journal Review, I meant to post this yesterday but got sidetracked by the Healthcare.gov Chernobyl. Tea partiers are as far ahead of the science curve relative to the general population, Yale professor Dan Kahan’s data shows, as liberal Democrats are relative to conservative Republicans. It’s a small difference, but it’s there — and so sharply contrary is it to the left’s view of TPers that Kahan felt obliged to acknowledge that fact explicitly. I’ve got to confess, though, I found this result surprising. As I pushed the button to run the analysis on my computer, I fully...

When the Germans found out from Edward Snowden that America's National Security Agency had spied on Germany, an outraged German artist projected onto a wall at the American embassy the words "United Stasi of America." Chancellor Angela Merkel was not so outraged. She said that American and German intelligence services had been working together in the service of the security of both countries. The comparison to the Stasi was absurd, particularly to Frau Merkel, who grew up in the East and who knew well the efficiency and extent of Stasi surveillance. When I was in Berlin earlier this month, the...

Sen. McCain says Rep. Gohmert has no intelligence, so therefore not capable of malice in his comment about McCain. #NBCNightlyNews

Their social lives are complex, and they can congregate in large groups. Their heart rates increase when they notice a family member suffering. They sound the alarm when they discover food or a potential threat. And experiments have shown they even anticipate future events. Biologist Justin Gregg is talking about chickens. … For more than 50 years, the dolphin has been viewed as an especially intelligent creature, grouped together with human beings and great apes. But now a dispute on the subject has erupted among scientists, and the smart aleck of the seas may end up being just an average...

Gerhard Schindler, told German lawmakeers last week, that they had intercepted many messages to the presidential palace in Damascus, asking for permission to use sarin gas, all of which Assad refused. This is a direct contradiction of the White House talking memos that claimed we had proof positive that Assad was behind the attacks. Gerhard Schindler is the head of the German Foreign Intelligence agency. Schindler, expressly told lawmakers that Assad did not order, nor did he approve of using sarin gas.

<p>A recently revealed National Security Agency program that searches the contents of Americans’ international Internet communications for people who mention foreigners under surveillance violated the Constitution for several years, according to an October 2011 top secret court ruling made public on Wednesday.</p>

When Lord Acton noted famously in 1887 that, “power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” he could hardly have imagined just how powerful the agencies of government would become a century later, and just how apt his warning would be about the dangers of absolute power. Washington Post writer Barton Gellman reported last week that the National Security Agency violates privacy restrictions on monitoring innocent U.S. citizens thousands of times each year. This data comes not from an outside organization with an axe to grind with the powerful eavesdropping agency headquartered just outside the nation’s capitol in Ft....

There are many things for which on principle we should stand. As long-time readers know, I’m keenly sensitive to oil price movements, believing that high oil prices, more than any other single factor, were responsible for the systemic failure of the financial industry worldwide in 2008. I have often argued, thanks to the work of the our contributors at Political Calculations, that high gas prices result in layoffs in the private workforce, something we can ill afford right now. In general, my strongest indictment of the Obama administration is the abandonment of the common sense and common policy that gives...

I’ve cobbling this entry together between uptime and downtime over the last couple of weeks so bear with me on this one. I think there’s a fundamental misunderstanding of how counter-insurgency intelligence and exploitation systems work so I’m going to touch on them a bit in this entry.  It’s by no means comprehensive as that would take an entire volume to document.  So what I’m going to attempt to do here is give the reader some insight into how an insurgency is identified, exploited, and targeted using a fairly simple and brief scenario.Make no mistake that over the last...