Free Republic

One privacy activist responded: “This decision will be added to the timelines of the most significant expansions of domestic surveillance in the modern era.” WITH ONLY DAYS until Donald Trump takes office, the Obama administration on Thursday announced new rules that will let the NSA share vast amounts of private data gathered without warrant, court orders or congressional authorization with 16 other agencies, including the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Agency, and the Department of Homeland Security. The new rules allow employees doing intelligence work for those agencies to sift through raw data collected under a broad, Reagan-era executive order that...

U.S. intelligence officials have withheld sensitive intelligence from President Donald Trump because they are concerned it could be leaked or compromised, according to current and former officials familiar with the matter. The officials’ decision to keep information from Mr. Trump underscores the deep mistrust that has developed between the intelligence community and the president over his team’s contacts with the Russian government, as well as the enmity he has shown toward U.S. spy agencies. On Wednesday, Mr. Trump accused the agencies of leaking information to undermine him. In some of these cases of withheld information, officials have decided not to...

The Russians are coming. The Russians are coming. This all started when Hillary Clinton reversed what Barack Obama had started four years earlier in a debate with Mitt Romney who actually stated the Russians were a problem. The only thing is that she stated that all 17 intelligence agencies agreed that the Russians had hacked the Democratic National Committee (DNC). Though technically correct there are “17” intelligence agencies, Ms. Clinton knows that these agencies “agreeing” is a hoax. My initial reaction to the statement was a logical and rational one. I stated Mr. Trump should have replied to her: “Why...

With only days until Donald Trump takes office, the Obama administration on Thursday announced new rules that will let the NSA share vast amounts of private data gathered without warrant, court orders or congressional authorization with 16 other agencies, including the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Agency, and the Department of Homeland Security. The new rules allow employees doing intelligence work for those agencies to sift through raw data collected under a broad, Reagan-era executive order that gives the NSA virtually unlimited authority to intercept communications abroad. Previously, NSA analysts would filter out information they deemed irrelevant and mask the names...

Dozens of House lawmakers want the Obama administration to release the secret “black budget” used to fund intelligence agencies. A bipartisan group of 62 members of Congress wrote President Obama a letter on Wednesday asking him to release the fiscal 2015 spending levels for 16 federal spy agencies when he delivers the rest of his budget to Congress on March 4. “The current practice of providing no specificity whatsoever regarding the overall budget requests for each intelligence agency falls woefully short of basic accountability requirements,” the legislators wrote. “As you develop your fiscal year 2015 budget, we strongly urge you...

Idaho's Democrat Senator Frank Church[i] was one of my heroes when I was in high school. Church wrote a letter of recommendation for me to Harvard and offered to nominate me to an appointment to any of the U.S. military academies. In the summer of 1971, he took me to lunch in the dining room of the United States Senate, where, for the first time in my life, I tasted French onion soup[ii]. He asked me if I would like to serve as an intern in his office in Washington, D.C. when I graduated from high school. (It was an...