Free Republic

The NSA has a “brand new” technology that enables one billion cell phone calls a day to be redirected into its data hoards and stored, according to the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald, who said that a new leak of Snowden’s documents was ‘coming soon.’ Calling it part of a “globalized system to destroy all privacy,” and the enduring creation of a climate of fear, Greenwald outlined the capabilities of the NSA to store every single call while having“the capability to listen to them at any time,” while speaking via Skype to the Socialism Conference in Chicago, on Friday. Greenwald was the...

Jeff Olson, the 40-year-old man who is being prosecuted for scrawling anti-megabank messages on sidewalks in water-soluble chalk last year now faces a 13-year jail sentence. A judge has barred his attorney from mentioning freedom of speech during trial. According to the San Diego Reader, which reported on Tuesday that a judge had opted to prevent Olson’s attorney from "mentioning the First Amendment, free speech, free expression, public forum, expressive conduct, or political speech during the trial,” Olson must now stand trial for on 13 counts of vandalism. In addition to possibly spending years in jail, Olson will also be...

Asians were accused of practicing witchcraft on their employersA Saudi court sentenced two Asian housemaids to 10 years in jail and ordered their lashed 1,000 times each after they were found guilty of indulging in sorcery at their employers’ houses in the Gulf Kingdom, a newspaper reported on Monday. Their Saudi employers reported the two maids to the Gulf country’s feared religious police, saying they had discovered that their families had been harmed because of sorcery practiced by the maids against them. Members of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice who searched the two houses...

When you get right down to it,the political targeting and stalling of tax-exempt applications by the IRS was an effort to defund the Tea Party. Rick Santelli,one of the Tea Party founders and my CNBC colleague,was the first to make this point. I’ve taken it a step further: The IRS was taking the Tea Party out of play for the 2012 election,as it looked to avoid a repeat of 2010 and another Tea Party landslide.… But there can be only one reason for the stalled-out approval process for conservative groups. The IRS was trying to put them out of business....

FULL TITLE: Pennsylvania judge Mark Ciavarella Jr. has been sentenced to almost three decades in jail after conspiring with private prisons to trade kids for cash. n the private prison industry, longer sentences earn more money from the state. Since 2003, Ciavarella received millions of dollars in bribes for condemning minors to maximum prison sentences. In one case, Ciavarella sentenced a 10-year-old to two years in a detention facility for accidentally bottoming out his mother’s car. According to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, over 5,000 young men and women were unjustly sentenced to prison and denied their constitutional rights. Many of...

The Justice Department’s secret subpoena for AP phone records included the seizure of records for five reporters' cellphones and three home phones as well as two fax lines, a lawyer for the news organization tells NBC News. David Schulz, the chief lawyer for the AP, said the subpoenas also covered the records for 21 phone lines in five AP office lines -- including one for a dead phone line at office in Washington that had been shut down six years ago. The phone lines at four other offices – where 100 reporters worked — were also covered by the subpoenas,...

Senior White House advisor Dan Pfeiffer is set to perform the 'full Ginsburg' on Sunday, appearing on all five major Sunday morning news shows in the latest sign that the Obama administration is determined to fight for control of the news cycle following an explosion of major scandals in the past several days. Pfeiffer will appear on CNN's State of the Union, ABC's This Week, CBS's Face the Nation, NBC's Meet the Press, and Fox News' Fox News Sunday. The White House began suffering unusual setbacks in the media following the revelation that its edits to "talking points" on the...

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Lois Lerner, the IRS official now at the center of a scandal involving tax agents who selectively targeted conservative groups, is scheduled to receive an award and give the commencement address at Western New England University School of Law. A spokesperson for the school said the university was aware of the controversy, but would still honor Lerner, who directs the agency’s exempt organizations division. “Our plans have not changed at this time,” said David Stawasz, a spokesperson for the university, in an interview with The Daily Caller News Foundation. “Ms. Werner has apologized for the actions of certain IRS employees....

Rep. Steve King (R-IA) accused U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack of knowing that women and minority farmers fraudulently claimed discrimination to receive taxpayer-funded settlements, and they knowingly initiated more programs to facilitate more of these payments. "It is my sense they know what they are doing," King said on "Breitbart News Sunday" on Sirius XM Patriot channel 125. "That's a heavy statement, but they knew what they were doing. They knew these were fraudulent claims." King said as he "watched the actions of the USDA" under Agriculture Secretary Vilsack and the Justice Department under Attorney...

Kermit Gosnell has been in jail since his January 2011 arrest after authorities raided his abortion clinic. The jury in the Gosnell murder trial is expected to deliver a verdict soon, and the abortion “doctor” is housed at the Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility. He is currently in solitary confinement pending the verdict and his expected sentencing. That’s because, according to one local reporter in Philadelphia, fellow prisoners don’t take his crimes of killing babies in infanticides too kindly. Rapists, child abusers, gang snitchers and the like are normally viewed as the lowest “rank” of prisoner by fellow inmates. They are often...

The Alabama Democrat Party just submitted a completely different birth certificate than the one that was posted at the White House website in 2011. Larry Klayman, the plaintiff’s counsel submitted the forgery of Barack Hussein Obama’s birth certificate that was posted to whitehouse.gov on 4-27-2001 (seen below). Fogbow/Jack Ryan obot group produced another bogus one. Still a third birth certificate has been submitted by Alabama Democrats to the Supreme Court. Remember, this court is being presided over by Chief Justice Roy Moore, who supported Lt. Col. Terry Lakin, when he believed Obama to be a usurper and denied following orders...

The US government knows who organized the Benghazi attack that killed our ambassador and three others and yet he walks freely in Libya today. Why? The whistleblower says “we basically don’t want to upset anybody”.

A former state Senate power broker and seven others were charged Wednesday in what prosecutors termed a "pay to play" scheme involving the Pennsylvania Turnpike, its vendors and political contributions. Attorney General Kathleen Kane said public money was used to line the defendants' pockets and sway elections. "The public has lost untold millions of dollars," Kane said, adding that the "greatest improper influence" involved the turnpike's procurement process. Retired state Senate Democratic Leader Bob Mellow, currently jailed on unrelated corruption charges, was accused of having his chief of staff help supporters and contributors get business from the turnpike, and having...

In response to Gov. Rick Snyder's proposal to increase the gas tax and auto registration fees, many legislators are looking for alternatives. This has increased the emphasis on trying to squeeze as many dollars as possible out of existing revenue. As lawmakers search for potential road funding dollars, one of the state's most expensive departments isn't likely to be left out of the equation. Costing $2 billion annually, the Michigan Department of Corrections continues to take a big bite out of Michigan's budget. The problem is, the process of how the Department of Corrections spends its money is a bureaucratic...

Not only was Homeland Secretary Janet Napolitano surprised when the people who work for her released hundreds of illegal immigrants this week, but she doesn’t know why those detainees were in jail in the first place, she told ABC News on Thursday. “That’s a good question. I’ve asked the same question myself,” she admitted. “So we’re looking into it.” Napolitano also said the release was poorly timed. “Do I wish that this all hadn’t been done all of a sudden and so that people weren’t surprised by it? Of course,” she said. But, Napolitano explained,

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The government has authorized the killing of American citizens as part of its controversial drone campaign against al Qaeda even without intelligence that such Americans are actively plotting to attack a U.S. target, according to a Justice Department memo. The unclassified memo, first obtained by NBC News, argues that drone strikes are justified under American law if a targeted U.S. citizen had "recently" been involved in "activities" posing a possible threat and provided that there is no evidence suggesting the individual "renounced or abandoned" such activities. The document was disclosed as a bipartisan group of U.S. senators...

FULL TITLE: 'He's treated like the worst of the worst': Sandusky put on hard routine and separated from other inmates for his own protection Serial child sex offender Jerry Sandusky lives under tight restrictions in prison for his own safety, it has been revealed. The former Penn State coach is on hard routine after he asked for more prison privileges and then received threats from inmates. 'He is being housed in the appropriate facility in order to assure his safety,' said Susan McNaughton, press secretary for the Pennsylvania state Department of Corrections. She responded to questions from Reuters after one...

State officials say they have found more than 1,100 inmates who they believe improperly collected unemployment benefits totaling more than $2 million while jailed in Illinois sometime in about the last year. One Cook County inmate collected almost $43,000, according to the Illinois Department of Employment Security, though most were paid far less. Nearly all of the fraud occurred in mid-2012 from county jails across the state.

Because of who he is and what he’s done, Jerry Sandusky could be in particular danger of sexual assault when he is sent off to prison this week. With thousands of inmates raped behind bars in the U.S. each year, statistics compiled by the federal government show that sex offenders are roughly two to four times more likely than other inmates to fall victim. Sandusky, the 68-year-old former Penn State assistant football coach, will be sentenced Tuesday for sexually abusing 10 boys in a scandal that rocked the university and brought down coach Joe Paterno. Sandusky is likely to spend...