Free Republic

The story vanished from the Washington Times website just hours after going online. For a few hours, it was big news. And then it vanished. On Monday morning, the American Civil Liberties Union and National Rifle Association published a joint op-ed in the Washington Times urging the Senate to pass legislation that would limit the government's domestic spying powers. It was a meaningful push from two powerful groups that—as the groups themselves noted—rarely agree on anything. And the support came just a day before the Senate is scheduled to take a key (and hotly contested) vote Tuesday on the measure,...

WASHINGTON -- Senate Republicans on Tuesday blocked a sweeping overhaul of the once-secret National Security Agency program that collects records of Americans' phone calls in bulk. Democrats and a handful of Republicans who supported the measure failed to secure the 60 votes they needed to take up the legislation. The vote was 58-42 for consideration. Sen. Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, worked hard to defeat the bill, which had the support of the Obama administration and a coalition of technology companies, including Apple, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo. "This is the worst possible time to be tying our hands behind our...

Three federal appeals court judges struggled Tuesday over whether the National Security Agency's phone data surveillance program is an intelligence-gathering tool that makes the nation safer or an intrusive threat that endangers privacy. The judges — all appointed by Republican presidents — expressed uncertainty about where to draw the line between legal surveillance and violations of constitutional rights in the age of terrorism.

Do bothersome facts matter anymore? Not really. This is an age when Americans were assured that the Affordable Care Act lowered our premiums. It cut deductibles. Obamacare allowed us to keep our doctors and health plans, and lowered the deficit. Those fantasies were both demonstrably untrue and did not matter, given the supposedly noble aims of health care reform. The Islamic State is at times dubbed jayvee, a manageable problem, and a dangerous enemy -- or anything the administration wishes it to be, depending on the political climate of any given week. Some days Americans are told there is no...

WASHINGTON — In a rare public accounting of its mass surveillance program, the United States Postal Service reported that it approved nearly 50,000 requests last year from law enforcement agencies and its own internal inspection unit to secretly monitor the mail of Americans for use in criminal and national security investigations. The number of requests, contained in a 2014 audit of the surveillance program by the Postal Service’s inspector general, shows that the surveillance program is more extensive than previously disclosed and that oversight protecting Americans from potential abuses is lax. The audit, along with interviews and documents obtained by...

Last year Former CBS News investigative reporter Sharyl Attkisson, who is known for incredible work on Operation Fast and Furious, Benghazi and other White House scandals, noticed her computers at work and at home were acting strange. She suspected someone had hacked into her computer, specifically into a desktop in her home due to the machine turning on and off by itself at all hours of the night. An initial review of the hard drive revealed that her computer had in fact been compromised, but it wasn't known at the time who did it. The intruder into her system didn't...

A friend at work told me if you type illuminati backwards it takes you to the CIA website. He was close. Anyone care to guess why it takes you to the NSA website? Truly weird. See for yourselves... itanimulli.com

Today EFF filed our latest brief in Jewel v. NSA, our longstanding case on behalf of AT&T customers aimed at ending the NSA’s dragnet surveillance of millions of ordinary Americans’ communications. The brief specifically argues that the Fourth Amendment is violated when the government taps into the Internet backbone at places like the AT&T facility on Folsom Street in San Francisco. As it happens, the filing coincides with the theatrical release of Laura Poitras’ new documentary, Citizenfour. The Jewel complaint was filed in 2008, and there’s a scene early in the film that shows the long road that case has...

Earlier this week, the federal government's National Science Foundation, an entity created to encourage the study of science -- encouragement that it achieves by awarding grants to scholars and universities -- announced that it had awarded a grant to study what people say about themselves and others in social media. The NSF dubbed the project Truthy, a reference to comedian Stephen Colbert's invention and hilarious use of the word "truthiness." The reference to Colbert is cute, and he is a very funny guy, but when the feds get into the business of monitoring speech, it is surely no joke; it...

Barack Obama did not tell the whole story this autumn when he tried to make the case that Bashar al-Assad was responsible for the chemical weapons attack near Damascus on 21 August. In some instances, he omitted important intelligence, and in others he presented assumptions as facts. Most significant, he failed to acknowledge something known to the US intelligence community: that the Syrian army is not the only party in the country’s civil war with access to sarin, the nerve agent that a UN study concluded – without assessing responsibility – had been used in the rocket attack. In the...

You saw the Disney movie as a kid. You may have read the book. But did you know some of it was based on real history? While the story of King Arthur, Merlin, and all the rest may not be true, there really is a centuries-old sword stuck in a stone. In the small Italian town of Chiusdino, there’s a small chapel near Saint Galgano Abbey known as Montesiepi chapel. And inside you’ll find a big slab of stone in the floor with the handle of a sword sticking out of it.

The crown jewels of any intelligence organization are its sources and methods – the means by which information is obtained. I have no doubts that, thanks to Edward Snowden, Russia and China now have an extraordinary volume of data on NSAs sources and methods for collecting information from communications. That means they now know the weaknesses in their and other of our adversaries’ communications procedures and our strengths in exploiting them. And not just voice communications, but also radar, telemetry, missile and rocket command and response, military GPS locationing and weapons systems countermeasures. On far too many subjects, Russia and...

(Reuters) - The U.S. National Security Agency has launched an internal review of a senior official’s part-time work for a private venture started by former NSA director Keith Alexander that raises questions over the blurring of lines between government and business. Under the arrangement, which was confirmed by Alexander and current intelligence officials, NSA's Chief Technical Officer, Patrick Dowd, is allowed to work up to 20 hours a week at IronNet Cybersecurity Inc, the private firm led by Alexander, a retired Army general and his former boss.

Once again I salute Edward Snowden as an all-American hero. On second thought, make that an all-world hero. A movie on how and why Snowden revealed NSA wiretaps is about to be released. Showbiz reports Edward Snowden Doc Premieres: Shocking Inside Look at How He Did It. Citizen Four is the shocking doc about Edward Snowden made by Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras. Just screened tonight was the two hour film which will be released by the Weinstein Company this month. It doesn’t paint the Obama administration in a very good light as Snowden explains how the government has violated...

The New Yorker Festival presents Edward Snowden in conversation with Jane Mayer.

The integrity of the Internet could be at risk if Congress does not act to rein in the National Security Agency, Google head Eric Schmidt warned on Wednesday. Speaking alongside other tech executives and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) at a Silicon Valley event, Schmidt said the revelations about U.S. surveillance could prompt countries to wall off their networks. “The simplest outcome: We’re going to end up breaking the Internet,” Schmidt said, “because what’s going to happen is governments will do bad laws of one kind or another, and eventually what’s going to happen is: ‘We’re going to have our own...

While the political commentators in the nation's capital are wrapped up in the debate over what to do about ISIS, and as one third of the Senate and nearly all members of the House campaign for re-election, the president's spies continue to capture massive amounts of personal information about hundreds of millions of us and lie about it. The president continues to dispatch his National Security Agency spies as if he were a law unto himself, and Congress -- which is also being spied upon -- has done nothing to protect the right to privacy that the Fourth Amendment was...

While the political commentators in the nation’s capital are wrapped up in the debate over what to do about ISIS, and as one third of the Senate and nearly all members of the House campaign for re-election, the president’s spies continue to capture massive amounts of personal information about hundreds of millions of us and lie about it. The president continues to dispatch his National Security Agency spies as if he were a law unto himself, and Congress — which is also being spied upon — has done nothing to protect the right to privacy that the Fourth Amendment was...

It is not an accident that the point man for the damaging disclosure of so much Top Secret information enjoys asylum in Russia and that the intelligence is ending up in the hands of Islamic extremists. “It is reasonable to assume that Vladimir Putin is giving information obtained via Snowden to ISIS or al Qaeda so they can damage U.S. infrastructure as his proxy,” former NSA executive Charlie Speight explained to us. “Without getting his hands dirty or spending a single ruble, Putin can bring us down and elevate Russia.” The Putin-Snowden collaboration makes sense in the context of the...

It’s been a year and a half since Edward Snowden revealed to the world just how much private information the National Security Agency has been collecting on just about everyone. The massive spying operation raised privacy and Constitutional concerns and set off alarms with reports that some employees had used the system to keep tabs on their love interests. Sadly, but not surprisingly, the government has done little to reform the program and reassure the public. Even relatively weak legislation that fails to address core concerns has stalled in Congress. Action has come, however, from Silicon Valley. The new Apple...