Free Republic

Matt Drudge of the influential Drudge Report news aggregation site expressed discontent over a federal spending bill that passed with votes from both Republicans and Democrats in the House. The $1.1 trillion spending bill that runs through September 2015 is now up for a vote in the Democratically-led Senate. Many conservatives, including Drudge, are upset that the bill funds both Obamacare and President Obama's immigration executive orders. "Obama got EVERYTHING," Drudge tweeted Friday. "NSA dirt on Boehner must be incredible. Chicago wins."

Congress this week quietly passed a bill that may give unprecedented legal authority to the government's warrantless surveillance powers, despite a last-minute effort by Rep. Justin Amash to kill the bill. Amash staged an aggressive eleventh-hour rally Wednesday night to block passage of the Intelligence Authorization Act, which will fund intelligence agencies for the next fiscal year. The Michigan Republican sounded alarms over recently amended language in the package that he said will for the first time give congressional backing to a controversial Reagan-era decree granting broad surveillance authority to the president.

As head of the Senate Intelligence Committee since 2009, Sen. Dianne Feinstein has spent hundreds of hours in secret briefings and seen thousands of pictures from battlefields in Syria, Iraq and Yemen. She keeps two images with her. One shows a little girl wearing a gingham dress, white tights and black Mary Janes — but the girl's head is gone. Another is of a teenage boy, duct tape over his mouth, eyes bulging out, being forced to hold two severed heads. "To me, it's what we are up against," Feinstein said in an interview. "It is a testament to pure...

The U.S. National Security Agency should have an unlimited ability to collect digital information in the name of protecting the country against terrorism and other threats, an influential federal judge said during a debate on privacy. "I think privacy is actually overvalued," Judge Richard Posner, of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, said during a conference about privacy and cybercrime in Washington, D.C., Thursday. "Much of what passes for the name of privacy is really just trying to conceal the disreputable parts of your conduct," Posner added. "Privacy is mainly about trying to improve your social and...

You may recall, back in June, that there was a key House vote that took NSA supporters by surprise. An amendment to the Defense Appropriations bill pushed by a bi-partisan team of Thomas Massie, Jim Sensenbrenner and Zoe Lofgren passed overwhelmingly, with a plan to slam the door shut on questionable NSA "backdoor searches" (as described in detail earlier). The House voted 293 to 123, making it a pretty clear and overwhelming statement that Congress did not, in fact, support such practices by the NSA. But, of course, the NSA gets the last laugh. As part of the big lameduck...

Two years ago, Bobby Jindal was pushing a state law to adapt national curriculum standards to local schools; today, not only is the Louisiana governor suing the federal government to stop Common Core — or “ObamaCore,” as many Republicans have taken to calling it — but most prospective Republican presidential candidates, except Jeb Bush, have reversed themselves. Likewise, two years ago, almost all GOP leaders were unified against gay marriage, supportive of most surveillance tactics designed to prevent terrorism attacks, opposed to a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants and unwilling to accept any aspects of the Affordable Care Act....

A retired National Security Agency (NSA) senior agency executive warned the agency in 2009 that the program to collect, store and analyze American phone records wasn’t providing enough intelligence to be effective. Prior to the revelations made by Edward Snowden, dissenters within the Intelligence agency warned that the collection program wasn’t worth the backlash if the program became public. The role of the NSA was to eavesdrop on hostile foreign entities, not American citizens. Now the agency has tarnished its reputation of guarding America to become the free world’s secret police. The AP–ever faithful to its dear leader–noted that Obama...

The head of the NSA issued a blunt warning Thursday to lawmakers: China can shut down the United States. The grim forecast came from Admiral Michael Rogers, the director of the National Security Agency and commander of the U.S .Cyber Command

Rapid DNA technology makes it easier than ever to grab and store your genetic profile. G-men, cops, and Homeland Security can't wait to see it everywhere. Robert Schueren shook my hand firmly, handed me his business card, and flipped it over, revealing a short list of letters and numbers. "Here is my DNA profile." He smiled. "I have nothing to hide." I had come to meet Schueren, the CEO of IntegenX, at his company's headquarters in Pleasanton, California, to see its signature product: a machine the size of a large desktop printer that can unravel your genetic code in the...

A Utah lawmaker concerned about government spying on its citizens is questioning whether city water service should be cut off to a massive National Security Agency data storage facility outside Salt Lake City. Republican Rep. Marc Roberts, of Santaquin, said there are serious questions about privacy and surveillance surrounding the center, and several Utah residents who spoke at a legislative committee hearing Wednesday agreed. During the last legislative session, lawmakers opted to hold off on Roberts’ bill to shut off the facility’s water and decided to study it during the interim. …

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...