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WSJ: White House Used NSA to Spy on Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu, Members of Congress, American Jewish Groups Dec. 30, 2015 7:23am Sharona Schwartz Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was the target of National Security Agency eavesdropping which also netted the private conversations of members of U.S. Congress and American Jewish groups, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday. The alleged spying took place despite a promise two years ago by President Barack Obama -- after it was revealed that the NSA had listened in on German Chancellor Angela Merkel's phone calls -- that the U.S. "will not monitor the communications of...

U.S. spying programs scooped up communications between members of Congress and Israeli leaders, giving the White House insight into Israel’s lobbying of U.S. lawmakers against the Iran nuclear deal, current and former U.S. officials told The Wall Street Journal. The article, published Tuesday afternoon, reports that the U.S. continued to spy on select leaders of allied nations despite President Barack Obama’s pledge to curb such surveillance two years ago, and that it was a top priority to maintain spying on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government. As part of that continued surveillance, the National Security Agency also swept...

Dual_EC weaknesses and Juniper error exploited, researchers say. Security researchers suspect the United States' National Security Agency may have had a hand in the planting of unauthorised backdoors in Juniper's enterprise firewalls. The network equipment vendor last week issued an urgent security alert for its NetScreen enterprise firewalls, after discovering "unauthorised code" in the device operating system that allows them to be fully compromised. Juniper had discovered the code during an internal review. The backdoors - which had been in existence since 2012 - meant attackers could gain administrative access and decrypt VPN connections unnoticed. Researchers have now said the...

Sens. Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz clashed over their opposing votes on a key surveillance bill during Tuesday night's GOP debate, with each senator trying to establish himself as the strongest on national security.Rubio accused Cruz of hampering intelligence agencies by supporting the USA Freedom Act, which ended the National Security Agency's vast collection of millions of U.S. phone records. That information could have been critical in investigating the shooting in San Bernardino, California, Rubio argued. "We are now at a time where we need more tools, not less tools," the Florida Republican said. "And that tool we lost, the...

Once again our national security agencies failed at detecting dangerous terrorists. ... Who knew that collecting massive amounts of irrelevant data on tens of millions of innocent Americans unrelated to terrorism does not prevent terrorist attacks? Actually, making the data haystack bigger makes it harder to find the needle. Like the country music song “Looking For Love in All the Wrong Places,” our country is determined to look for terrorists in all the wrong places. Our government responded by patting down grandmothers and young children at airport security screening, after the trauma of the terrorist attacks on September 11, while...

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz on Thursday offered an impassioned defense of his vote to rein in the government's bulk phone surveillance, blasting those in his party who he said wanted to "exploit the current crisis by calling on Americans to surrender our constitutional liberties as the only way to ensure our safety."The Republican presidential candidate, who has been gaining in recent early-state primary polling, used a speech at the conservative Heritage Foundation to respond to criticism from two fellow candidates, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, for his vote to end the National Security Agency's mass...

As the investigation into the San Bernardino terrorists moves into its second week, there are increasing indications that Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik were on the radar of authorities – or should have been, according to some lawmakers. “You have to say it was an intelligence failure,” Rep. Matt Salmon, R-Az., said Thursday following a closed-door House briefing on the shooting. “You have to. Because it was.”

Facing accusations from Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida that he's supported weakening surveillance powers, presidential rival and Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas hit back against his rival on Thursday. The two Republican presidential candidates have been at each other over their differing views on reauthorization of provisions of the Patriot Act. The provisions in question involve the bulk collection of telephone metadata by the National Security Agency. Rubio is in a contingent led by Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., that is blasting people who supported ending the bulk collection, claiming the practice is key to fighting terrorist threats. But Cruz, who...

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz offered an extended defense Thursday of his support for ending bulk data collection even as the threat of terrorism surges. In a lengthy policy speech at a conservative think tank, Cruz tried to rebut Florida Sen. Marco Rubio's forceful argument that Cruz's votes to end aspects of the National Security Agency's data collection program should raise red flags for voters concerned about national security. Cruz has tried to stake out a compromise position between the muscular interventionism of Rubio and the surveillance-skeptical libertarianism of Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, both GOP presidential competitors. "There are some on...

The National Security Agency has significantly enhanced its capabilities for detecting cyber-threats in the two-plus years since former NSA contractor Edward Snowden pilfered and disclosed classified information. The multi-layered capabilities, which include user behavior analytics, now protect a private cloud that provides storage, computing and operational analytics to the intelligence community, CIO Greg Smithberger tells CIO.com. "There are a number of initiatives we have underway there to really use a lot of our big data analytics, a lot of the technology we have developed for our foreign intelligence mission, as well as technology we've developed inside our Information Assurance Directorate,"...

Fox News continues to propagate the propaganda that the NSA needs to have our personal phone record metadata in order to prevent terrorism and that Americans against government intrusion of our privacy are hurting America. Phone record metadata includes the phone numbers involved, the time of the call, and the location of the phones at the time. This information is available from the phone carriers. We all have cell phone bills that show each and every phone call. For the San Bernadino muslim terrorist shooting, Fox News claims the FBI does not have access to metadata phone record information of...

Sources indicate heated tension between President Obama and FBI Director James Comey about the nature of the San Bernardino mass shooting, which left 14 civilians dead. Although the FBI believed that it was an act of terrorism from the beginning, immense political pressure was brought down on investigators to avoid using the term “terrorism,” with Obama stating, “It is possible that this is terrorist related, but we don’t know…It is also possible that this was workplace related.” A SOFREP source confirmed that after the shooting, Obama held a meeting in the Oval Office with his National Security Council, the attorney...

Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press," while discussing his condemnation of the controversial NSA data collection program, Republican presidential candidate Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY)93% attacked his opponent Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL)80%for his statements about the NSA's data collection program. Host Chuck Todd said, "Senator, respond to something Marco Rubio said. He said the following a week ago, 'We were still able to see the phone records of a potential terrorist cause, we held them, now you have to hope the phone company still has them, you have to argue with their chief counsel by the time you get access to...

The U.S. government's ability to review and analyze five years' worth of telephone records for the married couple blamed in the deadly shootings in California lapsed just four days earlier when the National Security Agency's controversial mass surveillance program was formally shut down. Under a court order, those historical calling records at the NSA are now off-limits to agents running the FBI terrorism investigation even with a warrant. Instead, under the new USA Freedom Act, authorities were able to obtain roughly two years' worth of calling records directly from the phone companies of the married couple blamed in the attack....

In an effort to draw attention away from the intelligence failures that permitted the attacks of 9/11 and create the impression that it was doing something -- anything -- to avoid a repeat, the federal government tampered seriously with freedoms expressly guaranteed in the Constitution. Its principal target was the right to privacy, which is protected in the Fourth Amendment. At President George W. Bush's urging, Congress passed the Patriot Act in October 2001. This 315-page statute passed the House of Representatives with no debate, and there was very limited debate in the Senate. I have asked many members of...

Former National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, who served under President Bill Clinton, has died at the age of 70. "V sad start to day; just learned Sandy Berger passed away during the night," Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, tweeted Wednesday morning. "Good man & friend who served nation well as bill clinton's NSA." Antony Blinken, the current deputy secretary of state and a Berger acolyte, tweeted, "Mourn the passing of Sandy Berger --- father, husband, mentor, friend, leader and great patriot. RIP SRB." Berger, a longtime lawyer who founded Stonebridge International, a Washington-based advisory group,...

The move, mandated by a law passed six months ago, represents the greatest reduction of U.S. spying capabilities since they expanded dramatically after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. Under the Freedom Act, the NSA and law enforcement agencies can no longer collect telephone-calling records in bulk in an effort to sniff out suspicious activity. Such records, known as 'metadata,' reveal which numbers Americans are calling and what time they place those calls, but not the content of the conversations. Instead analysts must now get a court order to ask telecommunications companies like Verizon Communications to enable monitoring of call records...

Craig Shirley, author of Last Act: The Final Years and Emerging Legacy of Ronald Reagan, is an impressive writer with a vast knowledge of Reagan's terms as president who has nonetheless gotten a very important part of Reagan's legacy wrong. Shirley has written about how Reagan would have reacted to the Paris massacre by enlisting today's "Christian Russia" and "free market China" in a coalition against Islamic terrorism.

A former National Security Agency employee convicted of selling defense and communication secrets he gained during his career has been released from federal custody 30 years after his arrest. The sentence for Cold War-era spy Ronald Pelton, 74, ended on Tuesday. He had been placed on home confinement several months ago to serve out the final stretch of his sentence and was released Tuesday from the custody of the Bureau of Prisons, agency spokesman Ed Ross said. Pelton, a former NSA intelligence communications specialist, was arrested in November 1985 on charges of selling information to the Soviets about signals intelligence...

Some of President Obama's top military officials are the subject of an expanded investigation into intelligence reports that were possibly doctored to paint a rosy picture of progress made in rooting out ISIS positions in Syria and Iraq. At issue is whether analysts at Central Command, which oversees U.S. Department of Defense operations in the Middle East, altered assessments of the campaign against ISIS to make it appear as though the United States and Western partners were making more progress than they really were, at least according to claims from a whistleblower assigned to Centcom, ABC News reported. A whistleblower...