Free Republic

WASHINGTON—The Senate early Saturday defeated a string of efforts to extend the Patriot Act as lawmakers splintered over its contentious phone surveillance program and left town with no plan in place to prevent the law from lapsing. After next week’s Memorial Day recess, the Senate will resume its debate over the national security law at 4 p.m. on May 31, eight hours before the law expires at midnight. Lawmakers fractured through the evening, rejecting a House bill overhauling the NSA, a two-month Patriot Act extension and then increasingly short extensions of the law. Primarily due to objections from presidential candidate...

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.

WASHINGTON — The National Security Agency has implanted software in nearly 100,000 computers around the world that allows the United States to conduct surveillance on those machines and can also create a digital highway for launching cyberattacks. While most of the software is inserted by gaining access to computer networks, the N.S.A. has increasingly made use of a secret technology that enables it to enter and alter data in computers even if they are not connected to the Internet, according to N.S.A. documents, computer experts and American officials. The technology, which has been used by the agency since at least...

"Has the NSA spied, or is the NSA currently spying, on members of Congress or other elected officials?" That's the question Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) put to the National Security Agency's chief in a bluntly worded letter Friday. It seems, however, that the agency cannot categorically say no. Sanders didn't use the word "spy" lightly. He was careful to define his terms, indicating he meant the collection of phone records from personal as well as official telephones, "content from Web sites visited or e-mails sent," and data that companies collect but don't release to the public.

In room-size metal boxes, secure against electromagnetic leaks, the National Security Agency is racing to build a computer that could break nearly every kind of encryption used to protect banking, medical, business and government records around the world. According to documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, the effort to build “a cryptologically useful quantum computer” — a machine exponentially faster than classical computers — is part of a $79.7 million research program titled, “Penetrating Hard Targets.” Much of the work is hosted under classified contracts at a laboratory in College Park.

A special hacking unit of the U.S. National Security Agency intercepts deliveries of new computer equipment en route to plant spyware, according to a report on Sunday from Der Spiegel, a German publication. The method, called “interdiction,” is one of the most successful operations conducted by the NSA’s Office of Tailored Access Operations (TAO), which specializes in infiltrating computers, wrote the publication, citing a top-secret document. ”If a target person, agency or company orders a new computer or related accessories, for example, TAO can divert the shipping delivery to its own secret workshops,” Der Spiegel wrote.

According to a new report from Der Spiegel based on internal NSA documents, the signals intelligence agency's elite hacking unit (TAO) is able to conduct sophisticated wiretaps in ways that make Hollywood fantasy look more like reality. The report indicates that the NSA, in collaboration with the CIA and FBI, routinely and secretly intercepts shipping deliveries for laptops or other computer accessories in order to implant bugs before they reach their destinations. According to Der Spiegel, the NSA's TAO group is able to divert shipping deliveries to its own "secret workshops" in a method called interdiction, where agents load malware onto the electronics or install...

“Almost Orwellian” -- that’s the description a federal judge gave earlier this week to the massive spying by the National Security Agency (NSA) on virtually all 380 million cellphones in the United States. In the first meaningful and jurisdictionally grounded judicial review of the NSA cellphone spying program, U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon, a George W. Bush appointee sitting in Washington, D.C., ruled that the scheme of asking a secret judge on a secret court for a general warrant to spy on all American cellphone users without providing evidence of probable cause of criminal behavior against any of them...

Following recent revelations about NSA spying, Spiegel has learned that Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution recently issued a security warning to authorities in the country’s 16 states. The domestic intelligence agency warned in an Oct. 30 letter that “an emotional response from certain segments of the population cannot be ruled out” and recommended that “security measures aimed at protecting US facilities in Germany should be increased.” The agency said the background behind the “potential threat” was ongoing discussions about the “collection of Germans’ data by the United States.” …

In the immediate wake of the initial Snowden revelations about the NSA demanding and receiving millions of phone records of Americans from the telcos, the agency officials and their apologists in Congress reflexively countered the public outcry with the narrative that domestic spying saved us from terror plots and that numerous such plots were thwarted by NSA breaches of privacy. NSA Chief, General Keith Alexander, in testimony before a Senate committee in June, made this statement - “It’s dozens of terrorist events that these (programs)have helped prevent, from my perspective.” Alexander also appeared before a House committee as seen in...

WASHINGTON—The National Security Agency—which possesses only limited legal authority to spy on U.S. citizens—has built a surveillance network that covers more Americans' Internet communications than officials have publicly disclosed, current and former officials say. The system has the capacity to reach roughly 75% of all U.S. Internet traffic in the hunt for foreign intelligence, including a wide array of communications by foreigners and Americans. In some cases, it retains the written content of emails sent between citizens within the U.S. and also filters domestic phone calls made with Internet technology, these people say. Details of these surveillance programs were gathered...

Matt McCall (R), For Congress: Texas - District 21 - Website- Issues Lamar Votes for Obama's NSA Snooping Vote Matt McCall July 26, 2013 Liberty is worth dying for, but Lamar Smith can’t even vote for it. This week he voted against basic fourth amendment freedoms and for a police state by refusing to cut NSA spying on innocent citizens. He sided with the Obama administration, and the Establishment to continue funding the NSA spying on citizens that are not even suspected of violating any law what so ever. We all seem to hate congress, but it is indeed difficult...

A group of U.S. senators asked if the NSA has created a national gun registry by keeping all electronic business transactions in a permanent database. NSA Surveillance Database: Backdoor to a National Gun Registry? The New American 01 July 2013 A large group of mostly Democratic U.S. senators penned a letter to National Intelligence Director James Clapper (shown) asking if the NSA had created a national gun registry by keeping all electronic business transactions in a permanent database. And the NSA just might have done this, contrary to existing law. The 26 senators stated in the June 27 letter...

Watch then-Senator Joe Biden from 2006 as he directly refutes each point made by his boss, President Obama, about the NSA surveillance program at his news conference last week.

In order for you to claim the right to be a sovereign citizen who can rebuke unwarranted intrusions into your life, you also need to take on the burden of self-government and accept the risk inherent in living in a society where every citizen is free and sovereign as well. But is seems we don’t want that, it seems we want to be coddled and protected from harm, especially from those “others”, those liberals or conservatives who scare us with their crazy notions. We want to make sure those brown skinned foreigners don’t infect us with their weird customs, that...

So who really requested the warrant-less wiretaps on all Verizon customers? It wasn't the NSA. Take another look at the warrant (at link) and see if you can figure it out.

After telling you yesterday that all this stuff about NSA phone number farming is OLD news and in fact TWELEVE Years old, and the fact that Mr. Hagel is full of crap when he feigns ignorance and outrage (He can forget the Presidential race in 2008 - he's already anathema to the Right). But a fact of that previous post needs repeating over and over again because it's the only way the truth will get told. Democrats that are complaining about NSA phone number farming have no one to bitch to but themselves. Now some of the media are bringing...

Minnesota Sen. Mark Dayton Thursday strongly criticized fellow Democrat Russ Feingold's resolution to censure President Bush over domestic spying. "It's an overreaching step by someone who is grandstanding and running for president at the expense of his own party and his own country," Dayton said of Feingold, a Wisconsin senator and potential 2008 presidential candidate. "I think it's a very dangerous territory for the democracy that we have in this country to be playing around with those kinds of resolutions, without any consultations from his colleagues. I think it was irresponsible." Dayton is a member of Feingold's own party from...

The latest attack by the Democrats on the Bush Administration has come under the name “NSA Spying Scandal”. Only the American Left can go from crying out that Bush failed to “connect the dots” before September 11th, to a full scale attempt to prevent him from preventing future attacks on this Nation. A glance back at American history will provide precedent for the President’s war powers and a view at how other Presidents used them. Lincoln: During the American Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln suspended Habeas corpus on April 27, 1861. President Lincoln took this action in Maryland and several...