Free Republic

The jihad rages on, but the War on Terror is over. There is no longer a national-security consensus — no longer the political support for wartime defense measures, much less offensive combat operations. While the enemy continues to fight, our will to break the enemy’s will has vanished. After a contentious week, that much is clear. The controversy swirling around shadowy intelligence programs hasn’t gotten to the bottom of those programs, but it tells us everything we need to know about . . . us. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s dog that did not bark is a metaphor worn out by...

Edward Snowden’s expansive disclosures to the Guardian and the Washington Post about various National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance programs have only two corollaries in contemporary history—the classified cache Bradley Manning allegedly released to WikiLeaks a few years ago and Daniel Ellsberg’s dissemination of the voluminous Pentagon Papers to the New York Times and other newspapers in 1971. Leakers like Snowden, Manning and Ellsberg don’t merely risk being called narcissists, traitors or mental cases for having liberated state secrets for public scrutiny. They absolutely guarantee it. In the last two days, the New York Times’s David Brooks, Politico’s Roger Simon, the...

I haven't been able to write this week here because I've been participating in the debate over the fallout from last week's NSA stories, and because we are very busy working on and writing the next series of stories that will begin appearing very shortly. I did, though, want to note a few points, and particularly highlight what Democratic Rep. Loretta Sanchez said after Congress on Wednesday was given a classified briefing by NSA officials on the agency's previously secret surveillance activities: "What we learned in there is significantly more than what is out in the media today. . ....

George Orwell's famous novel, 1984, was published in 1949, and he predicted that people in the future would have no privacy, as governments would monitor all their activities. The "big brother is watching" phrase became well known. But Orwell could never have predicted the technologies of the future, when he described a fictional system of oppression based on technologies that were available in 1949. In 1949, there were no personal computers, no cell phones, no internet, no satellites, etc. In the communist regimes of 1949, most people did not own telephones, therefore there were no phones to bug. Most people...

WASHINGTON—In the months and early years after 9/11, FBI agents began showing up at Microsoft Corp. more frequently than before, armed with court orders demanding information on customers. Around the world, government spies and eavesdroppers were tracking the email and Internet addresses used by suspected terrorists. Often, those trails led to the world's largest software company and, at the time, largest email provider. The agents wanted email archives, account information, practically everything, and quickly. Engineers compiled the data, sometimes by hand, and delivered it to the government. Often there was no easy way to tell if the information belonged to...

Hilarious and priceless music video by libertarian rapper (yes, you read that correctly), GoRemy, which slams Obama-style, Big Brother government. Entitled, “Tap It: The NSA Slow Jam,” this surely to go viral masterpiece was done in collaboration with ReasonTV (scroll down for lyrics)...

The NSA does not need a court order to search the database it maintains of the call data surrendered by the nation’s telecommunications firms, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein told reporters on Thursday. Feinstein spoke to reporters after a briefing on NSA monitoring by top Obama administration national security officials. She echoed an explanation given by NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander when he appeared before a Senate panel on Wednesday, including the specific legal hurdle NSA says it must clear before it can look into the data it collects.

JESSICA YELLIN, CNN: And then finally, on the NSA, Representative Peter King has said that he believes that Glenn Greenwald should be prosecuted for his leaks. Does the President share that view, first of all? And secondly, Speaker Boehner today said that he is surprised the White House has not spoken out more forcefully in defense of the program and explaining more forcefully why it’s necessary. Would you just react to that? JAY CARNEY: Well, I think you heard the President speak about his views on the program and the necessity --

Among the recent revelations about the NSA was the PRISM program, which tech companies have denied participating in. According to a New York Times report, one of those companies, Yahoo, fought back in 2008 against the government requests on the grounds that it would be unconstitutional — but failed. Thus, the company became part of the program. “The government had sought help in spying on certain foreign users, without a warrant,

Security: With the director of national intelligence defending a program he told Congress didn't exist, the Patriot Act's author says this isn't the targeted surveillance intended and warns of losing needles in a too-big haystack. Edward Snowden is quite possibly a traitor, but we have been caught in a Prism of our own making, outsourcing our national security to 29-year-old unstable contractors, one of nearly 500,000 employees of private firms with access to the government's most sensitive secrets. Perhaps if we were doing the targeted surveillance envisioned by Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., when he wrote the Patriot Act, we wouldn't...

Texas Congressman Louie Gohmert lit-up and clearly irked Obama FBI Director Robert Mueller, who testified under oath before the House Judiciary Committee today. Gohmert specifically focused on the FBI’s handling (i.e., mishandling) of the Boston Bombings. Below is a partial text of the heated exchange...

This weekend, U.S. President Barack Obama sat down for a series of meetings with China's newly appointed leader, Xi Jinping. We know that the two leaders spoke at length about the topic du jour -- cyber-espionage -- a subject that has long frustrated officials in Washington and is now front and center with the revelations of sweeping U.S. data mining. The media has focused at length on China's aggressive attempts to electronically steal U.S. military and commercial secrets, but Xi pushed back at the "shirt-sleeves" summit, noting that China, too, was the recipient of cyber-espionage. But what Obama probably neglected...

There are many idealistic progressives who’ve remained opposed to the National Security Agency’s data mining programs regardless of who is in the White House. (We can’t surrender our freedom for safety, you know!) It’s only a shame that these same people have such little reverence for constitutional liberties in other areas of public life. Really, it’s worse than that. Consider the central case of the left these days: “Unfettered” freedom is a tragedy — decadent, unfair and un-American. So if, as liberals like to argue, it’s a moral imperative for Americans to scale back personal liberty to build a cleaner,...

"Gentlemen do not read each other's mail." That's what Secretary of State Henry Stimson said to explain why he shut down the government's cryptanalysis operations in 1929. Edward Snowden, who leaked National Security Agency surveillance projects to Britain's Guardian, evidently feels the same way. "I can't in good conscience allow the U.S. government," he explained, "to destroy privacy, Internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they're secretly building." Some questions about this episode remain. How did a 29-year-old high school dropout get a $122,000 job with an NSA contractor? How did his...

National Security Agency chief Gen. Keith Alexander may be under fire for collecting millions of Americans' phone records and Internet data. But the nation's top electronic spy told a Congressional panel Wednesday that he wants the feds to slurp up even more information - and distribute it more widely throughout the government. ... The NSA, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the FBI -- a trio Alexander described as the core of the U.S. Federal Cybersecurity Team (a term we haven't heard before) -- are developing an "information sharing environment that will create a cross-governmental shared situational awareness that...

Admittedly, most people don’t seem to give a toss about PRISM one way or the other. But you should, and not just because certain groups claim that the NSA’s spying could be unconstitutional – there are lots of reasons why the alleged complicity of US tech firms could be bad for America, and no one wants to live in an Orwellian Dystopia, which is what could happen if we never take a stand. So with this in mind, is there any way to avoid the all-encompassing dragnet that the NSA has admitted to running? You bet there is, and today...

<p>Google on Wednesday pushed harder to downplay its role in a secret national surveillance program, detailing for the first time how it typically hands over data to federal officials.</p> <p>Surprisingly, the global innovator uses decidedly simple and low-tech methods, including the delivery of information by hand or by transferring files from one computer to another.</p>

The government has sought to “reassure” us that it is only tracking “metadata” such as the time and place of the calls, and not the actual content of the calls. But technology experts say that “metadata” can be more revealing than the content of your actual phone calls. ... What [government officials] are trying to say is that disclosure of metadata—the details about phone calls, without the actual voice—isn’t a big deal, not something for Americans to get upset about if the government knows. Let’s take a closer look at what they are saying: They know you rang a phone...

London, 1772. I have been asked by my superiors to give a brief demonstration of the surprising effectiveness of even the simplest techniques of the new-fangled Social Networke Analysis in the pursuit of those who would seek to undermine the liberty enjoyed by His Majesty’s subjects. This is in connection with the discussion of the role of “metadata” in certain recent events and the assurances of various respectable parties that the government was merely “sifting through this so-called metadata” and that the “information acquired does not include the content of any communications”. I will show how we can use this...