Free Republic

The weeks following any year’s Oscars are a home film festival at our house, an attempt to evaluate which movies were snubbed on the big night, and which were overpraised. After absorbing the great performances but ultimately unsatisfying payoff of “Birdman,” and the underappreciated triumph of “Still Alice,” it was time to assess the documentary feature winner, “Citizenfour,” Laura Poitras’ journey through a few days in Hong Kong with NSA leaker Edward Snowden. My political differences with the filmmaker and her subject made me even more curious. She would have no trouble hitting a home run with surveillance-phobic libertarians and...

On Tuesday, the Wikimedia Foundation announced that it is suing the US National Security Agency and Department of Justice over surveillance. The Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit behind web-based encyclopedia Wikipedia, has teamed up with the American Civil Liberties Union and eight other organizations to fight the NSA's mass surveillance program. The suit was filed on Tuesday at a Maryland federal court claiming the NSA and DoJ violated the First and Fourth Amendments with "large-scale search and seizure of internet communications" or "upstream surveillance." This surveillance tactic allows the NSA to collect data on Internet users who communicate with "non US...

Former four-star general and CIA chief David Petraeus pleaded guilty to one count of retaining classified information for handing over information in personal notebooks to his biographer girlfriend in 2011. He agreed to pay a $40,000 fine; prosecutors said they would recommend two years' probation instead of prison, although a judge could decide otherwise. It's a sad close to a government career for the man whose counterinsurgency strategy turned around the war in Iraq. He's an American hero who seemed all that much more upright when he resigned in November 2012 after admitting to an affair that compromised his position...

New Zealand is conducting mass surveillance over its Pacific neighbours, reports citing documents leaked by US whistleblower Edward Snowden say. Calls, emails and social media messages were being collected from Pacific nations, the New Zealand Herald said. The data was shared with other members of the "Five Eyes" network - the US, Australia, Britain and Canada.

A State Department whistleblower has come forward to say the details of a former colleague’s account of the sifting of Benghazi-related documents to identify damaging material “ring true.” The Daily Signal reported Monday on Raymond Maxwell, a former deputy assistant secretary at the State Department who says he observed an unusual after-hours session in a basement operations room of the agency’s headquarters in Washington in October 2012. Maxwell said a State Department office director told him those present were ordered to separate out any documents related to the Sept. 11, 2012 terrorist attacks on Americans in Benghazi that could prove...

It was just like old times, sort of. On Thursday, NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden got together again with journalist Glenn Greenwald and filmmaker and journalist Laura Poitras to talk surveillance, reliving in a sense their now historic secret meeting two summers ago in a Hong Kong hotel room. That first time around, Snowden handed the two a huge cache of top secret National Security Agency documents and asked them to let the public know about the NSA's gigantic and constitutionally questionable appetite for people's data. The meeting set off a chain of events that led to, among other things, consternation...

David Carr, a writer who wriggled away from the demon of drug addiction to become an unlikely name-brand media columnist at The New York Times, and the star of a documentary about the newspaper, died on Thursday in Manhattan. He was 58. Mr. Carr collapsed in the Times newsroom, where he was found shortly before 9 p.m. He was taken to St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital, where he was pronounced dead. Earlier in the evening, he moderated a panel discussion about the film “Citizenfour” with its principal subject, Edward J. Snowden; the film’s director, Laura Poitras; and Glenn Greenwald, a journalist.

President George W. Bush was fond of saying that "9/11 changed everything." He used that one-liner often as a purported moral basis to justify the radical restructuring of federal law and the federal assault on personal liberties over which he presided. He cast aside his oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution; he rejected his oath to enforce all federal laws faithfully; and he moved the government decidedly in the direction of secret laws, secret procedures and secret courts. During his presidency, Congress enacted the Patriot Act. This legislation permits federal agents to write their own search warrants when...

Message to Upper Canada College: This is no time to let political activists lead your students on a sleepwalk through the harsh reality of terrorism ISIS must be sending out resounding cheers for media-darling ‘whistleblowers’ Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald, for leading Canadian high school students through a sleep walk on the dangers of Islamic terrorism. According to former Guardian journalist Greenwald , a Canadian’s real-world chance of being killed in a terrorist attack is “infinitesimal.” That’s what Greenwald told almost 1,400 Upper Canada College students who watched a one-sided online talk titled, “Privacy vs. Security: A Discussion of Personal...

Apple's iPhone has "special software" that authorities can activate remotely to be able to gather information about the user.

If you want a truly anonymous life, then maybe it's time you learned about Tor, CSpace and ZRTP. These three technologies could help people hide their activities from the National Security Agency, according to NSA documents newly obtained from the archive of former contractor Edward Snowden by the German magazine Der Spiegel. The combination of Tor, CSpace and ZRTP (plus another anonymizing technology for good measure) results in levels of protection that the NSA deems "catastrophic" -- meaning the organization has "near-total loss/lack of insight to target communications," according to Der Spiegel. "Although the documents are around two years old,...

Remember when Valerie Plame was the poster girl for Bush and Cheney-haters? A desk jockey at the CIA with some flowing blonde hair claim to glamour (in terms of image exploitation, a Wendy Davis-like figure), Plame was supposedly endangered when her name was supposedly leaked by someone in the Bush administration, supposedly in retaliation for her husband Joe Wilson’s criticism of Iraq War policy.

Ecuador's government has ordered everyone in the US Embassy's military group, about 20 Defense Department employees, to leave the country by month's end. The group was ordered to halt operations in Ecuador in a letter dated April 7, embassy spokesman Jeffrey Weinshenker said Thursday. The Associated Press was alerted to the expulsions by a senior Ecuadorean official who refused to be identified by name due to the information's sensitive nature.

December 20, 2014 Diane Feinstein, the Iron Maiden By Deana Chadwell Language, that contract that we make with the members of our society, holds our society together; without it we can accomplish nothing. Nor can we function without the protection of good and selfless people who step forward to face the evil that always threatens successful nations. Diane Feinstein’s release of the enhanced interrogation technique documents is, on both national and linguistic fronts, an act of treason. To attack the language by which we carry on our national dialogue and the methods we use to protect our right to have...

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...

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...

Last year, UK cinemagoers were treated to two competing accounts of the story of Julian Assange: Bill Condon’s oddly inert drama The Fifth Estate, and Alex Gibney’s more pointedly dramatic documentary We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks. Although very different in form, content and, indeed, success (Gibney’s film was Bafta-nominated, Condon’s was hailed as one of the year’s biggest flops), both movies wrestled with the conundrum of separating the cult of Assange’s divisive personality from the significance of the information that he helped to publish – for better or worse.

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...