Free Republic

Without public notice or debate, the Obama administration has expanded the National Security Agency’s warrantless surveillance of Americans’ international Internet traffic to search for evidence of malicious computer hacking, according to classified NSA documents. In mid-2012, Justice Department lawyers wrote two secret memos permitting the spy agency to begin hunting on Internet cables, without a warrant and on American soil, for data linked to computer intrusions originating abroad — including traffic that flows to suspicious Internet addresses or contains malware, the documents show. The disclosures, based on documents provided by Edward J. Snowden, the former NSA contractor, and shared with...

An American cyberattack on North Korea half a decade ago was fruitless overall, sources say. The National Security Agency (NSA) led a mission in 2010 to damage North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, Reuters reported on Friday. Operatives tried using a variant of the Stuxnet computer virus deployed against Iran that same year, the news service said, with developers crafting a version that would activate once it reached Korean-language settings on targeted machines. Operatives hoped the virus would disable centrifuges for enriching uranium, much like it had when used against Iran, Reuters said, but the cyberattack stumbled when it encountered North...

Everyone who cares at all (one way or the other) about government surveillance should watch the documentary 1971 tonight, on the PBS show Independent Lens. Everyone who has an opinion on the Edward Snowden revelations should watch this film. Everyone who has an opinion on the USA PATRIOT Act should tune in. I say all this, mind you, before I've even seen the film. Full disclosure: I'm not being paid or compensated for this plug in any way, either. But I know that however the subject matter is handled by the director, it is significant enough and important enough to...

Even though Edward Snowden is in exile in Moscow, he's still hard at work — although he won't reveal what exactly he is working on quite yet because he believes in being judged on the results. Whatever he's working on, the former NSA contractor who exposed controversial US surveillance practices, says it's much tougher than his last gig. "The fact is I was getting paid an extraordinary amount of money for very little work with very little in the way of qualifications. That's changed significantly," Snowden said in an event at Stanford University on Friday, via teleconference from Moscow. "I...

A US appeals court has ruled that the NSA's dragnet of millions of Americans' phone calls is illegal, and Edward Snowden served as the catalyst for the decision. "Americans first learned about the telephone metadata program that appellants now challenge on June 5, 2013, when the British newspaper The Guardian published a FISC order leaked by former government contractor Edward Snowden," the court noted.

A US appeals court just ruled that the NSA's dragnet on millions of Americans' phone calls is illegal, and Edward Snowden served as the catalyst for the decision. "Americans first learned about the telephone metadata program that appellants now challenge on June 5, 2013, when the British newspaper The Guardian published a FISC order leaked by former government contractor Edward Snowden," the court notes. The order directed Verizon to produce to the NSA “on an ongoing daily basis . . . all call detail records or ‘telephony metadata’ created by Verizon for communications (i) between the United States and abroad;...

In a brief filed late Wednesday, Microsoft said the federal government’s legal argument for seizing user emails stored overseas “rewrites” an almost 30-year-old law to “reinterpret” it in a way it was never meant to be used.At the heart of the issue is a government warrant for Microsoft user emails stored on a server in Dublin, Ireland, which the government claims are relevant to an ongoing drug trafficking investigation. To justify the seizure of the data outside of U.S. territory, the government is basing its argument on legislation born out of the Reagan era.“The statute in this case, the Electronics...

The program also allowed agents to monitor calls the ruled out the possibility of foreign ties to the 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building by American Timothy McVeigh. The program only recently shuttered, and was used for nearly two decades, with top Justice Department officials in four administrations - George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama - approving the data collections. The data collection did not however allow DEA investigators access to the actual content of calls, just the numbers dialed and time of the calls were all recorded. A 1998 request for Sprint...

Former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden got into a heated exchange with comedian and late night host John Oliver over the ramifications of his wide-ranging leaks about U.S. surveillance apparatus during an interview that aired Sunday night. “How many of those documents have you actually read?” Oliver asked Snowden, during an interview on his show, "Last Week Tonight." “I’ve evaluated all of the documents that are in the archive,” Snowden replied. “You’ve read every single one?” Oliver asked. “Well, I do understand what I’ve turned over," Snowden said. "There’s a difference between understanding what’s in the documents and reading...

Journalist Glenn Greenwald reported on Thursday that the USA told the German government it would cut off intelligence sharing if the country offered NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden asylum. Writing at The Intercept, Greenwald said he was told of the threats by Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel after an award ceremony in Homburg on Sunday, where the journalist received the Siebenpfeiffer journalism prize. “They told us they would stop notifying us of plots and other intelligence matters,” Gabriel said. “If the threat were carried out, the Americans would literally allow the German population to remain vulnerable to a brewing attack… by withholding...

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.