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Yesterday “TheBlaze” published an interview with Romanian Lt. Gen Ion Pacepa, a discussion which arose around the publishing of his work, “Disinformation: Former Spy Chief Reveals Secret Strategies for Undermining Freedom, Attacking Religion, and Promoting Terrorism.” Pacepa is a defector to the United States, but not just any run-of-the-mill defector. He is the highest-ranking Soviet intelligence officer to ever defect. He crossed over back in 1978 and was given political asylum by then President Jimmy Carter. He has made a practice since that time to write in defense of freedom while living his life under threat of assassination, hiding out...

by Gina Cassini | Top Right News First in the nation. On Monday, an Arizona state senate committee became the first legislative body in the country to pass a bill designed to thwart surveillance programs from the National Security Agency (NSA).Senate Bill 1156 (SB1156), the Arizona 4th Amendment Protection Act, was introduced by Sen. Kelli Ward and 14 other sponsors and co-sponsors. The bill faced its first hurdle today, with an important hearing and vote in the Senate’s Government and Environment committee, where it required passage by majority vote to move forward. After a lengthy debate with significant opposition from...

Officials at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau are conducting a massive, NSA-esque data-mining project collecting account information on an estimated 991 million American credit card accounts. It was also learned at a Congressional hearing Tuesday that CFPB officials are working with the Federal Housing Finance Agency on a second data-mining effort, this one focused on the 53 million residential mortgages taken out by Americans since 1998.

The Startling New Way Big Brother Is Tracking Your Health January 28, 2014 by B. Christopher Agee As ObamaCare continues to eat away at the private American healthcare system that the rest of the world once envied, the federal government now has a hand in virtually all aspects of the medical industry. The intrusion is well-documented and is not limited to any particular federal agency. Among the most recent developments is the Environmental Protection Agency’s promise to scour social media posts for clues about potential outbreaks of disease. Apparently taking a page out of the NSA’s playbook, the EPA announced...

<p>A North Dakota farmer convicted of terrorizing law officers two years ago is the first American to be sentenced to prison with the help of a Predator drone, Forbes reported.</p> <p>Rodney Brossart, who was accused at the time of stealing six cows from a neighbor, was arrested after a summer-long standoff in 2011. Authorities say Brossart family members refused to allow deputies on their farmstead and didn't show up for court hearings.</p>

WASHINGTON—As the Obama administration considers ending the storage of millions of phone records by the National Security Agency, the government is quietly funding research to prevent eavesdroppers from seeing whom the U.S. is spying on, The Associated Press has learned. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has paid at least five research teams across the country to develop a system for high-volume, encrypted searches of electronic records kept outside the government's possession. The project is among several ideas that could allow the government to store Americans' phone records with phone companies or a third-party organization, but still search...

The National Security Agency has collected almost 200 million text messages a day from across the globe, using them to extract data including location, contact networks and credit card details, according to top-secret documents. The untargeted collection and storage of SMS messages – including their contacts – is revealed in a joint investigation between the Guardian and the UK’s Channel 4 News based on material provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. The documents also reveal the UK spy agency GCHQ has made use of the NSA database to search the metadata of “untargeted and unwarranted” communications belonging to people in...

Pratt & Whitney said Monday it is cooperating with authorities after federal agents arrested a former employee for trying to ship documents to Iran related to the U.S. military's Joint Strike Fighter aircraft. The East Hartford defense contractor, the sole manufacturer of the aircraft's engine, declined to comment on how Mozaffar Khazaee, 59, slipped thousands of pages of documents, diagrams, blueprints and technical manuals out the door before he was laid off in August along with hundreds of other employees. Federal authorities arrested Khazaee at Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey on Thursday before he could board a plane...

The Obama administration plans to overhaul the nation’s security clearance system to prevent future intelligence leaks like the one by former defense contractor Edward Snowden. The changes, part of a package of reforms President Obama is expected to announce Friday during a speech at the Justice Department, will include more stringent — and more frequent  — vetting of security clearances, according to sources familiar with the administration’s plans.  The president is embracing some of the proposals offered by an advisory panel he appointed. The panel recommended security clearances become more highly differentiated and that a new clearance level be created...

President Obama is under pressure from all sides to announce major reforms to the National Security Agency on Friday. Privacy and civil liberties groups as well as lawmakers on the left have urged for a wholesale termination of much of the government’s snooping. Silicon Valley, home to some of Obama’s biggest supports, is also pressing for change. So are foreign leaders, rankled by the notion that their ally might be spying on them. The calls for reforms put Obama in a tough spot give his administration’s insistence that the NSA’s efforts are critical for national security. While Obama is sure...

The perfect crime is far easier to pull off when nobody is watching. So on a night nearly 43 years ago, while Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier bludgeoned each other over 15 rounds in a televised title bout viewed by millions around the world, burglars took a lock pick and a crowbar and broke into a Federal Bureau of Investigation office in a suburb of Philadelphia, making off with nearly every document inside. They were never caught, and the stolen documents that they mailed anonymously to newspaper reporters were the first trickle of what would become a flood of revelations...

“[A security camera] doesn’t respond to complaint, threats, or insults. Instead, it just watches you in a forbidding manner. Today, the surveillance state is so deeply enmeshed in our data devices that we don’t even scream back because technology companies have convinced us that we need to be connected to them to be happy.” — Pratap Chatterjee, journalist What is most striking about the American police state is not the mega-corporations running amok in the halls of Congress, the militarized police crashing through doors and shooting unarmed citizens, or the invasive surveillance regime which has come to dominate every aspect...

Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) on Sunday said fellow Republican Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.) “doesn’t deserve to be in the United States Senate” based on his accusations against the National Security Agency over its domestic spying program. Appearing on Fox News, the hawkish former chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee launched a broadside against Paul, saying he was “totally uninformed or he’s part of that hate America crowd that I thought left us in the 1960s.” Earlier Sunday, the more libertarian Paul defended his planned class-action lawsuit against the NSA and suggested that both James Clapper, the director of national...

The secret court that oversees the nation’s intelligence activities renewed its approval of the National Security Agency’s telephone-records program on Friday, granting the government a new three-month window to collect data on all Americans’ phone calls. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper’s office announced the court’s ruling in a statement, though officials didn’t make the ruling itself public, saying it was going through declassification procedures. The decision marks the 36th time the program has been approved by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. “It is the administration’s view, consistent with the recent holdings of the United States District Courts for...

Leaked documents now show what we all suspected: the NSA can turn your iPhone’s microphone and camera on and off without you knowing. According to Der Spiegel’s website: “The NSA’s ANT division develops implants for mobile phones and SIM cards. One of these is a spyware implant called “DROPOUTJEEP” — designed for the first generation of iPhones — which was still in development in 2008, shortly after the iPhone’s launch. This spyware was to make it possible to remotely download or upload files to a mobile phone. It would also, according to the catalog, allow the NSA to divert text...

A federal judge in New York on Friday ruled that the National Security Agency’s program that is systematically keeping phone records of all Americans is lawful, creating a conflict among lower courts and increasing the likelihood that the issue will be resolved by the Supreme Court. In the ruling, Judge William H. Pauley III, of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, granted a motion filed by the federal government to dismiss a challenge to the program brought by the American Civil Liberties Union, which had tried to halt the program. Judge Pauley said that...

Today, a judge ruled that the NSA surveillance program that collects millions of American's phone calls is "lawful." The case was brought by the ACLU: American Civil Liberties Union et al v. Clapper et al, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, No. 13-03994 In his ruling, U.S District Judge Willian Pauley described how the government program "vacuums up information about virtually every telephone call to, from, or within the United States." But went on to say that the program's constitutionality "is ultimately a question of reasonableness," and that there was no evidence that the government had used "bulk...

... Hi, and merry Christmas. I’m honored to have a chance to speak to you and your family this year. Recently, we learned that our governments, working in concert, have created a system of worldwide mass surveillance watching everything we do. Great Britain’s George Orwell warned us of the danger of this kind of information. The types of collection in the book: microphones, video cameras, TVs that watch us —are nothing compared to what we have today. We have sensors in our pockets that track us everywhere we go. Think about what that means for the privacy of the average...

The NSA and RSA have reported to have made a deal. In exchange for "back door privileges" the NSA paid RSA $10M. Thanks in a large part to Snowden, we now know that this story is true, particularly when you read the carefully crafted statement from the RSA denying they sold a back door to the NSA -- They just happened to accept $10M from the NSA at the time they were selecting a known faulty and broken random number generator used in encryption. Now we've all read about the global fallout and protestations from foreign governments saying how upset...

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu will ask US President Barack Obama to commute the life sentence of convicted Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard at a critical stage of the diplomatic talks with the Palestinian Authority, Channel 2 diplomatic correspondent Udi Segal reported Monday night. Netanyahu had tied Pollard’s release to talks with the Palestinians in the past. He reached a deal with former US president Bill Clinton to commute Pollard’s sentence in 1998 as part of the Wye River Accord, but Clinton reneged on the deal after then-CIA director George Tenet threatened to quit. The prime minister reportedly asked the US for...