Free Republic

SYRACUSE, N.Y. -- There are 1,228 cameras mounted on the trunks of police cars across New York. From the tiny village of Jordan to New York City, the cameras snap a picture of every plate on every car that drives by. It's an effortless 100 pictures a minute for each camera, called an automatic license plate reader. A few pictures each shift might produce an alarm from a statewide hotlist updated daily: The registration is suspended, the car is stolen, the driver is wanted. But the rest of the plate pictures - millions a day across the nation - are...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Police across the country may be intercepting phone calls or text messages to find suspects using a technology tool known as Stingray. But they're refusing to turn over details about its use or heavily censoring files when they do. Police say Stingray, a suitcase-size device that pretends it's a cell tower, is useful for catching criminals, but that's about all they'll say. For example, they won't disclose details about contracts with the device's manufacturer, Harris Corp., insisting they are protecting both police tactics and commercial secrets. The secrecy - at times imposed by nondisclosure agreements signed by...

A parking ticket, traffic citation or involvement in a minor fender-bender are enough to get a person's name and other personal information logged into a massive, obscure federal database run by the U.S. military. The Law Enforcement Information Exchange, or LinX, has already amassed 506.3 million law enforcement records ranging from criminal histories and arrest reports to field information cards filled out by cops on the beat even when no crime has occurred.

The next threat to your privacy could be hovering over head while you walk down the street. Hackers have developed a drone that can steal the contents of your smartphone -- from your location data to your Amazon (AMZN, Fortune 500) password -- and they've been testing it out in the skies of London. The research will be presented next week at the Black Hat Asia cybersecurity conference in Singapore. The technology equipped on the drone, known as Snoopy, looks for mobile devices with Wi-Fi settings turned on. Snoopy takes advantage of a feature built into all smartphones and tablets:...

Initially, I was gratified to learn that Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, was unafraid to take on the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) over the issue of domestic spying. The CIA is limited by its charter to stealing secrets from foreigners outside the U.S. However, in a recent dust-up, Feinstein took to the Senate floor to accuse the CIA of spying on staff members of her committee while they were examining CIA documents in Virginia. This may be the first acknowledgment by any senior government official who walks the halls of the intelligence community that...

We're workin' our jobs, collect our pay Believe we're gliding down the highway, when in fact we're slip sliding away - Paul Simon, Slip Sliding Away Paul Simon wasn’t singing about our liberty in his song, but the words apply to what’s happening in the Senate and to our Constitution. While President Obama was poorly reading cue cards between two ferns for a comedy website, a battle was brewing in the Senate. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., accused the Central Intelligence Agency “of ­secretly removing documents, searching computers used by the committee and attempting to intimidate congressional investigators by requesting an...

Now you're gonna have to answer to the Coca-Cola company, Mr. Obama. OK, maybe not Coke, but, you’ll have to answer to today’s bubbly equivalent, which can also rot you from the inside out: Facebook. Yeah. So be warned “Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg called President Barack Obama Wednesday night to complain about U.S. government actions that are undermining trust in the Internet,” reports Politico, “after a report that described how the National Security Agency posed as a Facebook server to inject malicious software into targets’ computers.” I wonder if Zuck’s voice broke when he talked to Obama. I wonder if...

New research published by Stanford Univeristy Wednesday reveal phone and Internet metadata collected by the NSA can expose far more information about an individual than the agency admits, including, “medical conditions, financial and legal connections, and even whether they own a gun.” Two of the school’s computer science graduate students were able to uncover the sensitive personal details of individuals from phone data details, like the numbers of callers and recipients, the location of callers, phone serial numbers and the length of conversations — all of which are data the signals intelligence agency collects in bulk both domestically and internationally....

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein "reluctantly" accused the CIA on Tuesday of spying on her committee. The CIA should be very afraid. DiFi has stood out as Langley's fiercest Democratic defender. Now she threatens to become the agency's biggest nightmare. Edward Snowden accused Feinstein of hypocrisy for protesting when spooks spy on Congress but not protesting when people spy on regular folk. Others hailed her for courageously standing up to CIA thuggery. Me? I cannot fathom why the CIA would pick this fight, although that doesn't mean Feinstein's wrong. How did this convoluted story begin? As every newspaper reader...

America as a police state no longer is a conspiracy spin, but now is a very painful reality! While the USA has only 5% of the world’s population, our country now jails 25% of the world’s prisoners. This scary news stream rolled across the bottom of our TV screens this week and a great new book about what’s being done to average citizens is a must read! “Deep State: Inside the Government’s Secrecy Industry” is a big reveal for we ordinary citizens who are being watched 24/7 by a statist government that refuses to police itself. “We have more in...

A leading US senator has said that President Obama knew of an “unprecedented action” taken by the CIA against the Senate intelligence committee, which has apparently prompted an inspector general’s inquiry at Langley. The subtle reference in a Tuesday letter from Senator Mark Udall to Obama, seeking to enlist the president’s help in declassifying a 6,300-page inquiry by the committee into torture carried out by CIA interrogators after 9/11, threatens to plunge the White House into a battle between the agency and its Senate overseers.

Giant Eagle won't say much about the information it collects on people who enroll in its rewards program to earn savings on food and fuel, but it knows who has a weakness for Goldfish crackers. GNC can see when your New Year's resolution ended. And Dick's Sporting Goods has a pretty good idea who will return to its stores this spring to gear up for baseball or softball season. Consumers willingly — if unwittingly — provide trillions of “data points” to companies about their purchases, intimate habits and even where a computer mouse hovers on a computer screen without clicking....

When a hypertotalitarian banana republic takes another turn for the gigasurreal, even Elon Musk is speechless. In the most glaring example of how farcical idiocy has become the new normal, we will remind readers (especially those who do not follow us on twitter), of the following blurb from last night:

The government is considering enlarging the National Security Agency's controversial collection of Americans' phone records...

Why should we worry about tyrants abroad who would like to strip us of our freedoms? Their ultimate goal is not to hijack our planes so they can fly them into buildings or set off bombs in densely populated areas. Would they be attempting to blow us up if we simply declared "we surrender, do with us as you wish"? No, if we did surrender to the jihadists, the end result would only be an expedited version of what this President is already orchestrating right before our eyes on a daily basis - with no opposition. The NSA surveillance is...

Seek 'biosignature' spying ability to 'identify, locate specific individuals'The federal government doesn’t just want the ability to track down your car; it wants to be able to track down your body as well. Just as details are emerging about a controversial, nationwide vehicle-surveillance database, WND has learned the federal government is planning an even more invasive spy program using “physiological signatures” to track down individuals. The goal of this research is to detect – as well as analyze and categorize – unique traits the government can exploit to “identify, locate and track specific individuals or groups of people.” According to...

I’m a national security hawk. But, I’m also a free-market, anti-crony capitalist. I’m a Catholic, I’m a dad and I’m a businessman. And an American. For all these reasons, I stand with Rand in his lawsuit against Barack Obama and his co-defendants: the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander and FBI Director James Comey. “Paul’s suit, filed in conjunction with conservative group FreedomWorks,” says the New York Daily News, “alleges that the NSA’s bulk collection program, under which the agency has collected the telephone metadata of many Americans, violates the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution,...

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.