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Congress this week quietly passed a bill that may give unprecedented legal authority to the government's warrantless surveillance powers, despite a last-minute effort by Rep. Justin Amash to kill the bill. Amash staged an aggressive eleventh-hour rally Wednesday night to block passage of the Intelligence Authorization Act, which will fund intelligence agencies for the next fiscal year. The Michigan Republican sounded alarms over recently amended language in the package that he said will for the first time give congressional backing to a controversial Reagan-era decree granting broad surveillance authority to the president.

An army is attacking the United States. Its war is being waged without bullets or fanfare. Denied by its government, these soldiers operate in shadows and in silence. Yet, glimpses of their operations are seen on a daily basis—hackers and spies attacking and stealing from U.S. businesses and the U.S. government. Until now, a complete view of their operations and of the military department that gives them their orders remained hidden. Yet, China’s spy and cyberoperations all share one thing in common: they’re all orchestrated under the People’s Liberation Army General Staff Department (GSD), the Chinese military’s top-level department dedicated...

WASHINGTON -- Senate Republicans on Tuesday blocked a sweeping overhaul of the once-secret National Security Agency program that collects records of Americans' phone calls in bulk. Democrats and a handful of Republicans who supported the measure failed to secure the 60 votes they needed to take up the legislation. The vote was 58-42 for consideration. Sen. Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, worked hard to defeat the bill, which had the support of the Obama administration and a coalition of technology companies, including Apple, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo. "This is the worst possible time to be tying our hands behind our...

As fears grow over Iran secretly developing nuclear weapons, U.S. counterintelligence officials are keeping a close eye on scientists from Iran and other Muslim nations working at the U.S. nuclear weapons laboratories, WND has learned. The Energy Department recently revoked the security clearance of an Egyptian-born nuclear physicist because he was suspected of "conflicting allegiances." Last year, DOE and FBI agents began questioning Moniem El-Ganayni, who worked on the side as a Muslim prison chaplain.

WASHINGTON — In a rare public accounting of its mass surveillance program, the United States Postal Service reported that it approved nearly 50,000 requests last year from law enforcement agencies and its own internal inspection unit to secretly monitor the mail of Americans for use in criminal and national security investigations. The number of requests, contained in a 2014 audit of the surveillance program by the Postal Service’s inspector general, shows that the surveillance program is more extensive than previously disclosed and that oversight protecting Americans from potential abuses is lax. The audit, along with interviews and documents obtained by...

This has been an interesting story since it first surfaced in May of 2013. Sharyl has been tight lipped since she announced knowing who had bugged her back in June of 2013. The exfiltration and bugging was extensive and highly professional. Her Skype program was used as a bugging tool for government agencies (NSA, CIA, FBI) to listen in to her conversations, and electronic classified documents were planted in her computer system in case blackmail leverage was needed… This was done while Sharyl was investigating Fast-n-Furious and Benghazi. (New York Post) A former CBS News reporter who quit the network...

From the moment that Sharyl Attkisson met a shadowy source I’ll call Big Mac, she was plunged into a nightmare involving mysterious surveillance of her computers. They met at a McDonald’s in Northern Virginia at the beginning of 2013, and the source (she dubs him Number One) warned her about the threat of government spying. During their next hamburger rendezvous, Big Mac told Attkisson, then a CBS News reporter constantly at odds with the Obama administration, that he was “shocked” and “flabbergasted” by his examination of her computer and that this was “worse than anything Nixon ever did.” Attkisson’s forthcoming...

The New Yorker Festival presents Edward Snowden in conversation with Jane Mayer.

The information leaked by Edward Snowden last year raised the public consciousness quite a bit about user privacy and security in using certain services (not to mention the hope that companies won’t be that willing to acquiesce to government requests for user information). In recent weeks, Apple CEO Tim Cook has been emphasizing a new focus on user security and encryption. Both Apple and Google have implemented stronger data encryption so it’s harder to compromise user data. The problem is, however, that it would be harder for law enforcement to access that data too. And FBI Director James Comey isn’t...

Bloomberg, link only

Michael Corkery and Jessica Silver-Greenberg September 24, 2014 The thermometer showed a 103.5-degree fever, and her 10-year-old’s asthma was flaring up. Mary Bolender, who lives in Las Vegas, needed to get her daughter to an emergency room, but her 2005 Chrysler van would not start. The cause was not a mechanical problem — it was her lender. Ms. Bolender was three days behind on her monthly car payment. Her lender, C.A.G. Acceptance of Mesa, Ariz., remotely activated a device in her car’s dashboard that prevented her car from starting. Before she could get back on the road, she had to...

The CIA’s ongoing defiance of congressional authority continued during a closed-door meeting last week after Director John Brennan refused to tell lawmakers who authorized the illegal surveillance of Senate Intelligence Committee computers, which were used to compile a report on the agency’s interrogation practices.

“Academia has been and remains a key target of foreign intelligence services, including the [Cuban intelligence service],” says an FBI report from Sept. 2nd.“One recruitment method used by the Cubans is to appeal to American leftists’ ideology. “For instance, someone who is allied with communist or leftist ideology may assist the [Cuban intelligence service] because of his/her personal beliefs.” Not that any of the above should come as earth-shaking news to anyone who:A: Attended a typical college and suffered through typical Liberal Arts courses. B. Knows anything at all about the history of Cuban spying in the U.S.Give the A.B....

An environmental group that stands accused of overstepping its inspection authority and trespassing across a Virginia farm also tried to have video cameras installed to monitor the property. An officer of the Piedmont Environmental Council proposed that one of that group’s board members “runs a security company and could offer the use of security cameras to record visitors,” according to documents examined by The Daily Signal. Martha Boneta, who owns Liberty Farm in Paris, Va., last year sued the Piedmont Environmental Council and others because, she said, PEC encouraged Fauquier County officials to harass her with citations of zoning violations...

German secret agents intercepted one of Hillary Clinton's phone calls while she was US secretary of state and also listened in to a call by John Kerry, her successor, it emerged this weekend, in an embarrassing reversal of the spying scandal that blew up when it was revealed last year that America bugged Angela Merkel's mobile phone. Mrs Clinton was on a US government plane when German intelligence services overheard her call and, against their own internal protocol, stored it, intelligence sources told German media. The intercepted phone call took place in 2012 between Mrs Clinton and Kofi Annan, the...

Do you ever feel like you're being watched? In the past, you could chalk it up to paranoia, close the curtains and get on with your life. Thanks to technology, it's not just your imagination. You really are being watched in your home, at work and everywhere in between. From online advertisers and hackers to the NSA and other government agencies, everyone is trying to keep tabs on you. And things keep getting worse. If you think you know every gadget and organization that's a danger, think again. Here are three things spying on you that you probably didn't know...

In some respects, the recent admission by CIA Director John Brennan that his agents and his lawyers have been spying on the senators whose job it is to monitor the agency should come as no surprise. The agency's job is to steal and keep secrets, and implicit in those tasks, Brennan would no doubt argue, is lying. Yet in another respect, this may very well be a smoking gun in the now substantial case against President Barack Obama that alleges that much of his official behavior has manifested lawlessness and incompetence. It is hard to believe that the president did...

A few days ago this writer went to his first Minnesotans Against Common Core meeting in Becker Minnesota. This writer was not surprised to hear various concerns the speakers mentioned during the course of this meeting. Establishing Child Career Pathways beginning in Second Grade; Recording of "Biometrics" of Children in data bases for future Government use; Dumbing Down of the masses; Indoctrination children to make them more compliant to authority; Conditioning Individuality out of Children; Extending the Length of the School Year. Understandably, the parents in the audience were upset, agitated and angry over children having their career paths set...

With the escape route of deniability closed, CIA Director John Brennan grudgingly apologized to Senate intelligence committee leaders for his Agency’s covert perusal of their correspondence. “Yeah, we’re sorry,” Brennan growled. “But I still don’t see what the big deal is. We spy on everyone. Why should Senators be exempt from our efforts to protect national security? Are they somehow better than the average Americans they supposedly represent?” “Is it really implausible that Senators having access to classified information might pose a significant security risk?” Brennan continued. “I could argue that the need to keep an eye on what they...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Wall Street firms led by Goldman Sachs Group Inc are close to buying a stake in chat and instant messaging startup Perzo Inc in pursuit of an alternative to a similar application from Bloomberg LP, sources familiar with Goldman's plans said.