Free Republic

Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli leaves office Saturday, but he will continue to take on what he considers overreaching by the federal government. Cuccinelli will be the lead lawyer in a suit filed by Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., against the Obama administration over the data-collection policies of the National Security Agency, according to The Associated Press. As attorney general, Cuccinelli took on the Obama administration in court over the Affordable Care Act and the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate emissions....

“Has the NSA spied, or is the NSA currently spying, on members of Congress or other American elected officials?” This is the huge question U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is asking the National Security Administration in a new letter to the agency’s chief, Gen. Keith Alexander. If at first glance this seems like a legislator’s blind fishing expedition prompted by fact-free conspiracy theory, think again. As I noted in a NSFWCORP report back in August, there’s very good reason for every elected official in Washington to suspect – and fear – that the NSA is surveilling them. We already know...

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...

The NSA's TAO hacking unit is considered to be the intelligence agency's top secret weapon. It maintains its own covert network, infiltrates computers around the world and even intercepts shipping deliveries to plant back doors in electronics ordered by those it is targeting. In January 2010, numerous homeowners in San Antonio, Texas, stood baffled in front of their closed garage doors. They wanted to drive to work or head off to do their grocery shopping, but their garage door openers had gone dead, leaving them stranded. No matter how many times they pressed the buttons, the doors didn't budge. The...

Many Israelis were scandalized when documents released by Edward Snowden revealed that their best friend, America, had in 2009 targeted a former prime minister and defense minister for secret surveillance. But their political leaders were not surprised. For years, the United States has been running a complex eavesdropping and surveillance web to spy on friends and foes alike, including Israel. Satellites gather and transmit data to command centers, “informers” operate in the field and the most fertile sources of all are not human but the instruments which bug cell phones, tablets and social networks. The US National Security Agency, NSA,...

This is ‘very grave if true,’ says senior MK, calling it ‘classic espionage’ that Israel would not carry out against the US US intelligence not only spied on then-defense minister Ehud Barak’s offices during 2008-2009, but also maintained an apartment opposite Barak’s primary residence for that purpose, according to a report on Sunday, which came amid new revelations of the extent of US and British intelligence activity against Israel and other allies. In 2007, Israeli intelligence noted that the US government had rented an apartment across the street from Barak’s high-rise apartment in Tel Aviv, and observed “sizable amounts of...

The Obama administration moved late Friday to prevent a judge in California from ruling on the constitutionality of warrantless surveillance programs authorized during the Bush administration, telling a court that recent disclosures about National Security Agency spying were not enough to undermine its claim that litigating the case would jeopardize state secrets. In a set of filings in the two long-running cases in the Northern District of California, the government acknowledged facts that it had long held out to be secrets that would put the country at risk if they were to come out in court, including that the N.S.A....

Reuters reports that the NSA paid massive computer security firm RSA $10 million to promote a flawed encryption system so that the surveillance organization could wiggle its way around security. In other words, the NSA bribed the firm to leave the back door to computers all over the world open. Thanks to documents leaked by Edward Snowden, we already knew the NSA played a central role in promoting a flawed formula for generating random numbers, which if used in encryption, essentially gives the spies easy access to computing systems. A piece of RSA software, bSafe, became the most significant vector...

A member of the White House review panel on NSA surveillance said he was “absolutely” surprised when he discovered the agency’s lack of evidence that the bulk collection of telephone call records had thwarted any terrorist attacks. “It was, ‘Huh, hello? What are we doing here?’” said Geoffrey Stone, a University of Chicago law professor, in an interview with NBC News. “The results were very thin.” While Stone said the mass collection of telephone call records was a “logical program” from the NSA’s perspective, one question the White House panel was seeking to answer was whether it had actually stopped...

Surveillance video shows armed robber tackled by passengers aboard Seattle bus The shocking footage shows the moment a victim lunged at the gunman, who police identified as 19-year-old Trevonnte Brown, on a bus. A group of Good Samaritans helped tackle the suspect to the ground. A brave group of straphangers took down an armed robber after he pointed his gun at a victim’s head on a Seattle bus, newly released surveillance footage shows. The two-minute clip shows the gunman, who cops identified as 19-year-old Trevonnte Brown, trolling down the aisle of the downtown bus after robbing two men of their...

"I envy Obama because he can spy on his allies without any consequences," said Putin when asked about how his relations had changed with the US following Snowden’s espionage revelations. During an annual question-and-answer session with journalists, Putin praised Edward Snowden’s actions, saying that he was working for a “noble cause.” At the same time he accepted the importance of espionage programs in the fight against global terrorism, but said the NSA needed guidelines to limit its powers. “There is nothing to be upset about and nothing to be proud of, spying has always been and is one of the...

Not the result His Majesty expected, needless to say. Remember, he chose this panel because he trusted they’d go face-first into the tank for him by rubber-stamping mass surveillance. In the end they recommended 46 changes to the program, the most prominent of which is to have telecom companies control the database of customers’ metadata going forward rather than let the feds hoard the info and do lord knows what with it as government’s data-crunching capabilities inevitably expand. Only by getting an order from the FISA Court should the NSA be able to access the database, the panel said, and...

The Daily Mail reports that Barack Obama is still Barack Obama. During a White House meeting called to brief America’s largest tech companies today about government overreach in electronic surveillance, President Barack Obama changed the subject – angering some meeting participants by shifting gears to address the failed launch of healthcare.gov. ‘That wasn’t what we came for,’ a vice-president of a company whose CEO attended told MailOnline. ‘We really didn’t care for a PR pitch about how the administration is trying to salvage its internal health care tech nightmare.’ One executive said that meeting participants were dead-set against straying from...

MOSCOW—The space race may be over but Russia hopes the smartphone race has just begun. Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev was among the first to receive a YotaPhone—the country’s first foray into the hyper-competitive smartphone market—and was told industry pace-setter Apple Inc. better watch its back. “Is Apple concerned about our smartphone?” he asked Sergey Chemezov, the head of Russia’s state-run defense corporation, Rostec, who gave him the phone on Wednesday hours after it hit the market. “Definitely,” Mr. Chemezov replied, according to a transcript of the exchange posted on the government’s website.....

The U.S. Government, An Implicated Billionaire, Fortune-Seeking Journalists & A Public in the Dark Update 2: Glenn Greenwald Goes on Record: “I Don’t Doubt PayPal Cooperates with NSA!” Update 1: Verbatim Copy of Mr. Binney’s Statement The 50,000-pages of documents obtained by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden contain extensive documentation of PayPal Corporation’s partnership and cooperation with the National Security Agency (NSA), according to three NSA veterans. To date, no information has been released as to the extent of the working relationship and cooperation between the two entities- NSA and PayPal Corporation. What’s more, the billionaire owner of PayPal Corporation has...

Summary: The Reform Government Surveillance group, an alliance between eight major technology firms, aims to persuade the U.S. government to stop undermining the privacy rights of the general public. Household names including Apple and Google have formally called for changes to U.S. surveillance practices and policy, arguing that current operations undermine the freedom of people. Eight companies, Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo and LinkedIn have formed an alliance called the Reform Government Surveillance group. Although usually fierce competitors, the group have come together in agreement over the U.S. government's spying programs -- brought to light by former National...

The City Council has given the Police Department the green light to expand the coverage area and scope of the gunshot recognition system it will deploy in an effort to help reduce gun violence in the city. Video surveillance cameras will also be purchased for the two areas. The ShotSpotter technology and the surveillance cameras will be integrated into the Police Department's Real Time Crime Center, enabling police to direct the cameras to the area where gunshots originate. But at the urging of the City Council Public Safety Committee, the city manager was asked to find ways to expand the...

I don't know how to embed the video in the link but this important, and it is one of the issues that connects the Left and the Right which makes for a powerful combination. I think this is important. http://www.ted.com/talks/mikko_hypponen_how_the_nsa_betrayed_the_world_s_trust_time_to_act.html http://blog.ted.com/2013/11/07/reading-on-the-state-of-digital-privacy-nsa-surveillance/ http://blog.ted.com/2013/07/17/security-experts-on-the-nsas-real-problems/

SAN JOSE, Calif. — AT&T, under fire for ongoing revelations that it shares and sells customers' communications records to the National Security Agency and other U.S. intelligence offices, says it isn't required to disclose to shareholders what it does with customers' data. In a letter sent Thursday to the Securities and Exchange Commission, AT&T said it protects customer information and complies with government requests for call records "only to the extent required by law." The telecom giant's letter was a response to a shareholder revolt sparked on Nov. 20 by the New York State Common Retirement Fund, the ACLU of...

EX-OFFICIAL SAYS FBI CAN SECRETLY ACTIVATE AN INDIVIDUAL’S WEBCAM WITHOUT THE INDICATOR LIGHT TURNING ON The FBI can secretly activate a computer’s webcam to spy on an individual without turning on the indicator light, a former official revealed to the Washington Post in an article published Friday. According to the Washington Post’s account of what Marcus Thomas — former assistant director of the FBI’s Operational Technology Division in Quantico — said, “The FBI has been able to covertly activate a computer’s camera — without triggering the light that lets users know it is recording — for several years, and has...