Free Republic

On Tuesday, Barack Obama is coming to Germany. But who, really, will be visiting? He is the 44th president of the United States. He is the first African American to hold the office. He is an intelligent lawyer. And he is a Nobel Peace Prize laureate. But is he a friend? The revelations brought to us by IT expert Edward Snowden have made certain what paranoid computer geeks and left-wing conspiracy theorists have long claimed: that we are being watched. All the time and everywhere. And it is the Americans who are doing the watching. … We’re currently in the...

Just a few days ago, the man whom many Germans now see as one of the greatest villains in the world visited Berlin. Keith Alexander, the head of the world’s most powerful intelligence operation, the National Security Agency (NSA), had arranged meetings with important representatives of the German government … Why is the German government reacting so calmly to something that it should find alarming? Perhaps because these revelations are nothing new for it? Because the Germans would like to enjoy the same capabilities that PRISM affords the Americans? Or because our friends from the other side of the Atlantic...

The vast majority of the annual shooting homicides are committed by inner-city and minority youths below the age of 30. Handguns are involved in 80% of all murders. Rifles and shotguns account for less than 10% of homicides. No matter; the National Rifle Association is now blamed for generic gun violence, especially the mass shootings at schools, even though usually no one knows of any proposed gun law — barring outright confiscation of previously purchased firearms, bullets, and clips — that would have prevented the shooters at Sandy Hook and Columbine. Gun merchants are blamed by the president while in...

A new rule issued late Friday requires state, federal and local agencies as well as health insurers to swap the protected personal health information of anybody seeking to join the new health care program that will be enforced by the Internal Revenue Service. Personal health information, or PHI, is highly protected under federal law, but the latest ruling from the Department of Health and Human Services allows agencies to trade the information to verify that Obamacare applicants are getting the minimum amount of health insurance coverage they need from the health "exchanges." The ruling, explained on pages 72-73 of the...

Fighting terrorism? Don't be a chump. Excuses usually trade on something very important and genuine. But what is truly important can be abused, precisely because it should impress us. Government tries to fool us with phony excuses to do whatever officials and bureaucrats want to do. The NSA, et al., failed to detect the Tsarnaev brothers -- even after being tipped off by Russia -- before the Boston Marathon bombing. FBI agents actually investigated the Tsarnaev family in detail. Russia's tip would justify continuing, specific search warrants and phone taps. Yet the NSA and FBI never saw the bumbling brothers...

National Security Agency discloses in secret Capitol Hill briefing that thousands of analysts can listen to domestic phone calls. That authorization appears to extend to e-mail and text messages too.

<p>George Orwell was right. He was just 30 years early.</p> <p>In its April cover story, Wired has an exclusive report on the NSA's Utah Data Center, which is a must read for anyone who believes any privacy is still a possibility in the United States: "A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks.... Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket litter.”... The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013." In other words, in just over 1 year, virtually anything one communicates through any traceable medium, or any record of one's existence in the electronic medium, which these days is everything, will unofficially be property of the US government to deal with as it sees fit.</p>

I haven't been able to write this week here because I've been participating in the debate over the fallout from last week's NSA stories, and because we are very busy working on and writing the next series of stories that will begin appearing very shortly. I did, though, want to note a few points, and particularly highlight what Democratic Rep. Loretta Sanchez said after Congress on Wednesday was given a classified briefing by NSA officials on the agency's previously secret surveillance activities: "What we learned in there is significantly more than what is out in the media today. . ....

Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson – President George W. Bush’s top speechwriter from 2001 to 2006 – was hired by the Post in 2007 because he would be “a different kind of conservative” and "an independent voice." Translation: he would slash other people on the right as dishonest, dishonorable, unpatriotic people. He has not attacked talk-show hosts on MSNBC or other leftists this way. In his Friday column, Gerson whacked Ron Paul, Rush Limbaugh, and Mark Levin with these harsh attacks. Mark Levin offered NewsBusters his reaction. Gerson began: A number of libertarians and conservative populists have found data collection...

Stewart Rhodes, the group's founder, has emailed me a statement about Snowden: He is an example of what needs to be done by anyone who has knowledge of such gross violations of our rights. We need more to stand up, because this is surely the mere tip of the iceberg of the infrastructure for a police state that is being built over us. This is about far more than supposed attempts to ferry out al Qaeda operatives. This is part of a growing Stasi and Checka style surveillance police state which tags, tracks, and prepares plans to detain dissidents with...

The rabbit hole just got deeper. A whole lot deeper. On Sunday we predicated that "there's one reason why the administration, James Clapper and the NSA should just keep their mouths shut as the PRISM-gate fallout escalates: with every incremental attempt to refute some previously unknown facet of the US Big Brother state, a new piece of previously unleaked information from the same intelligence organization now scrambling for damage control, emerges and exposes the brand new narrative as yet another lie, forcing even more lies, more retribution against sources, more journalist persecution and so on." And like a hole that...

Speaking at a fundraising dinner held in Silicon Valley for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee on Thursday night, President Barack Obama said that the government should play a critical role in creating the nation’s “broadband” infrastructure—a role similar to the one the government plays in building roads and bridges. “[G]overnment has a critical role to play in funding science and research, in creating the infrastructure—not only the old infrastructure of roads and bridges and ports, but the new infrastructure of smartgrids and broadband,” Obama said. Broadband is the medium through which many Americans now get Internet access delivered to their...

And to think they told us the War on Terror was over.With news that the National Security Agency is currently collecting the telephone records of millions of us through one of America’s largest telecoms providers, Republicans have a chance to dramatically recast themselves in the debate over state surveillance and privacy.An order requires Verizon on an “ongoing, daily basis” to hand over information on all telephone calls in its systems to the NSA — both domestically and between the United States and other nations. A White House official has already defended the actions: “On its face, the order reprinted...

In an urgent, important blog post, computer scientist and security expert Ed Felten lays out the case against rules requiring manufacturers to put wiretapping backdoors in their communications tools. Since the early 1990s, manufacturers of telephone switching equipment have had to follow a US law called CALEA that says that phone switches have to have a deliberate back-door that cops can use to secretly listen in on phone calls without having to physically attach anything to them. This has already been a huge security problem -- through much of the 1990s, AT&T's CALEA controls went through a Solaris machine that...

Big Brother has been outsourced. The police can find out where you are, where you’ve been, even where you’re going. All thanks to that handy little human tracking device in your pocket: your cellphone.  There are 331 million cellphone subscriptions—about 20 million more than there are residents—in the United States. Nearly 90 percent of adult Americans carry at least one phone. The phones communicate via a nationwide network of nearly 300,000 cell towers and 600,000 micro sites, which perform the same function as towers. When they are turned on, they ping these nodes once every seven seconds or so, registering...

As the lame-duck session of the 112th Congress begins, millions of Americans are looking to the elected members of the 113th Congress to fix a host of problems ailing the country. The economy and job creation aside, one of the most pressing issues is reining in out-of-control federal bureaucracies. The Environmental Protection Agency comes to mind, as does the Department of Agriculture's promotion of GM foods. But additionally concerning is the rapid expansion of the size, scope and reach of the Transportation Security Administration, which continues to usurp authority and trample constitutional rights of more and more Americans - especially...

Amnesty Intentional, Oxfam, Reporters without Borders as well as internet rights groups and the Council of Europe all spoke out against the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) at a European Parliament hearing on Wednesday (11 April). "The vision set out by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is at stake," warned Marianne Mollmann, senior policy advisor of the London-based organization human rights group Amnesty International. Mollmann said the trade agreement threatens the right to the freedom of expression, the right to health, the right to due process and fair trial, and the right of an author to benefit from the protection...

AUSTRALIANS could soon be paid for spotting crimes happening on the other side of the world. British company Internet Eyes will offer a reward of up to $1740 to people who detect shoplifting and other crimes on a network of UK security cameras. Subscribers will watch live footage over the internet on their home computers. The company believes the different time zones made Australia the ideal location for detecting night-time crime in the UK.

Rep. Al O'Brien, D-Mountlake Terrace, a retired Seattle police sergeant, has sponsored a bill to look into the possibility of surgically implanting tracking devices in sex offenders who have been released to the community. His proposal, embodied in House Bill 1142, would hire the Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs to see whether implanting "subcutaneous" radio frequency identification devices could be used economically to keep an eye on offenders. The group would report back to the Legislature in December. That RFID technology is what the state uses on the Narrows Bridge to electronically collect tolls from motorist. It's that...