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WASHINGTON, Nov. 24 — When President Bush went on national television one Saturday morning last December to acknowledge the existence of a secret wiretapping program outside the courts, the fallout was fierce and immediate. Mr. Bush’s opponents accused him of breaking the law, with a few even calling for his impeachment. His backers demanded that he be given express legal authority to do what he had done. Law professors talked, civil rights groups sued and a federal judge in Detroit declared the wiretapping program unconstitutional. But as Democrats prepare to take over on Capitol Hill, not much has really changed....

Testimony in the trial of Chicago resident Muhammad Salah and Abdelhaleem al-Ashqar of Northern Virginia, continued yesterday. FBI Agents gave testimony focusing on items found in Ashqar's home during a search of his Oxford Mississippi residence on December 26, 1993, in addition to wiretaps of his phone and fax lines. Special Agent Bradley Benabidez testified that the FBI acquired over 2400 hours of audio during the year that they maintained a wiretap. Benabidez further described the December 1993 search of Ashqar’s home where a team of agents from the FBI photographed over 1600 documents. A few of those documents which...

WASHINGTON — Senate Republicans blocked Democratic attempts to rein in President Bush's domestic wiretapping program today, endorsing a White House-supported bill that would give the controversial surveillance legal status. Under pressure from the Bush administration for quick action, the full Senate could take up the measure next week. Progress on a companion bill in the House was not as tidy, in part because GOP leaders and Bush are intensely negotiating restrictions it proposes on the surveillance program. Even as the Senate Judiciary Committee advanced Chairman Arlen Specter's bill to the Senate floor on a party line vote, the same panel...

After listening extensively to the Sep 11th tapes, I'm annoyed, frustrated, and bitter. Listening to those tapes made me more proud than ever to be in the military. Those people in the towers pleaded for their lives while they choked on smoke and were burnt alive. The operators of the 911 systems in NY were powerless to do anything. Those innocent civilians, some 3000 of them, were literally tortured as they awaited their fate. As the oxygen was taken from their lungs, their deaths were prolonged. In agony, they called for someone, anyone, to help them. Sure, there were some...

Probably a duplicate post, but this is important: HICAGO -- Citing national security, a federal judge Tuesday threw out a lawsuit aimed at blocking AT&T Inc. from giving telephone records to the government for use in the war on terror. "The court is persuaded that requiring AT&T to confirm or deny whether it has disclosed large quantities of telephone records to the federal government could give adversaries of this country valuable insight into the government's intelligence activities," U.S. District Judge Matthew F. Kennelly said. A number of such lawsuits have been filed around the country in the wake of news...

CHICAGO (AFP) - A federal judge heard arguments in a suit arguing that US President George W. Bush overstepped his authority when he authorized the use of warrantless wiretaps on Americans. The arguments came less than two weeks after the Supreme Court ruled that the Bush administration overstepped its authority in setting up military tribunals to try war on terror detainees held at a US naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The American Civil Liberties Union asked a judge in Detroit, Michigan to rule that the wiretaps are illegal because they circumvent the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which requires the...

WASHINGTON, (AP) -- A divided federal appeals court Friday sided with the Bush administration over rules that make it easier for police and the FBI to wiretap Internet phone calls. In a 2-1 ruling, the court said the Federal Communications was correct when it decided that providers of Internet phone service and broadband services have legal obligations similar to those of telephone companies. The FCC was responding to Justice Department complaints that companies must ensure their equipment using new technologies can accommodate police wiretaps under the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, known as CALEA. "We cannot set aside...

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) and conservative members of his panel have reached agreement on legislation that may determine the legality of the National Security Agency’s (NSA) surveillance program, GOP sources say. Specter has mollified conservative opposition to his bill by agreeing to drop the requirement that the Bush administration seek a legal judgment on the program from a special court set up by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978. Instead, Specter agreed to allow the administration to retain an important legal defense by allowing the court, which holds its hearings in secret, to review the...

WE ARE IN the first war of the Information Age, and we have a critical advantage over our enemy: We are far better at gathering intelligence. It's an advantage we must utilize, and it's keeping us safe. But every time classified national security information is leaked, our ability to gather information on those who would do us harm is eroded. We suffered a setback Thursday when USA Today ran a front-page story alleging that the National Security Agency was collecting domestic phone records. This article hurt our efforts to protect Americans by giving the enemy valuable insights into the Terrorist...

US spy agency 'monitoring calls' Land lines and mobiles are both reportedly being logged A United States intelligence agency has been collecting data on the phone calls of tens of millions of Americans, a report in USA Today has alleged.The country's three biggest phone companies have been handing over call records to the National Security Agency (NSA) since 2001, the newspaper says. President Bush refused to confirm or deny the existence of the programme. He said he had authorised intelligence gathering in the wake of 9/11, adding that the activities were "lawful". "Our intelligence activities strictly target al-Qaeda and...

Valerie Plame should be the next Director of Central Intelligence, not Gen. Mike Hayden. Now that the CIA's Praetorian Guard has -- with the connivance of National Intelligence Director John Negroponte -- rid itself of Porter Goss, the CIA is confidently preparing to march back into the intelligence dark ages that preceded 9/11. Gen. Hayden -- former head of the National Intelligence Agency and most famous for his strong defense of the NSA terrorist surveillance program -- is slated to be nominated for the DCI post today. Hayden, now Negroponte's deputy and choice for DCI, will face tough questioning in...

WASHINGTON--Broadband providers and Internet phone companies will have to pick up the tab for the cost of building in mandatory wiretap access for police surveillance, federal regulators ruled Wednesday. The Federal Communications Commission voted unanimously to levy what likely will amount to wiretapping taxes on companies, municipalities and universities, saying it would create an incentive for them to keep costs down and that it was necessary to fight the war on terror. Universities have estimated their cost to be about $7 billion. "The first obligation is...the safety of the people," said FCC Commissioner Michael Copps, a Democrat. "This commission supports...

INTELLIGENCE OPERATIONS: Phone Taps Just Got Impossible April 12, 2006: Eavesdropping on phone calls just got a lot harder. Phil Zimmermann, the guy who invented PGP encryption for Internet mail, has developed a similar product, Zfone, for VOIP (telephone calls over the Internet). Zfone, like PGP, is free and easy to use. PGP drove intelligence agencies nuts, because it gave criminals and terrorists access to industrial grade cryptography. PGP doesn't stop the police or intel people from reading encrypted email, but it does slow them down. Zfone, however, uses stronger encryption. This means more delays, perhaps fatal delays, in finding...

WASHINGTON, March 28 — Five former judges on the nation's most secretive court, including one who resigned in apparent protest over President Bush's domestic eavesdropping, urged Congress on Tuesday to give the court a formal role in overseeing the surveillance program. In a rare glimpse into the inner workings of the secretive court, known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, several former judges who served on the panel also voiced skepticism at a Senate hearing about the president's constitutional authority to order wiretapping on Americans without a court order. They also suggested that the program could imperil criminal prosecutions that...

A panel of former Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judges yesterday told members of the Senate Judiciary Committee that President Bush did not act illegally when he created by executive order a wiretapping program conducted by the National Security Agency (NSA). The five judges testifying before the committee said they could not speak specifically to the NSA listening program without being briefed on it, but that a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act does not override the president's constitutional authority to spy on suspected international agents under executive order. "If a court refuses a FISA application and there is not sufficient time for...

BELLE PLAINE, WI (AP) -- Sen. Russ Feingold says he favors wiretapping terrorists, though he wants President Bush censured because of his domestic wiretapping program. "If you were on the phone with an al-Qaida person, I support your being wiretapped, all the time, for a long time," the Wisconsin Democrat said Monday during a listening session with constituents in Shawano County. "We have laws already that allow the president to wiretap your line for 72 hours without a warrant. All he has to do is apply for that warrant. . . . The whole thing they're saying about how Sen....

“Resolved that the United States Senate does hereby censure George W. Bush, president of the United States, and does condemn his unlawful authorization of wiretaps of Americans within the United States without obtaining the court orders required.” Just how stupid is Russ Feingold? Judging from his quest to censure the President of the United States for acting appropriately under the Constitution and Congressional legislation, he is stupid enough to sabotage the coming Feingold Administration that exists alone in his own addled mind. For the sake of argument let’s say swine soar, the Cubs win the World Series and Sen. Feingold...

When President Bush signs the Patriot Act amendments into law later this week, the civil liberties of people targeted in terrorism investigations will be strengthened. That's not the case, however, for corporate executives and directors under investigation for antitrust crimes. For them, the amendments will enable the government to wiretap phone conversations and bug boardrooms and offices if there's probable cause that antitrust violations are being committed. Up until now, the Department of Justice has used wiretaps and bugs mainly to gather evidence against suspected mobsters, drug runners, terrorists, and other "blue collar" criminals, as prosecutors like to refer to...

Boldly asserting that it has not yet done enough to "unmask the horrors of the Bush Regime," the New York Times has sued the U.S. Defense Department, demanding that it hand over documents about the National Security Agency's domestic spying program. The Times wants a list of documents including all internal memos and e-mails about the program. It also seeks the names of the people or groups identified by it. "The covert nature of this program gives the U.S. an unfair advantage against its technologically deprived adversaries," Times spokesman, Andy Busch. "We're not taking sides in this conflict. We just...

There is a variety of news stories out in the last week, all concerning the roll up of various Islamic terrorist cells operating in the United States. Unfortunately, the UAE-DPO story is taking up most of the room, so these real, right here, right now stories are getting short shrift. Little Green Footballs had a brief item up yesterday; it was confirmation of an earlier account with more details, sent to us by an informed reader. A number of people are concerned about the actual day-to-day terrorism activities of Middle Easterners in the United States, both naturalized citizens of our...