Free Republic

Live coverage of the rally at the U.S. Capitol online:The Right Scoop live streaming starts at 11:30 a.m. EDTC-SPAN 3 will be showing the rally live on cable/satellite and online here.The rally is being organized by the Tea Party Patriots.Speakers (via TPP) Ted Cruz , US Senate (TX) Mike Lee , US Senate (UT) Rand Paul , US Senate (KY) Michele Bachmann , US House (MN) Jim Bridenstine , US House (OK) Dave Camp , US House (MI) John Fleming , US House (LA) Louie Gohmert , US House (TX) Tom Graves , US House (GA) Richard Hudson , US...

I remember once when I was in college I took a trip home to the DC metro area with my girlfriend. She and I went to the movies not far from where my mother lived in a rather rough part of town called Capitol Heights, MD. I have no idea what we saw. I do however remember that we had a terrible time, and it had nothing to do with what was on the screen and everything to do with what was going on in the theater. Not long before this at a different theater a few miles away...

It's becoming increasingly difficult to give the government the benefit of the doubt in regards to dragnet domestic surveillance. Even before Glenn Greenwald published a top secret court order compelling Verizon to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems and interviewed NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, there were credible reports that the NSA was intercepting U.S. communications. The most significant of those occurred in July, when the court that was established to "hear applications for and grant orders approving electronic surveillance," called the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), found that the NSA violated the Fourth Amendment's restriction...

<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>

The following document is the current Department of Defense manual on the procedures for intercepting wire, electronic and oral communications for law enforcement. The manual also discusses 'access to electronic communications in electronic storage or in a remote computing service.' Though the manual was issued in 1995, it is still current according to another, unreleased DoD Directive-Type Memorandum updated in 2012 (DTM 11-007 – Delegation of Authority to Approve Consensual Interceptions for Law Enforcement) that makes reference to the manual and modifies some of its language.

Dear Mr. President ` ` I hereby absolve you of ANY responsibility to protect my family from terrorism on our farm. I have some pretty spiffy self-defense gadgets and have established decent clear zones around the house and out-buildings. So I think we can take care of most terrorist threats on our own for now. ` Of course, I'll let you know if that EVER changes. (But thanks for standing by--just in case.) ` ` In exchange, please remove the surveillance you are conducting on our mail, cell phones, internet, credit cards and CB/shortwave radios. You don't need me to...

Most voters oppose the U.S. government’s secret collection of the phone records of millions of Americans and think the feds are spying too much on U.S. citizens these days. Just 26% of Likely U.S. Voters favor the government’s secret collecting of these phone records for national security purposes regardless of whether there is any suspicion of wrongdoing. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 59% are opposed to the practice. Fifteen percent (15%) are undecided. (To see survey question wording, click here.) The survey of 1,000 Likely Voters was conducted on June 6-7, 2013 by Rasmussen Reports. The...

National Security Agency whistleblower William Binney explains how the secretive agency runs its pervasive domestic spying apparatus in a new piece by Laura Poitras in The New York Times. Binney—one of the best mathematicians and code breakers in NSA history—worked for the Defense Department's foreign signals intelligence agency for 32 years before resigning in late 2001 because he "could not stay after the NSA began purposefully violating the Constitution." In a short video called "The Program," Binney explains how the agency took part of one of the programs he built and started using it to spy on virtually every U.S....

Faulk says he and others in his section of the NSA facility at Fort Gordon routinely shared salacious or tantalizing phone calls that had been intercepted, alerting office mates to certain time codes of "cuts" that were available on each operator's computer. "Hey, check this out," Faulk says he would be told, "there's good phone sex or there's some pillow talk, pull up this call, it's really funny, go check it out. It would be some colonel making pillow talk and we would say, 'Wow, this was crazy'," Faulk told ABC News. Faulk said he joined in to listen, and...

BOULDER, Colo. - Boulder police say they have a right to enter unsecured homes if residents leave an open door. Boulder police Sgt. Michael Everett tells the Boulder Daily Camera entering unsecured residences is a standard procedure for most law enforcement agencies, including Boulder police. He says the practice is not likely to stop. Chrissy Smiley called police to complain after she returned to her south Boulder condominium after walking her dogs Thursday and found a card from a Boulder police officer sitting on her dining room table letting her know he had been there. Boulder police officials told The...

Apparently the “chilling effect” of Justice Department leak investigations on communications between government officials and the press has not been so chilling after all. It certainly did not deter former CIA employee and National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, who has admitted that he is the principal source of recent leaks to The Post and the Guardian revealing top-secret NSA programs tracking terrorist communications. The exposure of the PRISM program under which the NSA monitors foreign terrorists on the Internet, as well as the leak of a top-secret court order requiring Verizon to share calling data with the government, are...

An ex-CIA employee has said he acted to "protect basic liberties for people around the world" in leaking details of US phone and internet surveillance. Edward Snowden, 29, was revealed as the source of the leaks at his own request by the UK's Guardian newspaper. Mr Snowden, who says he has fled to Hong Kong, said he had an "obligation to help free people from oppression". The recent revelations are that US agencies gathered millions of phone records and monitored internet data. A spokesman for the US Office of the Director of National Intelligence said the case had been referred...

"New York Republican Rep. Peter King, chairman of the Homeland Security Subcommittee on Counterintelligence and Terrorism and a member of the Select Committee on Intelligence, said: "If Edward Snowden did in fact leak the NSA data as he claims, the United States government must prosecute him to the fullest extent of the law and begin extradition proceedings at the earliest date. The United States must make it clear that no country should be granting this individual asylum. This is a matter of extraordinary consequence to American intelligence." Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/06/09/report-nsa-contract-worker-is-surveillance-source/#ixzz2VlVdyNI0

The individual responsible for one of the most significant leaks in US political history is Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old former technical assistant for the CIA and current employee of the defence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. Snowden has been working at the National Security Agency for the last four years as an employee of various outside contractors, including Booz Allen and Dell. The Guardian, after several days of interviews, is revealing his identity at his request. From the moment he decided to disclose numerous top-secret documents to the public, he was determined not to opt for the protection of anonymity. "I...

Those crazy American conspiracy theorists who live up trees with guns and drink their own pee don’t seem quite so crazy anymore. It turns out that a “secret court order” has empowered the US government to collect the phone records of millions of users of Verizon, one of the most popular telephone providers – a massive domestic surveillance programme and a shocking intrusion into the lives of others. For the first time in history, being an AT&T customer doesn’t seem such a bad thing after all. Of course, it isn't the first time that a US administration has spied on...

"The boy was questioned by the principal and a sheriff's deputy, who also wanted to search the family home without a warrant, Henkelman said. "He started asking me questions about if I have firearms, and [the deputy said] he's going to have to search my house. Search my house? I just wanted to know what happened."

As gratifying as it was to see the “news” media actually do its job last week when the IRS scandal broke, it was also odd that the coverage focused exclusively on abuses of power relating to various Tea Party and anti-abortion groups. A much scarier IRS story has been virtually ignored by the establishment press. On Wednesday, it was reported that a class-action lawsuit had been filed against a group of IRS agents who, according to the complaint filed by “John Doe Company” in the Southern District of California, “stole more than 60,000,000 medical records of more than 10,000,000 Americans,...

The US Navy's quieter way to spy, the Ion Tiger, just bested its own 2009 flight record with a key assist from liquid hydrogen. The unmanned aerial vehicle had previously relied on 5000-psi compressed hydrogen for fuel, but for its latest flight test the Naval Research team swapped that out for a new cryogenic tank and delivery system that relies on the liquid stuff; a choice made for the element's increased density. With that one significant change in place, the craft was able to outperform its last endurance run of 26 hours and two minutes by almost double, lasting 48...

Where are today’s rebels?  Where is the counterculture? Ear-budded hipsters, with their sheep-like devotion to Apple products and the Obama administration, sit in on the April 20 “Day of Pot” in Denver, content and satisfied with their free birth control and legalized maryjane.  Meanwhile SWAT teams descend on Watertown, Massachusetts, trampling Fourth Amendment rights in search of a “person of interest”– while a Saudi National is quietly sent back to his homeland.These hipsters champion the legalization of recreational marijuana in Colorado while the war on Big Tobacco rages on.  Since 1997 the FDA inherited control over the $365.5 billion global...

On Monday, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced that the Constitution would have to be reinterpreted in order to curtail civil liberties to prevent terrorism. Bloomberg likened such reinterpretation to the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Second Amendment, which he says allowed for greater gun control to preserve public safety. At a press conference, Bloomberg stated, “The people who are worried about privacy have a legitimate worry. But we live in a complex world where you’re going to have to have a level of security greater than you did back in the olden days, if you will. And our...