Free Republic

In an op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal yesterday evening, Senator Rand Paul outlined how vast NSA surveillance of hundreds of millions of Americans is a violation of the Fourth Amendment. He also reminded readers that the Founding Fathers fought a revolution over this type of behavior....cue John McCain calling him a whacko bird again in 3...2...1... These activities violate the Fourth Amendment, which says warrants must be specific—"particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." And what is the government doing with these records? The president assures us that the government...

Ron Paul, a lion of the libertarian movement, is roaring again. He is praising Edward Snowden, the admitted leaker of information about a vast U.S. government surveillance program that is generating headlines around the world. "We should be thankful for individuals like Edward Snowden and [investigative reporter] Glenn Greenwald, who see injustice being carried out by their own government and speak out, despite the risk," Paul said in remarks posted on campaignforliberty.org, the website of an advocacy group that Paul leads. "They have done a great service to the American people by exposing the truth about what our government is...

Sen. Lindsey Graham would propose censoring Americans' "snail" mail if he thought it would help protect national security, the South Carolina Republican said Tuesday. But for now, he says he doesn't think it's necessary. Faced with questions about the disclosure that the National Security Agency has been collecting phone and email records of citizens, Graham pointed to a World War II-era program in which the federal government censored mail. He said it was appropriate at the time and that he would support reinstating the program if it aided security efforts. "In World War II, the mentality of the public was...

FYI....Verizon's Privacy Policy regarding information shared outside of the Verizon Family of Companies.

President Barack Obama needed a plot twist — badly. Enter Edward Snowden. The 29-year-old contractor who says he leaked the documents on the National Security Agency’s snooping activities has become a gripping story on his own — stealing the show from the spying program itself. Now the media is fixated on new questions about Snowden’s motivations, background and decisions — like the one to flee to Hong Kong.

George Takei is hardly the only American concerned about the NSA's massive surveillance programs. But unlike most people, his fears are rooted in the memory of the government persecution he suffered firsthand in a Japanese internment camp. "Due process is a pillar of our American justice system," the Star Trek star told Daily Intelligencer last night at the Eighth Annual Stella by Starlight Benefit Gala. "We were rounded up simply because we happened to look like the people who bombed Pearl Harbor. And we were put in prison camps with barbed wire and machine guns pointed at us. It was...

Verizon, the phone company whose disclosure of customer data to the federal government is at the center of the furor over cooperation by technology companies with top-secret national security programs, has offered a precise, clear, but little-noticed public explanation of why it did what it did. The Verizon explanation is not in the vague and cryptic memo the company issued last week after the Guardian exposed its program. It came, instead, in the company’s annual filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, included in Verizon’s annual report to shareholders.

We get it, Joe Citizen. You want your privacy. You want to be able to talk on the internet without everyone and their mother at the InsertAlphabetAgencyHere looking at it. You’re mad about the NSA snooping. You aren’t advocating a violent overthrow of the government. You’re not running a domestic terrorism group (well, there are those new DHS criteria…). You’re not even sending around emails about what a dismal failure President Obama’s administration is (THIS hour, anyway). You just want to be able to chat with friends, conduct your financial business, and argue with your spouse without Big Daddy Gummint...

I got the stuff. Tacos tomorrow at 6:00? Bring your shop-vac and some root beer.

Edward Snowden sounds like a thoughtful, patriotic young man, and I’m sure glad he blew the whistle on the NSA’s surveillance programs. But the more I learned about him this afternoon, the angrier I became. Wait, him? The NSA trusted its most sensitive documents to this guy? And now, after it has just proven itself so inept at handling its own information, the agency still wants us to believe that it can securely hold on to all of our data? Oy vey!

Things got feisty on Morning Joe today, as Glenn Greenwald of the Guardian clashed with Mika Brzezinski over the leak of the NSA phone surveillance program by Greenwald's informant, Edward Snowden. H/t NB reader Jeff M. When Brzezinski alleged that wiretapping or the review by the NSA of emails required an additional judicial review and warrant, Greenwald accused Mika of using "White House talking points" that were "completely misleading and false." Mika denied it. View the video here.

‘Under This Logic, They Can Do Anything!’ In the last 24 hours, it has been revealed that the National Security Agency (NSA) has been indiscriminately monitoring all Verizon phone records for the past seven years. The stunning revelation sent Fox News host Shep Smith and Judge Andrew Napolitano into a frenzy on Thursday. In fact, Napolitano said it represented the “most extraordinarily broad search warrant ever issued in the history of the federal courts of the United States.” Lawmakers like Sens. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) on Thursday tried to downplay the bombshell report, arguing that such surveillance...

Barton Gellman posted a story cobbled from his chat transcripts with Snowden late Sunday, which contained this exchange concerning the whistleblower's conditions to keep the story the Post's: To effect his plan, Snowden asked for a guarantee that The Washington Post would publish — within 72 hours — the full text of a PowerPoint presentation describing PRISM, a top-secret surveillance program that gathered intelligence from Microsoft, Facebook, Google and other Silicon Valley giants. He also asked that The Post publish online a cryptographic key that he could use to prove to a foreign embassy that he was the document’s source....

And for the iPhone: Silent Circle. Time to shut the NSA down by encrypting all our calls end-to-end. Anybody have any experience with either of these?

"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

Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), the Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, on Sunday had harsh words for the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald revealing last week that the National Security Agency is looking at phone records of virtually all Americans. Appearing on ABC’s This Week, Rogers said, “I know your reporter that you interviewed, Greenwald, says that he’s got it all and now is an expert on the program. He doesn't have a clue how this thing works” (video follows with transcript): Congressman Rogers on NSA Phone Surveillance: ‘Greenwald Doesn’t Have a Clue How This Thing Works’ GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: Finally, we're just about...

Security Expert Lt. Colonel Tony Shaffer, from the Center for Advanced Defense Studies, told FOX News today that PRISM did not catch the 2009 New York Subway bombers, the British did. “Let me say very clearly. The 2009 thing is a MacGuffin. They did not use this program to get the 2009 bombing stopped. It was actually the British who helped us do that. And, more importantly they missed the Major Hassan Nidal attack. He was in touch with Anwar al-Awlaki. And, we missed the Boston bombing, too.” (VIDEO-AT-LINK) Buzzfeed backs this up: Defenders of the American government’s online spying...

Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old former undercover CIA employee, unmasked himself Sunday as the principal source of recent Washington Post and Guardian disclosures about top-secret National Security Agency programs. Snowden, who has contracted for the NSA and works for the consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton, denounced what he described as systematic surveillance of innocent citizens and said in an interview that “it’s important to send a message to government that people will not be intimidated.”

June 8, 2013 Breaking: NSA Internet Spying Foils NSA Plot To Attack NSA Karl Marx Treatment Center In a stunning development, the National Security Agency (NSA) reports that PRISM, the secret spy program that monitors all internet activity in the US and the world and stores all the data in acres and acres of massive super-cooled buildings somewhere in the desert, has uncovered an active ongoing plot by the NSA to use the PRISM program to monitor, spy on, and collect all the internet activity in the US, in violation of the NSA's charter that limits it to foreign spy...

The National Security Agency has at times mistakenly intercepted the private email messages and phone calls of Americans who had no link to terrorism, requiring Justice Department officials to report the errors to a secret national security court and destroy the data, according to two former U.S. intelligence officials. At least some of the phone calls and emails were pulled from among the hundreds of millions stored by telecommunications companies as part of an NSA surveillance program. James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, Thursday night publicly acknowledged what he called “a sensitive intelligence collection program” after its existence was...