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In the immediate wake of the initial Snowden revelations about the NSA demanding and receiving millions of phone records of Americans from the telcos, the agency officials and their apologists in Congress reflexively countered the public outcry with the narrative that domestic spying saved us from terror plots and that numerous such plots were thwarted by NSA breaches of privacy. NSA Chief, General Keith Alexander, in testimony before a Senate committee in June, made this statement - “It’s dozens of terrorist events that these (programs)have helped prevent, from my perspective.” Alexander also appeared before a House committee as seen in...

The NSA has been graphing American’s social networks and plotting them as they do organized crime since at least 2010, according to the latest published Edward Snowden leak. The highly secretive intelligence agency has been mapping out American citizens’ social connections – identifying associates, determining locations, and logging who they talk to – by taking advantage of loosened rules previously meant to restrict surveillance actions. As far back as November, 2010, the agency authorized spies to conduct ‘large-scale graph analysis on very large sets of communications metadata without having to check foreignness,’ the New York Times revealed Saturday. Mapped out:...

I believe that, among other things, what makes America great are the freedoms and liberties our Founding Fathers correctly recognized as part of the natural law and incorporated into our Constitution’s Bill of Rights. The oath I took as your congressman was to support and defend that very Constitution. Revelations that the National Security Agency has been using Section 215 of the Patriot Act to collect records of American citizens who have not been suspected of doing anything wrong troubles me and others from across the political spectrum. Beginning on June 25, I have been requesting access to legal opinions...

Ten years before the recent global panic over the U.S. government’s domestic spying program, the Pentagon solicited contractors for a searchable database of people’s lives. In 2003, the Department of Defense’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) hoped to create a database that would amass everything about the life of a person participating in the project, ranging from GPS coordinates to every email and phone call sent and received. The participant would wear a camera, microphone and sensors to record the minutia of everyday life. The program, called Lifelog, would act as a person’s digital diary.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has been vacuuming up data on Americans' financial transactions in direct violation of both the Constitution and the law that created the bureau. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau: NSA of the Financial World The New American 30 June 2013 While the National Security Agency's (NSA) unconstitutional spying on Americans' communications has been getting most of the press lately, another federal agency has been quietly -- and illegally -- vacuuming up Americans' financial data: the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). Created by the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, the CFPB has been operating for just under two years...

Not even a week ago, President Obama was at the Berlin Wall vowing to scale back the U.S. arsenal in good faith that Moscow would follow suit in “negotiated cuts.” Before that, Obama was meeting Chinese President Xi Jinping in Palm Springs for a bilateral sit-down that he confidently branded as a positive step forward in U.S.-China relations. Buoyed by NSA leaker Edward Snowden’s revelations of U.S. intelligence activities and after reportedly milking the hard drives of four laptops he carried into his Hong Kong hotel, the Chinese government defied a Washington extradition request and let Snowden leave the former...

Police Commissioner Ray Kelly launched a stinging rebuke to the federal government’s secret phone and Internet monitoring campaign — and suggested leaker Edward Snowden was right about privacy “abuse.” “I don’t think it ever should have been made secret,” Kelly said today, breaking ranks with US law-enforcement officials.

The Obama administration is drawing up plans to give all U.S. spy agencies full access to a massive database that contains financial data on American citizens and others who bank in the country, according to a Treasury Department document seen by Reuters...

National Security Agency whistleblower William Binney explains how the secretive agency run its pervasive domestic spying apparatus... 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. citizen without warrants under the code-name Stellar Wind.

Gazillions. That's the number of times the federal government has spied on Americans since 9/11 through the use of drones, legal search warrants, illegal search warrants, federal agent-written search warrants and just plain government spying. This is according to Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., who, when he asked the government to tell him what it was doing to violate our privacy, was given a classified briefing. The senator -- one of just a few in the U.S. Senate who believes that the Constitution means what it says -- was required by federal law to agree not to reveal what spies and...

The TSA, DHS and countless other security agencies have been established to keep America safe from terrorist attacks in post-9/11 America. How far beyond that does the feds' reach really go, though? The attacks of September 11, 2001 were instrumental in getting the US government to establish counterterrorism agencies to curb future tragedies. Some officials say that they haven't stopped there, though, and are spying on everyone in America. Testimonies delivered in recent weeks by former employees of the National Security Agency suggest that the government is going beyond what most of America thinks they do in order to keep...

It didn’t take long for the See Something, Say Something campaign initiated by the Department of Homeland Security last year to show promising results. According to a report from St. Paul Minnesota’s KARE11 and NPR, actionable human intelligence is on the rise at the nation’s largest mall, and it’s being cross-referenced with personal information and threat assessments via the recently made public nationwide network of government Fusion centers. While a mystery to most Americans, the existence of Fusion centers recently made waves when they were brought to the mainstream public’s attention by talk show host Alex Jones and former governor...

decora writes "Crypto-mathematician Bill Binney worked in the Signals Intelligence Automation Research Center at the NSA. There, he worked on NSA's ThinThread program; a way to monitor the flood of internet data from outside the US while protecting the privacy of US citizens. In a new interview with Jane Mayer, he says his program 'got twisted. ... I should apologize to the American people. It's violated everyone's rights. It can be used to eavesdrop on the whole world. ... my people were brought in, and they told me, "Can you believe they're doing this? They're getting billing records on US...

The federal government is launching an expansive program dubbed "Perfect Citizen" to detect cyber assaults on private companies and government agencies running such critical infrastructure as the electricity grid and nuclear-power plants, according to people familiar with the program. The surveillance by the National Security Agency, the government's chief eavesdropping agency, would rely on a set of sensors deployed in computer networks for critical infrastructure that would be triggered by unusual activity suggesting an impending cyber attack, though it wouldn't persistently monitor the whole system, these people said. Defense contractor Raytheon Corp. recently won a classified contract for the initial...

The Government Is Monitoring Facebook And Twitter By Noel Sheppard Created 2009-12-14 11:59 "The government is increasingly monitoring Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites for tax delinquents, copyright infringers and political protesters." So ominously began an editorial [1] in Sunday's New York Times. Those with accounts at such websites should pay attention, for according to the Times, and other sources, Big Brother is watching you: The Wall Street Journal reported this summer that state revenue agents have been searching for tax scofflaws by mining information on MySpace and Facebook. In October, the F.B.I. searched the New York home of...

The Obama administration has for the first time set out its views on the controversial USA Patriot Act, telling lawmakers this week that legal approval of government surveillance methods scheduled to expire in December should be renewed, but leaving room to tweak the law to protect Americans' privacy. In a letter from Justice Department officials to key members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, the administration recommended that Congress move swiftly with legislation that would protect the government's ability to collect a variety of business and credit card records and to monitor terrorism suspects with roving wiretaps. But Assistant Attorney General...

The White House has asked people to send them fishy material. I think we should oblige them. Send them every fishing site in the world along with anything that mentions fish. Shame they couldn't be subscribed to mailing lists that involve fishing and fish. Of course the downside is the do get your ip address and an email address. The site is probably robust enough so it won't crash. I suppose that you could also send them any material produced by the Democrats as fishy as well

I rarely partake in either political discussions or mob rage, but what has transpired with the Palin “hacker,” and Gawker, is to my mind the very dead end, the very suicide, of the media cogniscenti, of anybody who touches it with a bargepole, or pretends it is anything short of a lynching of everything this country aims to stand for. This is not “hacking.” Hacking sounds kind of cute, like surfing, like something faintly nerdy and ingenious. No — the word is “surveillance,” and the cultures that invented it and perfected it were dictatorships, most of which have crumbled and...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. phone companies would be shielded from potentially billions of dollars in lawsuits under an anti-terror spy measure that appears headed toward approval, congressional sources said on Wednesday. House of Representatives Democratic Leader Steny Hoyer, a lead negotiator on the bill, said, "We're very close to having an agreement," and a House vote could come as early as Friday. Democratic and Republican aides and a lobbyist familiar with negotiations said the House would likely approve the measure overwhelmingly. Despite opposition from its top two Democrats, the Senate would then likely give it final approval, clearing the way...

This week, Aaron Mannes from CT Blog and Terror Wonk and the University of Maryland checks into answer the question: is Hugo Chavez seeking a nuke? Did you know that there have been 2 coup attempts against Berhsar Assad in the last 6 months? Where is the MSM on this? Olivier Guitta from The Croissant.Com checks in to break it all down. Finally, I debate with Cloud Morris an attorney based in Maine, who focuses on the civil rights issues surrounding domestic spying--this isn't FISA, this is actual spy satellites being used to snoop.