Free Republic

Shutting down the government in an effort to use a budget fight to get rid of Obamacare is not the strategy I would have recommended for the GOP. And while Republicans can be blamed for starting the shutdown, it's increasingly apparent that President Obama and the Democrats deserve the lion's share of blame for not only prolonging it, but for making it as painful as possible. Obama has always had a bit of a vindictive streak when it comes to politics. I think it stems from his Manichaean view of America. There are the reasonable people -- who agree with...

Nations looking to recruit U.S. spies have an opportunity in the government shutdown, the national intelligence director said Wednesday. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said it could be easier for enemies to recruit U.S. spies among the federal employees hit by furloughs from the sequester, and now the shutdown. "This is a dreamland for foreign intelligence service to recruit, particularly as our employees already ... [subjected] to furloughs driven by sequestration, are gonna have even greater financial challenges," he said. "I've been in the intelligence business for about 50 years. I've never seen anything like this," Clapper added during...

Stung by public unease about new details of spying by the National Security Agency, President Barack Obama selected a panel of advisers he described as independent experts to scrutinize the NSA’s surveillance programs to be sure they weren’t violating civil liberties and to restore Americans’ trust. But with just weeks remaining before its first deadline to report back to the White House, the review panel has effectively been operating as an arm of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees the NSA and all other U.S. spy efforts.The panel’s advisers work in offices on loan from the...

The real answer is Congress, but the President's answer to NSA spying on Americans is to put the guy who lied under oath about spying on Americans in charge of investigating the NSA. Is your head spinning yet? Today, Obama ordered Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to name an outside panel to review the United State's global collection of signals intelligence - meaning its efforts to target phone calls, internet messages, and various forms of electronic communication. And a flashback: DNI James Clapper says that the NSA does not collect data on millions of Americans

...Remember on Friday how one of President Obama's efforts to get people to trust the government more concerning the NSA's surveillance efforts was to create an "outside" and "independent" board to review it all?... ...Except, that was Friday. Today is Monday. And, on Monday we learn that "outside" and "independent" actually means setup by Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper--the same guy who has already admitted to lying to Congress about the program, and has received no punishment for doing so. This is independent? From this we're supposed to expect real oversight?!? This is from the letter sent to Clapper:...

The director of the National Intelligence says an effort in the House to rein in the National Security Agency’s electronic surveillance program would dismantle a critical tool in the fight against terrorism. James Clapper issued the statement just hours ahead of a House vote on an amendment by Republican Rep. Justin Amash that would end the statutory authority under the USA PATRIOT Act for the NSA to collect hundreds of millions of phone records. …

Our courts have too often become expressions of the popular will. In ancient Athens, popular courts of paid jurors helped institutionalize fairness. If a troublemaker like Socrates was thought to be a danger to the popular will, then he was put on trial for inane charges like “corrupting the youth” or “introducing new gods.” Convicting gadflies would remind all Athenians of the dangers of questioning democratic majority sentiment. If Athenian families were angry that their sons had supposedly died unnecessarily in battle, then they might charge the generals with capital negligence — a warning to all commanders to watch their...

The director of National Intelligence apologized in June to the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee for lying during a hearing, according to a letter published on the DNI website on Tuesday. Director James Clapper appeared before the committee in March, where Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., asked him specifically if NSA spies on millions of Americans. Clapper answered, "No."

Forty-seven U.S. senators attended a closed-door briefing with top national security officials Thursday to learn more about how telephone and Internet-tracking programs used by the National Security Agency have thwarted multiple terrorist attacks — details that lawmakers said the general public will begin learning more about by Monday. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, said it is taking longer to release the information as top NSA officials work to ensure that any information released publicly is as accurate as possible.

Security: With the director of national intelligence defending a program he told Congress didn't exist, the Patriot Act's author says this isn't the targeted surveillance intended and warns of losing needles in a too-big haystack. Edward Snowden is quite possibly a traitor, but we have been caught in a Prism of our own making, outsourcing our national security to 29-year-old unstable contractors, one of nearly 500,000 employees of private firms with access to the government's most sensitive secrets. Perhaps if we were doing the targeted surveillance envisioned by Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., when he wrote the Patriot Act, we wouldn't...

Weeks before the National Security Agency (NSA) began a massive phone sweeping operation on U.S. cellular provider Verizon, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told Congress the agency does not conduct intelligence on American citizens. "Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?" committee member Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) asked Clapper during the March 12 hearing. In response, Clapper replied quickly: "No, sir." "There are cases where they could inadvertently perhaps collect [intelligence on Americans], but not wittingly," the U.S. intelligence chief told Wyden and the rest of the committee....

The US has admitted using a secret system to mine the systems of the biggest technology companies to spy on millions of people's online activity, overshadowing attempts by Barack Obama to force China to abandon its cyber-espionage program. As concern mounted over the sweeping nature of US surveillance, the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, confirmed revelations by the Guardian that the National Security Agency uses companies such as Google, Facebook and Apple to obtain information that includes the content of emails and online files.

As we now know, the NSA has been collecting data on millions of domestic and international phone calls for some time now — since 2006, according to Dianne Feinstein. Maybe this bothers you; maybe it doesn't. Feinstein insists the program is an essential part of "protecting America"; Congressman Mike Rogers says it has already been "used to stop a terrorist attack in the United States." But one person who doesn't like the idea of the NSA spying on Americans is Oregon senator Ron Wyden. And at a hearing in March, he asked James Clapper, the director of National Intelligence, a...

Even as the White House strove last week to move beyond questions about the Benghazi attacks of Tuesday, September 11, 2012, fresh evidence emerged that senior Obama administration officials knowingly misled the country about what had happened in the days following the assaults. The Weekly Standard has obtained a timeline briefed by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence detailing the heavy substantive revisions made to the CIA’s talking points, just six weeks before the 2012 presidential election, and additional information about why the changes were made and by whom. As intelligence officials pieced together the puzzle of events...

The “Arab spring” has benefited Islamists rather than democracy advocates, while political transitions and unrest in the region have provided opportunities for terrorists to mount attacks against U.S. interests, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told lawmakers Tuesday. … “Islamist actors have been the chief electoral beneficiaries of the political openings, and Islamist parties in Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco will likely solidify their influence in the coming year,” he told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in a written statement. … “Sequestration forces the intelligence community to reduce all intelligence activities and functions, without regard to impact on our mission,”...

(CNSNews.com) - Sen. Richard Burr, a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said that the CIA has “flatly refused” to give some Benghazi-related documents to the committee, which is conducting an investigation of the Sept. 11, 2012 terrorist attacks on the State Department and CIA personnel and facilities in Benghazi, Libya. Sen. Burr made the assertion last week at the confirmation hearing for John Brennan, whom President Barack Obama has nominated to be director of the CIA. Brennan currently serves as the president's counterterrorism adviser. “Mr. Brennan, as you know, the committee's conducting a thorough inquiry into the...

“The intelligence community had it right, and they had it right early,” said chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Rep. Mike Rogers (R., Mich.). The CIA “talking points” on Benghazi initially identified the attackers as al Qaeda or al Qaeda-linked terrorists but senior administration officials removed the reference, Rogers said on NBC’s Meet the Press.Meanwhile, White House deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes told reporters traveling with the president on Saturday that the White House made only minor changes in the first comments by a White House official on the Benghazi security scandal.“We were provided with points...

The Obama Administration is playing dirty. Trying to put a price tag on access — either a news organization plays ball and accepts what they dish out without challenge, or the news organization is excluded, punished... ...and now the latest…. DNI Director James Clapper told Capitol Hill last week that the DNI did not know who took the term Al Qaeda out of the talking points that was given to Ambassador Susan Rice. It turns out that is not true and the DNI released a memo to the media last night indicating that DNI Director James Clapper was wrong last...

(CBS News) WASHINGTON - CBS News has learned that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) cut specific references to "al Qaeda" and "terrorism" from the unclassified talking points given to Amassador Susan Rice on the Benghazi consulate attack - with the agreement of the CIA and FBI. The White House or State Department did not make those changes. (snip) However, an intelligence source tells CBS News correspondent Margaret Brennan the links to al Qaeda were deemed too "tenuous" to make public, because there was not strong confidence in the person providing the intelligence. CIA Director David Petraeus,...

Meet James Clapper --- the latest fall guy for the White House on Benghazi. After last week's hearings in Congress showed that the talking points from the CIA had been changed to eliminate the mention of terrorism, Washington erupted into a whodunit. CBS reports today that the culprit has been found ... sort of:CLICK ABOVE LINK FOR THE VIDEO   CBS News has learned that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) cut specific references to "al Qaeda" and "terrorism" from the unclassified talking points given to Ambassador Susan Rice on the Benghazi consulate attack --- with the...