Free Republic

According to a new declassified ruling from the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), FBI personnel systematically abused National Security Agency (NSA) mass surveillance data in both 2017 and 2018. The 138-page ruling, which dates back to October 2018, was only unsealed 12 months later in October 2019. It offers a rare look at how the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has been abusing the constitutional privacy rights of U.S. citizens with alarming regularity. The court ruling is also a stinging rebuke to the FBI’s overreach of its ability to search surveillance intelligence databases. Key elements of the FISA court...

Sen. Ted Cruz responds to criticism from his presidential primary opponent Sen. Marco Rubio and his Super PAC on Thursday night's edition of FOX News' Kelly File. MEGYN KELLY, FOX NEWS: .... SEN. TED CRUZ: Right. Well, look. These attacks are silliness. You're right that Marco Rubio's Super PAC is spending $200,000 running attack ads directed at me. And these attack ads, they're suggesting that I, alone with Senator Mike Lee and Tim Scott and Chuck Grassley and the National Rifle Association, and somehow conservatives in the House and Senate were responsible for the Paris terrorist attack. And it's just...

U.S. lawmakers may very well be one step closer to bringing across-the-board U.S. government phone surveillance to an end. The House of Representatives is expected to vote Wednesday on an amendment to next year’s defense appropriations bill that would defund the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of people’s phone metadata not under investigation for international terrorism or foreign intelligence. According to the revised amendment’s summary available on the House Rules Committee website, the amendment “bars authority for the blanket collection of records under the Patriot Act.” It further “bars the NSA and other agencies from using Section 215 of the...

Due largely to unauthorized leaks, we now know that the National Security Agency has seized from private companies voluminous data on the phone and Internet usage of all U.S. citizens. We've also learned that the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has approved the constitutionality of these seizures in secret proceedings in which only the government appears, and in opinions kept secret even from the private companies from whom the data are seized. If this weren't disturbing enough, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, created by the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform, is compiling a massive database of citizens' personal information—including monthly...

by Mark Finkelstein August 18, 2006 - 07:42 If not quite from the grave, the decision by one of Jimmy Carter's judicial appointees, striking down the NSA terrorist surveillance program, was an unwelcome blast from past. Call it Carter's Revenge. Malaise Redux. The spirit of Desert One lives. That this was a political decision more than a legal one is evidenced by the intemperate language of the decision itself: "“There are no hereditary kings in America," harumphed Judge Anna Diggs Taylor of the United States District Court in Detroit, in a case filed by the ACLU. Naturally, the NY Times...

Homegrown terrorist Jeffrey Leon Battle considered America the “land of the kaffirs,” or unbelievers, and the American people “pigs.” He once lamented to an acquaintance—who happened to be a government informant—that the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks did not sufficiently damage the U.S. economy. “This is the land of the enemy,” he said of his own country in a May 8, 2002, conversation secretly recorded by the government. He explained to a friend how his “burning desire” to become an Islamic martyr had inspired his aborted quest to join forces with al Qaeda in Afghanistan, where he could kill American...