Free Republic

The same company that scrutinized former spy agency contractor Edward Snowden for a U.S. government security clearance said on Thursday it also checked the background of the Navy Yard shooter, allowing him to obtain a "secret" clearance. USIS, working as a contractor for the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), conducted a background review of Aaron Alexis, identified by law enforcement authorities as the shooter who killed 12 people at the Navy Yard before he was shot dead. "Today we were informed that in 2007, USIS conducted a background check of Aaron Alexis for OPM," USIS spokesman Ray Howell said in...

Warnings from U.S. officials on the threat of possible terrorist strikes against Americans overseas -- and the massive closure of embassies in the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia on Sunday -- may have divulged too much information, including details about the intercepted chatter and source of the information. Some intelligence officials say the disclosures may work against obtaining new information and even pose a deadly threat from militants who might kill anyone suspected of working with Western intelligence, The Washington Times reported. “There simply are not that many who would know about the attacks,” the Times quoted one...

A grassroots movement of Fourth Amendment activists is rallying across at least 20 US cities to protest illegal surveillance techniques by the American government. The protests “1984 Day,” named for George Orwell’s classic novel about an ultramodern surveillance state, have taken place across the nations, most notably in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Washington DC. The rallies have been organized by a number of social media initiatives by a grassroots organization called Restore the Fourth that demands an end to “unconstitutional surveillance of digital communications.” "By rallying this Sunday, we are sending a very loud message to our...

Glenn Greenwald’s Snowden dossier concerning the American Leviathan’s practice of harvesting, storing and analyzing the information/conversations of its own and the world’s political, military, economic and cultural gate keepers is fascinating. This is so not due to the technological sophistication and global reach of the USA’s intelligence capabilities, but for what it implies about the current state and future of the collective nation-states known as Western Democracies. And it undercuts nearly every ideal in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights, leaving the dry, functional and core text of the US Constitution as the last mooring line to—paraphrasing...

It is way too soon to bet the house fortune on the reliability of reports by the Washington Post (Washington, DC) and The Guardian (United Kingdom) on US President Barack Obama’s data harvesting program, known for the moment as PRISM. With the hot pursuit of mainstream media reporters underway by the US Department of Justice (Associated Press, for example); a US Corporate-State show trial of Bradley Manning, Julian Assange/Wikileaks (Obama has already stated they are guilty); the extraordinary cyberwar/hacking accusations against the Chinese government; and the shrill sound of cyber quackery from the Defense Science Board and its legion of...