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It took Edward Snowden and other whistleblowers to reveal the staggering extent of the government’s spying on its own people as institutional checks failed.. ... Panic made us politically vulnerable... That vulnerability was exploited by our own government to entitle itself to radically expanded powers that had for decades been out of reach. ... The Patriot Act, which swatted away longstanding rules preventing the state from monitoring US citizens without “probable cause”, was passed .. lightning-fast ... granting domestic law enforcement agencies sweeping new powers. ... green light for the FBI and CIA to carry out “roving wiretaps” where agents...

Just a month ago we raised more than a proverbial eyebrow when we noted the creation of the NSA's Utah Data Center (codename Stellar Wind) and William Binney's formidable statement that "we are this far from a turnkey totalitarian state". Democracy Now has the former National Security Agency technical director whistleblower's first TV interview in which he discusses the NSA's massive power to spy on Americans and why the FBI raided his home. Since retiring from the NSA in 2001, he has warned that the NSA’s data-mining program has become so vast that it could "create an Orwellian state." National...

Last night John rendered his "Verdict: The New York Times blew the story." The "story" was the testimony of five federal judges -- Magistrate Judge Allan Kornblum and four former FISA court judges -- on Senator Specter's proposed revision of the FISA statute. According to yesterday's New York Times story by Eric Lichtblau: In a rare glimpse into the inner workings of the secretive court, known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, several former judges who served on the panel...voiced skepticism at a Senate hearing about the president's constitutional authority to order wiretapping on Americans without a court order. They...

WASHINGTON — The attorney selected to replace James Comey as FBI director is described by those close to him as admirably low-key, yet he'd be taking over the law enforcement agency at a moment that's anything but tranquil. Christopher Wray would inherit an FBI that lost its popular leader in an unceremonious firing in May and that has spent the past year investigating whether the Trump campaign coordinated with Russia to win the presidency. During this most consequential investigation in decades, he'd be serving under a president who is said to have demanded loyalty from Comey and has appeared insensitive...

I will be nominating Christopher A. Wray, a man of impeccable credentials, to be the new Director of the FBI. Details to follow.

National Security Agency whistleblower William Binney explains how the secretive agency runs its pervasive domestic spying apparatus in a new piece by Laura Poitras in The New York Times. 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....

The Obama administration allowed the National Security Agency to gather Americans’ Internet information, including emails, until 2011 under a secret program launched by President George W. Bush, according to newly leaked documents. The data collection was first reported by the Guardian newspaper. An official confirmed its existence to the Associated Press. The NSA ended the program that collected email logs and timing, but not content, in 2011 because it did not do what was needed to stop terrorist attacks, according to the NSA's director. Gen. Keith Alexander, who also heads the U.S. Cyber Command, said all data was purged at...

On March 12, 2004, acting attorney general James B. Comey and the Justice Department’s top leadership reached the brink of resignation over electronic surveillance orders that they believed to be illegal. President George W. Bush backed down, halting secret foreign-intelligence-gathering operations that had crossed into domestic terrain. That morning marked the beginning of the end of STELLARWIND, the cover name for a set of four surveillance programs that brought Americans and American territory within the domain of the National Security Agency for the first time in decades. It was also a prelude to new legal structures that allowed Bush and...

<p>George Orwell was right. He was just 30 years early.</p> <p>In its April cover story, Wired has an exclusive report on the NSA's Utah Data Center, which is a must read for anyone who believes any privacy is still a possibility in the United States: "A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks.... Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket litter.”... The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013." In other words, in just over 1 year, virtually anything one communicates through any traceable medium, or any record of one's existence in the electronic medium, which these days is everything, will unofficially be property of the US government to deal with as it sees fit.</p>

A former FBI counterterrorism agent has hinted at a vast and intrusive surveillance network used by the U.S. government to monitor its own citizens. Tim Clemente admitted as much when he appeared on CNN Wednesday night. Discussing the Boston Marathon attack and past telephone conversations of Katherine Russell and her now deceased husband, suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev, Clemente said that those conversations would be available to investigators. Clemente discussed the issue in this exchange with host Erin Burnett, as recorded by the CNN transcript...

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.

We’re getting a lot of e-mail this weekend about an executive order issued on Friday afternoon by President Obama titled “National Defense Resources Preparedness.” While the timing of the EO is curious — why send it out on a Friday afternoon when an administration is usually trying to sneak bad news past the media? — the general impact of it is negligible. This EO simply updates another EO (12919) that had been in place since June 1994, and amended several times since.

Just reading "New Details on NSA‘s ’Spy Center‘ and Secrets From Domestic Eavesdropping Operation ’Stellar Wind’-- The Blaze/ March 16, 2012" http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2860168/posts reminded me that I wanted to report to you all that the Secret Service spied on a post I set up to report on Obama using the athletic fields of our university here on the eastside of Seattle. On Feb. 17 Obama made one of his frequent fundraising visits, this time to Washington State to shake down a couple billionaires who live near by. He spoke at Boeing in the morning, then flew to Kirkland. The trip was...

Articles posted about the "Utah Data Center and NSA's operation "Stellar Wind" are disappearing off of FreeRepubilc, as though they were never there!