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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....

Faulk says he and others in his section of the NSA facility at Fort Gordon routinely shared salacious or tantalizing phone calls that had been intercepted, alerting office mates to certain time codes of "cuts" that were available on each operator's computer. "Hey, check this out," Faulk says he would be told, "there's good phone sex or there's some pillow talk, pull up this call, it's really funny, go check it out. It would be some colonel making pillow talk and we would say, 'Wow, this was crazy'," Faulk told ABC News. Faulk said he joined in to listen, and...

BOULDER, Colo. - Boulder police say they have a right to enter unsecured homes if residents leave an open door. Boulder police Sgt. Michael Everett tells the Boulder Daily Camera entering unsecured residences is a standard procedure for most law enforcement agencies, including Boulder police. He says the practice is not likely to stop. Chrissy Smiley called police to complain after she returned to her south Boulder condominium after walking her dogs Thursday and found a card from a Boulder police officer sitting on her dining room table letting her know he had been there. Boulder police officials told The...

Apparently the “chilling effect” of Justice Department leak investigations on communications between government officials and the press has not been so chilling after all. It certainly did not deter former CIA employee and National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, who has admitted that he is the principal source of recent leaks to The Post and the Guardian revealing top-secret NSA programs tracking terrorist communications. The exposure of the PRISM program under which the NSA monitors foreign terrorists on the Internet, as well as the leak of a top-secret court order requiring Verizon to share calling data with the government, are...

An ex-CIA employee has said he acted to "protect basic liberties for people around the world" in leaking details of US phone and internet surveillance. Edward Snowden, 29, was revealed as the source of the leaks at his own request by the UK's Guardian newspaper. Mr Snowden, who says he has fled to Hong Kong, said he had an "obligation to help free people from oppression". The recent revelations are that US agencies gathered millions of phone records and monitored internet data. A spokesman for the US Office of the Director of National Intelligence said the case had been referred...

"New York Republican Rep. Peter King, chairman of the Homeland Security Subcommittee on Counterintelligence and Terrorism and a member of the Select Committee on Intelligence, said: "If Edward Snowden did in fact leak the NSA data as he claims, the United States government must prosecute him to the fullest extent of the law and begin extradition proceedings at the earliest date. The United States must make it clear that no country should be granting this individual asylum. This is a matter of extraordinary consequence to American intelligence." Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/06/09/report-nsa-contract-worker-is-surveillance-source/#ixzz2VlVdyNI0

The individual responsible for one of the most significant leaks in US political history is Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old former technical assistant for the CIA and current employee of the defence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. Snowden has been working at the National Security Agency for the last four years as an employee of various outside contractors, including Booz Allen and Dell. The Guardian, after several days of interviews, is revealing his identity at his request. From the moment he decided to disclose numerous top-secret documents to the public, he was determined not to opt for the protection of anonymity. "I...

Those crazy American conspiracy theorists who live up trees with guns and drink their own pee don’t seem quite so crazy anymore. It turns out that a “secret court order” has empowered the US government to collect the phone records of millions of users of Verizon, one of the most popular telephone providers – a massive domestic surveillance programme and a shocking intrusion into the lives of others. For the first time in history, being an AT&T customer doesn’t seem such a bad thing after all. Of course, it isn't the first time that a US administration has spied on...

"The boy was questioned by the principal and a sheriff's deputy, who also wanted to search the family home without a warrant, Henkelman said. "He started asking me questions about if I have firearms, and [the deputy said] he's going to have to search my house. Search my house? I just wanted to know what happened."

As gratifying as it was to see the “news” media actually do its job last week when the IRS scandal broke, it was also odd that the coverage focused exclusively on abuses of power relating to various Tea Party and anti-abortion groups. A much scarier IRS story has been virtually ignored by the establishment press. On Wednesday, it was reported that a class-action lawsuit had been filed against a group of IRS agents who, according to the complaint filed by “John Doe Company” in the Southern District of California, “stole more than 60,000,000 medical records of more than 10,000,000 Americans,...

The US Navy's quieter way to spy, the Ion Tiger, just bested its own 2009 flight record with a key assist from liquid hydrogen. The unmanned aerial vehicle had previously relied on 5000-psi compressed hydrogen for fuel, but for its latest flight test the Naval Research team swapped that out for a new cryogenic tank and delivery system that relies on the liquid stuff; a choice made for the element's increased density. With that one significant change in place, the craft was able to outperform its last endurance run of 26 hours and two minutes by almost double, lasting 48...

Where are today’s rebels?  Where is the counterculture? Ear-budded hipsters, with their sheep-like devotion to Apple products and the Obama administration, sit in on the April 20 “Day of Pot” in Denver, content and satisfied with their free birth control and legalized maryjane.  Meanwhile SWAT teams descend on Watertown, Massachusetts, trampling Fourth Amendment rights in search of a “person of interest”– while a Saudi National is quietly sent back to his homeland.These hipsters champion the legalization of recreational marijuana in Colorado while the war on Big Tobacco rages on.  Since 1997 the FDA inherited control over the $365.5 billion global...

On Monday, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced that the Constitution would have to be reinterpreted in order to curtail civil liberties to prevent terrorism. Bloomberg likened such reinterpretation to the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Second Amendment, which he says allowed for greater gun control to preserve public safety. At a press conference, Bloomberg stated, “The people who are worried about privacy have a legitimate worry. But we live in a complex world where you’re going to have to have a level of security greater than you did back in the olden days, if you will. And our...

The terrorist attack in Boston and ensuing events in Watertown had everyone on edge, but shocking new home video from Massachusetts show law enforcement officers trampling over the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution – which guarantees “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures… and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” A video recently uploaded to YouTube by residents whose home was searched...

How is it at all legal for the police to have coerced people from their homes during the house to house search that was conducted in Watertown MA last week? By 'coerced', I mean being told to leave their residence by police SWAT teams. When you have 10 police pointing rifles at you, yelling at your to get out of your house, I'd consider that coersion. These people were removed from their homes and forced to go someplace else. It appears that they were not 'allowed' back into their homes for hours. How is that possible in America? Were homeowners...

Sounds like right-wing, anti-Obama rhetoric, doesn't it? In California, it is dangerously close to true. Thursday, the state legislature approved $24 million to expedite gun confiscation. They are coming for your guns! And if they show up at your door in California, without a search warrant, you still don't have much of a choice but to hand over the weapon. Does this sound like a violation of the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution? This is a very slippery slope. The text of the Fourth Amendment: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers,...

The Republican led U.S. House of Representatives passed CISPA on Thursday with a majority of the major problems still intact. However, they wouldn’t even allow debate on an amendment put forward by Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) which would have made a provision for obtaining a warrant before any kind of spying into private data could be done. Grayson’s one-sentence amendment would have required the National Security Agency, the FBI, Homeland Security and other agencies to secure a “warrant obtained in accordance with the Fourth Amendment” before searching a database for evidence of criminal wrongdoing. Grayson complained this morning on Twitter...

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) released a report documenting attempted abuses of federal power by the Obama administration on Tuesday, saying the administration “knows virtually no bounds.” Cruz points to Obama’s own Supreme Court appointees, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, to make his case: "When President Obama’s own Supreme Court nominees join their colleagues in unanimously rejecting the Administration’s call for broader federal power six times in just over one year, the inescapable conclusion is that the Obama Administration’s view of federal power knows virtually no bounds,” the senator’s report said. The Obama administration’s over-reaching includes attempts to electronically track Americans...

The Internal Revenue Service doesn't believe it needs a search warrant to read your e-mail. Newly disclosed documents prepared by IRS lawyers says that Americans enjoy "generally no privacy" in their e-mail, Facebook chats, Twitter direct messages, and similar online communications -- meaning that they can be perused without obtaining a search warrant signed by a judge. That places the IRS at odds with a growing sentiment among many judges and legislators who believe that Americans' e-mail messages should be protected from warrantless search and seizure. They say e-mail should be protected by the same Fourth Amendment privacy standards that...

An Omaha police supervisor has been placed on administrative leave as authorities continue to investigate the circumstances of a controversial arrest in north Omaha. The World-Herald has learned that the command officer is Sgt. Aaron P. Von Behren, a 15-year department veteran and one-time recipient of the department's life-saving award. The World-Herald also learned the identity of an officer who earlier was placed on administrative leave: James T. Kinsella, a veteran of nearly five years.