Free Republic

Until Wednesday morning, you'd probably never heard of something called "XKeyscore," a program that the National Security Agency itself describes as its "widest reaching" means of gathering data from across the Internet. According to reports shared by NSA leaker Edward Snowden with the Guardian, is that in addition to all of the other recent revelations about the NSA's surveillance programs, by using XKeyscore, "analysts can also search by name, telephone number, IP address, keywords, the language in which the Internet activity was conducted or the type of browser used." David Brown, who co-authored the recent book "Deep State: Inside the...

In a ruling with broad implications for computer privacy, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled that federal investigators went too far when they seized the digital records of a drug testing company and kept the results of confidential drug tests performed on all Major League baseball players during the 2002 season. According to published reports, 104 players tested positive for performance enhancing drugs. The names of four of them — Alex Rodriguez, Manny Ramirez, David Ortiz, and (now retired) Sammy Sosa — were leaked to the press by an anonymous source or sources. The court...

AN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - A Montana man who used his work computer to access child pornography does not have a reasonable expectation of privacy that would bar a search of the machine, a U.S. federal appeals court ruled on Tuesday. Jeffrey Ziegler had argued that his Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable searches and seizures should prevent the government from using evidence that he had viewed many images of child pornography at work. The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals based in San Francisco cited similar past cases and found that even if some people lament the lack of privacy at...