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Gazillions. That's the number of times the federal government has spied on Americans since 9/11 through the use of drones, legal search warrants, illegal search warrants, federal agent-written search warrants and just plain government spying. This is according to Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., who, when he asked the government to tell him what it was doing to violate our privacy, was given a classified briefing. The senator -- one of just a few in the U.S. Senate who believes that the Constitution means what it says -- was required by federal law to agree not to reveal what spies and...

The TSA, DHS and countless other security agencies have been established to keep America safe from terrorist attacks in post-9/11 America. How far beyond that does the feds' reach really go, though? The attacks of September 11, 2001 were instrumental in getting the US government to establish counterterrorism agencies to curb future tragedies. Some officials say that they haven't stopped there, though, and are spying on everyone in America. Testimonies delivered in recent weeks by former employees of the National Security Agency suggest that the government is going beyond what most of America thinks they do in order to keep...

It didn’t take long for the See Something, Say Something campaign initiated by the Department of Homeland Security last year to show promising results. According to a report from St. Paul Minnesota’s KARE11 and NPR, actionable human intelligence is on the rise at the nation’s largest mall, and it’s being cross-referenced with personal information and threat assessments via the recently made public nationwide network of government Fusion centers. While a mystery to most Americans, the existence of Fusion centers recently made waves when they were brought to the mainstream public’s attention by talk show host Alex Jones and former governor...

decora writes "Crypto-mathematician Bill Binney worked in the Signals Intelligence Automation Research Center at the NSA. There, he worked on NSA's ThinThread program; a way to monitor the flood of internet data from outside the US while protecting the privacy of US citizens. In a new interview with Jane Mayer, he says his program 'got twisted. ... I should apologize to the American people. It's violated everyone's rights. It can be used to eavesdrop on the whole world. ... my people were brought in, and they told me, "Can you believe they're doing this? They're getting billing records on US...

The federal government is launching an expansive program dubbed "Perfect Citizen" to detect cyber assaults on private companies and government agencies running such critical infrastructure as the electricity grid and nuclear-power plants, according to people familiar with the program. The surveillance by the National Security Agency, the government's chief eavesdropping agency, would rely on a set of sensors deployed in computer networks for critical infrastructure that would be triggered by unusual activity suggesting an impending cyber attack, though it wouldn't persistently monitor the whole system, these people said. Defense contractor Raytheon Corp. recently won a classified contract for the initial...

The Government Is Monitoring Facebook And Twitter By Noel Sheppard Created 2009-12-14 11:59 "The government is increasingly monitoring Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites for tax delinquents, copyright infringers and political protesters." So ominously began an editorial [1] in Sunday's New York Times. Those with accounts at such websites should pay attention, for according to the Times, and other sources, Big Brother is watching you: The Wall Street Journal reported this summer that state revenue agents have been searching for tax scofflaws by mining information on MySpace and Facebook. In October, the F.B.I. searched the New York home of...

The Obama administration has for the first time set out its views on the controversial USA Patriot Act, telling lawmakers this week that legal approval of government surveillance methods scheduled to expire in December should be renewed, but leaving room to tweak the law to protect Americans' privacy. In a letter from Justice Department officials to key members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, the administration recommended that Congress move swiftly with legislation that would protect the government's ability to collect a variety of business and credit card records and to monitor terrorism suspects with roving wiretaps. But Assistant Attorney General...

The White House has asked people to send them fishy material. I think we should oblige them. Send them every fishing site in the world along with anything that mentions fish. Shame they couldn't be subscribed to mailing lists that involve fishing and fish. Of course the downside is the do get your ip address and an email address. The site is probably robust enough so it won't crash. I suppose that you could also send them any material produced by the Democrats as fishy as well

I rarely partake in either political discussions or mob rage, but what has transpired with the Palin “hacker,” and Gawker, is to my mind the very dead end, the very suicide, of the media cogniscenti, of anybody who touches it with a bargepole, or pretends it is anything short of a lynching of everything this country aims to stand for. This is not “hacking.” Hacking sounds kind of cute, like surfing, like something faintly nerdy and ingenious. No — the word is “surveillance,” and the cultures that invented it and perfected it were dictatorships, most of which have crumbled and...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. phone companies would be shielded from potentially billions of dollars in lawsuits under an anti-terror spy measure that appears headed toward approval, congressional sources said on Wednesday. House of Representatives Democratic Leader Steny Hoyer, a lead negotiator on the bill, said, "We're very close to having an agreement," and a House vote could come as early as Friday. Democratic and Republican aides and a lobbyist familiar with negotiations said the House would likely approve the measure overwhelmingly. Despite opposition from its top two Democrats, the Senate would then likely give it final approval, clearing the way...

This week, Aaron Mannes from CT Blog and Terror Wonk and the University of Maryland checks into answer the question: is Hugo Chavez seeking a nuke? Did you know that there have been 2 coup attempts against Berhsar Assad in the last 6 months? Where is the MSM on this? Olivier Guitta from The Croissant.Com checks in to break it all down. Finally, I debate with Cloud Morris an attorney based in Maine, who focuses on the civil rights issues surrounding domestic spying--this isn't FISA, this is actual spy satellites being used to snoop.

WASHINGTON - The Justice Department has reopened a long-dormant inquiry into the government's warrantless wiretapping program, a major policy shift only days into the tenure of new Attorney General Michael Mukasey. The investigation by the department's Office of Professional Responsibility was shut down after the previous attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, refused to grant security clearances to investigators. "We recently received the necessary security clearances and are now able to proceed with our investigation," H. Marshall Jarrett, counsel for the OPR, wrote to New York Rep. Maurice Hinchey. A copy of the letter, dated Tuesday, was obtained by The Associated Press....

The Bush administration acknowledged for the first time that telecommunications companies assisted the government's warrantless surveillance program and were being sued as a result, an admission some legal experts say could complicate the government's bid to halt numerous lawsuits challenging the program's legality. "[U]nder the president's program, the terrorist surveillance program, the private sector had assisted us," Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell said in an interview with the El Paso Times published Wednesday. His statement could help plaintiffs in dozens of lawsuits against the telecom companies, which allege that the companies participated in a wiretapping program that violated Americans'...

Did the Clinton Administration Engage in “Domestic Spying” Against Princess Diana? What the new revelations could mean. By Byron York The first thing to remember in trying to evaluate reports that U.S. intelligence services wiretapped Princess Diana is that British press accounts can be notoriously unreliable. We’ll know more about the story on Thursday morning, when results of the Lord Stevens inquiry into Diana’s death are released to the public. But if the reports out now are accurate, the Diana case could raise questions for veterans of the Clinton administration similar to those facing the Bush administration today. Some versions...

07:11 PDT -- Embattled Hewlett-Packard Chairwoman Patricia Dunn will give up her post in January, and will be replaced by CEO Mark Hurd, the company said this morning. The announcement follows two days of board meetings as HP reeled from a corporate spying scandal that has rocked Silicon Valley. Dunn will remain as director. Another director, Richard Hackborn, who has served on the HP board since 1992, was named lead independent director effective January. Dunn continued to defended her decision to investigation the leaks of confidential board deliberations to the media. But she apologized for the use of false identities...

Police paying brokers for telephone records Practice raises civil liberties questions, some say. By John Solomon ASSOCIATED PRESS Wednesday, June 21, 2006 WASHINGTON — Federal agents and local police across the country — as well as some of the nation's best-known companies — have been gathering Americans' phone records from private data brokers without subpoenas or warrants. These brokers, many of whom market aggressively on the Internet, have broken into customer accounts online, tricked phone companies into revealing information and sometimes acknowledged that their practices violate laws, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press. Legal experts and privacy advocates...

Assuming that Michael Hayden is confirmed as CIA director, the agency will be in strong hands--especially if, as rumored, Stephen Kappes is appointed his deputy. General Hayden is the nation's senior intelligence officer (his current boss, John Negroponte, the director of national intelligence, is a career diplomat rather than an intelligence professional). Mr. Kappes, a former director of the operations (human intelligence) division of the CIA, is highly respected throughout the intelligence community. These appointments will not "recenter" the beleaguered Central Intelligence Agency, which is being squeezed from three sides: The Defense Department, the FBI and the director of national...

It's legal In early September 2002, just before the first anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks, a group of lawyers gathered in a heavily protected, windowless room in the Department of Justice building in Washington. There were three federal appeals-court judges, Laurence Silberman, Edward Leavy, and Ralph Guy. There was Theodore Olson, the U.S. solicitor general. There was Larry Thompson, the deputy attorney general. And there was John Yoo, the Justice official who had closely studied questions of war powers and presidential authority. The purpose of the meeting was to argue a case whose details remain so classified that...

By Lowell Ponte February 22, 2006 Leftist politicians, by criticizing President George W. Bush’s wiretapping of overseas telephone calls with al-Qaeda suspects, have left the impression that Democrats are too fastidious to ever use such methods to eavesdrop on terrorists. This impression is wrong. We should give Democratic leaders their due. President Bill Clinton used questionable government surveillance in ways more sweeping than any Republican president would even consider doing.

Another House GOP committee chair has joined criticism of the Congressional Research Service for its legal analysis of the administration's program of ...