Free Republic

National Security Agency Director Gen. Keith Alexander was met with both heckling and applause at the Black Hat information security conference in Las Vegas, Nevada on Wednesday. Ever since the leaks from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden thrust the agency’s domestic surveillance policies into the limelight and sparked widespread public debate, Alexander and other intelligence officials have been on the hot seat, in a persistent state of defense against seemingly unending press reports.

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...

They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety. – Benjamin Franklin Last February Maxine Waters in an interview stated “The President has put in place an organization with the kind of database that no one has ever seen before in life,” She continued to reveal “That database will have information about everything on every individual on ways that it’s never been done before”. This week Americans were surprised to learn that the National Security Agency (NSA) has been collecting phone call information of American Verizon customers. Like all of the...