Free Republic

@RepThomasMassie Were it not for Edward Snowden, the elected lawmaking body of the United States would not know about vast unconstitutional programs that were being run by the unelected government of the U.S. I say this definitively as 1 of 535 elected lawmakers of the U.S. government.

Central bank digital currencies are feverishly being developed all over the globe, and this is something that should deeply alarm all of us. For a moment, I would like for you to imagine a world where the government instantly knows whenever you buy or sell something. No transaction would ever be truly private, not even your most personal or embarrassing ones. In addition, your money would not be truly your own under such a system. Your access to the digital currency system would be a privilege which could potentially be suspended or revoked with the click of a mouse. All...

Pelosi, Schiff, and Biden have politicized a career intelligence community position by demanding the removal of a national security professional.Hours after President Joe Biden delivered his inaugural address promising to bring unity and healing to the country, his administration began a politically charged attack on a highly respected, newly appointed career intelligence official over fears he would be insufficiently loyal to Democratic partisans. The attempted purge has thus far followed the playbook publicly laid out by top Democrats and their left-wing media enablers. In a stunning violation of precedent, Biden’s National Security Agency (NSA) placed General Counsel Michael J. Ellis...

Reuters has an interesting piece looking at how many experts are concerned that mass surveillance efforts by the federal government are making a mockery of the 4th Amendment. The focus of the article is on the scan of all Yahoo email that was revealed back in October, but it certainly touches on other programs as well. The concern is easily summarized by Orin Kerr: "A lot of it is unrecognizable from a Fourth Amendment perspective," said Orin Kerr, a former federal prosecutor and Georgetown University Law School expert on surveillance. "It's not where the traditional Fourth Amendment law is." But,...

Is the military handling of a Chinese balloon, identified as a surveillance device, and other unidentified Flying Objects (UFO) in recent days, just being hyped by the lapdog media to divert attention from the news that the Democrat administration of POTUS Joe Biden may have blown up the Nord Stream pipeline? That is a question on the minds of many Americans and many other people around the world. Answers are not so easy to come by as the Democrats have long and rambling press conferences to try to explain why such massive military action has been taken and what the...

Edward Snowden, who leaked highly classified information from the National Security Agency in 2013, has been one of the most polarizing people in politics over the last decade. Ask a libertarian, and they’ll tell you he’s a hero for exposing a range of government surveillance programs, some of which pushed or violated constitutional boundaries. Ask someone of a more hawkish leaning and they’ll tell you he got Americans killed and is a traitor to his former country.I tend to be one of the squishes who falls somewhere in the middle. I think calling him a whistleblower is a stretch given...

In mid-November, while the whole world was focused on the Ukraine crisis, the US midterms or whatever other “big story” the media decided was more important, a truly momentous shift took place in the global financial system. It might seem like a small step on the surface, but it has the potential to bring about a real and possibly irreversible sea change in the way we use money; or better said, the way it uses us. As Reuters reported on the 15th of November, “Global banking giants are starting a 12-week digital dollar pilot with the Federal Reserve Bank of...

June 12, 2013, Glenn Beck today on his show stated that he plans to break news within 24 hours that could take down the entire power structure of the government. The news that Beck said he will break within 24 hours comes on the reports of the NSA spying scandal when NSA contractor, Edward Snowden exposed the vast spy network that covered every single communication apparatus in America.

When Russian President Vladimir Putin granted citizenship to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden on Monday, the news revived a long-simmering debate about the propriety of his revelations of U.S. government secrets. At the same time, it prompted reiterations of a widely-embraced falsehood: that Snowden “fled to Russia.”The disinformation-trafficking wasn’t limited to random people on social media. Among others, The New York Times, The Guardian, ABC, Christian Science Monitor and Canada’s CBC all asserted in the past week that Snowden “fled to Russia” in 2013 after revealing that the United States government had created a mass surveillance regime targeting its own citizens,...

When Russian President Vladimir Putin granted citizenship to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden on Monday, the news revived a long-simmering debate about the propriety of his revelations of U.S. government secrets. At the same time, it prompted reiterations of a widely-embraced falsehood: that Snowden “fled to Russia.” That disinformation-trafficking wasn’t limited to random people on social media. Among others, The New York Times, The Guardian, ABC, Christian Science Monitor and Canada’s CBC all asserted in the past week that Snowden “fled to Russia” in 2013 after revealing that the United States government had created a mass surveillance regime targeting its own...

@Breaking911 BREAKING: Putin has granted Russian citizenship to U.S. whistleblower Edward Snowden - SKY

Chinese telecom giant Huawei is hiring Democratic lobbyist Tony Podesta to try and 'warm relations with the Biden administration,' according to Politico which cites two people familiar with the matter.Podesta will work to advance a variety of the company’s goals in Washington, according to one of the people. He declined to comment. A spokesperson for Huawei also declined to comment.Huawei faces a host of challenges in Washington. In February 2020, the Justice Department charged the company with violating the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO — a key DOJ tool for going after organized crime. DOJ alleged that...

President Vladimir Putin on Monday granted Russian citizenship to former U.S. intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, nine years after he exposed the scale of secret surveillance operations by the National Security Agency (NSA).

@ggreenwald Trump's failure to pardon Assange and Snowden was one of the worst and most cowardly mistakes he made. Few realize how close he was to doing it. He got scared by threats from GOP Senators that they'd vote for impeachment if he did it.

Robert Mueller says he was able to pinpoint security company executive Erik Prince’s precise location for several hours in January 2017 by matching his mobile phone signal to a cell site near Trump Tower in New York City. The special counsel’s report discloses the use of this investigative technique, by which police determine a suspect’s location via a cellphone’s GPS signal. The Prince narrative is one instance in unredacted sections of the report in which Mr. Mueller’s team explicitly discloses cellphone tracking. It raises the question of whether the FBI applied the process to other investigative subjects — a phone’s...

In a barbed tweet yesterday, NSA consultant turned whistleblower Edward Snowden said that Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) could “casually [annihilate] the savings of every wage-worker” in the country. Snowden began his attack against the nascent promise of CBDCs—digital currencies backed by the monetary reserves of a central bank—in response to an article by New York Times guest columnist Dr. Eswar Prasad, a professor of trade policies at Cornell University. Dr. Prasad highlighted the growing move towards a cashless economy, a move signaled by the research and trials of CBDCs in countries such as China, Sweden, Japan, Britain, as well...

Former Treasury Department official Natalie “May” Edwards said she is a whistleblower who sent suspicious activity reports to BuzzFeed News after trying in vain to work through lawful channels. Her actions became the basis for the global FinCEN Files investigation.. Natalie “May” Edwards has made a pact with her 16-year-old daughter: Every night before bed for the next six months, each will say a quiet prayer at the exact same time. Her daughter will be doing so from home in Virginia. Edwards will be doing so from a women’s federal prison in West Virginia. “I am emotionally prepared as far...

It is hard to overstate the sociopathy of US national security officials: their casual willingness to blatantly lie about the gravest matters is limitless. Ever since Edward Snowden received asylum from Russia in 2013, Obama officials have repeatedly maligned his motives and patriotism by citing his "choice” to take up residence there. It has long been clear that this narrative was a lie: Snowden, after meeting with journalists in Hong Kong, intended only to transit through Moscow and then Havana on his way to seek asylum in Latin America. He was purposely prevented from leaving Russia — trapped in the...

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...

“I can't in good conscience allow the U.S. government to destroy privacy, Internet freedom, and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they're secretly building... the NSA specifically targets the communications of everyone. It ingests them by default... they are intent on making every conversation and every form of behavior in the world known to them.” –Edward Snowden Edward Snowden might not yet be a historical figure, but he certainly is a hero. He is the whistleblower of all whistleblowers, the American who blew the lid off of Washington's spying on private citizens. But Snowden’s...