Free Republic

<p>Rome — US secret services allegedly eavesdropped on cardinals before the conclave in March to elect a new pope, Italian weekly magazine Panorama claimed Wednesday.</p> <p>"The National Security Agency wiretapped the pope," the magazine said, accusing the United States of listening in to telephone calls to and from the Vatican, including the accommodation housing cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio before he was elected Pope Francis.</p>

I've always thought of Barack Obama as the "Chauncey Gardiner" of American politics. Like Peter Sellers' character in the classic film, "Being There," Obama is an embodiment of outsiders' hopes and dreams for who they think he is. Reality, like the film, shows there isn't really a lot of there, there.This weekend, we learned that President Obama "didn't know about" NSA spying on world leaders, especially German Chancellor Angela Merkel. He also "didn't know about" the posthumously obvious problems with the rollout of the ObamaCare website exchanges. According to the New York Times, these problems were evident 8 months ago....

FRANCE has demanded an explanation from Washington of a report that the US swept up 70 million French telephone records and text messages in its global surveillance net, even recording certain private conversations. The fallout prompted a phone call yesterday from US President Barack Obama to French President Francois Hollande, and, the White House said, an acknowledgement by the US leader that the episode raised "legitimate questions for our friends and allies" about how surveillance capabilities are employed. Mr Hollande's office issued a strongly worded statement afterward expressing "profound reprobation" over US actions it said intruded on the private lives...

Moscow (AFP) - US intelligence leaker Edward Snowden warned of dangers to democracy in the first video released of the fugitive since Russia granted him temporary asylum in August. "If we can't understand the policies and programmes of our government we can't grant our consent in regulating them," Snowden said in one of the short video clips posted on the WikiLeaks website Friday night. The anti-secrecy group said the videos were filmed Wednesday when Snowden met with a group of four retired US ex-intelligence workers and activists now seeking to promote ethics within the profession. Snowden, a former National Security...

It certainly makes for a good story: a scrappy kid from Baltimore flunks out of an English class at what is now Loyola University Maryland only to become an international bestselling author. The problem is that the oft-told tale concerning Tom Clancy is just as fictitious as Jack Ryan. “It was an urban legend that just wouldn’t die,” said Carol Abromaitis, the English professor accused of giving Clancy an F in her class. For decades, Abromaitis urged English majors to let others know the truth. Her efforts bore little fruit. “One major said to me, ‘Of course not. It makes...

Iran claimed on Tuesday that Israel's arrest of an alleged Iranian spy was a "repetitive scenario" aimed at ending what it called the Jewish state's "isolation" within the international community. "This is a repetitive scenario by the Zionist regime. Even Western media said the timing of the arrest and [Prime Minister Binyamin] Netanyahu's leaving (for the U.S.) was a plan to end its isolation," foreign ministry spokeswoman Marzieh Afkham was quoted by AFP as having said in her weekly press briefing. "Such desperate scenarios stem from anger, and we cannot assess them," Afkham said, adding that Israel was also isolated...

SAO PAULO | Sun Sep 8, 2013 12:06pm EDT (Reuters) - The U.S. government allegedly spied on Brazilian state-run oil company Petroleo Brasileiro SA, known as Petrobras, according to the web site of Globo, Brazil's biggest television network. The network, which a week ago aired a report alleging that the U.S. National Security Agency intercepted communications by the presidents of Brazil and Mexico, said its information again came from Glenn Greenwald, an American activist who has worked with fugitive former NSA analyst Edward Snowden to expose the extent of U.S. spying at home and abroad. Promotional teasers from the network...

FORT MEADE, Maryland-A U.S. military judge on Tuesday started considering the sentence of soldier Bradley Manning for the largest leak of classified information in the country's history - and she said it will be announced Wednesday morning.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Under increasing pressure to justify electronic surveillance programs that at times capture communications of American citizens, the U.S. National Security Agency went to unusual lengths on Friday to insist its activities are lawful and any mistakes largely unintentional. **SNIP** The NSA's presentation was an attempt to calm the latest firestorm over documents disclosed by Snowden. The Washington Post late Thursday reported that the NSA had broken privacy rules or overstepped its legal authority thousands of times each year since 2008, citing an internal agency audit and other top secret documents. "These are not willful violations, they are...

Former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden began downloading documents describing the U.S. government's electronic spying programs while he was working for Dell Inc in April 2012, almost a year earlier than previously reported, according to U.S. officials and other sources familiar with the matter.

According to Soviet intelligence reports, we now know that one of FDR’s top officials, the Treasury Department’s Harry Dexter White, was a Soviet agent, who, among many other deceptions, subverted relations between the US and Japan by inserting “ultimatum” language into the cable flow that actually spurred the Japanese attack. This was language written in Moscow, passed to White by a Soviet handler in Washington, D.C., and dropped into a State Department communiqué sent to Japan. This brilliantly executed influence operation doesn’t live in infamy – at least not yet. ... “A continuous stream of fighter and pursuit planes is...

With his slow, steady stream of leaked NSA documents, Edward Snowden is offering a glimpse into what President Obama's pledge of transparent government might have looked like -- had he chosen to deliver on it. When he arrived in office, Obama declared that his administration would be "the most open and transparent in history" and rolled out a series of historic declassifications, including the Bush administration's legal justifications for so-called enhanced interrogation tactics and the size of American nuclear stockpiles. Each of these decisions broke with long-established precedent and seemed to signal a new era of government openness. Now, by...

NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — Motorola lifted the wraps Thursday on a new, customizable smartphone called the Moto X that’s set to roll out to consumers in the U.S. later this month. Bloomberg Dennis Woodside, CEO of Motorola Mobility, introduces the Moto X smartphone in New York on Thursday. This is the first significant smartphone to be designed by Motorola since its acquisition by Google Inc /quotes/zigman/93888/quotes/nls/goog GOOG +0.05% , which was completed last year. Google shares closed up 1.9% at $904.22 on Thursday following an event in New York City at which the company showed off the device.

He works at one of the three-letter intelligence agencies and oversees construction of a $1.2 billion surveillance data center in Utah that is 15 times the size of MetLife Stadium, home to the New York Giants and Jets. Long Island native Harvey Davis, a top National Security Agency official, needs that commanding presence. His role is to supervise infrastructure construction worldwide for NSA, which is part of the Defense Department. That involves tending to logistics, military installations, as well as power, space and cooling for all NSA data centers. In May, crews broke ground on a $792 million computing center...

In an initiative aimed at rooting out future leakers and other security violators, President Barack Obama has ordered federal employees to report suspicious actions of their colleagues based on behavioral profiling techniques that are not scientifically proven to work, according to experts and government documents. The techniques are a key pillar of the Insider Threat Program, an unprecedented government-wide crackdown under which millions of federal bureaucrats and contractors must watch out for “high-risk persons or behaviors” among co-workers. Those who fail to report them could face penalties, including criminal charges. Obama mandated the program in an October 2011 executive order...

The chief judge of America’s most powerful secret court is a 64-year-old man who has said his path toward the law began in part when he was stopped by police in the early 1960s simply for being black, and who once said he became a lawyer to “make an impact on the quality of life for people of color in this country.” Reggie Walton is the presiding judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, whose 11 members are appointed directly by the chief justice of the Supreme Court. Revelations of broad spying by the National Security Agency have drawn unusual...

US intelligence leaker Edward Snowden, who has been holed up in a Moscow airport for more than two weeks, has agreed to an offer of political asylum from Venezuela, a top pro-Kremlin lawmaker said on Tuesday.

India today rejected a request for asylum by US whistleblower Edward Snowden made through its Mission in Moscow three days ago. "I can confirm that earlier today our Embassy in Moscow did receive a communication dated 30 June from Mr Edward Snowden. That communication did contain a request for asylum. We have carefully examined the request. Following that examination we have concluded that we see no reason to accede to the request," spokesperson in the External Affairs Ministry said here. Snowden, a US former technical contractor for the National Security Agency (NSA) and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) employee who leaked...

Statement from Edward Snowden in Moscow One week ago I left Hong Kong after it became clear that my freedom and safety were under threat for revealing the truth. My continued liberty has been owed to the efforts of friends new and old, family, and others who I have never met and probably never will. I trusted them with my life and they returned that trust with a faith in me for which I will always be thankful. On Thursday, President Obama declared before the world that he would not permit any diplomatic "wheeling and dealing" over my case. Yet...