Free Republic

One of the things that civil liberties activists like to lament about is that the general public seems to care more about Google and Facebook using their personal data to target advertising than the government using it to target drone strikes. The reality is that both types of abuse are dangerous, and they work hand in hand. It’s hard to find a more perfect example of this collusion than in a bill that’s headed for a vote soon in the U.S. Senate: the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act, or CISA. CISA is an out and out surveillance bill masquerading as a...

Christopher Soghoian THE SPIES WE TRUST: THIRD PARTY SERVICE PROVIDERS AND LAW ENFORCEMENT SURVEILLANCE Telecommunications carriers and service providers now play an essential role in fa- cilitating modern surveillance by law enforcement agencies. The police merely select the individuals to be monitored, while the actual surveillance is performed by third parties: often the same email providers, search engines and telephone companies to whom con- sumers have entrusted their private data. Assisting Big Brother has become a routine part of business. While communications surveillance is widespread, the official government reports barely scratch the surface. As such, the true scale of law...

He promised us the most transparent administration in history. And he delivered. Combined with the 4.2 million people whose Social Security numbers were stolen in a separate breach, we’re now talking about upwards of eight percent of the entire population whose sensitive personal data is in an enemy power’s hands. On that note, let me gently remind you that not a single person has been fired for any of this. Of the 21.5 million records that were stolen, 19.7 million belonged to individuals who had undergone background investigation, OPM said. The remaining 1.8 million records belonged to other individuals, mostly...

A SMALL private firm in the US has developed a surveillance system of Orwellian proportions that could very well be the future of big brother. Thirty kilometres above a chosen city, a plane hangs out of sight of the thousands of people scurrying below — continuously circling the metropolis underneath. Every second, the plane takes a photo of the entire city and all the happenings within a 64sq km radius. The images are beamed down to a control centre where they create what is akin to a real-time Google map of everything taking place. When a crime occurs, teams of...

From a private communication: Lots of people casing streets with dogs sunglasses and baseball caps, always in pairs. They get real long hard looks up every driveway that doesn’t have a security camera at the end of it (as soon as they spot a camera the ground suddenly becomes really interesting). Seen this behavior myself more than a few times. Dogs always have their noses to the ground and the edges of the property. I have never seen an untrained dog sniff like a bloodhound quite like that. It doesn’t help [my paranoia] that every pair of people I’ve seen...

Suspicious activity noted ahead of #JadeHelm15 CHINO HILLS, Calif. (INTELLIHUB) — A reader, John Temblador, retired California State Peace Officer, CDC, witnessed a vehicle dashing through a Walmart parking lot on June 4. “at a high rate of speed”, bearing no “E” plate.Temblador thinks that the vehicle may have been conducting a “covert scan” of some type.The vehicle appears to be equipped with license plate scanning technology or code catcher technology, aimed both forward and aft to either side of the vehicle to catch every plate in the parking lot.

PARK CITY, Utah (AP) — Govs. Scott Walker and Chris Christie said presidential rivals in the Senate don't do anything. Sen. Marco Rubio denounced "old ways" in an indirect slap at older contenders. Sen. Lindsey Graham said his party may be going down a "death spiral" if it doesn't embrace minority and younger voters. In fighting for attention Friday at a luxury mountainside donor retreat convened by 2012 Republican nominee Mitt Romney, several 2016 contenders let loose some elbows at each other. Most did not name names, but Christie did. "If you want to know how little they know," he...

Tucked into the surveillance bill that became law was a little-noticed section that will let the United States complete ratification of two long-stalled treaties aimed at stopping a frightening scenario: terrorists wielding radioactive bombs. "Today, nearly 2,000 metric tons of weapons-usable nuclear materials remain spread across hundreds of sites around the globe — some of it poorly secured," said former Sen. Sam Nunn, co-chairman of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, an organization in Washington that works on the issue. "We know that to get the materials needed to build a bomb, terrorists will not necessarily go where there is the most...

Just when we thought the absurdity that marks every single day of Obama's reign could not possibly be surpassed, we learned that 4 hours (3 hours and 47 minutes to be precise) after the US president vowed to sign a new law banning bulk data collection by the NSA (named, for purely grotesque reasons, the "USA Freedom Act"), the Obama administration asked the secret Fisa surveillance court to ignore a federal court that found bulk surveillance illegal and to once again grant the National Security Agency the power to collect the phone records of millions of Americans for six months....

The Obama administration has asked a secret surveillance court to ignore a federal court that found bulk surveillance illegal and to once again grant the National Security Agency the power to collect the phone records of millions of Americans for six months. The legal request, filed nearly four hours after Barack Obama vowed to sign a new law banning precisely the bulk collection he asks the secret court to approve, also suggests that the administration may not necessarily comply with any potential court order demanding that the collection stop.

At Powerline this week, Steve Hayward penned a post aptly entitled “The Insincerity of Rand Paul.” The senator’s legal arguments against the Patriot Act, he posits, mimic papa Ron Paul’s 2003 calls for a formal declaration of war against Iraq: mere “constitutional punctilio to cover his real feelings.” Steve is right. Congress statutorily authorized the use of military force in Iraq. Nothing more was constitutionally required. The real reason for Representative Ron Paul’s formalistic nattering about a declaration of war was his opposition to American intervention in Iraq. That, in turn, was driven by his theory that it was American...

China has begun dispatching surveillance vessels off the coast of Hawaii in response to theNavy's monitoring activities of disputed islands in the South China Sea, according to the Taiwan newspaper Want China Times. The purported surveillance comes on the heels of raised tensions between China and the United States late last month. A Navy P-8A Poseidon surveillance plane was flying over the Spratly Islands near the Philippines and Malaysia when a Chinese radio dispatcher warned it several times to depart the airspace. China has been enlarging some of the uninhabited atolls by dredging up sand from the sea bottom, claiming...

Without public notice or debate, the Obama administration has expanded the National Security Agency’s warrantless surveillance of Americans’ international Internet traffic to search for evidence of malicious computer hacking, according to classified N.S.A. documents. In mid-2012, Justice Department lawyers wrote two secret memos permitting the spy agency to begin hunting on Internet cables, without a warrant and on American soil, for data linked to computer intrusions originating abroad — including traffic that flows to suspicious Internet addresses or contains malware, the documents show. The Justice Department allowed the agency to monitor only addresses and “cybersignatures” — patterns associated with computer...

He’s turning out to be a lot like his father, unable or unwilling to adjust to changing political realities within his party.There are many reasons to be bullish about Rand Paul's unconventional campaign for president. He's relentlessly courting support from young voters and African Americans, making the explicit case that outreach can translate into wider support. He's embracing issues that Republicans usually don't dare touch, such as criminal-justice reform, drug decriminalization, and reining in government surveillance. And based on the early polls, he's finding himself in solid shape, running competitively against Hillary Clinton and in the top tier of Republican...

Good morning Baltimore. Crime is up and arrests are down. Residents are afraid to go outside following the recent surge in homicides, the worst in 15 years. But have no fear, Al Sharpton has come to the rescue to bring peace and harmony to the mean streets of a city near you. America’s law-and-order champion has been calling for the deployment of a federal police force to take over local law enforcement in riot-troubled cities such as Baltimore and Ferguson. “We need the Justice Department to step in and take over policing in this country,” he said. He also suggested...

The relationship between Rand Paul and Mitch McConnell has always been more a marriage of political convenience than heartfelt bromance, and it is being tested now like never before.. The two Republican senators represent divergent flanks of the Republican Party, often pulling in different directions, most recently over what to do with the nation’s domestic telephone surveillance program. Paul is the libertarian-leaning firebrand who temporarily shut down the government's bulk collection of Americans’ phone records. McConnell, the Senate majority leader, is the establishment elder who believes surveillance is not infringing on privacy and should be preserved to catch terrorists. Paul...

Sen. Ted Cruz is polling better against Hillary Clinton, but not against the people he’d need to beat to face her. Cruz gained ground on the former secretary of state in a CNN/ORC poll released Tuesday trailing her 52 percent to 43 percent in a hypothetical 2016 match-up. The nine-point gap is a major improvement from the 24-point Cruz lost by in a mid-April poll. But Cruz only gained one point on his primary competition in a poll of Republicans and GOP-leaning independents, inching from seven to eight points. Clinton’s polling in favorability, trustworthiness and empathy also tanked, so this...

The Kentucky senator walks a tight line between pleasing libertarians and alienating moderates.Rand Paul is a man besieged. Eight weeks into his White House bid, the Kentucky Republican is hurting for deep-pocketed donors, watching supporters of his libertarian father, Ron Paul, gravitate toward opponents and getting flogged by a GOP establishment that abhors his calls for a less interventionist approach to foreign policy. But his latest confrontation with Republican power brokers — a move to block the renewal of the PATRIOT Act and federal spying programs — has also exposed Paul’s increasingly imperiled tightrope walk toward his party’s nomination. “His...

The FBI is operating a small air force to spy on Americans Associated Press Jack Gillum, Eileen Sullivan and Eric Tucker, Associated Press Jun. 2, 2015, WASHINGTON (AP) — The FBI is operating a small air force with scores of low-flying planes across the country carrying video and, at times, cellphone surveillance technology — all hidden behind fictitious companies that are fronts for the government, The Associated Press has learned. The planes' surveillance equipment is generally used without a judge's approval, and the FBI said the flights are used for specific, ongoing investigations. In a recent 30-day period, the agency...

---snip--- Sen. Rand Paul is in step with his party on most issues. He’s pro-life, a big backer of gun rights, a small-government conservative and he’s an unabashed critic of President Obama and Hillary Clinton. And yet, Paul is again in the spotlight talking about his disagreements with his own party. For months, Paul has been focused on reducing criminal penalties for drugs. Last week, he blamed GOP hawks for the creation of ISIS. Now, he has succeeded in pulling off a one-man blockade of the Patriot Act. Like his other views, Paul’s stand is no doubt sincere and he...