Free Republic

The National Security Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation violated specific civil liberty protections during the Obama years by improperly searching and disseminating raw intelligence on Americans or failing to promptly delete unauthorized intercepts, according to newly declassified memos that provide some of the richest detail to date on the spy agencies’ ability to obey their own rules. The memos reviewed by The Hill were publicly released on July 11 through Freedom of Information Act litigation by the American Civil Liberties Union.

The plight of the unredacted: Calling on Judicial Watch: Detailed research is needed on how NSA intelligence with the unredacted names of thousands of US citizens during the 2016 election campaign may have been put to use. Follow-up is needed to see what happened to thousands of citizens whose names were distributed throughout government agencies under the orders of the President Barack Hussein Obama administration—in effect giving them the power of harassment.

The National Security Agency vacuumed up more than 151 million records about Americans’ phone calls last year via a new system that Congress created to end the agency’s once-secret program that collected domestic calling records in bulk, a report disclosed Tuesday. The National Security Agency took in the 151 million records despite obtaining court orders to use the system on only 42 terrorism suspects in 2016, along with a few left over from late 2015, the report said. According to the report, the National Security Agency distributed 3,914 reports last year containing information about Americans gathered via the warrantless surveillance...

The U.S. National Security Agency collected more than 151 million records of Americans' phone calls last year, even after Congress limited its ability to collect bulk phone records, according to an annual report issued on Tuesday by the top U.S. intelligence officer. The report said the names of 1,934 "U.S. persons" were "unmasked" last year in response to specific requests, compared with 2,232 in 2015, but it did not identify who requested the names or on what grounds. The report from the office of Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats was the first measure of the effects of the 2015...

During his final year in office, President Barack Obama's team significantly expanded efforts to search National Security Agency intercepts for information about Americans, distributing thousands of intelligence reports across government with the unredacted names of U.S. residents during the midst of a divisive 2016 presidential election. In all, government officials conducted 30,355 searches in 2016 seeking information about Americans in NSA intercept metadata, which include telephone numbers and email addresses. The government in 2016 also scoured the actual contents of NSA intercepted calls and emails for 5,288 Americans, an increase of 13 percent over the prior year and a massive...

During his final year in office, President Obama's team significantly expanded efforts to search National Security Agency intercepts for information about Americans, distributing thousands of intelligence reports across government with the unredacted names of U.S. residents during the midst of a divisive 2016 presidential election. 2 of 26 The data, made available this week by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, provides the clearest evidence to date of how information accidentally collected by the NSA overseas about Americans was subsequently searched and disseminated after President Obama loosened privacy protections to make such sharing easier in 2011 in the...

Former National Security Agency contractor, Central Intelligence Agency employee and hide-and-seek champion Edward Snowden has been holed up in Russia for nearly three years, engaged in perhaps the longest-ever game of show-and-tell. Meanwhile, The Intercept -- an online publication that has served as a clearinghouse for data Snowden pilfered from the NSA -- has just dropped another stash of once highly classified material onto the Internet. This time, the leak consists of content from an internal NSA newsletter, SID Today. ("SID" is the abbreviation for "Signals Intelligence Directorate.") What can we learn from these newly released documents? Apparently, NSA culture...

Since the election of Barack Obama in 2008, and his inauguration in 2009, Democrats have increasingly shown no shame. They showed no shame when they passed the trillion dollar stimulus bill that was so full of pork that it failed to produce jobs; they showed no shame when they handed out Department of Energy “green” loans to their cronies; they showed no shame when they pandered to Hispanics, while not providing them the comprehensive immigration reform that Democrats say they favored; they showed no shame by giving Al Sharpton his own TV show; they showed no shame in the way...

Earlier this week, FBI Director James Comey gave an interview to "60 Minutes" during which he revealed a flawed understanding of personal freedom. He rightly distinguished what FBI agents do in their investigations of federal crimes from what the NSA does in its intelligence gathering, when the two federal agencies are looking for non-public data. The FBI requires, Comey correctly asserted, articulable suspicion to commence an investigation and probable cause to obtain a search warrant. It does this because its agents have sworn an oath to uphold the Constitution, and their failure to comply with that oath may very well...

Man people are stupid. And I mean a lot of people. So John Kerry went on national TV yesterday to triple double dog dare Edward Snowden to come back from Russia. “Secretary of State John Kerry on Wednesday called National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden a fugitive and challenged him to ‘man up and come back to the United States,’" reports ABCNews. "If Mr. Snowden wants to come back to the United States," Kerry said, "we'll have him on a flight today." Kerry said Snowden should "stand up in the United States and make his case to the American people."...

“We Kill People Based on Metadata,” Admits Former CIA/NSA Boss Written by Alex Newman font size decrease font size increase font size Print E-mail “We Kill People Based on Metadata,” Admits Former CIA/NSA Boss Essentially confessing to mass murder and multiple other crimes, retired Gen. Michael Hayden, the former boss of both the NSA and the CIA, admitted that the Obama administration has been murdering people around the world based solely on the so-called metadata collected by U.S. intelligence agencies. The controversial insider’s remarks confirmed growing fears and warnings by critics of the out-of-control federal government that, despite efforts to...

Now you're gonna have to answer to the Coca-Cola company, Mr. Obama. OK, maybe not Coke, but, you’ll have to answer to today’s bubbly equivalent, which can also rot you from the inside out: Facebook. Yeah. So be warned “Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg called President Barack Obama Wednesday night to complain about U.S. government actions that are undermining trust in the Internet,” reports Politico, “after a report that described how the National Security Agency posed as a Facebook server to inject malicious software into targets’ computers.” I wonder if Zuck’s voice broke when he talked to Obama. I wonder if...

Oh, now they’ve done it. They picked on the wrong people this time. The C.I.A. has apparently been spying on Congress. I know. Who would have seen that coming? Spies spying on people? That’s like lawyers legislating or something. Oh wait…. So, Congress is really, really mad at the C.I.A. now. According to a story by the New York Times, the C.I.A. snooped on Senate staffers in order to find out how the Senate got internal C.I.A. documents, some of which were critical of “agency’s detention and interrogation program. Parts of the C.I.A. report cast a particularly harsh light...

I’m a national security hawk. But, I’m also a free-market, anti-crony capitalist. I’m a Catholic, I’m a dad and I’m a businessman. And an American. For all these reasons, I stand with Rand in his lawsuit against Barack Obama and his co-defendants: the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander and FBI Director James Comey. “Paul’s suit, filed in conjunction with conservative group FreedomWorks,” says the New York Daily News, “alleges that the NSA’s bulk collection program, under which the agency has collected the telephone metadata of many Americans, violates the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution,...

Cisco announced two important things in today’s earnings report: The first is that the company is aggressively moving into the Internet of Things—the effort to connect just about every object on earth to the internet—by rolling out new technologies. The second is that Cisco has seen a huge drop-off in demand for its hardware in emerging markets, which the company blames on fears about the NSA using American hardware to spy on the rest of the world. Cisco chief executive John Chambers said on the company’s earnings call that he believes other American technology companies will be similarly affected. Cisco...

Why do a vast majority of the American public continue to fall for the constant lies coming out of Washington?What is it that they just don’t see?Time and time again the rug is pulled out from under them and they still fall for the same old “bait and switch”.Politicians know it and now they have no qualms about continuing the lies even after we know they are lies! I remember a time when at least they tried to cover it up, (Richard Nixon), or they came clean after they were caught, (Bill Clinton).Today however, they fabricate a lie in order...

If there is one man who knows about corrupt presidential administrations, it is Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward. So, when the man who helped bring down Richard Nixon warns about widespread corruption within the Executive Branch, it commands attention. Woodward spoke last weekend with CBS anchor Bob Schieffer about the Obama Administration’s “secret world” of government power, where it operates with impunity, often times well outside the rule of law. To keep Obama and his cronies ensconced in power, Woodward describes how the Administration routinely uses intimidation, misdirection, and outright lies to hide what it actually is doing. Of course,...

Secretary of State John Kerry went to Europe to talk about Mideast peace, Syria and Iran. What he got was an earful of outrage over U.S. snooping abroad. President Barack Obama has defended America’s surveillance dragnet to leaders of Russia, Mexico, Brazil, France and Germany, but the international anger over the disclosures shows no signs of abating in the short run. … Diplomatic relations are built on trust. If America’s credibility is in question, the U.S. will find it harder to maintain alliances, influence world opinion and maybe even close trade deals. …

The director of the National Security Agency and his deputy are expected to depart in the coming months, US officials said on Wednesday, in a development that could give President Obama a chance to reshape the eavesdropping agency. Army general Keith Alexander's eight-year tenure was rocked this year by revelations contained in documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden about the agency's widespread scooping up of telephone, email and social media data.

The National Security Agency is harvesting hundreds of millions of contact lists from personal e-mail and instant messaging accounts around the world, many of them belonging to Americans, according to senior intelligence officials and top secret documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.