NSA Wiretapping Public Service Announcement

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Eric Holder Refuses To Answer If Obama Admin Is Spying On Congress

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Eric Holder Refuses To Answer If Obama Admin Is Spying On Congress

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Ron Paul on Massive NSA Spying Scandal "Power in Government is Always Abused"

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Obama is Big Brother and a Bald Faced Liar!

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The Electronic Concentration Camp

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5 Lessons From the AP Spying Case and Other Leak Investigations

Cindy Cohn & Trevor Timm
EFF

The journalism world has been rightly outraged by theJustice Department dragging the Associated Press (and now a Fox News reporter) into one of its sprawling leak investigations. As we wrote last week, by obtaining the call records of twenty AP phone lines, “the Justice Department has struck a terrible blow against the freedom of the press and the ability of reporters to investigate and report the news."

But there are several other important lessons that this scandal can teach us besides how important free and uninhibited newsgathering is to the public’s right to know.

1. Weak Privacy Laws That Doomed AP Affect Everyone

The AP detailed in its letter to the Justice Department how its privacy was grossly invaded even though the government accessed only the call records of its reporters and not the content of their conversations. We completely agree. Unfortunately, this isn’t just a problem in the AP investigation. Law enforcement agencies routinely demand and receive this information about ordinary Americans over long periods of time without any court involvement whatsoever, much less a full warrant.

FBI thinks they don’t need warrants to spy on email, Facebook and other electronic communication

image: cliff1066/Flickr

Madison Ruppert

New documents reveal that the Department of Justice takes a similar stance to that of the IRS in claiming that they do not necessarily need warrants to spy on emails, Twitter direct messages, Facebook chats and other private communications of Americans.

In the case of the IRS, the head of the agency said last month that they would abandon their policy that claimed the authority to read the emails of Americans without a warrant. However, the agency did not say that they would extend the new policy to all private electronic communications.

The new documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) are excerpts from the Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide (DIOG) of 2008 and 2012.

The fact that the two guides both say that FBI agents don’t need a warrant for unopened emails or other electronic communications if they’re over 180 days old is incredibly important.

Congress Disgracefully Approves the FISA Warrantless Spying Bill for Five More Years, Rejects All Privacy Amendments

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Trevor Timm
EFF

Today, after just one day of rushed debate, the Senate shamefully voted on a five-year extension to the FISA Amendments Act, an unconstitutional law that openly allows for warrantless surveillance of Americans' overseas communications. 

Incredibly, the Senate rejected all the proposed amendments that would have brought a modicum of transparency and oversight to the government's activities, despite previous refusals by the Executive branch to even estimate how many Americans are surveilled by this program or reveal critical secret court rulings interpreting it. 

The common-sense amendments the Senate hastily rejected were modest in scope and written with the utmost deference to national security concerns. The Senate had months to consider them, but waited until four days before the law was to expire to bring them to the floor, and then used the contrived time crunch to stifle any chances of them passing. 

ACLU Tells Supreme Court FISA Surveillance Law is Unconstitutional

Activist Post

The Supreme Court heard arguments today in Clapper v. Amnesty International, to decide whether clients of the American Civil Liberties Union can challenge the constitutionality of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), enacted by Congress after the abuses of the 1960s and 70s, regulates the government’s conduct of intelligence surveillance inside the United States. It generally requires the government to seek warrants before monitoring Americans’ communications. In 2001, however, President Bush authorized the National Security Agency to launch a warrantless wiretapping program, and in 2008 Congress ratified and expanded that program, giving the NSA almost unchecked power to monitor Americans’ international phone calls and emails.

House Votes Today to Legalize Warrantless Wiretaps

All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent. -- Thomas Jefferson

Activist Post

Only days after a NSA whistleblower has sounded the alarm about the government's massive spying campaign on American citizens, the U.S. Congress who swore an oath to uphold the Constitution are set to legalize warrantless wiretaps with the reauthorization of the secretive FISA Amendments Act.

This legislation is the perfect example of why there is no difference between the political parties. Their rhetoric may differ when it's politically expedient, but when push comes to shove they always vote for tyranny.

Obama said he was against the Patriot Act to get elected because the majority of Americans opposed it, but then he supported its extension not for one year, but for four years. Obama repeatedly attacked Bush's warrantless wiretaps as unconstitutional, but now he's expected to sign this 5-year reauthorization once the unprincipled legislators rubber stamp it today.

Congress Must Act After US Government Admits To Unconstitutional Warrantless Wiretapping

Trevor Timm
EFF

As Congress and the President rush to re-authorize the dangerous FISA Amendments Act (FAA)—the law shamefully passed after pressure to legalize certain portions of the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program—EFF has been sounding the alarm that Americans’ communications are still being unconstitutionally collected by the government without a warrant. On Friday, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, (DNI) begrudgingly agreed, acknowledging that, “on at least one occasion” the secret FISA court “held that some collection…used by the government was unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment.”

In a letter to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), the DNI declassified three statements at the request of the Senator, one of which indicated that the FISA Court agreed with Wyden that the government had “circumvented the spirit of the law.” Wired called it a “federal sidestep of a major section of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act,” and the Wall Street Journalconfirmed it “represented the first time the government has acknowledged U.S. spy activities violated the constitution since the passage of” the FAA in 2008.