Three former NSA employees expose in court ‘mass illegal surveillance’ program

Madison Ruppert, Contributor
Activist Post

The National Security Agency (NSA), which has recently been protected from having to disclose their relationship withthe search engine giant and data mining powerhouse Google, is back in court over the case Jewel v. NSA.

The case, which was reinstated by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in late 2011, is challenging the NSA’s now well known massive warrantless surveillance program.

This case is more important than ever with the NSA pouring a whopping $2 billion into a heavily fortified data centerwhich will almost certainly be used to monitor the communications of Americans. The National Counterterrorism Center’s new guidelines allowing extended data retention make matters even worse, if you can imagine such a thing.

Three former employees of the NSA, William E. Binney, Thomas A. Drake, and J. Kirk Wiebe, have come forward with evidence to back up a case being valiantly fought by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

US refocuses on home-grown terror threat

President Barack Obama's top counterterrorism aide,
John Brennan, vowed to pursue the
"utter destruction" of Al-Qaeda
© AFP/File Saul Loeb

AFP

WASHINGTON (AFP) - The United States vowed Wednesday to pursue the "utter destruction" of Al-Qaeda, while refocusing its counter-terrorism strategy to combat the threat of home-grown terror.

The new strategy comes on the 10th year of the US-led "war on terror," launched by former president George W. Bush after the deadly September 11 attacks on the United States.

It is a "pragmatic, not ideological" approach to counterterrorism that "formalizes" the administration's approach since January 2009, said John Brennan, President Barack Obama's top counterterrorism advisor.

The new strategy, developed after US commandos killed Osama bin Laden on May 2 in Pakistan, also reflects "the extraordinary political changes" sweeping the Middle East and North Africa, Brennan said.

Ex-spy says US officials went after Iraq critic: report

Juan Cole, pictured in 2006
© AFP/Getty Images/File Alex Wong

AFP

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Officials in the George W. Bush administration may have tried to use the CIA to dig up information on an Iraq war critic in order to discredit him, the New York Times reported Thursday.

Glenn Carle, who served as a top counterterrorism official in the Central Intelligence Agency, told the Times that officials twice sought to investigate Juan Cole, a professor and widely read blogger.

Cole, a Middle East expert and history professor at the University of Michigan, was a strident critic of the Bush administration and the Iraq war, which he wrote about extensively on his "Informed Comment" blog.

You're Going to Need a Warrant For That, Officer

FBI Tracking Device found on American citizen's car
without a warrant. (Source)

Sandra Fulton
ACLU

Last year Yasir Afifi, a 20-year-old U.S.-born citizen, found a strange device attached to his car. When he posted a photo of it online, the FBI showed up at his home two days later. They wanted their GPS tracking device back. The FBI had been tracking Afifi’s movement for months without his knowing about it. Moreover, the agency did so without a warrant and apparently based on the flimsy rationale that his friend wrote a blog they felt was questionable. This type of warrantless tracking seems to be an increasingly common government practice.

Following this incident, as well as revelations about how much location information Apple and Google are storing about their customers, there has been a significant public outcry over the privacy of location information. Congress has held a number of hearings on the topic and today Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) introduced companion bills in the Senate and House, respectively, to protect location privacy. The bills not only require law enforcement to get a warrant based on probable cause before accessing location information, but also regulate the use of this information by businesses. With location tracking cases popping up all over the country, this would provide a strong and clear national standard for law enforcement.

EFF Demands Answers About Secret Surveillance Law Memo

Justice Department Withholding Information on Controversial Legal Theory

Cybersecurity AFP File image

Electronic Frontier Foundation

Washington, D.C. - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) suit against the Department of Justice (DOJ), demanding the release of a secret legal memo used to justify FBI access to Americans' telephone records without any legal process or oversight.

A report released last year by the DOJ's own Inspector General revealed how the FBI, in defending its past violations of the Electronic Privacy Communications Act (ECPA), had come up with a new legal argument to justify secret, unchecked access to private telephone records. According to the report, the DOJ's Office of the Legal Counsel (OLC) had issued a legal opinion agreeing with the FBI's theory. That legal opinion is the target of the FOIA lawsuit filed Thursday.

The Inspector General's report is heavily redacted, concealing which part of the surveillance statutes the FBI and OLC are relying on to reach their dangerous conclusion and to what types of records this new purported exception to the law applies. However, the report does show that the Inspector General had grave concerns about the FBI's interpretation of the law.

Peaceful Republic or Police State? (Video)

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Feds to Supreme Court: Allow Warrantless GPS Monitoring

Navstar GPS Wikimedia Commons

David Kravets
Wired

The Obama administration is urging the Supreme Court to allow the government, without a court warrant, to affix GPS devices on suspects’ vehicles to track their every move.

The Justice Department, saying “a person has no reasonable expectation of privacy in his movements (.pdf) from one place to another,” is demanding the justices undo a lower court decision that reversed the conviction and life sentence of a cocaine dealer whose vehicle was tracked via GPS for a month without a court warrant.

The petition, if accepted by the justices, arguably would make it the biggest Fourth Amendment case in a decade — one weighing the collision of privacy, technology and the Constitution.

In 2001, the justices said thermal-imaging devices used to detect marijuana-growing operationsinside a house amounted to a search requiring a court warrant. The justices are likely to accept the government’s petition to clear conflicting lower-court rulings on when warrants are required for GPS tracking.

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US appeals court reinstates wiretap abuse lawsuit

 NSA headquarters at Fort Meade, Maryland
© AFP/File Saul Loeb

AFP

WASHINGTON (AFP) - An appeals court Monday reinstated a lawsuit challenging a law giving the US government broad authority in electronic wiretapping and monitoring of overseas calls and emails in probing suspected terrorism.

The US Court of Appeals in New York said the suit by civil liberties activists can proceed, reversing a lower court decision dismissing the case.

The suit, filed by a coalition of groups including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, had been dismissed by a judge who said they had not established legal standing by showing their own communications had been monitored.

But the three-judge appeals panel said the plaintiffs "have established that they reasonably fear being monitored under the allegedly unconstitutional (law), and that they have undertaken costly measures to avoid it."

As a result, the plaintiffs "have established that they suffered present injuries in fact... stemming from a reasonable fear of future harmful government conduct."

The appeals court sent the measure back to a lower court to review the merits of the case.