Judge: FBI Raid on Lawmaker’s Office Legal
An FBI raid on a Louisiana congressman’s Capitol Hill office was legal, a
federal judge ruled Monday.
Chief U.S. District Judge Thomas F. Hogan said members of Congress
are not above the law. He rejected requests from lawmakers and
Democratic Rep. William Jefferson to return material seized by the FBI
in a May 20-21 search of Jefferson’s office.
Breitbart, July 10, 2006
CIA has tracked bank transactions in terror hunt
The US Treasury Secretary, John Snow, said a programme that tracks
millions of financial transactions is not an invasion of Americans’
privacy but "government at its best" and vital to anti-terrorism
operations.
Mr Snow said yesterday that the programme, run by the CIA and
overseen by the Treasury Department, was "responsible government. It’s
effective government. It’s government that works. It’s entirely
consistent with democratic values, with our best legal traditions."
The Independent (online), July 23, 2006
N.Y. Times editor: I’d publish it again
"This was a case where clearly the terrorists or the people who
finance terrorism know quite well, because the Treasury Department and
the White House have talked openly about it, that they monitor
international banking transactions. It’s not news to the terrorists."
Source: WorldNetDaily, July 2, 2006
FBI Shadowed Playwright Arthur Miller
In the summer of 1956, playwright Arthur Miller married screen idol
Marilyn Monroe in a Jewish ceremony, an event of high-level gossip for
much of the world and of high-level curiosity for the U.S. government.
"An anonymous telephone call" has been placed to the New York Daily
News, an FBI report notes at the time. The caller stated that the
"religious" wedding _ Miller was Jewish and Monroe had converted _ was
an obvious "cover up" for Miller, who "had been and still was a member
of the CP (Communist Party) and was their cultural front man." Monroe also "had drifted into the Communist Party orbit."
Source: Breitbart, June 20, 2006
Police got phone data from brokers
Numerous federal and local law enforcement agencies have bypassed
subpoenas and warrants designed to protect civil liberties and gathered
Americans’ personal telephone records from private-sector data brokers.
These brokers, many of whom advertise aggressively on the Internet,
have gotten into customer accounts online, tricked phone companies into
revealing information and even acknowledged that their practices violate
laws, according to documents gathered by congressional investigators
and provided to The Associated Press.
Source: Yahoo News, June 20, 2006
Government Increasingly Turning to Data Mining
The Pentagon pays a private company to compile data on teenagers it
can recruit to the military. The Homeland Security Department buys
consumer information to help screen people at borders and detect
immigration fraud.
Source: The Washington Post (online), June 15, 2006
High Court Backs Police No-Knock Searches
The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that police armed with a warrant can
barge into homes and seize evidence even if they don’t knock, a huge
government victory that was decided by President Bush’s new justices.
Source: My Way, June 15, 2006
Pentagon’s NSA sets sights on social-network websites
If the prospect of being asked to explain some embarrassing detail
about their personal lives by a prospective employer or a future
romantic interest isn’t enough to deter users of social-networking
websites like MySpace.com from posting it online, perhaps this will – the National Security Agency is funding research into mass harvesting what people post about themselves on the Internet.
Source: WorldNetDaily, June 10, 2006
U.S. Court Backs Government Broadband Wiretap Access
A U.S. appeals court Friday upheld the government’s authority to
force high-speed Internet service providers to give law enforcement
authorities access for surveillance purposes.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit
rejected a petition aimed at overturning a decision by regulators
requiring facilities-based broadband providers and those that offer
Internet telephone service to comply with U.S. wiretap laws.
Source: Reuters (online), June 9, 2006
FBI wants internet records kept two years
The Federal Bureau of Investigation wants US internet providers to
retain web address records for up to two years to aid investigations
into terrorism and pornography, a source familiar with the matter said
today.
Source: Stuff (New Zealand), June 2, 2006
National Guard units to be armed, close to border
The head of the U.S. National Guard surprised Border Patrol
officials, declaring some of the troops he will send to assist them will
work in close proximity to the border, be armed and allowed to fire
their weapons if necessary.
Source: WorldNetDaily, May 27, 2006
White House invokes secrets privilege in eavesdropping cases
The Bush administration has asked federal judges in New York and
Michigan to dismiss a pair of lawsuits filed over the National Security
Agency’s domestic eavesdropping program, saying litigating them would
jeopardize state secrets.
Source: USAToday (online), May 27, 2006
Suit Seeks to Stop Phone Records Release
A lawsuit filed Monday on behalf of author Studs Terkel and other
professionals seeks to stop AT&T from giving customer phone records
to the National Security Agency without a court order.
Source: Breitbart, May 22, 2006
FBI Secret Probes: 3,501 Targets in the U.S.
The Department of Justice says it secretly sought phone records and
other documents of 3,501 people last year under a provision of the
Patriot Act that does not require judicial oversight.
Source: ABC News The Blotter (online), May 16, 2006
BellSouth Says It Gave NSA No Call Records
BellSouth Corp. said Monday its "thorough review" found no indication
it gave telephone records to the National Security Agency as part
of a federal anti-terrorism surveillance program.
A report last week by USA Today identified BellSouth, along with
AT&T Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc., as companies that had
complied with an NSA request to turn over tens of millions of customer
phone records after the 2001 terror attacks.
Source: Breitbart, May 15, 2006
FBI Rebuffed on Reporter’s Files
The family of the late newspaper columnist Jack Anderson yesterday
rejected a request by the FBI to turn over 50 years of files to agents
who want to look for evidence in the prosecution of two pro-Israel
lobbyists, as well as any classified documents Anderson had collected.
Source: The Washington Post (online), April 19, 2006
AT&T, S.F. Group Battle Over White House Wiretaps
AT&T Inc. and an Internet advocacy group are waging in federal
court a privacy battle that could expose the reach of the Bush
administration’s secretive domestic wiretapping program.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation said it obtained documents from a
former AT&T technician showing that the National Security Agency is
capable of monitoring all communications on AT&T’s network.
Source: CBS5 San Francisco, April 13, 2006
Whistle-Blower Outs NSA Spy Room
AT&T provided National Security Agency eavesdroppers with full
access to its customers’ phone calls, and shunted its customers’
internet traffic to data-mining equipment installed in a secret room in
its San Francisco switching center, according to a former AT&T
worker cooperating in the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s lawsuit
against the company.
Source: Wired, April 7, 2006
Army Has Authority to Spy on Americans
“Contrary to popular belief, there is no absolute ban on [military]
intelligence components collecting U.S. person information,” the
U.S.Army’s top intelligence officer said in a 2001 memo that surfaced
Tuesday.
CQ Homeland Security, January 30, 2006
Spy Agency Data After Sept. 11 Led F.B.I. to Dead Ends
In the anxious months after the Sept. 11 attacks, the National
Security Agency began sending a steady stream of telephone numbers,
e-mail addresses and names to the F.B.I. in search of terrorists. The
stream soon became a flood, requiring hundreds of agents to check out
thousands of tips a month.
Source: The New York Times (online), January 17, 2005
ACLU Sues to Stop Domestic Spy Program
Civil liberties groups filed lawsuits in two cities Tuesday seeking
to block President Bush’s domestic eavesdropping program, arguing the
electronic surveillance of American citizens was unconstitutional.
Source: MyWay, January 17, 2005
Secret Service took thousands of phone records
A series of internal documents from the U.S. Secret Service obtained
by the McCutain Daily Gazette provide details of a project involving the
transfer of thousands of telephone and bank records to a government
database with the help of U.S. telephone and financial company
executives.
Source: WorldNetDaily, January 5, 2006
Bush Contends Spying Program Vital, Legal
President Bush strongly defended his domestic spying program on
Sunday, calling it legal as well as vital to thwarting terrorist
attacks, and contended the leak making it public had caused "great harm
to the nation."
Source: Breitbart, January 1, 2006
Cookies Are Recipe for Controversy at NSA
The National Security Agency has been inserting files known as
cookies onto the computers of individuals who visit the NSA Web site, a
violation of federal rules meant to protect privacy.
Source: Sce-Tec Today, December 29, 2005
Powell: ‘Nothing Wrong’ With Eavesdropping
Former Secretary of State Colin Powell on Sunday supported government
eavesdropping to prevent terrorism but said a major controversy over
presidential powers could have been avoided by obtaining court warrants.
Powell said that when he was in the Cabinet, he was not told that
President Bush authorized a warrantless National Security Agency
surveillance operation after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.
Source: Breitbart, December 25, 2005
Officials Want to Expand Review of Domestic Spying
Congressional officials said Saturday that they wanted to investigate
the disclosure that the National Security Agency had gained access to
some of the country’s main telephone arteries to glean data on possible
terrorists.
Source: New York Times (online), December 25, 2005
Secret court modified wiretap requests
Government records show that the administration was encountering
unprecedented second-guessing by the secret federal surveillance court
when President Bush decided to bypass the panel and order surveillance
of U.S.-based terror suspects without the court’s approval.
Source: Seattle Pi, December 24, 2005
NSA spy program broader than Bush admitted
The volume of information gathered from telephone and Internet
communications by the National Security Agency without court-approved
warrants was much larger than the White House has acknowledged, The New
York Times reported Saturday.
Source: MSNBC, December 24, 2005
Daschle: Congress Didn’t OK Spying Authority
The use of warrantless wiretaps on American citizens was never
discussed when Congress authorized the White House to use force against
al-Qaida after the Sept. 11 attacks, says former Senate Majority Leader
Tom Daschle. In an article printed Friday on the op-ed page of The
Washington Post, Daschle also wrote that Congress explicitly denied a
White House request for war-making authority in the United States.
Source: Breitbart, December 23, 2005
U.S. has been secretly testing for radiation
A classified radiation monitoring program, conducted without
warrants, has targeted private U.S. property in an effort to prevent an
al-Qaida attack, federal law enforcement officials confirmed Friday.
Source: MSNBC, December 23, 2005
Spying Program Snared U.S. Calls
A surveillance program approved by President Bush to conduct
eavesdropping without warrants has captured what are purely domestic
communications in some cases, despite a requirement by the White House
that one end of the intercepted conversations take place on foreign
soil, officials say.
Source: New York Times (online), December 21, 2005
Cheney Defends Presidential Powers
Vice President Dick Cheney on Tuesday vigorously defended the Bush
administration’s use of secret domestic spying and efforts to expand
presidential powers, saying "it’s not an accident that we haven’t been
hit in four years."
Source: My Way, December 20, 2005
Bush Acknowledges Approving Eavesdropping
President Bush said Saturday he has no
intention of stopping his personal authorizations of a post-Sept. 11
secret eavesdropping program in the U.S., lashing out at those involved
in revealing it while defending it as crucial to preventing future
attacks.
Source: Forbes (online), December 17, 2005
White House secretly OK’d eavesdropping on Americans
Months after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush secretly authorized
the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others
inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity
without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic
spying, according to government officials.
Source: Deseret Morning News (online), December 16, 2005
Is the Pentagon spying on Americans?
A year ago, at a Quaker Meeting House in Lake
Worth, Fla., a small group of activists met to plan a protest of
military recruiting at local high schools. What they didn’t know was
that their meeting had come to the attention of the U.S. military.
A secret 400-page
Defense Department document obtained by NBC News lists the Lake Worth
meeting as a “threat” and one of more than 1,500 “suspicious incidents”
across the country over a recent 10-month period.
Source: MSNBC, December 14, 2005
Air Marshals to Expand Their Mission
Federal air marshals are expanding their work beyond airplanes,
launching counterterror surveillance at train stations and other mass
transit facilities in a three-day test program.
Source: My Way, December 14, 2005
Rarely used spy satellite monitored Elohim City
The McCurtain Daily Gazette has obtained U.S. Secret Service (USSS)
documents revealing for the first time references to the use of a
top-secret military satellite by federal investigators in the days after
the Oklahoma City bombing.
According to these documents a spy satellite was tasked to gather
intelligence at Elohim City * a paramilitary, Christian Identity
compound in eastern Oklahoma near Muldrow.
McCurtain Daily Gazette (Oklahoma), December 14, 2005
Pentagon Expanding Its Domestic Surveillance Activity
The Defense Department has expanded its programs aimed at gathering
and analyzing intelligence within the United States, creating new
agencies, adding personnel and seeking additional legal authority for
domestic security activities in the post-9/11 world.
The moves have taken place on several fronts. The White House is
considering expanding the power of a little-known Pentagon agency called
the Counterintelligence Field Activity, or CIFA, which was created
three years ago. The proposal, made by a presidential commission, would
transform CIFA from an office that coordinates Pentagon security efforts
— including protecting military facilities from attack — to one that
also has authority to investigate crimes within the United States such
as treason, foreign or terrorist sabotage or even economic espionage.
Source: The Washington Post (online), November 27, 2005
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