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Five years after Congress authorized a sweeping warrantless surveillance program, the Justice Department is setting up a potential Supreme Court test of whether it is constitutional by notifying a criminal defendant — for the first time — that evidence against him derived from the eavesdropping, according to officials.

Prosecutors plan to inform the defendant about the monitoring in the next two weeks, a law enforcement official said. The move comes after an internal Justice Department debate in which Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr. argued that there was no legal basis for a previous practice of not disclosing links to such surveillance, several Obama administration officials familiar with the deliberations said. Meanwhile, the department’s National Security Division is combing active and closed case files to identify other defendants who faced evidence resulting from the 2008 wiretapping law. It permits eavesdropping without warrants on Americans’ cross-border phone calls and e-mails so long as the surveillance is “targeted” at foreigners abroad.

In February, the Supreme Court dismissed a case challenging its constitutionality because the plaintiffs, led by Amnesty International, could not prove they had been wiretapped. Mr. Verrilli had told the justices that someone else would have legal standing to trigger review of the program because prosecutors would notify people facing evidence derived from surveillance under the 2008 law. But it turned out that Mr. Verrilli’s assurances clashed with the practices of national security prosecutors, who had not been alerting such defendants that evidence in their cases had stemmed from wiretapping their conversations without a warrant.

In May 2010, when the United Nations Security Council was weighing sanctions against Iran over its nuclear program, several members were undecided about how they would vote. The American ambassador to the United Nations, Susan E. Rice, asked the National Security Agency for help “so that she could develop a strategy,” a leaked agency document shows.The N.S.A. swiftly went to work, developing the paperwork to obtain legal approval for spying on diplomats from four Security Council members — Bosnia, Gabon, Nigeria and Uganda — whose embassies and missions were not already under surveillance. The following month, 12 members of the 15-seat Security Council voted to approve new sanctions, with Lebanon abstaining and only Brazil and Turkey voting against. Continue reading the main story Related Coverage Books of The Times: ‘No Place to Hide,’ by Glenn GreenwaldMAY 12, 2014 Later that summer, Ms. Rice thanked the agency, saying its intelligence had helped her to know when diplomats from the other permanent representatives — China, England, France and Russia — “were telling the truth ... revealed their real position on sanctions ... gave us an upper hand in negotiations ... and provided information on various countries ‘red lines.’ ”

The two documents laying out that episode, both leaked by the former N.S.A. contractor Edward J. Snowden, are reproduced in a new book by Glenn Greenwald, “No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the N.S.A., and the U.S. Surveillance State.” The book is being published Tuesday.

Circumstances surrounding the European and Ukrainian elections were far from being a mere coincidence. The regime changers in Kiev decided to hold a presidential election on May 25, the same day as European Parliament elections, in order to demonstrate their desire to follow a European-centric foreign policy.

Way beyond the established fact of an Atlantic push against Russian western borderlands, Ukraine remains a catfight of local oligarchies. No wonder the new Ukrainian president is also an oligarch; the 7th wealthiest citizen in the land, who owns not just a chocolate empire, but also automotive plants, a shipyard in Crimea and a TV channel. The only difference is that he’s a NATO oligarch

Meanwhile, in NATOstan, local and transnational elites have been desperately trying to spin a measure of success. Abstention remains notable – only roughly 4 in 10 Europeans take the trouble to vote on what goes on in Strasbourg, with a majority alienated enough to legitimize the mix of internal European austerity and international belligerence.

China has dismissed all US accusations of industrial cyber-espionage against five of its military officials and published proof that Washington is actually stealing data from China. Beijing also summoned the US ambassador for an explanation. Beijing reacted to Washington’s recent round of industrial espionage accusations by publishing its latest data on US cyber-attacks against China.

China’s National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Team Coordination Center of China (NCNERTTCC) reported that during just two months, from March 19 to May 18, the US directly controlled 1.18 million host computers in China using 2,077 Trojan horse networks or botnet servers. According to the NCNERTTCC, over the last two months 135 host computers stationed in the US conducted 14,000 phishing operations against Chinese websites using for the attacks 563 phishing pages. The other hacking activities through the same period of time included 57,000 backdoor attacks, performed from 2,016 IP addresses in the US through backdoors implanted on 1,754 Chinese websites. The Chinese Foreign Ministry summoned the American ambassador to China for an explanation, urging him to drop all charges against China’s military officers. The meeting between Chinese Assistant Foreign Minister Zheng Zeguang and US Ambassador Max Baucus took place on Monday night, reported Xinhua.

Depending on further developments, China “will take further action on the so-called charges by the United States,” Zheng told Baucus. “The Chinese government and military and its associated personnel have never conducted or participated in the theft of trade secrets over the internet,” Zheng reportedly told Baucus as quoted by Xinhua.

A truly stunning debasement of the U.S. justice system just occurred through the joint efforts of the Obama Justice Department and a meek and frightened Obama-appointed federal judge, Edgardo Ramos, all in order to protect an extremist neocon front group from scrutiny and accountability. The details are crucial for understanding the magnitude of the abuse here. At the center of it is an anti-Iranian group calling itself “United Against Nuclear Iran” (UANI), which is very likely a front for some combination of the Israeli and U.S. intelligence services. When launched, NBC described its mission as waging “economic and psychological warfare” against Iran. The group was founded and is run and guided by a roster of U.S., Israeli and British neocon extremists such as Joe Lieberman, former Bush Homeland Security adviser (and current CNN “analyst”) Fran Townsend, former CIA Director James Woolsey, and former Mossad Director Meir Dagan. One of its key advisers is Olli Heinonen, who just co-authored a Washington Post Op-Ed with former Bush CIA/NSA Director Michael Hayden arguing that Washington is being too soft on Tehran.

This group of neocon extremists was literally just immunized by a federal court from the rule of law. That was based on the claim — advocated by the Obama DOJ and accepted by Judge Ramos — that subjecting them to litigation for their actions would risk disclosure of vital “state secrets.” The court’s ruling was based on assertions made through completely secret proceedings between the court and the U.S. government, with everyone else — including the lawyers for the parties — kept in the dark. In May 2013, UANI launched a “name and shame” campaign designed to publicly identify — and malign — any individuals or entities enabling trade with Iran. One of the accused was the shipping company of Greek billionaire Victor Restis, who vehemently denies the accusation. He hired an American law firm and sued UANI for defamation in a New York federal court, claiming the “name and shame” campaign destroyed his reputation.

Up until that point, there was nothing unusual about any of this: just a garden-variety defamation case brought in court by someone who claims that public statements made about him are damaging and false. That happens every day. But then something quite extraordinary happened: In September of last year, the U.S. government, which was not a party, formally intervened in the lawsuit, and demanded that the court refuse to hear Restis’s claims and instead dismiss the lawsuit against UANI before it could even start, on the ground that allowing the case to proceed would damage national security. When the DOJ intervened in this case and asserted the “state secrets privilege,” it confounded almost everyone. The New York Times’s Matt Apuzzo noted at the time that “the group is not affiliated with the government, and lists no government contracts on its tax forms. The government has cited no precedent for using the so­-called state­ secrets privilege to quash a private lawsuit that does not focus on government activity.” He quoted the ACLU’s Ben Wizner as saying: “I have never seen anything like this.” Reuters’s Allison Frankel labeled the DOJ’s involvement a “mystery” and said “the government’s brief is maddeningly opaque about its interest in a private libel case.”

Justifiable suspicions about what happened surfaced straightaway after the incident. The alleged perpetrators, Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik, appear to have been used as convenient patsies – the same way April 2013 Boston Marathon bombing suspects Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Dzhokhar were unjustly framed for a crime they didn’t commit. False flag attacks are used to stoke fear, to enlist public support for planned domestic and foreign horrors. Events post-9/11 are well-documented. What’s unfolding now looks like more of the same – the phony pretext of combating ISIS, state-sponsored high crimes at home and abroad. Eyewitnesses to the San Bernardino shooting said three white gunmen in black military attire, armed with assault rifles, were responsible. Sally Abdelmageed working at the Inland Regional Center described them this way, saying “(a)s soon as they opened up the doors to building three…one of them (began) shoot(ing) into the room.”

“I couldn’t see a face. He had a black hat on…black cargo pants, the kind with the big puffy pockets on the side…long sleeve shirt…gloves…huge assault rifle…six magazines…I just saw three dressed exactly the same.” “It looked like their skin color was white. They look like they were athletic(ally) buil(t), and they appeared to be tall” – clearly professionals, carrying out a well-planned attack, the way all false flags are conducted. Abdelmageed and other eyewitnesses gave similar accounts, debunking the official narrative – a Big Lie, framing two innocent Muslim patsies, killed by police to tell no tales, given no chance to explain their innocence. Their bodies were found handcuffed, indicating they were apprehended and likely extrajudicially executed to be unable to refute the official narrative. Former NSA/CIA contractor Steven D. Kelley told Press TV intimated that hired guns allegedly from Craft International (a Blackwater type paramilitary group, the same one responsible for the Boston Marathon bombings) could have been behind the San Bernardino shootings. (see below)

The incident “is just one in a long string of false flag events that I am afraid to say are not over,” he said. “We’ll probably be seeing several more before the end of the year, because of the events that are going on in the world, specifically with NATO implicated in the buying of (stolen Iraqi and Syrian oil complicit with) Daesh and other events.” “(W)hen these things happen, they need to have a rapid response which requires a false flag attack. This was very obvious that this was going to happen” – with lots more to come, Kelly believes, part of Washington’s well-orchestrated fear-mongering campaign. The early stages of its dirty aftermath are playing out, most Americans mindless about how they’re being duped.