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Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said he would end the National Security Agency's bulk collection of Americans' phone records on his first day in the White House if he is elected. "The president created this vast dragnet by executive order. And as president on day one, I would immediately end this unconstitutional surveillance," he said in a Kentucky speech Tuesday announcing his presidential bid. 

Paul has split with most of his party over the issue, even Cruz who has also pushed for reform. Paul has rankled some NSA reform advocates by opposing a bill to end the program because he does not believe it goes far enough to dismantle the authorizing authority.   <A HREF="http://ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?rt=tf_mfw&ServiceVersion=20070822&MarketPlace=US&ID=V20070822%2FUS%2Fthehill07-20%2F8001%2Fdffbe72d-f425-4b83-b07e-357ae9d405f6&Operation=NoScript">Amazon.com Widgets</A> He has filed a lawsuit against the government over the program and has promised not to vote to renew sections of the Patriot Act that authorize the program and are up for renewal in June. The Kentucky senator dusted off an old line in the speech Tuesday, saying the phone records of law-abiding Americans should stay private. "Warrantless searches of Americans phone and computer records are un-American and a threat to our civil liberties. I say that your phone records are yours. I say that phone records of law abiding citizens are none of their damn business," he said, later joking "is this where we light up the phones?""I believe we can have liberty and security, and I will not compromise your liberty for a false sense of security," he added later.  

President Obama has advocated for ending the government's bulk collection of Americans' phone records as well, but he has resisted ending it unilaterally.  The courts renew the current program every 90 days. Advocates have called on the administration to end it by simply declining to have it renewed.But Obama has resisted taking this route, calling on Congress to act.

A GOP-led investigation that debunked theories about the 2012 Benghazi attack was purposely released on the Friday before Thanksgiving to evade exposure, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) said Sunday. On CNN’s “State of the Union,” Schiff questioned the decision behind the timing of the release of the House Intelligence Committee’s report. “Why is this report being released on the Friday before Thanksgiving?” Schiff asked.Schiff said if a panel spends two years compiling an important report, it wouldn’t make much sense to conceal it.ADVERTISEMENT“You want to trumpet it to the high heavens, you don’t want to bury it on the Friday before Thanksgiving,” he said.

The House Intelligence panel released the report Friday evening, and it found there was no intelligence failure surrounding the attack, no delay in the rescue of U.S. personnel and no political cover-up by Obama administration officials.Schiff, a member of the committee, said he wouldn’t be surprised if Republicans employed a similar tactic when the House Select Committee on Benghazi releases its own report on the attack. “If the select committee comes up with a similar conclusion, it’ll release a similar report on Christmas Eve,” he said. Schiff rejected Sen. Lindsey Graham’s (R-S.C.) earlier claims that the report is “full of crap” and a “bunch of garbage.”Republicans and Democrats on the Intelligence committee supported the report’s findings, Schiff said, adding that it exonerates the Obama administration.

Schiff said talk about Benghazi would have died down by now if it weren’t for the former secretary of State possibly running for president.“If Hillary Clinton weren’t a likely candidate for president,” he said, “I think this investigation would have been over with a long time ago.”

Suddenly there was a chilling scream. “Allah,” someone wailed. “Allah! Allah!” As I wrote at the time, this wasn’t a cry of religious ecstasy. It was the sound of deep pain, coming from elsewhere in the town library, which had been turned into a detention center by Iraqi security forces who were advised by American soldiers and contractors. I was embedded with the Americans for a week, and I had already heard two of them, from the Wisconsin National Guard, talk about seeing their Iraqi partners trussing up prisoners like animals at a slaughter. During raids, I had seen these Iraqis beat their detainees — muggings as a form of questioning — while their American advisers watched.

The CIA’s violations of its detainees are the tip of the torture iceberg. We run the risk, in the necessary debate sparked by the Senate’s release of 500 pages on CIA interrogation abuses, of focusing too narrowly on what happened to 119 detainees held at the agency’s black sites from 2002-2006. The problem of American torture — how much occurred, what impact it had, who bears responsibility — is much larger. Across Iraq and Afghanistan, American soldiers and the indigenous forces they fought alongside committed a large number of abuses against a considerable number of people. It didn’t begin at Abu Ghraib and it didn’t end there. The evidence, which has emerged in a drip-drip way over the years, is abundant though less dramatic than the aforementioned 500-page executive summary of the Senate’s still-classified report on the CIA.

Just as the CIA opposed release of the Senate torture report, the Pentagon and White House continue to do their best to suppress the evidence. The Daily Beast noted the other day that the Obama Administration, responding to pressure from the Pentagon, continues to fight in court to prevent the publication of thousands of photos of detainee abuse. The argument against release is nearly identical to the argument used by the CIA to repress the Senate’s report—it could put American lives in danger. To her credit, Sen. Dianne Feinstein pushed back and published an executive summary of her committee’s 6,000-page report (which has caused practically no protest or violence overseas). Repression is the gut instinct of institutions that have something to hide, and I came across that in Samarra, too. Shortly after I witnessed the threatened execution of a detainee (an Iraqi soldier pointed his AK-47 at a prisoner who was against a wall with his hands up), an order came down from the American command to get me out of Samarra. I was told to pack my backpack for the next convoy out of town. After I made a flurry of calls on my satellite phone, the order was rescinded. Someone wanted the truth to come out.

The planned release of a report by the Senate Intelligence Committee on the CIA’s interrogation of terrorism suspects has broken down in a dispute between the committee and the Obama administration over how much of the document can be declassified. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D­Calif.), chairman of the committee, said Tuesday that she had written a letter to President Obama raising objections to material that was stripped from the report by the CIA and the White House. “I have concluded the redactions eliminate or obscure key facts that support the report’s findings and conclusions,” Feinstein said in a statement. “Until these redactions are addressed to the committee’s satisfaction, the report will not be made public.”

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) on Monday slammed a speech by Denis McDonough on Israel, saying the White House chief of staff used the same language as terrorists.

European privacy regulators are putting U.S. surveillance practices under the microscope, this time with a crucial transatlantic data deal hanging in the balance.Legal and privacy advocates say European nations are poised to strike down the deal if they decide the U.S. hasn't done enough to reform its spying programs.The new test comes after the European Commission and the Commerce Department — after months of tense negotiations — reached a deal this week permitting Facebook, Google and thousands of other companies to continue legally handling Europeans’ personal data.ADVERTISEMENTCritics though have long warned that unless the U.S. overhauls its privacy and national security laws, there is no legal framework that can stand up in European court, where privacy is considered a fundamental right under the EU Charter.A working group of 28 EU nations’ data protection authorities — domestic entities separate from the Commission that will be in charge of enforcing the new agreement — may now cast the deciding vote.The group is spending the next few months picking through the so-called Privacy Shield agreement to determine if it adequately protects the personal data of European citizens.

“The Commission has said, ‘We’re satisfied. We believe them. We believe the U.S. has substantially changed its practices,’ and they are no longer going off the [Edward] Snowden revelations in the media,” said Susan Foster, a privacy attorney at Mintz Levin who works in both the EU and the U.S.“Whether the working group will go along with it is another question.”The privacy advocate whose complaint against Facebook brought down the Privacy Shield’s 15-year-old predecessor agreement is already questioning the new deal’s validity.“With all due respect ... a couple of letters by the outgoing Obama administration is by no means a legal basis to guarantee the fundamental rights of 500 million European users in the long run, when there is explicit U.S. law allowing mass surveillance,” Max Schrems of Austria said in a statement Tuesday.The United States has been fighting against the perception that it tramples on civil liberties after ex-National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden revealed the breadth of the agency’s snooping.One sticking point in the Privacy Shield negotiations was over the scope of an exception allowing surveillance for national security purposes.

In announcing the deal, Commission officials insisted that the U.S. had provided “detailed written assurances” that surveillance of Europeans’ data by intelligence agencies would be subject to appropriate limitations.“The U.S. has clarified that they do not carry out indiscriminate surveillance of Europeans,” Andrus Ansip, Vice President for the Digital Single Market on the European Commission, said Tuesday.The U.S. has also agreed to create an office in the State Department, to address complaints from EU citizens who feel their data has been inappropriately accessed by intelligence authorities.Complicating the working group’s approval of the deal is the hodgepodge of competing regulators in Europe. Each nation has an agency in charge of its own country’s regulation. Some countries — such as Germany — are seen as tougher on privacy than others, like France or the U.K.While some countries consider U.S. privacy protections to be satisfactory, in others they are seen as woefully inadequate.

After years of pushing to gain public release of 28 secret pages of a report on the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, former U.S. Sen. Bob Graham said he got a call from the White House on Tuesday.

Graham told the Tampa Bay Times that Brett Holmgren, a senior policy adviser to the assistant to the president for Homeland Security, told him the declassification review of the documents withheld from a report issued by a Joint Congressional Commission in 2003 will soon be completed. Graham, who asked the president to declassify the records more than two years ago, said he asked how soon he could expect a decision and was told “one or two months.” Graham was co-chairman of a joint congressional committee that investigated the attacks. The 28 pages were classified at the request of the FBI. Graham has been pushing for release of the documents since 2011 when he learned that the FBI had failed to disclose part of its investigation that included reports that high-ranking Saudi Arabian officials provided financial aid and other help to the 19 hijackers who flew airplanes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. He says the FBI initially denied there were such reports but has since turned over 80,000 pages in a federal lawsuit seeking the release of all reports on the investigation. Graham said he believes recent news reports on the secrecy surrounding the 28 pages, including a report Sunday on 60 Minutes, prompted the White House to react. “The decisionmakers at the White House have realized the public cares about it and there is an urgency to come to a decision,’’ Graham said.

The Associated Press story this week revealing that as secretary of state, Hillary Clinton frequently met with donors to the Clinton Foundation, set off a firestorm in the media. Many Democrats and sympathetic pundits are criticizing the article — and have made the sweeping claim that, contrary to many deeply reported investigations, there is no evidence that well-heeled backers of the foundation received favorable treatment from the State Department. While there are some legitimate criticisms of the AP story — its focus, for instance, on a Nobel Peace Prize winner meeting with Clinton distracts from the thesis of the piece — it is nonetheless a substantive investigation based on calendars that the State Department has fought to withhold from the public. The AP took the agency to court to obtain a partial release of the meeting logs. Other commentators took issue with a tweet promoting the AP piece, which they said might confuse readers because the AP story reflected private sector meetings, not overall meetings. But in challenging the overall credibility of the AP story, Clinton surrogates and allies are going well beyond a reasoned critique in an effort to downplay the serious ethical issues raised by Clinton Foundation activities.

The assertions above obscure the problems unearthed through years of investigative reporting on the foundation. Journalist David Sirota, who has reported extensively on the Clinton Foundation, rounded up a sample of the stories that provide a window into Clinton Foundation issues: The Washington Post found that two months after Secretary Clinton encouraged the Russian government to approve a $3.7 billion deal with Boeing, the aerospace company announced a $900,000 donation to the Clinton Foundation. The Wall Street Journal found that Clinton made an “unusual intervention” to announce a legal settlement with UBS, after which the Swiss bank increased its donations to, and involvement with, the Clinton Foundation. The New York Times reported that a Russian company assumed control of major uranium reserves in a deal that required State Department approval, as the chairman of the company involved in the transaction donated $2.35 million to the Clinton Foundation.

The Intercept has also reported on the Clinton Foundation and the conduct of the State Department under Clinton. Leaked government documents obtained by The Intercept revealed that the Moroccan government lobbied Clinton aggressively to influence her and other officials on the Moroccan military occupation of Western Sahara, which holds some of the world’s largest reserves of phosphate, a lucrative export for the kingdom. As part of its strategy for influence, the Moroccan government and companies controlled by the kingdom donated to the Bill Clinton presidential library, the Clinton Foundation, and hired individuals associated with the Clinton political network. Despite a statement by the Obama administration that suggested it would reverse the previous Bush administration support for the Moroccan government and would back a U.N.-negotiated settlement for the conflict in Western Sahara, Clinton announced there would be “no change” in policy — and has gone on to praise the Moroccan government’s human rights record. As recently as Monday, we learned that after being denied an official meeting with the State Department, Peabody Energy, the worlds largest coal company, used a consultant who donated heavily to the Clinton Foundation to back channel and attempt to set up a meeting with Clinton via her aide Huma Abedin. The consultant, Joyce Aboussie, wrote that “It should go without saying that the Peabody folks” reached out to her because of her “relationship with the Clinton’s [sic].” Peabody and Aboussie have declined to comment, and it is unclear if the meeting took place.

The State Department said Monday it is concerned about Iranian state media reports that the country has deployed an advanced missile defense system around its Fordow underground uranium facility.  The S-300 surface-to-air missile system was sold to Iran by Russia over U.S. objections, after an international accord was reached last July that lifted sanctions on Iran in exchange for limits to its nuclear program. 

Russia had canceled a contract to deliver the systems to Iran in 2010, under pressure from the West, but announced it was reviving the contract in April 2015, as reaching a final nuclear deal appeared imminent. On Sunday, Iranian state TV reported that the S-300 was deployed at the Fordow facility, about 60 miles south of Tehran, according to Reuters. Since the signing of the deal in January, Iran has stopped enriching uranium there.  But U.S. officials and allies are concerned that the deployment of the S-300, which intercepts missiles, would limit potential future military options. Last August, the Pentagon expressed objections to the sale, but said it was "confident" the president would "have all the options he needs" to counteract the system.  

In October, former Marine Corps commandant retired Gen. James Conway warned the S-300's deployment "would be a game changer in the region." Iranian officials characterized the deployment of the system as defensive. "Our main priority is to protect Iran's nuclear facilities under any circumstances," said Brig. Gen. Farzad Esmaili, commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps' air defense force. "Today, Iran's sky is one of the most secure in the Middle East." "The S-300 system is a defense system, not an assault one, but the Americans did their utmost to prevent Iran from getting it," Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said. Sen. Tom CottonTom CottonState: US concerned about missile defense system at Iranian uranium facility GOP senators argue DOJ pressured Aetna on ObamaCare Trump, GOP see gold in Clinton Foundation attacks MORE (R-Ark.), member of the Senate Armed Service Committee, on Monday blasted the administration's Iran policy, saying it emboldened the "ayatollahs in Tehran" and led to the deal going through. "Had the Obama Administration not rushed to dismantle the international sanctions restraining Iran’s belligerence in the Middle East in pursuit of a legacy, Iran would not have been able to acquire and deploy such destabilizing weapons," he said.  

Since World War II – and extending well into the Twenty-first Century – the United States has invaded or otherwise intervened in so many countries that it would be challenging to compile a complete list. Just last decade, there were full-scale U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, plus American bombing operations from Pakistan to Yemen to Libya. So, what is one to make of Secretary of State John Kerry’s pronouncement that Russia’s military intervention in the Crimea section of Ukraine – at the behest of the country’s deposed president – is a violation of international law that the United States would never countenance?

Kerry decried the Russian intervention as “a Nineteenth Century act in the Twenty-first Century.” However, if memory serves, Sen. Kerry in 2002 voted along with most other members of the U.S. Congress to authorize President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003, which was also part of the Twenty-first Century. And, Kerry is a member of the Obama administration, which like its Bush predecessor, has been sending drones into the national territory of other nations to blow up various “enemy combatants.” Are Kerry and pretty much everyone else in Official Washington so lacking in self-awareness that they don’t realize that they are condemning actions by Russian President Vladimir Putin that are far less egregious than what they themselves have done?

And, what do Hiatt and other neocons at the Washington Post say about confronting the Russians over the Ukraine crisis, which was stoked by neocon holdovers in the U.S. State Department, such as Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland,  and the U.S.-funded National Endowment for Democracy, which was founded in 1983 to replace the CIA in the business of destabilizing targeted governments? [See Consortiumnews.com’s “What Neocons Want from Ukraine Crisis.”] The Post is demanding a new Cold War with Russia in retaliation for its relatively non-violent interventions to protect pro-Russian provinces of two countries that were carved out of the old Soviet Union: Georgia where Russian troops have protected South Ossetia and Abkhazia since 2008 and in Ukraine where Russian soldiers have taken control of Crimea. In both cases, the pro-Russian areas felt threatened from their central governments and sought Moscow’s assistance. In the case of Ukraine, a neo-Nazi-led putsch – representing the interests of the western part of the country – overthrew the democratically elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, who came from the eastern region. Then, under the watchful eye of the neo-Nazi storm troopers in Kiev, a rump parliament voted unanimously or near unanimously to enact a series of draconian laws offensive to the ethnic Russian areas in the east and south.

Sen. McCain to the rescue. He looks on in horror as the dramatic threats of the Obama administration against Russia on Ukraine are not only undeterring but in fact mocked by the Russians. He has developed an eleven point plan to hoist the administration back up onto a war footing with Russia. Never let a good crisis go to waste. McCain would start of course with money. Not his own but ours. His first point is to pass the one billion dollar loan guarantee to Ukraine currently stalled in the Senate. Just an appetizer, as he foresees much more US money “to strengthen the IMF’s ability to be a stronger partner to Ukraine.”

In a landmark victory for privacy, a federal appeals court ruled unanimously today that the mass phone-records program exposed two years ago by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden is illegal because it goes far beyond what Congress ever intended to permit when it passed Section 215 of the Patriot Act. The ruling in ACLU v. Clapper is enormously significant, and not only because the program in question — the first to be revealed by Edward Snowden — is at the heart of a legislative reform effort playing out right now, or because it sparked the most significant debate about government surveillance in decades. The decision could also affect many other laws the government has stretched to the breaking point in order to justify dragnet collection of Americans’ sensitive information. Under the program, revealed in the Guardian on June 5, 2013, telecommunications companies hand over to the NSA, on a daily basis, records relating to the calls of all of their customers. Those records include information about who called whom, when, and for how long. The ACLU sued the NSA over the program just days after it was revealed, and we took the case to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals after it was dismissed by a district court.

A few points on what makes the decision so important. 1. It recognizes that Section 215 of the Patriot Act does not authorize the government to collect information on such a massive scale.

2. The decision’s significance extends far beyond the phone records program alone. It implicates other mass spying programs that we have learned about in the past two years and — almost certainly ­— others that the government continues to conceal from the public. For example, we know that the Drug Enforcement Administration, for decades, employed a similar definition of “relevance” to amass logs of every call made from the United States to as many as 116 different countries. The same theory was also used to justify the collection of email metadata. Both those programs have been discontinued, but the legal reasoning hasn’t, and it could very well be the basis for programs the government has never acknowledged to the public, including the CIA’s bulk collection of Americans’ financial records.

The Senate passed the USA Freedom Act today by 67-32, marking the first time in over thirty years that both houses of Congress have approved a bill placing real restrictions and oversight on the National Security Agency’s surveillance powers. The weakening amendments to the legislation proposed by NSA defender Senate Majority Mitch McConnell were defeated, and we have every reason to believe that President Obama will sign USA Freedom into law. Technology users everywhere should celebrate, knowing that the NSA will be a little more hampered in its surveillance overreach, and both the NSA and the FISA court will be more transparent and accountable than it was before the USA Freedom Act. It’s no secret that we wanted more. In the wake of the damning evidence of surveillance abuses disclosed by Edward Snowden, Congress had an opportunity to champion comprehensive surveillance reform and undertake a thorough investigation, like it did with the Church Committee. Congress could have tried to completely end mass surveillance and taken numerous other steps to rein in the NSA and FBI. This bill was the result of compromise and strong leadership by Sens. Patrick Leahy and Mike Lee and Reps. Robert Goodlatte, Jim Sensenbrenner, and John Conyers. It’s not the bill EFF would have written, and in light of the Second Circuit's thoughtful opinion, we withdrew our support from the bill in an effort to spur Congress to strengthen some of its privacy protections and out of concern about language added to the bill at the behest of the intelligence community. Even so, we’re celebrating. We’re celebrating because, however small, this bill marks a day that some said could never happen—a day when the NSA saw its surveillance power reduced by Congress. And we’re hoping that this could be a turning point in the fight to rein in the NSA.

The head of the National Security Agency on Thursday told Senate lawmakers that preventing his agency from collecting Americans’ information in bulk would make it harder to do its job.Under questioning before the Senate Intelligence Committee, Adm. Michael Rogers agreed that ending bulk collection would “significantly reduce [his] operational capabilities.”ADVERTISEMENT“Right now, bulk collection gives us the ability ... to generate insights as to what’s going on,” Rogers told the committee.The NSA head also referenced a January report from the National Academy of Sciences that concluded there is “no software technique that will fully substitute for bulk collection” because of the ability to search through the storehouse of old information. “That independent, impartial, scientifically-founded body came back and said no, under the current structure there is no real replacement,” Rogers said.Rogers was questioned on Thursday by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a member of the Intelligence Committee who has become its most vocal privacy hawk.

In response to the NSA head’s comments, Wyden pointed to a 2013 White House review group, which found that one controversial NSA bulk collection program “was not essential to preventing attacks” and that the information obtained by the NSA “could readily have been obtained in a timely manner using” other means.The debate follows on a congressional clash earlier this year over the NSA’s bulk collection of records about the phone calls of millions of Americans. The records contained information about whom people called and when but not what they talked about.

After a brief lapsing of some portions of the Patriot Act, Congress eventually reined in the NSA by forcing it to go through the courts to search private phone companies’ records for a narrower set of records. Many privacy advocates treated the new law, called the USA Freedom Act, as a significant victory, through national security hawks worried that it would make it harder for the NSA to track terrorists.Under the new system — which has not gone into effect yet — the amount of time it takes to obtain those records “is probably going to be longer I suspect,” Rogers said.Though the phone records database has been the NSA’s most prominent bulk collection program, it is not the only one. The agency’s collection of vast amounts of Internet data has alarmed many privacy advocates and is the target of a current lawsuit from Wikipedia and the American Civil Liberties Union. 

A senior administration official rebutted Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s statement on Monday that the White House had assured her that they would no longer spy on allies. “The statement that ‘…collection on our allies will not continue…’ is not accurate,” a senior administration official told BuzzFeed. “While we have made some individual changes, which I cannot detail, we have not made across the board changes in policy like, for example, terminating intelligence collection that might be aimed at all allies.” Feinstein, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, put out a statement on Monday criticizing the administration for not briefing her committee on the National Security Agency’s surveillance of foreign leaders.

“It is abundantly clear that a total review of all intelligence programs is necessary so that members of the Senate Intelligence Committee are fully informed as to what is actually being carried out by the intelligence community,” Feinstein said. “Unlike [National Security Agency]’s collection of phone records under a court order, it is clear to me that certain surveillance activities have been in effect for more than a decade and that the Senate Intelligence Committee was not satisfactorily informed. Therefore our oversight needs to be strengthened and increased.” Feinstein, who has defended the NSA in the wake of revelations of large-scale domestic surveillance, said that she was “totally opposed” to spying on U.S. allies. She said that the White House had told her that “collection on our allies will not continue.”A spokesperson for Feinstein did not immediately return requests for comment.

The National Security Agency on Tuesday restarted its bulk collection of Americans’ phone records for a temporary period, following a federal court ruling this week that gave it the green light, U.S. officials said. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on Monday ruled that the NSA could resume gathering millions of Americans’ phone metadata — call times, dates and durations — to scan for links to foreign terrorists. [Here’s the court’s opinion] But the resumption is good for only 180 days — or until Nov. 29, in compliance with the USA Freedom Act. That law, which President Obama signed June 2 after a contentious congressional debate, will end the government’s bulk collection of metadata. It provided, however, for a transition period to allow the NSA time to set up an alternative system in which the data is stored by the phone companies.

After the law took effect, the government immediately applied to the surveillance court to restart its collection. Because Congress passed the bill a day after the underlying statute authorizing the NSA program had expired, there was a question as to whether lawmakers had authorized the government’s temporary harvesting of phone records. “In passing the USA Freedom Act, Congress clearly intended to end bulk data collection of business records and other tangible things,” Judge Michael W. Mosman wrote in his opinion. “But what it took away with one hand, it gave back — for a limited time — with the other. . . . It chose to allow a 180-day transitional period during which such [bulk] collection could continue.”

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said he saw no reason to resume collection, even on a temporary basis. “This illegal dragnet surveillance violated Americans’ rights for 14 years without making our country any safer,” he said. Mosman also ruled that FreedomWorks, a grass-roots libertarian organization, and its attorney, Ken Cuccinelli II, could submit “friend of the court” briefs that argue against the lawfulness of the metadata program. In May, a federal appeals court in New York held that the program was unlawful. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit ruled that the program stretched the meaning of the statute — Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act — to enable data collection in “staggering” volumes in the chance that “at some future point” there might be a need to search for terrorist links.

Posted: Friday, November 19, 2010 12:00 am |

In effect, the federal government is gradually collectivizing the farms, although it is careful to use euphemisms for its activities such as "safety" and "modernization" to avoid getting us peasants in an uproar. Soon the only folks who will be able to comply with this regulatory quagmire will be the huge corporate farms; bye-bye small farmers and ranchers.

unny, I don't see their authority to enact this bill in the Constitution.

The release of the executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA’s post-9/11 interrogation program is, among other things, an epic act of record preservation. Numerous CIA records that might not have been disclosed for decades, or ever, were rescued from oblivion by the Senate report and are now indelibly cited and quoted, even if many of them are not yet released in full. That’s not a small thing, since the history of the CIA interrogation program was not a story that the Agency was motivated or equipped to tell. “The CIA informed the Committee that due to CIA record retention policies, the CIA could not produce all CIA email communications requested by the Committee,” the report noted, explaining that the desired information was sometimes recovered from a reply message when the original email was missing. Agency emails turned out to be a critical source of information, a fact that illuminates the Committee’s sharp response recently to the (now suspended) CIA proposal to the National Archives (NARA) to destroy most Agency emails of non-senior officials.

Thus, the gruesome record of the waterboarding of al Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah “was referenced in emails, but was not documented or otherwise noted in CIA cables.” (This is at odds with NARA’s initial view that “It is unlikely that permanent records will be found in these email accounts that is not filed in other appropriate files.”) The Committee report is also a remarkable demonstration of the congressional oversight function that is all the more impressive because it was performed in adverse, unfavorable conditions. It is striking to see how the CIA sometimes treated the Senate Intelligence Committee, its leadership and its staff with the same disdain and evasiveness that is often perceived by FOIA requesters and other members of the public. Committee questions were ignored, inaccurate information was provided, and the oversight process was gamed.

“Internal CIA emails include discussion of how the CIA could ‘get… off the hook on the cheap’ regarding [then-Committee] Chairman [Bob] Graham’s requests for additional information…. In the end, CIA officials simply did not respond to Graham’s requests prior to his departure from the Committee in January 2003,” the report said. “I am deeply disturbed by the implications of the study for the committee’s ability to discharge its oversight responsibility,” wrote Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) in his additional remarks. “Because it appears from the study that the committee was continuously misled as to virtually all aspects of this program, it naturally raises the extremely troubling question as to whether we can trust the representations of the agency in connection with difficult or sensitive issues in the future.” But minority members of the Committee disputed this characterization: “In reality, the overall pattern of engagement with the Congress shows that the CIA attempted to keep the Congress informed of its activities,” they wrote in their extensive dissenting views. Perhaps the most important achievement of the Committee report was to document and memorialize the fact that agents of the US Government practiced torture. Not “harsh measures” or “enhanced techniques,” but torture.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is taking the position that court warrants are not required when deploying cell-site simulators in public places. Nicknamed "stingrays," the devices are decoy cell towers that capture locations and identities of mobile phone users and can intercept calls and texts. The FBI made its position known during private briefings with staff members of Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa). In response, the two lawmakers wrote Attorney General Eric Holder and Homeland Security chief Jeh Johnson, maintaining they were "concerned about whether the FBI and other law enforcement agencies have adequately considered the privacy interests" of Americans. According to the letter, which was released last week: For example, we understand that the FBI’s new policy requires FBI agents to obtain a search warrant whenever a cell-site simulator is used as part of a FBI investigation or operation, unless one of several exceptions apply, including (among others): (1) cases that pose an imminent danger to public safety, (2) cases that involve a fugitive, or (3) cases in which the technology is used in public places or other locations at which the FBI deems there is no reasonable expectation of privacy.

The letter was prompted in part by a Wall Street Journal report in November that said the Justice Department was deploying small airplanes equipped with cell-site simulators that enabled "investigators to scoop data from tens of thousands of cellphones in a single flight, collecting their identifying information and general location." The bureau's position on Americans' privacy isn't surprising. The Obama Administration has repeatedly maintained that the public has no privacy in public places. It began making that argument as early as 2010, when it told a federal appeals court that the authorities should be allowed to affix GPS devices on vehicles and track a suspect's every move without court authorization. The Supreme Court, however, eventually ruled that warrants are required. What's more, the administration has argued that placing a webcam with pan-and-zoom capabilities on a utility pole to spy on a suspect at his or her residence was no different from a police officer's observation from the public right-of-way. A federal judge last month disagreed with the government's position, tossing evidence gathered by the webcam that was operated from afar.

In their letter, Leahy and Grassley complained that little is known about how stingrays, also known as ISMI catchers, are used by law enforcement agencies. The Harris Corp., a maker of the devices from Florida, includes non-disclosure clauses with buyers. Baltimore authorities cited a non-disclosure agreement to a judge in November as their grounds for refusing to say how they tracked a suspect's mobile phone. They eventually dropped charges rather than disclose their techniques. Further, sometimes the authorities simply lie to judges about their use or undertake other underhanded methods to prevent the public from knowing that the cell-site simulators are being used.

A Senate leader said Sunday she thinks terrorist sleeper cells are in the U.S. — a claim sure to spark even greater fears of a strike on the homeland as the White House launches new efforts to confront growing Islamist extremism around the globe.Sen. Dianne Feinstein, California Democrat and her party’s ranking member on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, flatly stated that she believes terrorist cells are hiding in Europe and the U.S., waiting to be activated and carry out attacks similar to the ones that claimed 17 lives in France last week.“I think there are sleeper cells not only in France but certainly in other countries and, yes, in our own,” she told CNN. “This calls for vigilance. … Hopefully, we can be more active in terms of doing those things which enable us to find terrorists, see who they’re communicating with and to track that.”

Mrs. Feinstein and Obama administration officials did not elaborate on how many suspected terrorists are in the country, nor did they discuss details of any terrorist plot.Despite the apparent lack of specific threats, polling data show the American people are deeply worried about a strike in the U.S.A Rasmussen poll released Sunday shows that 65 percent of Americans believe it is at least somewhat likely that an attack “on those critical of Islam” in the U.S. will occur over the next year. Just 26 percent said such an attack is not likely, the survey shows.