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Gary Edwards

Google News - 0 views

news.google.com/?ar=1375391426

Libertarians freedom-liberty freedom-tyranny authoritarianism-individual-liberty

shared by Gary Edwards on 01 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 01 Aug 13
     
    WOW!!! Incredible presentation concerning the history of Freedom vs. Tyranny. WOW!! If ever there's a MUST Watch, this is it. Very impressive and sweeping comparison of how authoritarian collectivist seize power in a free society and establish their tyrannies. My notes are listed below: How to recognize potential tyrants and keep them from seizing power. The urge to save humanity is always used to justify those who want to rule humanity. - ML Menken Daniel Webster on the Constitution Obstacles to Tyranny : Limited powers of government .... Due Process .... Presumption of Innocence .... Freedom to Dissent .... Armed Populace: The right to be Armed! Due Process .... 5th Amendment .... Emergency powers. there is no authorization in the US Constitution to suspend Due Process or any aspect of the Bill of Rights .... Asset Seizure Laws for criminal activities (alleged - without warrant or court order) .... Eminent Domain: seizure of private property for government uses: 2005 Kelo vs New London seizure based on jobs (economy) and tax revenue possibilities. .... 6th Amendment - right to trial by jury : plea bargaining admonition based on facing the awesome power of the government to prosecute no matter what - intimidation and threat of personal destruction. .... Forced confessions through plea bargaining. .... Indefinite detention without trial or charges: President has power to kill or issue orders without warrant, charges or trial .... Presumption of Innocence: Probable Cause .... Random stops at Border check points. 5th Amendment protections violated .... Sobriety Check Points: 4th and 5th Amendments violated - no presumption of innocence .... Random detention and questioning: airport security pat downs, housing projects, bus transportation .... The Right to Privacy: financial transactions and the IRS audit (without warrant or accusation) .... Warrant-less Spying .... Agents writing their own search warrants .... Snatch and Peek Freedom to Disse
Paul Merrell

Tech giants oppose NSA reform bill for timid safeguards against spying - RT USA - 0 views

rt.com/...644-google-facebook-nsa-reform

surveillance state NSA NSA-reform legislation ambush-tactics Obama

shared by Paul Merrell on 23 May 14 - No Cached
  • Ahead of Thursday’s US House vote on a bill sold as reform of a major US government spying program, top technology firms like Google have joined civil liberties and privacy groups in calling the legislation inadequate in fighting mass surveillance. The Reform Government Surveillance coalition – AOL, Apple, Dropbox, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Twitter, and Yahoo – offered a statement on Wednesday denouncing the USA Freedom Act as a weak attempt at ending the government’s bulk storage of domestic phone metadata.
  • The USA Freedom Act would take the mass storage of phone records away from the government. Instead, telecommunications companies would be required to store the data. The bill would require the National Security Agency to get approval to search the telecoms’ cache of records from the often-compliant Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Last-minute changes to the bill rankled privacy groups on Tuesday, leading many of them to decry the backdoor dealings as responsible for a “weakened,” “watered down” bill compared to what had previously passed the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees earlier this month. On Wednesday, the tech coalition echoed these concerns, calling the amended legislation a move “in the wrong direction” of needed reform regarding mass surveillance. "The latest draft opens up an unacceptable loophole that could enable the bulk collection of Internet users' data," the coalition said. "While it makes important progress, we cannot support this bill as currently drafted and urge Congress to close this loophole to ensure meaningful reform." The loophole referred to by the coalition pertains to the USA Freedom Act’s definition for how and when government officials can search collected phone metadata records.
  • The new language – approved by House leaders and the Obama administration in recent days – modifies the prohibitions on bulk collection of domestic data to allow government officials to search for Americans’ phone records using a “a discrete term, such as a term specifically identifying a person, entity, account, address, or device, used by the Government to limit the scope of the information or tangible things sought.” This revised standard for the USA Freedom Act’s reform of surveillance is too broad and leaves privacy protections at risk, civil liberties groups said on Tuesday. In addition, the legislation’s new language also weakens the bill’s transparency provisions which outlined how much technology companies can disclose to customers about the extent of government requests of user data.
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  • In addition to the tech coalition’s protest, the Computer & Communications Industry Association – whose members include Pandora, Samsung, Sprint, and others – said Wednesday it would “not support consideration or passage of the USA Freedom Act in its current form." The Obama administration publicly threw its support behind the amended USA Freedom Act, saying the bill would “provide the public greater confidence in our programs and the checks and balances in the system.” “The bill ensures our intelligence and law enforcement professionals have the authorities they need to protect the nation, while further ensuring that individuals’ privacy is appropriately protected when these authorities are employed,” the White House included.
  • Lawmakers opposed to the secretive negotiations attempted on Tuesday to counter the weakened surveillance reform bill by offering an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that is “materially identical” to the version of the USA Freedom Act that was advanced by the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees earlier this month. Yet the amendment was denied by the House Rules Committee late Tuesday. The House is now scheduled to vote on the USA Freedom Act on Thursday under closed rules, which forbids adding amendments before the final vote.
  • Paul Merrell on 23 May 14
     
    The Obama Administration and NSA supporters in the House of Representatives resort to a successful last-minute ambush attack to eviscerate the modest reforms proposed in the USA Freedom Act. 
Paul Merrell

Congress Is Irrelevant on Mass Surveillance. Here's What Matters Instead. - The Intercept - 0 views

firstlook.org/...topping-nsas-mass-surveillance

surveillance state nsa-reform

shared by Paul Merrell on 20 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • The “USA Freedom Act”—the proponents of which were heralding as “NSA reform” despite its suffocatingly narrow scope—died in the august U.S. Senate last night when it attracted only 58 of the 60 votes needed to close debate and move on to an up-or-down vote. All Democratic and independent senators except one (Bill Nelson of Florida) voted in favor of the bill, as did three tea-party GOP Senators (Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, and Dean Heller). One GOP Senator, Rand Paul, voted against it on the ground that it did not go nearly far enough in reining in the NSA. On Monday, the White House had issued a statement “strongly supporting” the bill. The “debate” among the Senators that preceded the vote was darkly funny and deeply boring, in equal measure. The black humor was due to the way one GOP senator after the next—led by ranking intelligence committee member Saxby Chambliss of Georgia (pictured above)—stood up and literally screeched about 9/11 and ISIS over and over and over, and then sat down as though they had made a point.
  • So the pro-NSA Republican senators were actually arguing that if the NSA were no longer allowed to bulk-collect the communication records of Americans inside the U.S., then ISIS would kill you and your kids. But because they were speaking in an empty chamber and only to their warped and insulated D.C. circles and sycophantic aides, there was nobody there to cackle contemptuously or tell them how self-evidently moronic it all was. So they kept their Serious Faces on like they were doing The Nation’s Serious Business, even though what was coming out of their mouths sounded like the demented ramblings of a paranoid End is Nigh cult. The boredom of this spectacle was simply due to the fact that this has been seen so many times before—in fact, every time in the post-9/11 era that the U.S. Congress pretends publicly to debate some kind of foreign policy or civil liberties bill. Just enough members stand up to scream “9/11″ and “terrorism” over and over until the bill vesting new powers is passed or the bill protecting civil liberties is defeated.
  • Eight years ago, when this tawdry ritual was still a bit surprising to me, I live-blogged the 2006 debate over passage of the Military Commissions Act, which, with bipartisan support, literally abolished habeas corpus rights established by the Magna Carta by sanctioning detention without charges or trial. (My favorite episode there was when GOP Sen. Arlen Specter warned that “what the bill seeks to do is set back basic rights by some nine hundred years,” and then voted in favor of its enactment.) In my state of naive disbelief, as one senator after the next thundered about the “message we are sending” to “the terrorists,” I wrote: “The quality of the ‘debate’ on the Senate floor is so shockingly (though appropriately) low and devoid of substance that it is hard to watch.” So watching last night’s Senate debate was like watching a repeat of some hideously shallow TV show. The only new aspect was that the aging Al Qaeda villain has been rather ruthlessly replaced by the show’s producers with the younger, sleeker ISIS model. Showing no gratitude at all for the years of value it provided these senators, they ignored the veteran terror group almost completely in favor of its new replacement. And they proceeded to save a domestic surveillance program clearly unpopular among those they pretend to represent.
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  • Ever since the Snowden reporting began and public opinion (in both the U.S. and globally) began radically changing, the White House’s strategy has been obvious. It’s vintage Obama: Enact something that is called “reform”—so that he can give a pretty speech telling the world that he heard and responded to their concerns—but that in actuality changes almost nothing, thus strengthening the very system he can pretend he “changed.” That’s the same tactic as Silicon Valley, which also supported this bill: Be able to point to something called “reform” so they can trick hundreds of millions of current and future users around the world into believing that their communications are now safe if they use Facebook, Google, Skype and the rest. In pretty much every interview I’ve done over the last year, I’ve been asked why there haven’t been significant changes from all the disclosures. I vehemently disagree with the premise of the question, which equates “U.S. legislative changes” with “meaningful changes.” But it has been clear from the start that U.S. legislation is not going to impose meaningful limitations on the NSA’s powers of mass surveillance, at least not fundamentally. Those limitations are going to come from—are now coming from —very different places:
  • All of that illustrates what is, to me, the most important point from all of this: the last place one should look to impose limits on the powers of the U.S. government is . . . the U.S. government. Governments don’t walk around trying to figure out how to limit their own power, and that’s particularly true of empires. The entire system in D.C. is designed at its core to prevent real reform. This Congress is not going to enact anything resembling fundamental limits on the NSA’s powers of mass surveillance. Even if it somehow did, this White House would never sign it. Even if all that miraculously happened, the fact that the U.S. intelligence community and National Security State operates with no limits and no oversight means they’d easily co-opt the entire reform process. That’s what happened after the eavesdropping scandals of the mid-1970s led to the establishment of congressional intelligence committees and a special FISA “oversight” court—the committees were instantly captured by putting in charge supreme servants of the intelligence community like Senators Dianne Feinstein and Chambliss, and Congressmen Mike Rogers and “Dutch” Ruppersberger, while the court quickly became a rubber stamp with subservient judges who operate in total secrecy.
  • There is a real question about whether the defeat of this bill is good, bad, or irrelevant. To begin with, it sought to change only one small sliver of NSA mass surveillance (domestic bulk collection of phone records under section 215 of the Patriot Act) while leaving completely unchanged the primary means of NSA mass surveillance, which takes place under section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act, based on the lovely and quintessentially American theory that all that matters are the privacy rights of Americans (and not the 95 percent of the planet called “non-Americans”). There were some mildly positive provisions in the USA Freedom Act: the placement of “public advocates” at the FISA court to contest the claims of the government; the prohibition on the NSA holding Americans’ phone records, requiring instead that they obtain FISA court approval before seeking specific records from the telecoms (which already hold those records for at least 18 months); and reducing the agency’s “contact chaining” analysis from three hops to two. One could reasonably argue (as the ACLU and EFF did) that, though woefully inadequate, the bill was a net-positive as a first step toward real reform, but one could also reasonably argue, as Marcy Wheeler has with characteristic insight, that the bill is so larded with ambiguities and fundamental inadequacies that it would forestall better options and advocates for real reform should thus root for its defeat.
  • 1) Individuals refusing to use internet services that compromise their privacy.
  • 2) Other countries taking action against U.S. hegemony over the internet.
  • 3) U.S. court proceedings.
  • 4) Greater individual demand for, and use of, encryption.
  • The “USA Freedom Act”—which its proponents were heralding as “NSA reform” despite its suffocatingly narrow scope—died in the august U.S. Senate last night when it attracted only 58 of the 60 votes needed to close debate and move on to an up-or-down vote. All Democratic and independent senators except one (Bill Nelson of Florida) voted in favor of the bill, as did three tea-party GOP Senators (Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, and Dean Heller). One GOP Senator, Rand Paul, voted against it on the ground that it did not go nearly far enough in reining in the NSA. On Monday, the White House had issued a statement “strongly supporting” the bill.
  • Paul Merrell on 20 Nov 14
     
    Glenn Greenwald on why the death of the USA Freedom Act is actually a Very Good Thing. I couldn't agree more.
Paul Merrell

USA Freedom Act Passes: What We Celebrate, What We Mourn, and Where We Go From Here | E... - 0 views

www.eff.org/...-we-mourn-and-where-we-go-here

surveillance state USA-Freedom-Act enactment EFF

shared by Paul Merrell on 04 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • 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.
Paul Merrell

USA Freedom Act Passes House, Codifying Bulk Collection For First Time, Critics Say - T... - 0 views

firstlook.org/...usa-freedom-act

surveillance state NSA-reform USA-Freedom-Act legislation

shared by Paul Merrell on 14 May 15 - No Cached
  • After only one hour of floor debate, and no allowed amendments, the House of Representatives today passed legislation that opponents believe may give brand new authorization to the U.S. government to conduct domestic dragnets. The USA Freedom Act was approved in a 338-88 vote, with approximately equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans voting against. The bill’s supporters say it will disallow bulk collection of domestic telephone metadata, in which the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has regularly ordered phone companies to turn over such data. The Obama administration claims such collection is authorized by Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act, which is set to expire June 1. However, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit recently held that Section 215 does not provide such authorization. Today’s legislation would prevent the government from issuing such orders for bulk collection and instead rely on telephone companies to store all their metadata — some of which the government could then demand using a “specific selection term” related to foreign terrorism. Bill supporters maintain this would prevent indiscriminate collection.
  • However, the legislation may not end bulk surveillance and in fact could codify the ability of the government to conduct dragnet data collection. “We’re taking something that was not permitted under regular section 215 … and now we’re creating a whole apparatus to provide for it,” Rep. Justin Amash, R-Mich., said on Tuesday night during a House Rules Committee proceeding. “The language does limit the amount of bulk collection, it doesn’t end bulk collection,” Rep. Amash said, arguing that the problematic “specific selection term” allows for “very large data collection, potentially in the hundreds of thousands of people, maybe even millions.” In a statement posted to Facebook ahead of the vote, Rep. Amash said the legislation “falls woefully short of reining in the mass collection of Americans’ data, and it takes us a step in the wrong direction by specifically authorizing such collection in violation of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution.”
  • “While I appreciate a number of the reforms in the bill and understand the need for secure counter-espionage and terrorism investigations, I believe our nation is better served by allowing Section 215 to expire completely and replacing it with a measure that finds a better balance between national security interests and protecting the civil liberties of Americans,” Congressman Ted Lieu, D-Calif., said in a statement explaining his vote against the bill.
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  • Not addressed in the bill, however, are a slew of other spying authorities in use by the NSA that either directly or inadvertently target the communications of American citizens. Lawmakers offered several amendments in the days leading up to the vote that would have tackled surveillance activities laid out in Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and Executive Order 12333 — two authorities intended for foreign surveillance that have been used to collect Americans’ internet data, including online address books and buddy lists. The House Rules Committee, however, prohibited consideration of any amendment to the USA Freedom Act, claiming that any changes to the legislation would have weakened its chances of passage.
  • The measure now goes to the Senate where its future is uncertain. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has declined to schedule the bill for consideration, and is instead pushing for a clean reauthorization of expiring Patriot Act provisions that includes no surveillance reforms. Senators Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Rand Paul, R-Ky., have threated to filibuster any bill that extends the Patriot Act without also reforming the NSA.
  • Paul Merrell on 14 May 15
     
    Surprise, surprise. U.S. "progressive" groups are waging an all-out email lobbying effort to sunset the Patriot Act. https://www.sunsetthepatriotact.com/ Same with civil liberties groups. e.g., https://action.aclu.org/secure/Section215 And a coalition of libertarian organizations. http://docs.techfreedom.org/Coalition_Letter_McConnell_215Reauth_4.27.15.pdf
Paul Merrell

Prospects dim for 11th-hour PATRIOT Act deal - Burgess Everett and Seung Min Kim - POLI... - 0 views

www.politico.com/...r-patriot-act-deal-118300.html

surveillance state NSA sunset-section-215 legislation

shared by Paul Merrell on 27 May 15 - No Cached
  • The PATRIOT Act is going to need a miracle to survive the weekend unscathed. Backers of the post-9/11 anti-terror measure are scrambling this week to prevent the law’s key surveillance programs from lapsing at midnight Sunday. But with the Senate not slated to return to Washington until just hours before that deadline, opponents like Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) showing no signs of budging, and the House so far unwilling to bail out the upper chamber, the prospects for an eleventh-hour breakthrough look slim.
  • “Our options are a lot more limited” given the time constraints, said Utah Sen. Mike Lee, the chief Republican backer of the bill in the Senate. “We can either let the provisions at issue expire, or we can pass the House-passed USA Freedom Act.” The problem is that doing anything ahead of the midnight deadline would take the cooperation of all 100 senators. That’s hardly a given since Paul is still insisting that McConnell allow votes on privacy-related amendments, and Wyden has vowed to block any clean extension of what he calls a “bad law.”
  • n an appearance in Kentucky on Tuesday, McConnell acknowledged the strong support for the USA Freedom Act “makes it pretty challenging to extend the law as it is.” In Washington, top Republican aides could not — or would not — explain how the Senate will escape the fix beyond the possibility that Senate leaders can somehow persuade Paul and Wyden to stop blocking a PATRIOT Act extension with the promise of a robust Senate debate to follow.
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  • The 57-42 vote in the Senate on the USA Freedom Act has its backers tasting victory. Sen. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) switched his vote on the floor to “no” but indicated afterward that he had been “inclined” to let the House bill proceed. Sen. Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.) missed the late-night votes but signaled in a statement released by his office that he would support changes to bulk collection. Backers have also eyed Republican Sens. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and John Boozman (R-Ark.) as potential votes in favor. Aides to the two lawmakers didn’t return requests seeking comment on Tuesday. “Some of those members voted ‘no’ on Friday night,” Lee said. “I suspect that now that we’re in this posture, some of those might flip.”
  • The reform bill stalled, yet there appears to be a path to 60 if McConnell allows another vote and stops advocating against it. Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.), for one, said he expects another attempt Sunday to break a filibuster on the USA Freedom Act.
  • The more immediate question is what happens on Sunday. If the Senate passes anything other than the USA Freedom Act as it stands, the House would need to agree to go along — which might be impossible given that the chamber isn’t scheduled to return until Monday. Some privacy advocates have a backup plan for Congress: Don’t do anything at all. “If Congress can’t coalesce around far-reaching changes,” said Neema Singh Guliani, the legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, “they should allow the expiring provisions of the PATRIOT Act to sunset.”
Paul Merrell

Sen. Leahy's Latest NSA bill: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly | Just Security - 0 views

justsecurity.org/...-latest-nsa-bill-good-bad-ugly

surveillance state NSA NSA-reform legislation USA-Freedom-Act

shared by Paul Merrell on 05 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • This morning, Senator Patrick Leahy released a new version of the USA Freedom Act, a bill intended to reform NSA surveillance following Edward Snowden’s revelations that the intelligence agency collects Americans’ calling records in bulk. USA Freedom Act has a disappointing history. While initially proposing much for Americans, if not our friends overseas, to like, the version that eventually passed the House in May was, at best, utterly neutered.  Today’s version, hashed out between Sen. Leahy, Obama Administration officials, and civil liberties proponents, moves the needle much closer to the original version. Of course, as this USA Freedom Act moves through the Senate, the bill could change. And if it passes the Senate, the House will have to reconcile this version with its own gelded one. But for now, there are things to like, things to hate, and things remaining to fear in USA Freedom.
  • Paul Merrell on 05 Aug 14
     
    U.S. Constitution Amendment 4, as the enemies of civil liberties would like it to read: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, *unless a government official wants to violate that right,* and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized, *unless a government official should decide that he or she would be inconvenienced by such procedure."*
Paul Merrell

PATRIOT Act spying programs on death watch - Seung Min Kim and Kate Tummarello - POLITICO - 0 views

www.politico.com/...ct-spying-programs-117976.html

surveillance state NSA 502-program legislation must-read

shared by Paul Merrell on 15 May 15 - No Cached
  • With only days left to act and Rand Paul threatening a filibuster, Senate Republicans remain deeply divided over the future of the PATRIOT Act and have no clear path to keep key government spying authorities from expiring at the end of the month. Crucial parts of the PATRIOT Act, including a provision authorizing the government’s controversial bulk collection of American phone records, first revealed by Edward Snowden, are due to lapse May 31. That means Congress has barely a week to figure out a fix before before lawmakers leave town for Memorial Day recess at the end of the next week. Story Continued Below The prospects of a deal look grim: Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Thursday night proposed just a two-month extension of expiring PATRIOT Act provisions to give the two sides more time to negotiate, but even that was immediately dismissed by critics of the program.
  • Paul Merrell on 15 May 15
     
    A must-read. The major danger is that the the Senate could pass the USA Freedom Act, which has already been passed by the House. Passage of that Act, despite its name, would be bad news for civil liberties.  Now is the time to let your Congress critters know that you want them to fight to the Patriot Act provisions expire on May 31, without any replacement legislation.  Keep in mind that Section 502 does not apply just to telephone metadata. It authorizes the FBI to gather without notice to their victims "any tangible thing", specifically including as examples "library circulation records, library patron lists, book sales records, book customer lists, firearms sales records, tax return records, educational records, or medical records containing information that would identify a person." The breadth of the section is illustrated by telephone metadata not even being mentioned in the section.  NSA going after your medical records souand far fetched? Former NSA technical director William Binney says they're already doing it: "Binney alludes to even more extreme intelligence practices that are not yet public knowledge, including the collection of Americans' medical data, the collection and use of client-attorney conversations, and law enforcement agencies' "direct access," without oversight, to NSA databases." https://consortiumnews.com/2015/03/05/seeing-the-stasi-through-nsa-eyes/ So please, contact your Congress critters right now and tell them to sunset the Patriot Act NOW. This will be decided in the next few days so the sooner you contact them the better. 
Paul Merrell

ACLU Demands Secret Court Hand Over Crucial Rulings On Surveillance Law - 0 views

www.mintpressnews.com/...221667

surveillance state FISA-Court opinions disclosure litigation ACLU

shared by Paul Merrell on 24 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has filed a motion to reveal the secret court opinions with “novel or significant interpretations” of surveillance law, in a renewed push for government transparency. The motion, filed Wednesday by the ACLU and Yale Law School’s Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic, asks the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Court, which rules on intelligence gathering activities in secret, to release 23 classified decisions it made between 9/11 and the passage of the USA Freedom Act in June 2015. As ACLU National Security Project staff attorney Patrick Toomey explains, the opinions are part of a “much larger collection of hidden rulings on all sorts of government surveillance activities that affect the privacy rights of Americans.” Among them is the court order that the government used to direct Yahoo to secretly scanits users’ emails for “a specific set of characters.” Toomey writes: These court rulings are essential for the public to understand how federal laws are being construed and implemented. They also show how constitutional protections for personal privacy and expressive activities are being enforced by the courts. In other words, access to these opinions is necessary for the public to properly oversee their government.
  • Although the USA Freedom Act requires the release of novel FISA court opinions on surveillance law, the government maintains that the rule does not apply retroactively—thereby protecting the panel from publishing many of its post-9/11 opinions, which helped create an “unprecedented buildup” of secret surveillance laws. Even after National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed the scope of mass surveillance in 2013, sparking widespread outcry, dozens of rulings on spying operations remain hidden from the public eye, which stymies efforts to keep the government accountable, civil liberties advocates say. “These rulings are necessary to inform the public about the scope of the government’s surveillance powers today,” the ACLU’s motion states.
  • Toomey writes that the rulings helped influence a number of novel spying activities, including: The government’s use of malware, which it calls “Network Investigative Techniques” The government’s efforts to compel technology companies to weaken or circumvent their own encryption protocols The government’s efforts to compel technology companies to disclose their source code so that it can identify vulnerabilities The government’s use of “cybersignatures” to search through internet communications for evidence of computer intrusions The government’s use of stingray cell-phone tracking devices under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) The government’s warrantless surveillance of Americans under FISA Section 702—a controversial authority scheduled to expire in December 2017 The bulk collection of financial records by the CIA and FBI under Section 215 of the Patriot Act Without these rulings being made public, “it simply isn’t possible to understand the government’s claimed authority to conduct surveillance,” Toomey writes. As he told The Intercept on Wednesday, “The people of this country can’t hold the government accountable for its surveillance activities unless they know what our laws allow. These secret court opinions define the limits of the government’s spying powers. Their disclosure is essential for meaningful public oversight in our democracy.”
Gary Edwards

Ron Paul @ The Daily Bell - The NDAA Repeals More Rights - 1 views

www.thedailybell.com/...l-The-NDAA-Repeals-More-Rights

Ron-Paul NDAA Patriot-Act traitorous-bastards Libertarian

shared by Gary Edwards on 27 Dec 11 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 27 Dec 11
     
    Congressman Ron Paul explains the NDAA - National Defense Authorization Act. This military budget and expense Act has been approved by the USA Senate, and includes presidential authorization to arrest and detain Americans without charges. The Act suspends the 5th Amendment of the Bill of Rights. It suspends Habeas Corpus. Ron Paul argues that what the Patriot Act does to destroy the 4th Amendment, the NDAA does to the Bill of Rights 5th Amendment. It seems to me that no representative can take an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution, and then vote for either the Patriot Act or NDA Act. The Bill of Rights states exactly what government can't do. And now these traitorous bastards have done it anyway. And people wonder why Ron Paul is so popular? Americans love their Constitution and will demand representatives that will uphold and defend the individual rights and freedoms that sacred document protects.
Paul Merrell

Four librarians gagged and threatened with prison time under the Patriot Act | Police S... - 0 views

www.policestateusa.com/...librarians-gagged-patriot-act

surveillance state NSLs gag-orders prior-restraint

shared by Paul Merrell on 07 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • Using the broad powers granted under the USA PATRIOT Act, the FBI demanded that 4 librarians produce private information about library patrons’ reading habits, then used an endless gag order to force them to remain silent about the request for the rest of their lives under penalty of prison time.
  • The FBI was demanding that the library hand over private data on library patrons en masse “to protect against international terrorism.” The document that Mr. Christian was given was a so-called National Security Letter (NSL), a type of administrative subpoena for personal information — self-written by the FBI without any probable cause or judicial oversight.  The legal framework for these powerful NSLs was established by Section 505 of the USA PATRIOT Act in 2001. What’s more, Mr. Christian was placed under a perpetual gag order.  The NSL prohibited the recipient “from disclosing to any person that the F.B.I. has sought or obtained access to information or records under these provisions.”  The gag order was broad enough that it was a crime to discuss the matter to any other person — for life.  The USA PATRIOT Act allows for this suppression of speech, and issues a punishment of up to 5 years in prison for anyone caught violating the endless gag order.
  • The only reason we know about this case today is because Mr. Christian and 3 other library board members fought back in court.  
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  • In fact, the librarians were even barred from attending the court hearings on the very precedent-setting lawsuit with which they were involved. 
  • “Our presence in the courtroom was declared a threat to national security,” Mr. Chase related. The gag served to legally prevent Mr. Christian from personally testifying before Congress about the effects of the USA PATRIOT Act before the law’s reauthorization in March of 2006.   It passed through Congress easily and was signed once again by President George W. Bush. Appellate judges were clearly disturbed by the breadth of the NSL gag provisions.  One appellate judge wrote, “A ban on speech and a shroud of secrecy in perpetuity are antithetical to democratic concepts and do not fit comfortably with the fundamental rights guaranteed American citizens… Unending secrecy of actions taken by government officials may also serve as a cover for possible official misconduct and/or incompetence.” Sensing a potential legal defeat, the government took the steps necessary to preserve its powers.  Only a few weeks after the USA PATRIOT Act was renewed, the FBI abandoned the Library Connection case and voluntarily lifted the librarians’ gag order.  This eliminated the possibility that the NSL provisions could be struck down in court, protecting the USA PATRIOT Act from further judicial scrutiny.  In May 2006, the four librarians broke their silence at last.
  • The result could only be considered a partial victory, however.  While the librarians had regained their freedom to speak, they no longer had legal standing to challenge the NSL provisions, meaning that the sweeping power to subpoena and gag American citizens would remain unchecked in the hands of the government — and continue to be used at an alarming rate; tens of thousands of NSLs and gag orders are issued per year in the name of fighting the so-called War on Terror.
Paul Merrell

Rally your friends to support the #USAFreedomAct! - Take Action - Google - 0 views

www.google.com/...surveillance-share

surveillance state USA-Freedom-Act legislation Google

shared by Paul Merrell on 15 May 15 - No Cached
  • The House of Representatives has passed the USA Freedom Act, which represents a significant down payment on broader government surveillance reform. We need as many people as possible speaking up to make sure that the Senate says YES to the USA Freedom Act.
  • Paul Merrell on 15 May 15
     
    I suppose it was too much to hope that Google would do the right thing as called for by nearly all civil liberties organizations and call for sunsetting the Patriot Act. But Google's revolving door with NSA speaks and sides with NSA. Bad Google. Truly evil.   
Paul Merrell

Weakened surveillance reform bill is 'yesterday's news', civil libertarians say | World... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...dom-act-nsa-civil-libertarians

surveillance state 215-sunset USA-Freedom-Act

shared by Paul Merrell on 18 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • When the premiere surveillance reform bill of 2014 is reintroduced in the current Congress, it can count on antipathy and even opposition from many of the civil libertarian activists who pushed it to the brink of passage last year. The USA Freedom Act, a bill that aims to stop the National Security Agency (NSA) from its daily collection of US phone records in bulk, is set for a 2015 revamp after failing in the Senate last November. Supporters pledge to unveil it late this week or early next week.
  • This time, as reported by the Guardian, the bill is shaping up to be the preferred piece of legislation to extend the lifespan of a controversial part of the Patriot Act, known as Section 215. The NSA uses Section 215 to justify its domestic mass surveillance. The FBI considers it critical for terrorism and espionage investigations outside typical warrant or subpoena channels. Section 215 expires on 1 June. The bill’s architects consider the USA Freedom Act the strongest piece of legislation to roll back the domestic reach of US surveillance that Congress will pass. But a new coalition of civil libertarian groups on the left and the right is already looking past the bill, in the hopes of broadening what is possible – something they consider realistic, thanks to the intelligence community’s fervent desire to avoid the expiration of Section 215.
  • Paul Merrell on 18 Apr 15
     
    I'm pushing for no legislation. Let section 215 sunset in peace.
Paul Merrell

Edward Snowden, a year on: reformers frustrated as NSA preserves its power | World news... - 1 views

www.theguardian.com/...e-year-nsa-surveillance-reform

surveillance-state NSA-reform legislation

shared by Paul Merrell on 07 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • For two weeks in May, it looked as though privacy advocates had scored a tenuous victory against the widespread surveillance practices exposed by Edward Snowden a year ago. Then came a resurgent intelligence community, armed with pens, and dry, legislative language.During several protracted sessions in secure rooms in the Capitol, intelligence veterans, often backed by the congressional leadership, sparred with House aides to abridge privacy and transparency provisions contained in the first bill rolling back National Security Agency spying powers in more than three decades. The revisions took place in secret after two congressional committees had passed the bill. The NSA and its allies took creative advantage of a twilight legislative period permitting technical or cosmetic language changes.The episode shows the lengths to which the architects and advocates of bulk surveillance have gone to preserve their authorities in the time since the Guardian, 12 months ago today, began disclosing the scope of NSA data collection. That resistance to change, aided by the power and trust enjoyed by the NSA on Capitol Hill, helps explain why most NSA powers remain intact a year after the largest leak in the agency's histo
  • But exactly one year on, the NSA’s greatest wound so far has been its PR difficulties. The agency, under public pressure, has divested itself of exactly one activity, the bulk collection of US phone data. Yet while the NSA will not itself continue to gather the data directly, the major post-Snowden legislative fix grants the agency wide berth in accessing and searching large volumes of phone records, and even wider latitude in collecting other kinds of data.There are no other mandated reforms.
  • The Freedom Act ultimately sped to passage in the House on May 22 by a bipartisan 303-121 vote. NSA advocates who had blasted its earlier version as hazardous to national security dropped their objections – largely because they had no more reason.Accordingly, the compromise language caused civil libertarians and technology groups not just to abandon the Freedom Act that they had long championed, but to question whether it actually banned bulk data collection. The government could acquire call-records data up to two degrees of separation from any "reasonable articulable suspicion" of wrongdoing, potentially representing hundreds or thousands of people on a single judicial order." That was not all.
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  • Some NSA critics look to the courts for a fuller tally of their victories in the wake of the Snowden disclosures. Judges have begun to permit defendants to see evidence gathered against them that had its origins in NSA email or call intercepts, which could disrupt prosecutions or invalidate convictions. At least one such defendant, in Colorado, is seeking the exclusion of such evidence, arguing that its use in court is illegal.Still other cases challenging the surveillance efforts have gotten beyond the government’s longtime insistence that accusers cannot prove they were spied upon, as the Snowden trove demonstrated a dragnet that presumptively touched every American’s phone records. This week, an Idaho federal judge implored the supreme court to settle the question of the bulk surveillance's constitutionality."The litigation now is about the merits. It’s about the lawfulness of the surveillance program," said Jameel Jaffer, the ACLU’s deputy legal director.
  • "As the bill stands today, it could still permit the collection of email records from everyone who uses a particular email service," warned a Google legislative action alert after the bill passed the House. In a recent statement, cloud-storage firm Tresorit lamented that "there still has been no real progress in achieving truly effective security for consumer and corporate information."No one familiar with the negotiations alleges the NSA or its allies broke the law by amending the bill during the technical-fix period. But it is unusual for substantive changes to be introduced secretly after a bill has cleared committee and before its open debate by the full Senate or House."It is not out of order, but major changes in substance are rare, and appropriately so," said Norman Ornstein, an expert on congressional procedure at the American Enterprise Institute.Steve Aftergood, an intelligence policy analyst at the Federation of American Scientists, said the rewrites to the bill were an "invitation to cynicism."
  • "There does seem to be a sort of gamesmanship to it. Why go through all the troubling of crafting legislation, enlisting support and co-sponsorship, and adopting compromises if the bill is just going to be rewritten behind closed doors anyway?" Aftergood said.
  • Civil libertarians and activists now hope to strengthen the bill in the Senate. Its chief sponsor, Patrick Leahy of Vermont, vowed to take it up this month, and to push for "meaningful reforms" he said he was "disappointed" the House excluded. Obama administration officials will testify in the Senate intelligence committee about the bill on Thursday afternoon, the first anniversary of the Guardian's disclosure of bulk domestic phone records collection. That same day, Reddit, Imgur and other large websites will stage an online "Reset The Net" protest of NSA bulk surveillance.But the way the bill "morphed behind the scenes," as Lofgren put it, points to the obstacles such efforts face. It also points to a continuing opportunity for the NSA to say that Congress has actually blessed widespread data collection – a claim made after the Snowden leaks, despite most members of Congress and the public not knowing that NSA and the Fisa court secretly reinterpreted the Patriot Act in order to collect all US phone records.
  • Paul Merrell on 07 Jun 14
     
    Good Guardian article on how the American Freedom Act as reported out of House committees was gutted in secret meetings between key representatives and NSA (and other Executive Branch) officials. The House of Representatives kisses the feet of Dark Government. 
Paul Merrell

The good news about the 'death' of NSA reform: surveillance supporters may have dug the... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ce-usa-freedom-act-section-215

surveillance

shared by Paul Merrell on 24 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • Snowden haters may have blocked the USA Freedom Act, but the clock is ticking before the law that justifies vacuuming your phone records blows up in the face of newly conservative Washington
  • Paul Merrell on 24 Nov 14
     
    Trevor Timm caught the hilarity of the moment. Myself, I was in full ROTFLMAO Mode when I stumbled across this priceless gem written by someone who knew enough that he should have known that he didn't know enough about the topic to write about it: "Sometime around 7:30 p.m. (EST) last night, the 17-month-long national conversation over how to reform U.S. foreign intelligence surveillance authorities effectively ended when the Senate failed to clear a crucial procedural step en route to what would otherwise have been the near-certain passage of the Senate version of the USA FREEDOM Act-the surveillance reform bill that has been in the works for well over a year. "  http://justsecurity.org/17582/snowden-affair/ He who laughs last laughs best. Get ready for the punch line, War Party! But please bend over first. 
Paul Merrell

Tech firms and privacy groups press for curbs on NSA surveillance powers - The Washingt... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...4-ab77-9646eea6a4c7_story.html

surveillance state Patriot-Act 215-sunset NSA-reform legislation

shared by Paul Merrell on 29 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • The nation’s top technology firms and a coalition of privacy groups are urging Congress to place curbs on government surveillance in the face of a fast-approaching deadline for legislative action. A set of key Patriot Act surveillance authorities expire June 1, but the effective date is May 21 — the last day before Congress breaks for a Memorial Day recess. In a letter to be sent Wednesday to the Obama administration and senior lawmakers, the coalition vowed to oppose any legislation that, among other things, does not ban the “bulk collection” of Americans’ phone records and other data.
  • We know that there are some in Congress who think that they can get away with reauthorizing the expiring provisions of the Patriot Act without any reforms at all,” said Kevin Bankston, policy director of New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute, a privacy group that organized the effort. “This letter draws a line in the sand that makes clear that the privacy community and the Internet industry do not intend to let that happen without a fight.” At issue is the bulk collection of Americans’ data by intelligence agencies such as the National Security Agency. The NSA’s daily gathering of millions of records logging phone call times, lengths and other “metadata” stirred controversy when it was revealed in June 2013 by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. The records are placed in a database that can, with a judge’s permission, be searched for links to foreign terrorists.They do not include the content of conversations.
  • That program, placed under federal surveillance court oversight in 2006, was authorized by the court in secret under Section 215 of the Patriot Act — one of the expiring provisions. The public outcry that ensued after the program was disclosed forced President Obama in January 2014 to call for an end to the NSA’s storage of the data. He also appealed to Congress to find a way to preserve the agency’s access to the data for counterterrorism information.
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  • Despite growing opposition in some quarters to ending the NSA’s program, a “clean” authorization — one that would enable its continuation without any changes — is unlikely, lawmakers from both parties say. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a leading opponent of the NSA’s program in its current format, said he would be “surprised if there are 60 votes” in the Senate for that. In the House, where there is bipartisan support for reining in surveillance, it’s a longer shot still. “It’s a toxic vote back in your district to reauthorize the Patriot Act, if you don’t get some reforms” with it, said Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.). The House last fall passed the USA Freedom Act, which would have ended the NSA program, but the Senate failed to advance its own version.The House and Senate judiciary committees are working to come up with new bipartisan legislation to be introduced soon.
  • The tech firms and privacy groups’ demands are a baseline, they say. Besides ending bulk collection, they want companies to have the right to be more transparent in reporting on national security requests and greater declassification of opinions by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
  • Some legal experts have pointed to a little-noticed clause in the Patriot Act that would appear to allow bulk collection to continue even if the authority is not renewed. Administration officials have conceded privately that a legal case probably could be made for that, but politically it would be a tough sell. On Tuesday, a White House spokesman indicated the administration would not seek to exploit that clause. “If Section 215 sunsets, we will not continue the bulk telephony metadata program,” National Security Council spokesman Edward Price said in a statement first reported by Reuters. Price added that allowing Section 215 to expire would result in the loss of a “critical national security tool” used in investigations that do not involve the bulk collection of data. “That is why we have underscored the imperative of Congressional action in the coming weeks, and we welcome the opportunity to work with lawmakers on such legislation,” he said.
  • Paul Merrell on 29 Mar 15
     
    I omitted some stuff about opposition to sunsetting the provisions. They  seem to forget, as does Obama, that the proponents of the FISA Court's expansive reading of section 215 have not yet come up with a single instance where 215-derived data caught a single terrorist or prevented a single act of terrorism. Which means that if that data is of some use, it ain't in fighting terrorism, the purpose of the section.  Patriot Act § 215 is codified as 50 USCS § 1861, https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/50/1861 That section authorizes the FBI to obtain an iorder from the FISA Court "requiring the production of *any tangible things* (including books, records, papers, documents, and other items)."  Specific examples (a non-exclusive list) include: the production of library circulation records, library patron lists, book sales records, book customer lists, firearms sales records, tax return records, educational records, or medical records containing information that would identify a person." The Court can order that the recipient of the order tell no one of its receipt of the order or its response to it.   In other words, this is about way more than your telephone metadata. Do you trust the NSA with your medical records? 
Paul Merrell

NSA surveillance reform bill passes House by 303 votes to 121 | World news | theguardia... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...l-usa-freedom-act-passes-house

surveillance state NSA legislation NSA-reform

shared by Paul Merrell on 23 May 14 - No Cached
  • The first legislation aimed specifically at curbing US surveillance abuses revealed by Edward Snowden passed the House of Representatives on Thursday, with a majority of both Republicans and Democrats.But last-minute efforts by intelligence community loyalists to weaken key language in the USA Freedom Act led to a larger-than-expected rebellion by members of Congress, with the measure passing by 303 votes to 121.The bill's authors concede it was watered down significantly in recent days, but insist it will still outlaw the practice of bulk collection of US telephone metadata by the NSA first revealed by Snowden.Some members of Congress were worried that the bill will fail to prevent the National Security Agency from continuing to collect large amounts of data on ordinary US citizens.
  • “Perfect is rarely possible in politics, and this bill is no exception,” said Republican Jim Sensenbrenner, who has led efforts on the House judiciary committee to rein in the NSA.“In order to preserve core operations of the intelligence and law enforcement agencies, the administration insisted on broadening certain authorities and lessening certain restrictions. Some of the changes raise justifiable concerns. I don’t blame people for losing trust in their government, because the government violated their trust.”
  • But the revised language lost the support of several influential members of the judiciary committee who had previously voted for it, including Republicans Darrell Issa, Ted Poe and Raul Labrador and Democrat Zoe Lofgren.Issa also chairs the House oversight committee. Adam Smith, the most senior Democrat on the armed services committee, also voted against the bill.“Regrettably, we have learned that the intelligence community will run a truck through ambiguity,” said Lofgren during an hour and 15 minutes of debate which preceded the vote. No amendments were allowed.
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  • After the vote, Mark Jaycox, a legislative analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said: “The bill is littered with loopholes. The problem right now, especially after multiple revisions, is that it doesn't effectively end mass surveillance.”In a statement, Zeke Johnson, the director of Amnesty International USA's security and human rights program, said the House had “failed to deliver serious surveillance reform”.
  • The size of the rebellion and the seniority of the rebels may support efforts to tighten language in the legislation as it makes its way to the Senate.Senator Patrick Leahy, the chair of the Senate judiciary committee and the lead Democratic author of the Freedom Act, said that the actions of the house in passing it was an “important step towards reforming our nation's surveillance authorities”which “few could have predicted less than a year ago.”However, in a statement issued on Thursday, Leahy expressed disappointment that the bill, which he had introduced jointly with Sensenbrenner in October, had been diluted.
  • Senator Ron Wyden, the Oregon Democrat who has waged an often lonely campaign against NSA surveillance, said he opposed the House bill in the form that passed on Thursday. "I am gravely concerned that the changes that have been made to the House version of this bill have watered it down so far that it fails to protect Americans from suspicionless mass surveillance," he said.He said the Senate version of the bill remained strong, and that he hoped that its provisions could be preserved.
  • The bill was the first vote on a NSA related matter in either the House or Senate since last July, when Republican congressman Justin Amash failed by 205-217 votes to pass an amendment to an appropriations bill that would have stripped funding for bulk surveillance.The revised USA Freedom Act was supported by the White House. Obama had urged for a solution to ending bulk collection of telephone metadata in ways that would not unduly constrain the NSA.
  • Paul Merrell on 23 May 14
     
    On to the Senate. No meaningful reform from the House. That the measure passed was supported by Obama tells the story of its effectiveness. It will "constrain the NSA."
Paul Merrell

Anonymous Fearmongering About the Patriot Act from the White House and NYT - The Intercept - 0 views

firstlook.org/...r-mongering-patriot-act-nyt-wh

surveillance state politics-of-fear Patriot-Act white-house

shared by Paul Merrell on 31 May 15 - No Cached
  • Several of the most extremist provisions of the 2001 Patriot Act are going to expire on June 1 unless Congress reauthorizes them in some form. Obama officials such as Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and new Attorney General Loretta Lynch have been engaged in rank fear-mongering to coerce renewal, warning that we’ll all be “less safe” if these provisions are allowed to “sunset” as originally intended, while invoking classic Cheneyite rhetoric by saying Patriot Act opponents will bear the blame for the next attack. In an interview yesterday with the Intercept, ACLU Deputy Legal Director Jameel Jaffer explained why those scare tactics are outright frivolous. Enter the New York Times. An article this morning by Julie Hirschfeld Davis, in the first paragraph, cites anonymous Obama officials warning that “failing to [strike a deal by the deadline] would suspend crucial domestic surveillance authority at a time of mounting terrorism threats.” Behold the next two paragraphs:
  • “What you’re doing, essentially, is you’re playing national security Russian roulette,” one senior administration official said of allowing the powers to lapse. That prospect appears increasingly likely with the measure, the USA Freedom Act, stalled and lawmakers in their home states and districts during a congressional recess. “We’re in uncharted waters,” another senior member of the administration said at a briefing organized by the White House, where three officials spoke with reporters about the consequences of inaction by Congress. “We have not had to confront addressing the terrorist threat without these authorities, and it’s going to be fraught with unnecessary risk.”
  • Those two paragraphs, courtesy of the Obama White House and the Paper of Record, have it all: the principal weapons that have poisoned post-9/11 political discourse in the U.S.
  • Paul Merrell on 31 May 15
     
    Greenwald takes on the politics of fear.
Paul Merrell

Did Congress's Best Plan for NSA Reform Just Lose Its Teeth? | The Nation - 0 views

www.thenation.com/...nsa-reform-just-lose-its-teeth

surveillance state NSA-reform legislation

shared by Paul Merrell on 09 May 14 - No Cached
  • For the first time since Edward Snowden revealed some of the National Security Agency’s (NSA’s) surveillance programs last June, a congressional committee has voted to send legislation intended to curb the government’s spying power on for a full vote. On Wednesday, the House Judiciary Committee passed a version of the USA Freedom Act, considered by civil liberties advocates to be among the strongest of several competing reform bills. But what lawmakers voted unanimously to approve is a trimmed down version that is narrower in significant ways. The revision is the result of an agreement crafted by members of the Judiciary Committee— including Republican chairman Bob Goodlatte, who voted previously against an attempt to limit the NSA’s reach—in a bid to win wider support. In its compromised form the bill is more specifically focused on the phone records program and the statute that authorizes it, Section 215 of the Patriot Act. Under the amended version of the bill, the government itself would no longer be allowed to hold a database of people’s calling records, and would have to seek a judge’s order before collecting data held by the telecom companies—a change that President Obama has said he would support. The bill would also increase transparency by allowing phone companies to inform the public about the requests for data they receive.
  • Cut out of the amended version is a ban on unauthorized “back door” searches, the practice of mining a database of foreigners’ communications for the emails and phone calls of American citizens. Such searches are made under a different authority, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which lawmakers left untouched during Wednesday’s markup. The amendment also softened reforms to the secret court that authorizes the NSA’s surveillance activities, and preserved the requirement that the government need only prove “reasonable articulable suspicion” that records sought are relevant to an open investigation—the NSA’s preferred relevancy standard.
  • there’s valid concern that the phone records program will turn out to be a sacrificial lamb for the administration, something given up in the hopes that Congress will wash its hands of the rest. The dragnet is not disappearing under the USA Freedom Act; metadata will still be available to the government, if not quite so freely; and a single court order will allow officials to explore phone records two “hops” away from the initial target—potentially millions of records. It’s unclear whether the bill explicitly bars intelligence agencies from collecting the contents of communications under Section 215, a provision that originally distinguished the USA Freedom Act from Rogers’s bill. Though the ban was absent in the version that passed the committee, Lofgren speculated that the omission was due to a clerical error. What’s for sure is that Congress’s ability to truly reform—and oversee— the intelligence community remains unclear.
Gary Edwards

Peter Beinart: How Ron Paul Will Change the GOP in 2012 - The Daily Beast - 2 views

www.thedailybeast.com/...ll-change-the-gop-in-2012.html

Banksters Ron-Paul Libertarians Peter-Beinart

shared by Gary Edwards on 30 Dec 11 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 30 Dec 11
     
    Not a big Peter Beinhart fan, but this article explains a large part of the Ron Paul phenom. After a life time as a big C Goldwater-Reagan Constitutional Conservative, this summer i made a full transition to big C Constitutional Libertarian. The tipping point for me was the GAO audit of the Federal Reserve, where they discovered $16.1 Trillion of taxpayer dollars missing from the Federal Reserve Bankster Cartel management books. It went to a who's who of international Bankster Cartel members. None of the taxpayer funded "financial collapse of 2008" bailout dollars went to the purposes chartered by their legislation. That includees the TARP $850 Billion, the Obama Stimulous $1 Trillion, and the mega FRBC $16.1 Trillion. No bad debts were purchased and retired. No rotting mortgage securities were swept up and restructured. No shovel ready jobs either. And no one in government or banksterism having caused the financial collapse went to jail. Instead, the perps feasted on the bailout dollars. The debt remains on the books of international Banksters, collecting interest, thirsting for foreclosure. The Bankster Cartel members are flush with cash, but not lending. By law (The Federal Reserve Act of December 23rd, 1913), FRBC members must keep a significant amount of their assets on "reserve" at the Federal Reserve, at 6% interest. In exchange for managing this process and the exploding money supply, the taxpayers of the USA are obligated by law to pay the FRBC 1% per year of (assets under management" (the money supply). Take note: the FRBC takes the 1% per year payment for their services in the form of GOLD!! They will not take payment in the form of paper notes labeled legal tender "Federal Reserve Notes". They only take GOLD. My transition to Constitutional Libertarian begins with a strct reading of the Constitution (the How), the Declaration of Independence, (the Why), and belief in the Rule of Law, not man. The concept of achievi
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