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LISBON: A former CIA operative convicted of kidnapping an Egyptian cleric in Milan as part of the U.S. extraordinary renditions program is fighting against being sent to Italy to serve the six-year sentence she received in absentia there, a Portuguese court official said Friday.Sabrina De Sousa, who has both U.S. and Portuguese citizenship, was arrested at Lisbon's international airport Monday on a European arrest warrant issued by Italy.She told a judge on Tuesday she wants to stay in Portugal, where she has been living recently, Luis Vaz das Neves, president of the Lisbon court handling her case, told The Associated Press on Friday.De Sousa also "expressed a wish to serve her sentence, if she has to serve it, here in Portugal," he said.De Sousa was among 26 Americans, mostly CIA agents, convicted in absentia in the kidnapping of Milan cleric Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, known as Abu Omar, from a Milan street on Feb. 17, 2003.De Sousa claims she was never notified of the Italian court decision, according to Vaz das Neves.

De Sousa handed both her passports over to the Lisbon court, which gave her 10 days to provide written arguments against her extradition. In the meantime, she must report weekly to a police station.The court believed she was not a flight risk, Vaz das Neves said, since she had a return plane ticket to Lisbon, is a Portuguese citizen and says she wants to settle here.De Sousa, who operated for the CIA under diplomatic cover, was initially acquitted due to diplomatic immunity but was found guilty by Italy's highest court in 2014.The Indian-born De Sousa came out against the U.S. decision not to allow the American defendants to get their own lawyers near the end of the first trial, eventually winning permission to have her own counsel. De Sousa said she was concerned about losing her freedom to visit family in India.

Vaz das Neves said De Sousa was trying to fly to Goa, a one-time Portuguese territory in India, to see her 89-year-old mother when she was arrested. She was due back in Portugal on Oct. 27.Asked why De Sousa was not caught earlier, Vaz das Neves said Portuguese authorities were aware of the warrant but police had no record of her residing here.De Sousa's lawyer in Lisbon said neither he nor his client would give interviews until the extradition case was resolved.But De Sousa acknowledged in published comments that she had endangered her freedom by trying to travel across a border."I knew I was taking a risk, but at some point I want to live (in Portugal) as a free citizen, and this needs to be resolved," De Sousa told Vice News in an article Thursday.After De Sousa presents her arguments, the court has 10 days to respond. The Portuguese Constitution prohibits the extradition of nationals, but Vaz das Neves said the court will also have to take European Union laws into account.

Judges of the International Criminal Court presented a new challenge to Israel on Thursday, asking the court’s chief prosecutor to review her decision not to investigate a deadly Israeli commando raid on a Gaza-bound flotilla of aid ships in 2010. Israel denounced the move.In their request, posted on the court’s website, the judges of a pretrial chamber said the prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, had committed “errors of fact” and reached “simplistic conclusions” in her assessment of whether a criminal inquiry was warranted into the raid on the flotilla, which left eight Turks and an American of Turkish descent dead on the lead vessel, the Mavi Marmara.The judges asked that Ms. Bensouda “reconsider her decision not to initiate an investigation,” and do so “as soon as possible.”

Former attorney general Eric Holder was the honored guest at a Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press reception on Wednesday (leading investigative reporter Murray Waas to reasonably wonder: How’s that again?). And while I was primarily interested in hearing whether Holder regretted whiffing on torture prosecutions during his tenure (see story: “Holder, Too Late, Calls for Transparency on DOJ Torture Investigation”), I also asked him about whiffing on financial fraud prosecutions. Specifically, I noted his failure to hold accountable the people responsible for the wide-scale financial fraud that led to the massive economic recession of 2007-2009. And I noted that after he stepped down from his post in April, he went back to his job at Covington & Burling, the gigantic D.C. law firm whose clients have included many of the big banks that Holder chose not to prosecute. (The reception was actually held at Covington & Burling’s swanky new building downtown. While it was being built — while Holder was still attorney general! — the firm actually kept an 11th-story corner office reserved for his return. He was making over $3 million a year from the firm before his sojourn at the Justice Department; his current salary has not been disclosed.)

Holder bristled at my suggestion that there might be a connection between his current employer and his conduct at Justice, saying that many top prosecutors at Justice had pursued cases as best they could. “We were simply unable to do it under the existing statutes that we had, and given the ways the decision-making worked at those institutions,” he said. However, Holder had all the statutory authority he needed to prosecute straightforward crimes such as robosigning fraud, perjury in front of Congress by Goldman Sachs executives, or for that matter, HSBC’s money laundering for Mexican drug cartels. He simply chose not to. (In response to another questioner, he denied that any of his decisions not to prosecute were based on the massive legal teams that were fielded against the government.) Moreover, he actively waved off offers of additional help such as the suggestion from Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, that Congress give him more staff for his Residential Mortgage-Backed Securities Working Group, or extend the statute of limitations on some crimes. At Wednesday’s event, Holder continued: “It’s an easy thing for people who are not a part of the process” to “ask questions,” he said. “It pisses me off, on the other hand,” for people “not conversant” in the process to “somehow say that I did something that was inconsistent with my oath or that I’m not a person of integrity.” “I’m proud to be back at the firm,” he said. “It’s a great firm. And I’m proud of the work I did at the Justice Department.”

Holder’s comment was only the most recent in a series of pronouncements from formerly powerful government officials that they were in fact powerless — while talking tough once they no longer have the ability to do anything about it. See, for instance, my colleague David Dayen’s recent article, “Bernanke Talks Tough But Was Weak When It Mattered,” about former Federal Reserve chair Ben Bernanke saying that more Wall Street executives should have gone to jail for criminal misconduct that led to the financial crisis. As Fed chair, Beranke could have initiated criminal referrals to the Justice Department, but chose not to. As attorney general, Holder could have made pursuing financial fraud a top priority. And he did not.

The cash assistance program in Gaza has been suspended due to lack of fund, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) announced Tuesday. The program urgently called for raising U.S. $100 million in aid in the first three months of 2015 to 12,000 displaced Palestinians in Gaza, mostly to repair their homes damaged during the latest 51-day war between Palestine and Israel in July and August 2014. “US$ 720 million is required to address this need. To date, UNRWA has received only US$ 135 million in pledges, leaving a shortfall of US$ 585 million,” the UNRWA said in a statement Tuesday. “We are talking about thousands of families who continue to suffer through this cold winter with inadequate shelter. People are literally sleeping amongst the rubble; children have died of hypothermia,” UNRWA Director in Gaza Robert Turner was quoted as saying in the statement.

U.S. $ 5.4 billion were pledged at a Cairo-based donor conference on Gaza reconstruction Oct. 12, 2014; however, the program statement noted that none of the announced aid has reached Gaza strip, saying “this is distressing and unacceptable.” “People are desperate and the international community cannot even provide the bare minimum – for example a repaired home in winter – let alone a lifting of the blockade, access to markets or freedom of movement,” Turner continued. UNRWA was established in 1949 to provide more than 5 million registered Palestinian refugees in neighboring countries with aid. In a previous statement, the UNRWA announced that it had spent the “last available dollar on repairs and temporary shelter cash assistance.”

Freelance video journalist Jason Parkinson returned home from vacation this year to find a brown paper envelope in his mailbox. He opened it to find nine years of his life laid out in shocking detail.Twelve pages of police intelligence logs noted which protests he covered, who he spoke to and what he wore - all the way down to the color of his boots. It was, he said, proof of something he'd long suspected: The police were watching him."Finally," he thought as he leafed through documents over a strong black coffee, "we've got them."Parkinson's documents, obtained through a public records request, are the basis of a lawsuit being filed by the National Union of Journalists against London's Metropolitan Police and Britain's Home Office. The lawsuit, announced late Thursday, along with recent revelations about the seizure of reporters' phone records, is pulling back the curtain on how British police have spent years tracking the movements of the country's news media.

Parkinson, three photographers, an investigative journalist and a newspaper reporter are filing the lawsuit after obtaining their surveillance records. Parkinson, a 44-year-old freelancer who has covered hundreds of protests - some of them for The Associated Press - said he and his colleagues had long suspected that the police were monitoring them."Police officers we'd never even met before knew our names and seemed to know a hell of a lot about us," he said.Several journalists told AP the records police kept on them were sometimes startling, sometimes funny and occasionally wrong.

Jess Hurd, a 41-year-old freelance photographer and Parkinson's partner, said she was worried the intelligence logs were being shared internationally."I go to a lot of countries on assignment," she said. "Where are these database logs being shared? Who with, for what purpose?"The revelations add to public disclosures about British police secretly seizing journalists' telephone records in leak investigations. Several senior officers have recently acknowledged using anti-terrorism powers to uncover journalists' sources by combing through the records.

The latest issue of Time magazine, one of the very models of the mainstream press, says it all: “NATO’s Back in Business, Thanks to Russia’s Threat to Ukraine.” The basic theme of the article is that we should be thankful that NATO didn’t go out of business when the Cold War ended. Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, the article suggests, proves that keeping NATO in existence was a wise decision. What a crock.

The best thing the American people could have ever done is not having embraced the totalitarian-type apparatus known as the national-security state. In the name of fighting communism, it caused America to abandon its founding principles and ideals of liberty and limited government and turned America toward dark side practices that characterize communist and other totalitarian regimes. The next-best thing the American people could have done is having dismantled the national-security state apparatus at the end of the Cold War. The best thing the American people could do today is dismantle, not reform, the national-security state apparatus. That’s a key to restoring a balanced, harmonious, peaceful, moral, free, and prosperous society to our land.

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.

The U.S. State Department says it is “troubled” by Russia’s decision to ban two of liberal billionaire George Soros' pro-democracy charities and label the organizations a threat to national security. “Today’s designation of the Open Society Foundations and the Open Society Institute Assistance Foundation as so-called ‘undesirable’ organizations will only further restrict the work of civil society in Russia for the benefit of the Russian people,” State Department spokesman Mark Toner said Monday. “This action is yet another example of the Russian Government’s growing crackdown on independent voices and a deliberate step to further isolate the Russian people from the world.” A spokesperson from Russia’s Prosecutor General’s Office said the activities of the fund are threats to state security and the Russian constitution, Radio Free Europe reports. The Open Society Foundations said in a statement on its website that it was “dismayed” by the decision.

Prosecutors started investigating the charity fund in July after Russian senators flagged a list of 12 groups that required a closer look over their supposed anti-Russian activities, RT reports. Other groups on the list include the National Endowment for Democracy, the International Republican Institute, the MacArthur Foundation and Freedom House. Once a group in Russia is recognized as “undesirable,” its assets in the country must be frozen, its offices closed and the distribution of any of its materials is outlawed, RT reports. Violators of the ban could face heavy fines and jail time.

For the first time, a majority of Americans believe the federal government threatens their rights and freedoms, according to a poll released Thursday.Fifty-three percent of Americans believe the government is a threat, and 43 percent do not, according to a Pew Research Center poll. Three-in-ten Americans believe government constitutes a major threat. In a poll conducted October 2003, only 45 percent saw government as a threat to their freedoms. Fifty-four percent do not.

State Department officials have uncovered thousands of emails between Philippe Reines, a top Hillary Clinton aide, and members of the media, they previously said did not exist.In a court filing last Thursday, the State Department estimated that a recent search turned up more than 81,000 emails from Reines’s official account while at the State Department. And 17,855 potentially fall within a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed by Gawker earlier this year.ADVERTISEMENTThat is a reversal from 2013, when the State Department said a thorough search turned up no responsive records for Gawker’s request. In 2012, Gawker requested all emails between Reines and reporters from 34 media outlets.The State Department did not explain the reversal in the court document, nor did it return a request for comment.It will begin releasing a tranche of Reines's emails by the end of September.

fter it was revealed earlier this year that Clinton, and potentially some of her aides, used personal email accounts for official business, Gawker sued the State Department over its initial request for communications between Reines and reporters.Gawker asserted the search must not have been exhaustive if it turned up no emails between the press and a State Department spokesman, who regularly communicated with the media.In March, Reines said reporters would have to ask the State Department about the apparent discrepancy.In last week’s court filing, the State Department estimated it would begin releasing some of those emails that do not fall within an exemption on Sept. 30. It will release more every 30 days as they are reviewed.The agency said it does not know how many of the 17,855 are exempt from disclosure and will have to be redacted or handed over to other agencies for redaction

This morning, the US Senate defeated the Cybersecurity Act of 2012, a bill that would have given companies new rights to monitor our private communications and pass that data to the government. The bill sponsors were 8 votes short of the 60 votes necessary to end debate on the bill (vote breakdown here). This is a victory for Internet freedom advocates everywhere. Hundreds of thousands of individuals emailed, tweeted, called, and sent Facebook messages to Senators asking them to defend privacy in the cybersecurity debate. Those voices were heard loud and clear in the halls of Congress today. EFF extends our heartfelt thanks to everyone who fought with us on this issue. We can all be proud today that there was no law enacted on our watch that would have compromised the online privacy rights of Internet users in the name of cybersecurity.  

Internet users also found they had powerful friends in the Senate. Senators Al Franken, Richard Durbin, Chris Coons, Bernie Sanders, Daniel Akaka, Ron Wyden and Richard Blumenthal championed civil liberties fixes to the bill. Senator Wyden, in particular, opposed the bill on privacy grounds, stating:  Today’s vote was one in which Senators were asked to sacrifice Internet users’ privacy and civil liberties for weak proposals to improve cyber security; I voted no. And Senators Al Franken and Rand Paul sponsored an amendment that would have removed the most privacy-invasive provisions of the bill. These champions of online rights helped us in the cybersecurity fight – and will hopefully stand with us again in defending civil liberties the next time this issue arises.

As noted by the Brookings Institution, “For the first time ever, it will become technologically and financially feasible for authoritarian governments to record nearly everything that is said or done within their borders — every phone conversation, electronic message, social media interaction, the movements of nearly every person and vehicle, and video from every street corner.” As the following will show, the electronic concentration camp, as I have dubbed the surveillance state, is perhaps the most insidious of the police state’s many tentacles, impacting almost every aspect of our lives and making it that much easier for the government to encroach on our most vital freedoms, ranging from free speech, assembly and the press to due process, privacy, and property, by eavesdropping on our communications, tracking our movements and spying on our activities.

To put it bluntly, we are living in an electronic concentration camp. Through a series of imperceptible steps, we have willingly allowed ourselves to become enmeshed in a system that knows the most intimate details of our lives, analyzes them, and treats us accordingly. Whether via fear of terrorism, narcissistic pleasure, or lazy materialism, we have slowly handed over our information to all sorts of entities, corporate and governmental, public and private, who are now using that information to cow and control us for their profit. As George Orwell warned, “You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.” Thus, we have arrived in Orwell’s world. The question now is: will we take a stand and fight to remain free or will we go gently into the concentration camp?

Russia’s Ministry of Justice, on Tuesday, designated nine U.S. media outlets as foreign agents. The measure came in “retaliation” after the U.S. designated the Russian State funded Russia Today (RT) USA as a foreign agent. Independent journalists and media fear the battle of the giants will make it more difficult for independent and “unorthodox” journalists and media while major State and corporate-funded giants are likely to continue unabated.

Russia listed Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), the Voice of America (VOA), and several other affiliates as “foreign agents. RFE/RL president Tom Kent said in a statement that the Russian Ministry of Justice indicated the new designation will involve more “limitations” on the work of its company in Russia. He added that “the full nature of these limitations is unknown,” but vowed that the network remains “committed to continuing our journalistic work, in the interests of providing accurate and objective news to our Russian-speaking audiences.” Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a law in November empowering the government to designate media outlets receiving funding from abroad as “foreign agents” and impose sanctions against them. Russian officials have called the new legislation a “symmetrical response” to what they describe as U.S. pressure on Russian media. On November 13, Russian state-funded television channel RT registered as a foreign agent in the United States under a decades-old law called the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). U.S. Ambassador to Russia Jon Huntsman said FARA is aimed at promoting transparency but does not restrict the television network’s operation in the United States. The U.S. State Department has condemned Russia’s law, saying it obstructs press freedom. “New Russian legislation that allows the Ministry of Justice to label media outlets as ‘foreign agents’ and to monitor or block certain internet activity presents yet another threat to free media in Russia,” State Department spokesperson Heather Nauert said in a statement last month.

n the wake of the Boston Marathon bombings, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Monday the country’s interpretation of the Constitution will “have to change” to allow for greater security to stave off future attacks. “The people who are worried about privacy have a legitimate worry,” Mr. Bloomberg said during a press conference in Midtown. “But we live in a complex world where you’re going to have to have a level of security greater than you did back in the olden days, if you will. And our laws and our interpretation of the Constitution, I think, have to change.”

Former Bush-era CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden appeared on CNN this week and confirmed that our reporting on the NSA's X-Keyscore program was accurate, telling the nation that we should all be grateful for those capabilities.NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen has a superb essay on the behavior of the US media in NSA stories.Foreign Policy CEO and Editor David Rothkopf becomes the latest establishment figure to recognize, as he puts it in a quite good column: "I have myself been too slow to recognize that the benefits we have derived from Snowden's revelations substantially outweigh the costs associated with the breach."

Meanwhile, 150 press freedom and human rights groups from around the world issued a letter demanding that the US cease prosecuting Snowden on the ground that "Snowden's disclosures have triggered a much-needed public debate about mass surveillance online everywhere" and "thanks to him, we have learned the extent to which our online lives are systematically monitored by governments, without transparency, accountability or safeguards from abuse."

Finally, Princeton University international law professor Richard Falk has an Op-Ed today explaining that the granting of asylum to Snowden wasn't just within Russia's rights, but was legally compelled.

A treason investigation against two German journalists claimed its first casualty Tuesday — the country's top prosecutor who ordered the probe.

Justice Minister Heiko Maas announced he was seeking the dismissal of Harald Range hours after the chief federal prosecutor accused the government of interfering in his investigation.Maas said he made the decision in consultation with Chancellor Angela Merkel's office, indicating that the sacking was approved at the highest level.The Justice Ministry had questioned Range's decision to open the investigation against two journalists from the website Netzpolitik.org who had reported that Germany's domestic spy agency plans to expand surveillance of online communication.The treason probe was widely criticized and regarded as an embarrassment to the government. Senior officials stressed in recent days that Germany is committed to protecting press freedom.

New documents released by the FBI show that the Bureau is well on its way toward its goal of a fully operational face recognition database by this summer. The EFF received these records in response to our Freedom of Information Act lawsuit for information on Next Generation Identification (NGI)—the FBI’s massive biometric database that may hold records on as much as one-third of the US population. The facial recognition component of this database poses real threats to privacy for all Americans.