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Mark Carney, the head of the Bank of England, and other officials from the BOE were put through a five hour marathon of questioning yesterday by Parliament’s Treasury Select Committee covering everything from how long the BOE plans to continue Quantitative Easing (QE), to the potential for Scotland to vote for its independence, to what it knew and when it knew it about the rigging of the Foreign Exchange market by colluding global banks. The bombshell of the day, however, did not occur during the session on the Foreign Exchange scandal, which is stacking up to be a more serious matter than the rigging of the Libor interest rate benchmark which occurred under the nose of the Bank of England and the British Bankers Association. (London now seems to be in competition with itself for the prize of the century for overseeing the rigging of the greatest number of markets.)

The bombshell came in the following exchange between the Chair of the Treasury Select Committee, Andrew Tyrie, and a very frightened appearing Paul Fisher, the Executive Director of Markets at the BOE, who has served in that position since 2009. Apparently neither Parliament nor the public knew prior to this exchange that the records of the pre-crisis year of 2007, the financial collapse in 2008, and the monetary policy maneuvers in subsequent years to prevent another Great Depression had been destroyed in one of the world’s most important financial centers; not to mention the fact that critical recordings potentially relevant to the Foreign Exchange probe are also gone.

Chairman Tyrie: “The MPC [Monetary Policy Committee] records might be of interest one day to historians about the inception of QE. MPC records used to be recorded and transcribed when the MPC was created. Is that still the case Mr. Fisher?” Paul Fisher: “They are not transcribed. They are still recorded so that the secretariat can go back to check any discrepancies between the minutes and what people may have said. But as far as I know they are not transcribed.” Chairman Tyrie: “And they’re stored?” Paul Fisher: “The recordings are not kept. Once the minutes are published…” Chairman Tyrie: [In a booming, outraged voice] “The recordings are destroyed! Why? Paul Fisher: “Because we have one copy of the minutes; that’s the one that’s published and there are not alternative versions.”

The Obama administration fought a legal battle against Google to secretly obtain the email records of a security researcher and journalist associated with WikiLeaks. Newly unsealed court documents obtained by The Intercept reveal the Justice Department won an order forcing Google to turn over more than one year’s worth of data from the Gmail account of Jacob Appelbaum (pictured above), a developer for the Tor online anonymity project who has worked with WikiLeaks as a volunteer. The order also gagged Google, preventing it from notifying Appelbaum that his records had been provided to the government. The surveillance of Appelbaum’s Gmail account was tied to the Justice Department’s long-running criminal investigation of WikiLeaks, which began in 2010 following the transparency group’s publication of a large cache of U.S. government diplomatic cables. According to the unsealed documents, the Justice Department first sought details from Google about a Gmail account operated by Appelbaum in January 2011, triggering a three-month dispute between the government and the tech giant. Government investigators demanded metadata records from the account showing email addresses of those with whom Appelbaum had corresponded between the period of November 2009 and early 2011; they also wanted to obtain information showing the unique IP addresses of the computers he had used to log in to the account.

The Justice Department argued in the case that Appelbaum had “no reasonable expectation of privacy” over his email records under the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable searches and seizures. Rather than seeking a search warrant that would require it to show probable cause that he had committed a crime, the government instead sought and received an order to obtain the data under a lesser standard, requiring only “reasonable grounds” to believe that the records were “relevant and material” to an ongoing criminal investigation. Google repeatedly attempted to challenge the demand, and wanted to immediately notify Appelbaum that his records were being sought so he could have an opportunity to launch his own legal defense. Attorneys for the tech giant argued in a series of court filings that the government’s case raised “serious First Amendment concerns.” They noted that Appelbaum’s records “may implicate journalistic and academic freedom” because they could “reveal confidential sources or information about WikiLeaks’ purported journalistic or academic activities.” However, the Justice Department asserted that “journalists have no special privilege to resist compelled disclosure of their records, absent evidence that the government is acting in bad faith,” and refused to concede Appelbaum was in fact a journalist. It claimed it had acted in “good faith throughout this criminal investigation, and there is no evidence that either the investigation or the order is intended to harass the … subscriber or anyone else.” Google’s attempts to fight the surveillance gag order angered the government, with the Justice Department stating that the company’s “resistance to providing the records” had “frustrated the government’s ability to efficiently conduct a lawful criminal investigation.”

The Justice Department wanted to keep the surveillance secret largely because of an earlier public backlash over its WikiLeaks investigation. In January 2011, Appelbaum and other WikiLeaks volunteers’ – including Icelandic parlimentarian Birgitta Jonsdottir – were notified by Twitter that the Justice Department had obtained data about their accounts. This disclosure generated widepread news coverage and controversy; the government says in the unsealed court records that it “failed to anticipate the degree of  damage that would be caused” by the Twitter disclosure and did not want to “exacerbate this problem” when it went after Appelbaum’s Gmail data. The court documents show the Justice Department said the disclosure of its Twitter data grab “seriously jeopardized the [WikiLeaks] investigation” because it resulted in efforts to “conceal evidence” and put public pressure on other companies to resist similar surveillance orders. It also claimed that officials named in the subpeona ordering Twitter to turn over information were “harassed” after a copy was published by Intercept co-founder Glenn Greenwald at Salon in 2011. (The only specific evidence of the alleged harassment cited by the government is an email that was sent to an employee of the U.S. Attorney’s office that purportedly said: “You guys are fucking nazis trying to controll [sic] the whole fucking world. Well guess what. WE DO NOT FORGIVE. WE DO NOT FORGET. EXPECT US.”)

(AP) — The U.S. government is looking at ways to prevent anyone from spying on its own surveillance of Americans' phone records. As the Obama administration considers shifting the collection of those records from the National Security Agency to requiring that they be stored at phone companies or elsewhere, it's quietly funding research to prevent phone company employees or eavesdroppers from seeing whom the U.S. is spying on, The Associated Press has learned. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has paid at least five research teams across the country to develop a system for high-volume, encrypted searches of electronic records kept outside the government's possession. The project is among several ideas that would allow the government to discontinue storing Americans' phone records, but still search them as needed.

Under the research, U.S. data mining would be shielded by secret coding that could conceal identifying details from outsiders and even the owners of the targeted databases, according to public documents obtained by The Associated Press and AP interviews with researchers, corporate executives and government officials.

Internal documents describing the Security and Privacy Assurance Research project do not cite the NSA or its phone surveillance program. But if the project were to prove successful, its encrypted search technology could pave the way for the government to shift storage of the records from NSA computers to either phone companies or a third-party organization. A DNI spokesman, Michael Birmingham, confirmed that the research was relevant to the NSA's phone records program. He cited "interest throughout the intelligence community" but cautioned that it may be some time before the technology is used. The intelligence director's office is by law exempt from disclosing detailed budget figures, so it's unclear how much money the government has spent on the SPAR project, which is overseen by the DNI's Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity office. Birmingham said the research is aimed for use in a "situation where a large sensitive data set is held by one party which another seeks to query, preserving privacy and enforcing access policies."

On March 12, 2004, acting attorney general James B. Comey and the Justice Department’s top leadership reached the brink of resignation over electronic surveillance orders that they believed to be illegal. President George W. Bush backed down, halting secret foreign-intelligence-gathering operations that had crossed into domestic terrain. That morning marked the beginning of the end of STELLARWIND, the cover name for a set of four surveillance programs that brought Americans and American territory within the domain of the National Security Agency for the first time in decades. It was also a prelude to new legal structures that allowed Bush and then President Obama to reproduce each of those programs and expand their reach.What exactly STELLARWIND did has never been disclosed in an unclassified form. Which parts of it did Comey approve? Which did he shut down? What became of the programs when the crisis passed and Comey, now Obama’s expected nominee for FBI director, returned to private life?Authoritative new answers to those questions, drawing upon a classified NSA history of STELLARWIND and interviews with high-ranking intelligence officials, offer the clearest map yet of the Bush-era programs and the NSA’s contemporary U.S. operations.STELLARWIND was succeeded by four major lines of intelligence collection in the territorial United States, together capable of spanning the full range of modern telecommunications, according to the interviews and documents.

Two of the four collection programs, one each for telephony and the Internet, process trillions of “metadata” records for storage and analysis in systems called MAINWAY and MARINA, respectively. Metadata includes highly revealing information about the times, places, devices and participants in electronic communication, but not its contents. The bulk collection of telephone call records from Verizon Business Services, disclosed this month by the British newspaper the Guardian, is one source of raw intelligence for MAINWAY.The other two types of collection, which operate on a much smaller scale, are aimed at content. One of them intercepts telephone calls and routes the spoken words to a system called ­NUCLEON.For Internet content, the most important source collection is the PRISM project reported on June 6 by The Washington Post and the Guardian. It draws from data held by Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and other Silicon Valley giants, collectively the richest depositories of personal information in history.

The debate has focused on two of the four U.S.-based collection programs: PRISM, for Internet content, and the comprehensive collection of telephone call records, foreign and domestic, that the Guardian revealed by posting a classified order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to Verizon Business Services.The Post has learned that similar orders have been renewed every three months for other large U.S. phone companies, including Bell South and AT&T, since May 24, 2006. On that day, the surveillance court made a fundamental shift in its approach to Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which permits the FBI to compel production of “business records” that are relevant to a particular terrorism investigation and to share those in some circumstances with the NSA. Henceforth, the court ruled, it would define the relevant business records as the entirety of a telephone company’s call database.The Bush administration, by then, had been taking “bulk metadata” from the phone companies under voluntary agreements for more than four years. The volume of information overwhelmed the MAINWAY database, according to a classified report from the NSA inspector general in 2009. The agency spent $146 million in supplemental counterterrorism funds to buy new hardware and contract support — and to make unspecified payments to the phone companies for “collaborative partnerships.”When the New York Times revealed the warrantless surveillance of voice calls, in December 2005, the telephone companies got nervous. One of them, unnamed in the report, approached the NSA with a request. Rather than volunteer the data, at a price, the “provider preferred to be compelled to do so by a court order,” the report said. Other companies followed suit. The surveillance court order that recast the meaning of business records “essentially gave NSA the same authority to collect bulk telephony metadata from business records that it had” under Bush’s asserted authority alone.

The U.S. government started keeping secret records of Americans' international telephone calls nearly a decade before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, harvesting billions of calls in a program that provided a blueprint for the far broader National Security Agency surveillance that followed.For more than two decades, the Justice Department and the Drug Enforcement Administration amassed logs of virtually all telephone calls from the USA to as many as 116 countries linked to drug trafficking, current and former officials involved with the operation said. The targeted countries changed over time but included Canada, Mexico and most of Central and South America.Federal investigators used the call records to track drug cartels' distribution networks in the USA, allowing agents to detect previously unknown trafficking rings and money handlers. They also used the records to help rule out foreign ties to the bombing in 1995 of a federal building in Oklahoma City and to identify U.S. suspects in a wide range of other investigations.The Justice Department revealed in January that the DEA had collected data about calls to "designated foreign countries." But the history and vast scale of that operation have not been disclosed until now.

The now-discontinued operation, carried out by the DEA's intelligence arm, was the government's first known effort to gather data on Americans in bulk, sweeping up records of telephone calls made by millions of U.S. citizens regardless of whether they were suspected of a crime. It was a model for the massive phone surveillance system the NSA launched to identify terrorists after the Sept. 11 attacks. That dragnet drew sharp criticism that the government had intruded too deeply into Americans' privacy after former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked it to the news media two years ago.More than a dozen current and former law enforcement and intelligence officials described the details of the Justice Department operation to USA TODAY. Most did so on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the intelligence program, part of which remains classified.The DEA program did not intercept the content of Americans' calls, but the records — which numbers were dialed and when — allowed agents to map suspects' communications and link them to troves of other police and intelligence data. At first, the drug agency did so with help from military computers and intelligence analysts

The extent of that surveillance alarmed privacy advocates, who questioned its legality. "This was aimed squarely at Americans," said Mark Rumold, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "That's very significant from a constitutional perspective."Holder halted the data collection in September 2013 amid the fallout from Snowden's revelations about other surveillance programs. In its place, current and former officials said the drug agency sends telecom companies daily subpoenas for international calling records involving only phone numbers that agents suspect are linked to the drug trade or other crimes — sometimes a thousand or more numbers a day.Tuesday, Justice Department spokesman Patrick Rodenbush said the DEA "is no longer collecting bulk telephony metadata from U.S. service providers." A DEA spokesman declined to comment.

Here are the emails. An article written by Umar Cheema is also on the Web, will post link once I am on my laptop. http://cirp.pk/e-mail.htm (edit: although some names have been blacked out, you can still view them by taking mouse over the links! e.g. First email is by Hassan Noor.. to Mike Novell, tkrift (??), Amanullah Khan.. CC is Afnan Aleem) These basically proves that everyone in the Abbotabad commission (except Mr Ashraf Qazi), including a very senior judge and general, were working under the influence of Save The Children NGO Retired General Nadeem was directly working under them! Afridi was NOT tortured by ISI. He did give ISI some false statements which the ISI didn't dig deeper because it suited them! (Example he was working for CIA since 2008, not 2009 as ISI was led to believe) Edit: Here is the article: http://www.thenews.com.pk/Todays-Ne...s-Abbottabad-Commission-was-penetrated-by-CIA -- All these NGOs should be banned and thrashed! ISI should publically hang foreign agents! (Even if they are Generals)

The NGO has neither denied the email record and the contents it carried (when shown by The News for seeking version) nor offered specific comments but that: “Our assistance to the Abbottabad Commission and its members including Gen Nadeem was within the legal parameters and Abbottabad Commission mandate to find facts.” Nadeem was not available for comments, however, his close aide termed the allegations as utterly “rubbish and non-sense” when comments were sought after showing the email record A transcript of internal wrangling: Muhammad Hassan Noor Saadi, deputy country director of Save the Children, met Gen (R) Nadeem on November 20, 2012 that followed his email to four senior colleagues. The report was primarily compiled by ‘our friend’, his email reads, and was endorsed by the Chairman but one of the members, Ashraf Qazi, was not in agreement with them. He wrote a dissenting note criticising Chairman Justice (R) Javed Iqbal and Gen (R) Nadeem ‘for being soft on certain institutions (including Save the Children).’

Another member, Abbas Khan, was neither willing to sign the report in its current shape, discloses email record, nor wanted to put a dissenting note hence decided to prolong his stay in the US where he went on the ‘pretext of medical ground’. More alarmingly, the NGO was granted access to the Commission’s report well before it was sent to the prime minister. Save the Children had uninterrupted access to the four drafts prepared in June 2012 by the members including the chairman, email record available with The News indicates. All favours granted to Save the Children on behalf of the Commission were in clear breach of public trust raising question marks about the integrity of the members. The chairman of the NGO, Save the Children, was contacted by The News. He initially agreed to meet but later stopped taking calls and did not respond to messages sent to him.Nadeem also felt confident, the email record shows, that he would be able to convince the panel with the answers given by the NGO and urge his colleagues to go by the facts presented by Save the Children instead of believing on the contents of Afridi’s statement. Gen (R) Nadeem also advised the NGO, an email of the country director reads, to fight the expulsion of our expatriate as otherwise the ISI would move quickly to close down the country programme before the Commission report comes out.

Fueled by the Edward Snowden scandal, more Americans than ever are asking the National Security Agency if their personal life is being spied on.And the NSA has a very direct answer for them: Tough luck, we're not telling you.Americans are inundating the NSA with open-records requests, leading to an 888% increase in such inquiries in the past fiscal year. Anyone asking is getting a standard pre-written letter saying the NSA can neither confirm nor deny that any information has been gathered."This was the largest spike we've ever had," said Pamela Phillips, the chief of the NSA Freedom of Information Act and Privacy Act Office, which handles all records requests to the agency. "We've had requests from individuals who want any records we have on their phone calls, their phone numbers, their e-mail addresses, their IP addresses, anything like that."

News reports of the NSA's surveillance program motivates most inquirers, she said.During the first quarter of the NSA's last fiscal year, which went from October to December 2012, it received 257 open-records requests. The next quarter, it received 241. However, on June 6, at the end of NSA's third fiscal quarter, news of Snowden's leaks hit the press, and the agency got 1,302 requests.In the next three months, the NSA received 2,538 requests. The spike has continued into the fall months and has overwhelmed her staff, Phillips said

The first court challenge to the federal government's mass surveillance of Americans' phone and Internet records opened Monday with two potential strikes against it, but the judge predicted it could go all the way to the Supreme Court.Federal District Court Judge Richard Leon expressed concern that conservative activist Larry Klayman and others lacked standing to bring the case and that his court lacked jurisdiction -- factors that could further insulate the spy programs from public oversight."To me, this is the overarching question," Leon said, referring to "this court's authority or lack thereof to inject itself into this situation."

A member of the White House review panel on NSA surveillance said he was “absolutely” surprised when he discovered the agency’s lack of evidence that the bulk collection of telephone call records had thwarted any terrorist attacks.

“It was, ‘Huh, hello? What are we doing here?’” said Geoffrey Stone, a University of Chicago law professor, in an interview with NBC News. “The results were very thin.”While Stone said the mass collection of telephone call records was a “logical program” from the NSA’s perspective, one question the White House panel was seeking to answer was whether it had actually stopped “any [terror attacks] that might have been really big.” Advertise | AdChoices “We found none,” said Stone. Under the NSA program, first revealed by ex-contractor Edward Snowden, the agency collects in bulk the records of the time and duration of phone calls made by persons inside the United States.Stone was one of five members of the White House review panel – and the only one without any intelligence community experience – that this week produced a sweeping report recommending that the NSA’s collection of phone call records be terminated to protect Americans’ privacy rights.The panel made that recommendation after concluding that the program was “not essential in preventing attacks.”“That was stunning. That was the ballgame,” said one congressional intelligence official, who asked not to be publicly identified. “It flies in the face of everything that they have tossed at us.”

The conclusions of the panel’s reports were at direct odds with public statements by President Barack Obama and U.S. intelligence officials. “Lives have been saved,” Obama told reporters last June, referring to the bulk collection program and another program that intercepts communications overseas. “We know of at least 50 threats that have been averted because of this information.”

The National Security Agency is secretly intercepting, recording, and archiving the audio of virtually every cell phone conversation on the island nation of the Bahamas. According to documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the surveillance is part of a top-secret system – code-named SOMALGET – that was implemented without the knowledge or consent of the Bahamian government. Instead, the agency appears to have used access legally obtained in cooperation with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration to open a backdoor to the country’s cellular telephone network, enabling it to covertly record and store the “full-take audio” of every mobile call made to, from and within the Bahamas – and to replay those calls for up to a month. SOMALGET is part of a broader NSA program called MYSTIC, which The Intercept has learned is being used to secretly monitor the telecommunications systems of the Bahamas and several other countries, including Mexico, the Philippines, and Kenya. But while MYSTIC scrapes mobile networks for so-called “metadata” – information that reveals the time, source, and destination of calls – SOMALGET is a cutting-edge tool that enables the NSA to vacuum up and store the actual content of every conversation in an entire country.

All told, the NSA is using MYSTIC to gather personal data on mobile calls placed in countries with a combined population of more than 250 million people. And according to classified documents, the agency is seeking funding to export the sweeping surveillance capability elsewhere. The program raises profound questions about the nature and extent of American surveillance abroad. The U.S. intelligence community routinely justifies its massive spying efforts by citing the threats to national security posed by global terrorism and unpredictable rival nations like Russia and Iran. But the NSA documents indicate that SOMALGET has been deployed in the Bahamas to locate “international narcotics traffickers and special-interest alien smugglers” – traditional law-enforcement concerns, but a far cry from derailing terror plots or intercepting weapons of mass destruction.

By targeting the Bahamas’ entire mobile network, the NSA is intentionally collecting and retaining intelligence on millions of people who have not been accused of any crime or terrorist activity. Nearly five million Americans visit the country each year, and many prominent U.S. citizens keep homes there, including Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), Bill Gates, and Oprah Winfrey.

On January 20, as Houthi fighters battled the guards watching the compound of Yemen's president and further expanded their grip on the capital, a US citizen who has been detained in Sana'a since 2010 and hasn't been seen in almost a year called home to say that the Shia rebels had taken over the prison where he is held and that they planned to "kill everyone," according to his wife who resides in the US."Yemen is in complete turmoil as of yesterday," she wrote on a Facebook page advocating for his release. "He was able to make a call and asked for his country, America, to save his life by rescuing him from a sectarian battle between two groups [with] which he has no involvement."Sharif Mobley, a 31-year-old father of three from New Jersey, was snatched by Yemeni security officers 5 years ago and is suspected by the US of having ties to terrorist groups after he made contract with US-born Islamist cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who was killed in a US drone attack in Yemen in 2011. His wife, who lived with him at the time of his capture, said they had traveled to Yemen to study Arabic and the teachings of Islam.

On January 20, as Houthi fighters battled the guards watching the compound of Yemen's president and further expanded their grip on the capital, a US citizen who has been detained in Sana'a since 2010 and hasn't been seen in almost a year called home to say that the Shia rebels had taken over the prison where he is held and that they planned to "kill everyone," according to his wife who resides in the US.

On January 20, as Houthi fighters battled the guards watching the compound of Yemen's president and further expanded their grip on the capital, a US citizen who has been detained in Sana'a since 2010 and hasn't been seen in almost a year called home to say that the Shia rebels had taken over the prison where he is held and that they planned to "kill everyone," according to his wife who resides in the US."Yemen is in complete turmoil as of yesterday," she wrote on a Facebook page advocating for his release. "He was able to make a call and asked for his country, America, to save his life by rescuing him from a sectarian battle between two groups [with] which he has no involvement."Sharif Mobley, a 31-year-old father of three from New Jersey, was snatched by Yemeni security officers 5 years ago and is suspected by the US of having ties to terrorist groups after he made contract with US-born Islamist cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who was killed in a US drone attack in Yemen in 2011. His wife, who lived with him at the time of his capture, said they had traveled to Yemen to study Arabic and the teachings of Islam.

A Senate security officer stepped out of the December chill last year and delivered envelopes marked “Top Secret” to the Pentagon, the C.I.A., the State Department and the Justice Department. Inside each packet was a disc containing a 6,700-page classified report on the C.I.A.’s secret prison program and a letter from Senator Dianne Feinstein, urging officials to read the report to ensure that the lessons were not lost to time. Today, those discs sit untouched in vaults across Washington, still in their original envelopes. The F.B.I. has not retrieved a copy held for it in the Justice Department’s safe. State Department officials, who locked up their copy and marked it “Congressional Record — Do Not Open, Do Not Access” as soon as it arrived, have not read it either. Continue reading the main story Related Coverage document The Senate Committee’s Report on the C.I.A.’s Use of TortureDEC. 9, 2014 Panel Faults C.I.A. Over Brutality and Deceit in Terrorism InterrogationsDEC. 9, 2014 Senate Votes to Turn Presidential Ban on Torture Into LawJUNE 16, 2015 Outside Psychologists Shielded U.S. Torture Program, Report FindsJULY 10, 2015 Nearly a year after the Senate released a declassified 500-page summary of the report, the fate of the entire document remains in limbo, the subject of battles in the courts and in Congress. Until those disputes are resolved, the Justice Department has prohibited officials from the government agencies that possess it from even opening the report, effectively keeping the people in charge of America’s counterterrorism future from reading about its past. There is also the possibility that the documents could remain locked in a Senate vault for good.

In a letter to Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch last week, Ms. Feinstein, a California Democrat, said the Justice Department was preventing the government from “learning from the mistakes of the past to ensure that they are not repeated.”Although Ms. Feinstein is eager to see the document circulated, the Senate is now under Republican control. Her successor as head of the Intelligence Committee, Senator Richard M. Burr of North Carolina, has demanded that the Obama administration return every copy of the report. Mr. Burr has declared the report to be nothing more than “a footnote in history.”It was always clear that the full report would remain shielded from public view for years, if not decades. But Mr. Burr’s demand, which means that even officials with top security clearances might never read it, has reminded some officials of the final scene of “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” when the Ark of the Covenant is put into a wooden crate alongside thousands of others in a government warehouse of secrets.

The full report is not expected to offer evidence of previously undisclosed interrogation techniques, but the interrogation sessions are said to be described in great detail. The report explains the origins of the program and names the officials involved. The full report also offers details on the role of each agency in the secret prison program.The Justice Department, which played a central role in approving the interrogation methods, has even prohibited its own officials from reading the full report.“The Department of Justice was among those parts of the executive branch that were misled about the program, and D.O.J. officials’ understanding of this history is critical to its institutional role going forward,” Ms. Feinstein wrote to the Justice Department last week in a letter she signed with Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee.In court, Justice Department lawyers have agreed with Mr. Burr’s contention that the document belongs to Congress. As evidence, they point to an agreement between the C.I.A. and the Senate as the Intelligence Committee began its lengthy investigation. The Senate was under Democratic control at the time.

Reporter David Fahrenthold got a phone call around 11 a.m. Friday from a source with a tip about Donald Trump. The source asked: Would Fahrenthold be interested in seeing some previously unaired video of Trump? Fahrenthold didn’t hesitate. Within a few moments of watching an outtake of footage from a 2005 segment on “Access Hollywood,” the Washington Post reporter was on the phone, calling Trump’s campaign, “Access Hollywood” and NBC for reaction. By 4 p.m., his story was causing shock waves.

Fahrenthold’s story about the recording — which some observers said might deal a death blow to Trump’s presidential campaign — was the second major revelation, or “October surprise,” that came courtesy of an anonymous source. The New York Times last week revealed that Trump took a $916 million loss on his 1995 taxes, which could have relieved him from paying federal income taxes for as many as 18 years. The Times’ story was based on tax returns supplied by a source whose identity is unknown even to the Times. Fahrenthold, a 16-year veteran of The Post, said he knows who pointed him to the “Access Hollywood” video, but he will not reveal the identity because he promised anonymity to his tipster. But like many readers, he said he was surprised and shocked by what he saw on the tape.

As it happens, Fahrenthold was racing to produce his story in competition with “Access Hollywood” itself. The syndicated show, owned by NBC Universal, had found the Trump recording in its archives and was preparing its own story. NBC News, tipped by “Access Hollywood,” was also aware of the tape and was preparing a story, which it intended to broadcast after the entertainment show aired the recording. It was not clear, however, when “Access Hollywood” and NBC News were planning to go ahead with their stories.

First Twitter, now YouTube. The Turkish telecoms authority TIB said the move to was an "administrative measure." But only a few hours before the measure came into force, a rather provocative recording was posted on the site. According to the official view, the audio clip is one of the most flagrant among the many that anonymous opponents of the government have been leaking online over the last few months. It exposes the Islamic-conservative government led by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan just before the municipal elections scheduled to take place on March 30. The conversation that was leaked this time is between Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu and several heads of the intelligence service and the military. Participants of the conversation were apparently looking for a reason to go to war with Syria.

According to reports from the Turkish newspaper Hürriyet, the Turkish foreign ministry has confirmed the authenticity of the recording and has explained that the conversation took place in the foreign ministry. The ministry also emphasized, however, that the contents of the recording were distorted. In a statement issued by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs this explanation was given: "Monitoring such a meeting of a highly confidential nature which was held at a location such as the office of the foreign minister, where the most sensitive security issues of the state are discussed; and releasing these conversations to the public are a despicable attack, an act of espionage and a very serious crime against the national security of Turkey. This incident reveals the extent the threats of cyber and electronic attacks that Turkey encounters." The statement called the perpetrators "enemies of our state" and said they would be identified and severely punished as soon as possible.

The Turkish radio and television supervisory board RTÜK banned several Turkish media outlets from spreading the video or communicating its contents. According to the newspaper Hürriyet, the Turkish federal prosecutor's office has already initiated investigations against those responsible for the video. Measures taken too far According to legal expert Bertan Tokuzlu, the recording gives the impression that the government wanted to make trouble internationally, in order to distract the public from internal problems. "If the government wanted to create a reason for war, that is absolutely not in keeping with international legal standards," says Tokuzlu.

SMITH v. MARYLAND, 442 U.S. 735 (1979)

The telephone company, at police request, installed at its central offices a pen register to record the numbers dialed from the telephone at petitioner's home. Prior to his robbery trial, petitioner moved to suppress "all fruits derived from" the pen register. The Maryland trial court denied this motion, holding that the warrantless installation of the pen register did not violate the Fourth Amendment. Petitioner was convicted, and the Maryland Court of Appeals affirmed. Held: The installation and use of the pen register was not a "search" within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment, and hence no warrant was required. Pp. 739-746. (a) Application of the Fourth Amendment depends on whether the person invoking its protection can claim a "legitimate expectation of privacy" that has been invaded by government action. This inquiry normally embraces two questions: first, whether the individual has exhibited an actual (subjective) expectation of privacy; and second, whether his expectation is one that society is prepared to recognize as "reasonable." Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347 . Pp. 739-741.

(b) Petitioner in all probability entertained no actual expectation of privacy in the phone numbers he dialed, and even if he did, his expectation was not "legitimate." First, it is doubtful that telephone users in general have any expectation of privacy regarding the numbers they dial, since they typically know that they must convey phone numbers to the telephone company and that the company has facilities for recording this information and does in fact record it for various legitimate business purposes. And petitioner did not demonstrate an expectation of privacy merely by using his home phone rather than some other phone, since his conduct, although perhaps calculated to keep the contents of his conversation private, was not calculated to preserve the privacy of the number he dialed. Second, even if petitioner did harbor some subjective expectation of privacy, this expectation was not one that society is prepared to recognize as "reasonable." When petitioner voluntarily conveyed numerical information to the phone company and "exposed" that information to its equipment in the normal course of business, he assumed the risk that the company would reveal the information [442 U.S. 735, 736]   to the police, cf. United States v. Miller, 425 U.S. 435 . Pp. 741-746. 283 Md. 156, 389 A. 2d 858, affirmed.

HERE WAS A SIMPLE AIM at the heart of the top-secret program: Record the website browsing habits of “every visible user on the Internet.” Before long, billions of digital records about ordinary people’s online activities were being stored every day. Among them were details cataloging visits to porn, social media and news websites, search engines, chat forums, and blogs. The mass surveillance operation — code-named KARMA POLICE — was launched by British spies about seven years ago without any public debate or scrutiny. It was just one part of a giant global Internet spying apparatus built by the United Kingdom’s electronic eavesdropping agency, Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ. The revelations about the scope of the British agency’s surveillance are contained in documents obtained by The Intercept from National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden. Previous reports based on the leaked files have exposed how GCHQ taps into Internet cables to monitor communications on a vast scale, but many details about what happens to the data after it has been vacuumed up have remained unclear.

Amid a renewed push from the U.K. government for more surveillance powers, more than two dozen documents being disclosed today by The Intercept reveal for the first time several major strands of GCHQ’s existing electronic eavesdropping capabilities.

The surveillance is underpinned by an opaque legal regime that has authorized GCHQ to sift through huge archives of metadata about the private phone calls, emails and Internet browsing logs of Brits, Americans, and any other citizens — all without a court order or judicial warrant

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has won the infamous Rosemary Award for worst open government performance in 2013, according to the citation published today by the National Security Archive at www.nsarchive.org. Despite heavy competition, Clapper's "No, sir" lie to Senator Ron Wyden's question: "Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?" sealed his receipt of the dubious achievement award, which cites the vastly excessive secrecy of the entire U.S. surveillance establishment. The Rosemary Award citation leads with what Clapper later called the "least untruthful" answer possible to congressional questions about the secret bulk collection of Americans' phone call data. It further cites other Clapper claims later proved false, such as his 2012 statement that "we don't hold data on U.S. citizens." But the Award also recognizes Clapper's fellow secrecy fetishists and enablers, including:

Gen. Keith Alexander, director of the NSA, for multiple Rose Mary Woods-type stretches, such as (1) claiming that the secret bulk collection prevented 54 terrorist plots against the U.S. when the actual number, according to the congressionally-established Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) investigation (pp. 145-153), is zero; (2) his 2009 declaration to the wiretap court that multiple NSA violations of the court's orders arose from differences over "terminology," an explanation which the chief judge said "strains credulity;" and (3) public statements by the NSA about its programs that had to be taken down from its website for inaccuracies (see Documents 78, 85, 87 in The Snowden Affair), along with public statements by other top NSA officials now known to be untrue (see "Remarks of Rajesh De," NSA General Counsel, Document 53 in The Snowden Affair).

Robert Mueller, former FBI director, for suggesting (as have Gen. Alexander and many others) that the secret bulk collection program might have been able to prevent the 9/11 attacks, when the 9/11 Commission found explicitly the problem was not lack of data points, but failing to connect the many dots the intelligence community already had about the would-be hijackers living in San Diego. The National Security Division lawyers at the Justice Department, for misleading their own Solicitor General (Donald Verrilli) who then misled (inadvertently) the U.S. Supreme Court over whether Justice let defendants know that bulk collection had contributed to their prosecutions. The same National Security Division lawyers who swore under oath in the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Freedom of Information Act lawsuit for a key wiretap court opinion that the entire text of the opinion was appropriately classified Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information (release of which would cause "exceptionally grave damage" to U.S. national security). Only after the Edward Snowden leaks and the embarrassed governmental declassification of the opinion did we find that one key part of the opinion's text simply reproduced the actual language of the 4th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and the only "grave damage" was to the government's false claims.

The controversy over Barack Hussein Obama and his past, along with fraudulent documents continues to make headlines. Yet, the items needed to actually verify who Obama is continue to be kept from the public eye. Well, that all may be about to change. Attorney Orly Taitz may have just found a chink in the federal government’s armor in protecting Barack Obama from scrutiny, following a judge’s ruling over her Freedom of Information Act request from the Social Security Administration. Taitz has claimed that Obama uses the Social Security number of Harry Bounel and has submitted several Freedom of Information Act requests for the information from the Social Security Administration. Each time, she has been met with stonewalling by the Social Security Administration. However, Judge Ellen Lipton Hollander has ruled to give Taitz “an opportunity to file a second amended complaint and add allegations of SSA not doing a proper search and withholding records.”

You could still type http://www.piratebay.se into your browser, but without a working DNS record, you wouldn't be able to find the site itself. If a takedown notice could blacklist a site from every available DNS provider, the URL would be effectively erased from the internet.

No one's ever tried to issue a takedown notice like that, but this latest memo suggests the MPAA is looking into it as a potentially powerful new tool in the fight against piracy. "A takedown notice program, therefore, could threaten ISPs with potential secondary liability in the event that they do not cease connecting users to known infringing material through their own DNS servers," the letter reads. "While not making it impossible for users to reach pirate sites (i.e., a user could still use a third-party DNS server), it could make it substantially more complicated for casual infringers to reach pirate sites if their ISPs decline to assist in the routing of communications to those sites." The full document is embedded below.

The MPAA’s legal argument centers on the claim that DNS records are working as an index or directory rather than simply routing data. If that argument holds, then the DNS links could be vulnerable to the same takedown notices used to strike torrent links from Google searches. The net effect would be similar to site-blocking, making it as easy to unplug a URL as it is to take down a YouTube video. It would also cast DNS providers as legally responsible for all the sites on the web, the same way YouTube is responsible for every video uploaded to its network. For many providers, simply managing the flood of notices might create a logistical nightmare.

Task force will help Clinton supporters push back on online harassment and thank superdelegates Anonymous online attacks, from both sides of the political spectrum, have sought to spread lies and misleading narratives about Secretary Hillary Clinton. Hillary’s supporters are more enthusiastic than Sen. Bernie Sanders’ supporters, yet oftentimes are discouraged from engaging online and are “often afraid to voice their thoughts” because of the fear of online harassment. Many of Hillary Clinton’s female supporters in particular have been subject to intense cyber-bullying and sexist attacks from swarms of anonymous attackers. Among the many Hillary Clinton supporters attacked online, superdelegates have been subject to vicious attacks for supporting her. Even the director of MoveOn, which has endorsed Sen. Sanders, denounced this harassment. In response to these attacks on supporters and superdelegates, Correct The Record is launching the Barrier Breakers 2016 digital task force. While Hillary Clinton fights to break down barriers and bring America together, the Barrier Breakers 2016 digital task force will serve as a resource for supporters looking for positive content and push-back to share with their online progressive communities, as well as thanking prominent supporters and committed superdelegates on social media.

ask force will help Clinton supporters push back on online harassment and thank superdelegates Anonymous online attacks, from both sides of the political spectrum, have sought to spread lies and misleading narratives about Secretary Hillary Clinton. Hillary’s supporters are more enthusiastic than Sen. Bernie Sanders’ supporters, yet oftentimes are discouraged from engaging online and are “often afraid to voice their thoughts” because of the fear of online harassment. Many of Hillary Clinton’s female supporters in particular have been subject to intense cyber-bullying and sexist attacks from swarms of anonymous attackers. Among the many Hillary Clinton supporters attacked online, superdelegates have been subject to vicious attacks for supporting her. Even the director of MoveOn, which has endorsed Sen. Sanders, denounced this harassment. In response to these attacks on supporters and superdelegates, Correct The Record is launching the Barrier Breakers 2016 digital task force. While Hillary Clinton fights to break down barriers and bring America together, the Barrier Breakers 2016 digital task force will serve as a resource for supporters looking for positive content and push-back to share with their online progressive communities, as well as thanking prominent supporters and committed superdelegates on social media.

Correct The Record will invest more than $1 million into Barrier Breakers 2016 activities, including the more than tripling of its digital operation to engage in online messaging both for Secretary Clinton and to push back against attackers on social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and Instagram. Barrier Breakers 2016 is a project of Correct The Record and the brainchild of David Brock, and the task force will be overseen by President of Correct The Record Brad Woodhouse and Digital Director Benjamin Fischbein. The task force staff’s backgrounds are as diverse as the community they will be engaging with and include former reporters, bloggers, public affairs specialists, designers, Ready for Hillary alumni, and Hillary super fans who have led groups similar to those with which the task force will organize. Lessons learned from online engagement with “Bernie Bros” during the Democratic Primary will be applied to the rest of the primary season and general election–responding quickly and forcefully to negative attacks and false narratives. Additionally, as the general election approaches, the task force will begin to push out information to Sanders supporters online, encouraging them to support Hillary Clinton. The task force currently combats online political harassment, having already addressed more than 5,000 individuals who have personally attacked Secretary Clinton on Twitter. The task force will provide a presence and space online where Clinton supporters can organize and engage with one another and are able to obtain graphics, videos, gifs, and messaging to use in their own social spaces. Additionally, the Barrier Breakers 2016 task force hopes to embrace the creativity of Hillary Clinton’s supporters by sharing their efforts and content with other groups.