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By Richard Schickel
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By Jack Gilbert
$35.00
$35
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the pain of fleeting joy (CC BY-SA 2.0)
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By Dennis Bernstein —
We have a global battlefield, where if there is someone, anywhere, who might be associated with Al-Qaida, according to a high government official, then Obama can authorize on Terror Tuesday who he is going to kill after consulting with counterterrorism guru John Brennan.
Posted on Feb 8, 2013
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Electronic Frontier Foundation (CC BY 2.0)
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As the larger part of American culture seems ready to surrender its claim to privacy without question, organizations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation are riding like Paul Revere through the digital Massachusetts night.
Posted on Dec 29, 2012
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TheeErin (CC BY-ND 2.0)
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On Friday, Congress extended through 2017 a bill that grants the government power to monitor Americans without a warrant and accepted none of the proposals to ensure protections to privacy and civil liberties.
Posted on Dec 29, 2012
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Kradlum (CC BY 2.0)
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The U.S. Congress—one of the branches intended by America’s founders to balance the president’s power—is showing just as much and in some cases more interest in preserving a growing culture of secrecy as its executive counterpart, says Steven Aftergood, secrecy researcher at the Federation of American Scientists.
Posted on Aug 8, 2012
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kainet (CC BY-SA 2.0)
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A bill put forward by Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., proposes to slap some limits on the U.S. government’s collecting of information on Americans under its warrantless electronic spying program.
Posted on Aug 4, 2012
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The Senate is moving to renew the soon-to-expire 2008 amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which authorized the U.S. government to monitor American citizens’ emails and telephone calls without a warrant. Former National Security Agency Director William Binney has warned that its vast data mining program, which operates under the amendments, could “create an Orwellian state.”
Posted on May 24, 2012
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Flickr / HeatedGroundPhotography
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Lagging a few years behind the liberal media, public opinion and common sense, the justice system has come to the conclusion that President George W. Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program broke the rules. (continued)
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infowars.net
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A judge has rejected a challenge to FISA brought by activists abroad who fear that their communications may be tapped by the U.S. government. The judge said fear is not enough to warrant a change in the law, and that challenges need to make explicit claims of unlawful surveillance. The question remains: How does one know he is being surveilled?
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Original: Flickr / kiwanja
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It turns out George W. Bush’s warrantless wiretap program wasn’t just illegal, it was pretty useless. A new report by the inspectors general of the agencies charged with catching the evildoers determined that many agents were flummoxed by the vague information coming out of the overly secretive program, and those who weren’t couldn’t demonstrate how it was helpful.
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Russell Tice helped blow the whistle on Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program back in 2005, but the revelations don’t end there. On Wednesday’s “Countdown,” the former NSA analyst said the agency had “monitored all communications” and specifically targeted journalists.
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AP photo / Charles Dharapak
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By Eugene Jarecki —
For anyone seeking real reform of America’s foreign and defense policies in the years ahead, the introduction of Barack Obama’s national security team last Monday was a mixed bag. Yet what these and other appointments really suggest about Obama’s broader prospects for reform requires vigilant public attention.
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thirdphaze.com
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Just what kind of interpretation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act would allow U.S. National Security Agency linguists to eavesdrop on Americans’, er, pillow talk? That’s the charge being leveled by more than one such NSA interpreter who worked at an NSA listening station at Fort Gordon, Ga.
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AP photo / Ziv Koren, Pool
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By Robert Scheer — Barack Obama is betraying his promise of change and is in danger of becoming just another political hack. Yes, just like former maverick John McCain, who has refashioned himself as a mindless rubber stamp for the most inane policies of the miserably failed Bush administration.
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Truthdig columnist Chris Hedges warns in an L.A. Times Op-Ed that “If the sweeping surveillance law signed by President Bush on Thursday—giving the U.S. government nearly unchecked authority to eavesdrop on the phone calls and e-mails of innocent Americans—is allowed to stand, we will have eroded one of the most important bulwarks to a free press and an open society.”
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AP photo / Ron Edmonds
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Following Thursday’s announcement that Congress had passed the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, there were some who weren’t willing to take the news sitting down. In fact, Congress’ capitulation sparked a legal response from the ACLU and The Nation magazine and two of its key contributors—Chris Hedges and Naomi Klein—in the form of a lawsuit.
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Executive Office of the President of the United States
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You know a legislative compromise is one-sided when the AP headline announcing its passage reads “Senate Bows to Bush.” Democratic advocates of the new FISA bill, passed by the Senate on Wednesday, are still trying to explain what they got in exchange for rolling back a few civil liberties and burying some of the president’s abuses. When they figure it out, someone, somewhere, will surely be listening.
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AP photo /J im Cole
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By Bill Boyarsky — Politics is a cruel and disappointing business. This year, Democratic liberals gambled on a young man who offered hope and change. But after those wondrous primary days, they are furious over Sen. Barack Obama’s understandable effort to reach out to an electorate that is, and long has been, planted firmly in the middle of the road.
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antiwar.com
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What’s the big deal about the new FISA “compromise”? Simply put, it legitimizes warrantless spying on Americans while papering over one of George W. Bush’s worst abuses. Daniel Ellsberg would like your help in stopping it, provided you can set aside 60 seconds of your Monday.
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There’s a lot more to object to in the new FISA bill than just retroactive immunity for the telecoms. It seems that the regulation of surveillance is still hopelessly out of date. How is a court supposed to handle complex algorithms and countless terabytes of data? Truthdig contributor Elliot Cohen warns that the new law could conceivably allow the theft of the 2008 presidential election.
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By Amy Goodman — I was on a panel at the Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado this week when Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter asked me, “Is Obama a sellout?”
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The “Countdown” host is as frustrated as can be with Barack Obama’s newfound enthusiasm for the dreaded FISA bill, but luck has provided the senator with a second chance to walk the “tight rope,” and Keith Olbermann hopes he takes it.
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Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights has the goods on the new FISA bill, which offers retroactive immunity to the telecoms and allows the government to spy on Americans without a warrant.
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boston.com
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At the request of House Republicans, Congress on Thursday held a closed-door session to debate the FISA warrantless eavesdropping bill. The last time a closed-door session occurred was in 1983, when lawmakers convened in secret to discuss clandestine U.S. support of Contra paramilitaries in Nicaragua.
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nationalsecurity.org
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This might be a moment when Democratic supporters wonder what all the “changing of the guard” fuss was about when Dems took control of Congress in 2006: On Tuesday, the Senate effectively voted in favor of granting telecommunication companies retroactive immunity for their cooperation in the National Security Agency’s warrantless wiretapping program.
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Lawmakers who take a principled stand on the tough and often complex issues that face our nation typically struggle to condense the relevant intricacies into a comprehensible sound bite. Here, Sen. Russ Feingold bucks the trend as he explains the administration’s plan for spying on Americans.
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Sen. Chris Dodd just put his money where his mouth has been in the presidential campaign, filibustering a nasty bit of legislation the Senate tried to push through before the Christmas break. Here he tells MSNBC why giving retroactive immunity to the telecom companies for spying on Americans is a bad thing.
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hoinews.com
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Sen. Chris Dodd is preparing to take to the Senate floor with a filibuster to thwart the legislative advancement of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act if it doesn’t include his proposed amendment, co-sponsored with Sen. Russ Feingold, that would prevent the Bush administration from retroactively letting big telecom companies off the hook for allowing the government to conduct warrantless surveillance on their networks.
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Under pressure from Congress, Verizon has provided some insight into the government’s domestic surveillance program. The telecommunications giant defended the legality of its actions, but admitted complying “as expeditiously as possible” when federal officials, without a subpoena, asked for telephone and Internet records.
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AP photo / Evan Vucci
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In a scathing editorial on Sunday, The New York Times accused President Bush of playing on the nation’s post-9/11 fears in order to justify violating our civil liberties and protecting big telecom companies implicated in his wiretapping scheme. The Bush camp “use[d] the nation’s tragedy to grab ever more power for its vision of an imperial presidency,” the Times editorial board charged.
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After German authorities foiled a terror plot earlier this month, U.S. National Intelligence Director J. Michael McConnell was all to eager to give credit to recently revised FISA rules, arguing, in effect, that potential civil liberty violations helped save American lives. Woops. It turns out that much of the information used by the Germans was obtained under the old FISA law, which McConnell continues to claim wasn’t effective enough.
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The “Real Time” host returns with a look back on the summer, full of the usual barbs like this gem about the Democrats’ FISA capitulation: “Yes the Democrats in Congress took advantage of a deeply unpopular lame duck president by caving into his every whim and agreeing to allow the attorney general to spy on Americans without a warrant.”
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J. Michael McConnell, the director of national intelligence, has in part explained Congress’ hurry to revise domestic surveillance law. It seems that the FISA court, established three decades ago to keep the government from abusively spying on American citizens, decided that the administration’s warrantless wiretapping program was illegal—and that just wouldn’t do.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Some lawmakers were furious over the administration’s actions regarding a surveillance bill, but in the end members of the majority party in Congress caved in under political pressure.
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By Eugene Robinson — It wasn’t so long ago that thinking the government was reading your mail, listening to your phone calls, tracking your movements and snapping photos along the way meant you were just paranoid. Ah, the good old days.
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A flurry of legislative activity over the weekend left a mixed bag of progress and surrender. While the House voted to require clean-energy standards for the first time and cut oil industry tax breaks, enough Democrats caved to the White House to pass the president’s preferred FISA rule changes.
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softvote.com
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President Bush has finally agreed to allow a secret court to oversee the NSA’s wiretapping program, which had been operating without warrants for years. The administration’s capitulation after 13 months of stubborn resistance might have something to do with pending congressional investigations and legal battles.
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Sen. Arlen Specter went on TV to vehemently deny a Washington Post report that he had proposed legislation which included blanket amnesty for everyone involved with Bush’s warrantless spying. But lawyer Glenn Greenwald has apparently proved that the Post was right in its report—and the Specter had lied about it.
Posted on Jun 17, 2006
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Paul Conrad
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The White House rejected a 2002 Senate proposal to ease surveillance warrant restrictions, saying such a move would probably be unconstitutional. The Washington Post picks up the story blazed by Glenn Greenwald.
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The transcript of the Al Gore speech that’s got everyone talking—as well as links to C-SPAN’s downloadable video of the event.
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After the attorney general dismissed the vexed former veep’s charges of illegal spying, Gore swats back: No wonder you didn’t defend yourself on the issues—you can’t. | release
Meanwhile, a group of arch-conservatives call for hearings into Bush’s program. Hey, if you’ve lost Grover Norquist and David Keene… | release
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