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By Adam Johnson
By T.J. English
$18.45
$18
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nolifebeforecoffee (CC BY 2.0)
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Intelligence experts say criticism that the FBI should have done more to catch the Tsarnaev brothers and prevent the Boston Marathon bombings could provoke government agencies to infringe civil liberties.
Posted on Apr 23, 2013
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Photo illustration from an image by Colin Grey (CC-BY)
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This week on Truthdig Radio in association with KPFK: A deeper look at the Supreme Court’s historic week, the Obama administration harasses whistle-blowers, and “Duck Dynasty” in revolt.
Posted on Mar 29, 2013
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This week on Truthdig Radio in association with KPFK: A deeper look at the Supreme Court’s historic week, the Obama administration harasses whistle-blowers, and “Duck Dynasty” in revolt.
Posted on Mar 29, 2013
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After a court hearing over the 2012 NDAA in Manhattan on Wednesday, Truthdig columnist Chris Hedges appeared on a panel of activists who are suing the Obama administration over its attempt to claim the right to indefinitely hold U.S. citizens in military detention.
Posted on Feb 8, 2013
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The U.S. Army (CC BY 2.0)
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Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald asks “whether [the United States’] endless war [on terror] is the intended result of U.S. actions or just an unwanted miscalculation.”
Posted on Jan 4, 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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pareeerica (CC BY 2.0)
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By Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch —
The Invisible Government, published by David Wise and Thomas B. Ross in 1964, was groundbreaking, shadow-removing, illuminating. It caused a fuss from its very first paragraph, which was then a shockeroo: “There are two governments in the United States today. One is visible. The other is invisible.”
Posted on Dec 18, 2012
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David Orban (CC-BY)
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By Thomas Hedges, Center for Study of Responsive Law —
Whistle-blowers have warned that intelligence agencies are abusing the Constitution and lavishing private companies with expensive contracts in exchange for subpar results.
Posted on Nov 30, 2012
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Democracy Now!
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Former National Security Agency official and whistle-blower William Binney is appalled but unsurprised by last week’s revelation that President Obama has institutionalized a mechanism for generating targets for his secretive assassination list.
Posted on Oct 27, 2012
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Public Domain Photos (CC BY 2.0)
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Technical advancements and plunging costs for digital storage mean that government surveillance programs no longer have to be selective about the data they store. And with the average person leaving a trail of Web browsing, emails, text messages and more, there’s plenty of information that can be filed away on individuals.
Posted on Aug 24, 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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Last time on Truthdig Radio in association with KPFK: The editor in chief of The Advocate talks chicken and bigotry, the tea party wins big in Texas, cybersecurity from the inbox to the nuclear power plant, race and politics, and we remember Gore Vidal.
Posted on Aug 5, 2012
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Photo illustration from an image by Colin Grey (CC-BY)
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This week on Truthdig Radio in association with KPFK: The editor in chief of The Advocate talks chicken and bigotry, the tea party wins big in Texas, cybersecurity from the inbox to the nuclear power plant, race and politics, and we remember Gore Vidal.
Posted on Aug 5, 2012
READ MORE
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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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ssoosay (CC BY 2.0)
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By Peter Maass and Megha Rajagopalan, ProPublica —
A handful of media stories, blog posts and academic studies have been skeptical about such attention-getting figures. But that has not stopped an array of government officials and politicians from continuing to cite them as authoritative. Now, ProPublica has found new grounds to question the data and methods used to generate them.
Posted on Aug 2, 2012
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Furryscaly (CC BY-SA 2.0)
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By Alexander Reed Kelly — Nicholas Merrill is tired of waiting for Congress to protect Americans’ privacy online. So he plans to force the matter by changing the way telecommunication companies do business.
Posted on Jul 24, 2012
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david drexler (CC BY 2.0)
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By Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch —
When my daughter was little and I read to her regularly, one illustrated book was a favorite of ours. In a series of scenes, a frustrated young girl booms out: “that makes me mad!” For our present national security moment, however, I might amend the book’s punch line slightly.
Posted on Jul 20, 2012
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Democracy Now!
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By Alexander Reed Kelly — It’s the first day of the HOPE conference, and hackers and technology enthusiasts have come to hear NSA whistle-blower William Binney give the meeting’s keynote address.
Posted on Jul 14, 2012
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Malakh Kelevra (CC BY-ND 2.0)
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The amount the U.S. government spent to keep classified information secret exceeded $11 billion in 2011—12 percent more than during the previous year.
Posted on Jul 3, 2012
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By David Sirota — As Wired’s Spencer Ackerman reports, “Surveillance experts at the National Security Agency won’t tell two powerful United States Senators how many Americans have had their communications picked up by the agency [because] it would violate your privacy to say so.”
Posted on Jun 28, 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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(CC-BY)
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By Amy Goodman — Three targeted Americans: A career government intelligence official, a filmmaker and a hacker. None of these U.S. citizens was charged with a crime, but they have been tracked, surveilled, detained—sometimes at gunpoint—and interrogated, with no access to a lawyer.
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Jennuine Captures (CC-BY)
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By Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch —
I was out of the country only nine days, hardly a blink in time, but time enough, as it happened, for another small, airless room to be added to the American national security labyrinth.
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Google already threatened to quit China over a network attack originating from that country, but it seems the Internet giant was shaken up enough to call the National Security Agency (of spying-on-Americans fame) for assistance. (continued)
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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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By Amy Goodman — President-elect Barack Obama introduced his principal national security Cabinet selections to the world Monday and left no doubt that he intends to start his administration on a war footing. It is revealing that his choice for national security adviser is a director of Boeing, a weapons manufacturer, and Chevron, an oil giant.
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USAF / Tech. Sgt. Jerry Morrison
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Multiple news outlets, from ABC to Fox, now confirm that Robert Gates will retain his post as secretary of defense for at least the first year of the Obama administration. The president-elect will roll out Gates and his other hawks during a national security team unveiling next week.
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signonsandiego.com
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Maybe it was the past eight years, or maybe it was the past three months, but a new report by the U.S. intelligence community estimates that American global power is on the decline, and will be for the next two decades as upcoming powers like China and India gain greater international standing.
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Warrantless wiretapping makes for a rollicking good time at the National Security Agency, according to moral crusader Stephen Colbert, who’s not above a little dramatic re-enactment of his own biblically inspired carnal fantasies (for illustrative purposes only).
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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 / Ron Edmonds
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It’s reassuring to know that when Alberto Gonzales was our nation’s attorney general, he schlepped highly classified documents to his home in Virginia in an unlocked briefcase. Oops! Also, once he’d toted them home, Gonzales didn’t put them in a safe for extra protection because he “couldn’t remember the combination.” Fiddlesticks!
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U.S. Navy / Jordon R. Beesley
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By Chalmers Johnson — Since 1961, there has been too little serious study of, or discussion of, the origins of the military-industrial complex, how it has changed over time, how governmental secrecy has hidden it from oversight by members of Congress or attentive citizens, and how it degrades our constitutional structure of checks and balances.
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AP photo / LM Otero
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By Elliot D. Cohen — John McCain has long been a major player in a radical militaristic group driven by an ideology of global expansionism and dominance attained through perpetual, pre-emptive, unilateral, multiple wars. Over its two terms, the George W. Bush administration has planted the seeds for this geopolitical master plan, and now appears to be counting on the McCain administration, if one comes to power, to nurture it.
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time.com
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As if 100 years in Iraq wasn’t enough, a top adviser to John McCain claims that the presumptive Republican presidential nominee supports and believes lawful Bush’s infamous warrantless wiretapping program.
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nsa.gov
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Only a year after his agency warned of a resurgence of al-Qaida in the Arab world, CIA Director Michael Hayden remarked on Friday that U.S. “counter-terrorism work” has led to the strategic defeat of al-Qaida in Iraq and Saudi Arabia and significant setbacks for al-Qaida globally.
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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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wikipedia.org
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CIA Director Michael Hayden told lawmakers Thursday that waterboarding is a useful technique but might not be “lawful under current statute.” Hayden said his agency used waterboarding because of “misshaped and misformed” direction from Washington.
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By Elliot D. Cohen — The “Last Days of Democracy” author warns that Congress is about to aid the Bush administration with its Orwellian plans by granting retroactive immunity to the telecommunications giants for helping the government spy on Americans.
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On Monday, Vice President Dick Cheney’s office allowed that it has “dozens of documents” detailing the Bush administration’s controversial warrant-free overseas wiretapping program, according to The Washington Post, but it doesn’t seem likely that Cheney’s cohorts will fork them over without a struggle.
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The Bush administration’s domestic spying program has depended on the willing participation of America’s telecommunications giants, and all but one, Qwest, were willing to comply. Truthdig contributor Onnesha Roychoudhuri investigates the complex world of national security and regulation to find out whether Qwest’s extraordinary bad luck in recent years has been more than a coincidence—and what it means for what’s left of your privacy.
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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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Former Deputy Attorney General James Comey reveals the circumstances surrounding the reauthorization of the domestic spying program, including then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales’ late-night visit to an ailing John Ashcroft in order to “take advantage of a very sick man who did not have the powers of the attorney general” at the time.
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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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washingtonpost.com
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The Justice Department will, at long last, examine the NSA’s domestic spying program, through which agents have eavesdropped on countless phone calls and e-mails. Unfortunately, the review will not explore the legality of the program and was described by one Democrat as an attempt at appeasement.
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AP / Carlos Osorio
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Truthdig salutes Ann Beeson, the American Civil Liberties Union officer and lead attorney for the plaintiffs in ACLU v. NSA, the case that persuaded a Detroit judge to order a halt to the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program.
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A federal judge has denied the government?s request to dismiss a lawsuit against AT&T. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is suing AT&T for its involvement in the NSA?s wiretapping program.
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From ThinkProgress
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Testifying before Congress this morning, Atty. Gen. Alberto Gonzales said that Bush halted the investigation into the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program by personally denying security clearances to Department of Justice lawyers investigating the case. (article or video)
Pardon us for being reflexively cynical about Bush’s motives in this one, but the president doesn’t have a shred of credibility on this issue.
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Looks like we were a little too hasty on this one. We had blogged that Sen. Arlen Specter had introduced a bill that would require Bush to get court approval for his NSA wiretapping programs.
Turns out that’s not the case. Specter’s bill would merely give Bush the option of bringing his program before a court—which Bush should have done in the first place. Think Progress and AMERICAblog have the details.
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From CNN: Sen. Arlen Specter revealed a bill that would require a court to review the constitutionality of the National Security Agency’s controversial intelligence-gathering program, saying the deal was negotiated with the Bush administration’s cooperation, and that Bush would sign the bill if it doesn’t change dramatically.
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