|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
By Deanne Stillman
$9.66
By Kevin Sites
$15.95
$19
|
|
|
|
Image via Shutterstock
|
After its recent revelation that the National Security Agency is monitoring the phone records and Internet activity of millions of Americans, The Guardian reported Sunday that the U.S. and Britain monitored and intercepted the digital communications of foreign officials during two international conferences in London.
Posted on Jun 17, 2013
READ MORE 
|
|
A look at the day’s political happenings, including a lawmaker makes history on the U.S. Senate floor and outgoing Congresswoman Michele Bachmann continues to fundraise on her campaign site.
Posted on Jun 11, 2013
READ MORE
|
Flickr/ massmatt
|
The U.S. Supreme Court has declined to hear a case against the nation’s telecommunications companies for cooperating with a once-secret wiretap program enacted by the Bush administration to monitor suspected terrorists.
Posted on Oct 9, 2012
READ MORE
|
Dank Depot (CC BY 2.0)
|
After mischaracterizing a law governing medical marijuana distribution, the president who refused to prosecute those who led the U.S. into an indefinite war on terror told a Rolling Stone interviewer last month that he couldn’t ask the Justice Department to “turn the other way” when it comes to potential violations of medical marijuana use.
|
Wikimedia Commons / Ollie Atkins, White House photographer
|
After nearly 35 years, the American public finally gets to hear Richard Nixon’s claims about some of his administration’s shadier practices, Watergate figuring most notoriously among them, after the National Archives’ release Thursday of transcripts of his grand jury testimony. ... (more)
Posted on Nov 10, 2011
READ MORE
|
Flickr/ScruffyDan and Breanne
|
On Thursday, the Senate voted in favor of extending the part of the Patriot Act that allows U.S. law enforcement officials to legally eavesdrop on certain phone calls for the sake of—you guessed it—homeland security.
|
Flickr/mikecolvin82
|
This week in surveillance: The New York Times revealed that the NSA has been spying on the e-mails of millions of Americans, including ex-President Bill Clinton. Meanwhile, China has backed down from installing mandatory security software, while Iran tries to clamp down on communications, and Britain plans to track every phone call, e-mail and text message in Britain. Yikes!
|
|
It was just politics as usual, Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich said Thursday of the corruption allegations that seem all but certain to upend his political career.
|
|
By Amy Goodman — Millions have served time in U.S. prisons for crimes that fall far short of those attributed to the Bush administration. Some criminals, it seems, are like banks judged too big to fail: too big to jail, too powerful to prosecute.
|
|
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.
|
|
By Joe Conason — To understand the philosophy of government that Dick Cheney brought to Washington over the past seven years, it is most instructive to see “Frost/Nixon,” with Frank Langella’s remarkable reanimation of Tricky Dick for a generation that never knew him.
|
|
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).
|
thirdphaze.com
|
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.
|
AP photo / Ron Edmonds
|
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!
|
|
By David Sirota — In the asylum that is American politics, beware a candidate like Barack Obama when he is lauded for moving to “the center”—because usually that means he is drifting away from it.
|
Executive Office of the President of the United States
|
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.
|
itpsites.com
|
If there was one word that summed up the political tenor of the Bush II presidency, it definitely wouldn’t be accountability. On Friday, this was once again made clear as the House of Representatives passed a bill granting retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies that allowed their networks to be used by the government to eavesdrop on Americans following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
|
|
By Marie Cocco — You cannot find a more complete and compelling indictment of the Bush administration than the Ohio representative has presented in his 35 articles of impeachment.
|
time.com
|
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.
|
nsa.gov
|
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.
|
nationalsecurity.org
|
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.
|
|
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.
|
AP photo / Evan Vucci
|
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.
|
btinternet.com
|
First we had “Operation Iraqi Freedom.” Then came the Patriot Act. And now, President Bush has co-opted another vague term that’s hard to argue with, emptied it of its intended significance, and altered it to mean “let big telecom companies that aided the administration in its dubious wiretapping activities off the hook.” Yes, folks, this latest round of rhetorical gymnastics has brought us “the Protect America Act.”
|
itpsites.com
|
Not to be deterred by new developments in digital technology, the FBI laid the groundwork for its current DCSNet (Digital Collection System Network) wiretapping system during the Clinton years, allowing agents to just point ‘n’ click their way into the nation’s land lines, cell phones and Internet telephony networks.
|
|
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.
|
|
Corroborating an account by former Deputy Attorney General James B. Comey, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III detailed the dramatic events that occurred in then-Attorney General John Ashcroft’s hospital room in March 2004 when his successor, Alberto Gonzales, attempted to persuade a convalescing Ashcroft to sign off on a domestic wiretapping program he opposed.
|
|
Taking a page from the Ronald Reagan Guide to Dodging Sticky Political Issues, Vice President Dick Cheney told Larry King that he didn’t recall if he was the one who asked Alberto Gonzales to pressure John Ashcroft to sign off on a wiretapping program as Ashcroft lay in a hospital bed in 2004.
|
|
Although Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was characteristically dodgy during last week’s questioning by the Senate Judiciary Committee about just who had dispatched him in March 2004 to persuade an ailing John Ashcroft to approve an illegal wiretapping program, The New York Times leaves little mystery that it was Vice President Dick Cheney.
|
AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta
|
On Tuesday, CIA Director Michael V. Hayden made good on his pledge to declassify nearly 700 pages of documents about some of the agency’s dirtiest laundry from the past—its “family jewels”—including details about assassination plots, wiretapping and other alarming activities.
|
nialler9
|
Former Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman writes in The Nation that in the year since she called for Bush’s impeachment, the case against him has only gotten stronger. Just because Nancy Pelosi has taken impeachment off the table, Holtzman argues, doesn’t mean it isn’t going to happen.
|
|
Although a judge recently ruled Bush’s warrentless wiretapping program unconstitutional, a federal court unanimously agreed to keep the program running until an appeal is decided, though the three judges involved gave little explanation as to how they reached their decision.
Posted on Oct 5, 2006
READ MORE
|
|
We earlier blogged that legislation authorizing the NSA’s wiretapping program was nearing passage. That now appears not to be the case. Senate and House versions of the bill may be too far apart to be bridged before Congress recesses next week.
Posted on Sep 26, 2006
READ MORE
|
|
This version of the president’s warrantless eavesdropping bill—which appears headed for passage—will apparently still allow Bush the option of submitting his surveillance programs to a court for review.
Posted on Sep 26, 2006
READ MORE
|
|
From the AP: “Senate Republicans blocked Democratic attempts to rein in President Bush’s domestic wiretapping program Wednesday, endorsing a White House-supported bill that would give the controversial surveillance legal status.”
The November elections can’t come soon enough….
|
|
Phew! President Bush’s attempt to provide legal support for his warrantless wiretapping program appears dead—for now—in the Senate. Quote of the day (from Sen. Russ Feingold): “The president has basically said: I’ll agree to let a court decide if I’m breaking the law if you pass a law first that says I’m not breaking the law.”
|
|
From U.S. Newswire: “Two lawyers who brought the first lawsuit against the Bush administration, Verizon and AT&T for illegally examining the phone records of virtually every American citizen will announce today that they are serving subpoenas on the Bush White House and on Verizon.”
We suspect those lawyers may have a bit of trouble nailing down that particular deposition.
|
AP / Carlos Osorio
|
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.
|
From ThinkProgress
|
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.
|
|
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.
|
|
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.
|
From antiwar.com
|
The White House said this morning that every prisoner in Gitmo and in U.S. military custody everywhere is entitled to Geneva Convention protections. Bush spokesman Tony Snow claimed that this apparent about-face is “not really a reversal of policy,” while admitting that it stems directly from the Supreme Court’s striking down of Bush’s military tribunals.
Reminder: This is far from total victory. Constitutional expert Glenn Greenwald reminds us that the Hamdan ruling also removed any conceivable argument to support Bush’s illegal wiretapping programs, and we haven’t heard about any policy shift on that front….
|
|
According to CNET: “The FBI has drafted sweeping legislation that would require Internet service providers to create wiretapping hubs for police surveillance and force makers of networking gear to build in backdoors for eavesdropping.”
|
|
Constitutional expert and best-selling author Glenn Greenwald reminds us that the Supreme Court’s Hamdan decision not only outlawed Bush’s military tribunals, but also removed any conceivable argument to support Bush’s illegal wiretapping programs.
Greenwald: “Journalists should begin asking the Justice Department every day what their legal justification for warrantless eavesdropping is now that Hamdan has rendered frivolous their prior legal arguments in defense of the President.”
|
|
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
READ MORE
|
|
History will surely boggle at this one: The architect of the NSA’s domestic spying program has been made the head of the CIA. And the vote was 78-15.
|
|
Atty. Gen. Alberto Gonzales says that the Bush White House may go after journalists who report on national security-related matters. “There are some statutes on the book which, if you read the language carefully, would seem to indicate that that is a possibility.”
Funny: There are lots of FISA statutes that you don’t have to read particularly carefully to learn that spying on Americans without warrants is illegal.
|
Illustration: Blair Golson
|
This is the big one, folks. Wired News unearths internal AT&T documents that show how the telecom company, at the behest of the government, built “secret rooms” in cities across America that enable the NSA “to look at every individual message on the Internet and analyze exactly what people are doing.”
Story and AT&T internal documents
Wired News explains why it published the story
|
View older articles:
1 2 >
View the most popular tags overall?
|
|
Bank of America Lied to Homeowners and Rewarded Foreclosures, Ex-Employees Say
Newsletter 
Like Us
Follow Us
Get Our Feed
