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US Senate Judiciary Committee chops wood, carries water for Obama
Last Thursday the US Senate Judiciary Committee, in an 11-8 voice vote, reauthorized three sections of the USA PATRIOT Act that expire at the end of the year. Proposed changes from civil libertarians...
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The lost manuscripts: Social implications of hypermedia
In 2003, I had a catastrophic equipment failure in my office. My working hard disk — including all of my manuscripts — and its backups were destroyed. Back then I never archived my projects, only...
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Don’t be evil — much
Don’t be evil. That’s Google’s widely known corporate motto. Too bad it’s been rubbed away completely like button labels on a cheap remote control.As the network neutrality debate has grown more...
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Warrantless wiretapping found to be illegal. Again.
Judge Vaughn R. Walker, chief of the Federal District Court in San Francisco, ruled Wednesday that George W. Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program, first disclosed by the New York Times in December...
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US spooks out of control
In December 2005, after sitting on the story for more than a year, the New York Times exposed George W. Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program (which continues under Barack Obama) but kind of dropped...
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Obama misuses Espionage Act as personal Official Secrets Act
Candidate Obama promised — quite vigorously — to strengthen existing whistle-blower protection laws to protect federal workers who disclose government misdeeds. It was a cornerstone of his pledge to...
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Not a good time to be a secretive spook
Louis Brandeis is remembered for many things, not the least of which is for writing “sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants” in a 20 December 1913 Harper’s Weekly article. As a culture, it’s...
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US surveillance statistics rise dramatically
It’s a good thing that the US government is required to release reports on its surveillance activities. It’s a bad thing that it ignored the requirement. It’s a good thing that the American Civil...
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US Supreme Court declines to review warrantless wiretapping dismissal
For six years the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) fought a good legal battle to bring the US telecommunications giants to justice for allegedly providing backdoors to their networks allowing the...
View ArticleNCTC free to surveil and datamine the US citizenry at will
Last March, US intelligence officials met at the White House to debate a proposal to “create a government dragnet, sweeping up millions of records about US citizens — even people suspected of no...
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Freedom of the Press Foundation launches
In late 2010, MasterCard, PayPal, and Visa all announced that they would unilaterally stop accepting donation transactions for WikiLeaks, the group that has released scores of secret US government...
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Google requires warrants for user data
For the last three years, Google has regularly released transparency reports, containing information about government requests for access to its users’ data. Government requests for user data have...
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Obama claims broad preemptive cyberattack powers
President Barack Obama, so far as is known, has only used cyberweapons once: A series of attacks against Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities under the auspices of the National Security Agency (NSA)...
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Here come the warrantless wiretap immunities again
The Obama administration has authorized — in secret, of course — ongoing warrantless wiretaps of network segments operated by AT&T, CenturyLink, and several other telecommunications companies,...
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US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court approved every 2012 surveillance...
The US Justice Department has released a report (.pdf; 73.3KB) indicating that its secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) approved each of the 1,856 surveillance requests it received...
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Spook internet research manual released
In response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by Michael Morisy through MuckRock, the US National Security Agency (NSA) has released Untangling the Web; A Guide to Internet Research...
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Secret lawsuit seeks Google user data
The US Justice Department has filed a secret lawsuit asking a judge to grant its “petition to enforce” a warrantless demand that Google release user data. Declan McCullagh, writing for CNET reports...
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Spook surveillance de-pantsing follow-up
Recently we all learned, pretty much at the same time, that which most of us who have paid attention already knew: The Obama administration had doubled-down on George W. Bush administration’s civil...
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Eyes of the world: Candidate Obama v. President Obama
Wake up to find out that you are the eyes of the world but the heart has its beaches its homeland and thoughts of its own Wake now, discover that you are the song that the morning brings but the heart...
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Details of Obama’s Insider Threat Program leaked
Between 1917, when the Espionage Act was enacted, and 20 January 2009 when President Barack Obama took first office, a whopping total of three charges of spying were brought. Since Obama’s first term,...
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