Freedom of the Press Foundation Launches Campaign to Support Encryption Tools For Journalists. Crowd-funding Campaign Will Support A Variety of Open-Source Encryption Tools That Make Communications Between Journalists and Sources Safer San Francisco, CA – December 5, 2013 – In its first year, Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) crowd-funded over $480,000 that went directly to cutting-edge journalism focused on transparency and accountability. Today, FPF is launching its next crowd-funding campaign to support open-source encryption tools for journalists, in light of the recent NSA revelations and the US government’s unprecedented crackdown on whistleblowers. “Protecting the digital communications of journalists is turning into the press freedom fight of the 21st Century,” said Freedom of the Press Foundation executive director Trevor Timm.
“The Obama administration has been able to prosecute a record number of whistleblowers largely by subpoenaing emails and phone calls. You can make a donation here. Contact Information For more information: Latest FISA Court Declassification Shows an Adversarial System with No Willing Adversaries. Source: Rowan & Martin's Laugh-InYesterday another Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) opinion was declassified (pdf), discussing the guidelines specifically for the collection of telephone metadata.
This particular opinion was much more recent than previously declassified documents, dated August 29, and even makes notes of Edward Snowden’s leaks. The latest opinion by Judge Claire V. Eagan probably doesn’t have any huge bombshells for those who have been following data privacy for years so much as it confirms already held theories. The opinion quickly disposes of any Fourth Amendment claims protecting metadata by invoking the Supreme Court case Smith v. Maryland. This doesn’t mean that other laws couldn’t restrain the federal government’s metadata collection, so the bulk of Eagon’s opinion is about exploring the rules set forth by the PATRIOT Act.
Today Sen. “The document also points to the Supreme Court’s 1979 decision in Smith v. Sworn Declaration of Whistleblower William Binney on NSA Domestic Surveillance Capabilities. NSA spying program: Whistleblower William Binney shared details last year. A former National Security Agency director hit the road last year to warn Americans about the NSA’s controversial program to collect your emails, phone records and other personal data without your knowledge.
Former technical director William Binney stopped by a DefCon hackers conference, spoke at MIT, chatted on Democracy Now and made other stops to share some of the details that are now emerging. Related: Obama, Silicon Valley & PRISM ... Awkward! NSA confirms (and defends) massive data gathering program PRISM Say Google, Apple, etc. gave up user data. “The reason I left the NSA was because they started spying on everybody in the country,” he told a conference last July, Wired reported . “It started in February 2001 when they started asking telecoms for data (including Qwest, AT&T, Verizon and Bellsouth),” Binney said. During an interview on Democracy Now, he added that the events of 9/11 helped strengthen and grow the program. “I believe they have most of them, yes,” he responded.
Congress Disgracefully Approves the FISA Warrantless Spying Bill for Five More Years, Rejects All Privacy Amendments. Today, after just one day of rushed debate, the Senate shamefully voted on a five-year extension to the FISA Amendments Act, an unconsitutional law that openly allows for warrantless surveillance of Americans' overseas communications. Incredibly, the Senate rejected all the proposed amendments that would have brought a modicum of transparency and oversight to the government's activities, despite previous refusals by the Executive branch to even estimate how many Americans are surveilled by this program or reveal critical secret court rulings interpreting it.
The common-sense amendments the Senate hastily rejected were modest in scope and written with the utmost deference to national security concerns. The Senate had months to consider them, but waited until four days before the law was to expire to bring them to the floor, and then used the contrived time crunch to stifle any chances of them passing. Sen. You can watch Sen. Sen. Tellingly, Sen. Uncle Sam Is Watching You: Stop FISA Renewal. This week, Congress prepares to abuse the Constitution again, by extending its 2008 amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).
With the House of Representatives poised to vote today on a premature five year extension, will members remember what they heard when theatrically reading the Constitution on the House floor, or instead entrench the Bush-Cheney legacy beyond even the next administration? When Congress first voted back in 2008 to give the National Security Agency the power to eavesdrop on any—in other words, every–American without any reason for individual suspicion, it did so without a full picture of what it allowed.
Indeed, the full contours of the program remain secret even today. The only reason the NSA's spying powers have survived this long is because courts have refused to consider claims that they are unconstitutionally invasive. We know that FISA has enabled the most pervasive state surveillance system ever known to humankind. Congress Votes to Let Government Continue Spying on Your Emails. The Senate on Friday voted in favor of extending for five years the FISA Amendments Act, which allows the government to monitor American citizens who communicate with foreign citizens when terrorism is believed to be involved.
As part of the monitoring program, the government can get court orders — which do not require probable cause, like typical search warrant — to access citizens' phone calls as well as electronic messages such as emails, provided there is evidence those communications involve "foreign intelligence information. " Individual FISA orders can cast a huge net, targeting large groups of people at a time, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital privacy rights watchdog. Extension of the FISA Amendments Act was passed by the Senate on a vote of 73-23 after four separate attempts by lawmakers to amend the bill were voted down Thursday. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), shown above, was a supporter of the bill. NSA Gets Another 5 Years to Spy On You Without Warrants - FISA Renewed Along With All of Its Major Problems.
She is the big wheel on the Senate Intelligence Committee and is privy to spy info most in Congress never get to see. One of the so-called Gang of 8( »en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gang_of_Eight ) that the President and his intelligence advisers must keep informed. Her knowledge of threats to US not shared with other legislators(because they can't be trusted not to leak info) may be the reason she is strongly backing these intelligence laws.
Um, yeah, and because she and President Obama are NOT FUCKING IDIOTS. They know that, were there to be another major 9/11 type terror attack, and they had NOT done whatever they could to "connect the dots", it would be really, really bad. This is not a left vs. right, repub vs. dem. issue. Boys and girls, this is not rocket science. Cool, I heard barcodes, checkpoints and neighbors spying on eachother at every street would save lives too. If someone is really determined there is nothing this group of 8 stooges can do about it. Tell your member of Congress: Fix FISA. On the News With Thom Hartmann: Civil Liberties Were Once Again Defeated in the Senate on Thursday, and More. 5949, The FISA Amendments Act Reauthorization Act of 2012. No To Five More Years of Wiretapping! | United For Peace and Justice.
The House of Representatives will be voting on a bill that would extend the NSA’s warrantless wiretap program for another 5 years. Tell them NO! Congress passed the FAA (FISA Amendments Act) in 2008, in effect legalizing President Bush’s controversial warrantless wiretap program. Four years later, we know almost nothing about how the FAA has been implemented or about the scope of the surveillance that’s being conducted under the Act.
And what we do know raises serious concerns… · the NSA intercepts 1.7 billion emails, phone calls and other communications every single day (Washington Post, 7/19/2010) · the NSA says it cannot even give a rough estimate of the number of Americans whose communications have been swept up (Wired.com, 6/18/2012) · the NSA has reportedly overstepped the bounds of this very lax law, intercepting private emails and phone calls of Americans illegally (New York Times, 4/16/2009) It’s a disgrace. Please send an email to your Representative today! The National Security Agency’s Domestic Spying Program. NSA Whistleblower Explains How The NSA Is Collecting Data On All Of You (And He's Sorry About It)
Last year, in writing about the US government's vindictive lawsuit against whistleblower and former NSA employee Thomas Drake, we also talked about William Binney -- another ex-NSA employee and whistleblower (who was also raided by the feds, though they failed to find anything they could pin on him in a lawsuit). Binney is the mathematical genius behind one of the key algorithms the NSA is using to track everyone. Here's what the New Yorker said about Binner over a year ago: Binney expressed terrible remorse over the way some of his algorithms were used after 9/11. ThinThread, the "little program" that he invented to track enemies outside the U.S., "got twisted," and was used for both foreign and domestic spying: "I should apologize to the American people.
It's violated everyone's rights. It can be used to eavesdrop on the whole world. " I'd embed the video here, except the geniuses over at the NY Times seem to have not figured out how to allow embeds with their video player. Supreme Court Puzzles: How There Can Be Oversight Concerning Warrantless Wiretapping If No One Can Sue? One of the more ridiculous things about the government's ongoing campaign of secret surveillance on Americans is how hard it's fought back against anyone who has sought to have the policy tested in the courts. If the feds were confident that what they were doing was legal, they wouldn't be so aggressive in blocking each and every attempt. When the ACLU and others filed suit over the warrantless wiretapping under the FISA Amendments Bill (the Clapper v.
Amnesty International case) the lower court rulings were especially troubling, because it was ruled that there was no standing to sue, because there was no direct proof of such spying. So that leaves the public in quite a bind. They can't complain about the program unless they can prove they've been spied upon, but they can't do that unless they know more about the program, which is secret. And, thankfully, Justice Ginsburg calls him on this point: General Verrilli, can you be specific on who that person would be? Senate approves bill to reauthorize foreign surveillance programs - The Hill's Floor Action. The Senate on Friday approved a bill reauthorizing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in a 73-23 vote. The bill will extend for five years the ability of U.S. intelligence authorities to conduct surveillance of suspected terrorists overseas without first getting permission from a court.
The House already approved the legislation, meaning the Senate vote will send the bill to President Obama's desk. The president is expected to sign the bill. Supporters said the Senate needed to act quickly so that Obama could sign the legislation and extend the programs before they expired at the end of the year. Senate Intelligence Committee ranking member Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) urged his colleagues not to support any amendments because he said the bill would then have to be reconsidered by the House.
He said unless the House version passed, surveillance would halt after Dec. 31, posing a threat to national security. Before final passage, the Senate voted against an amendment from Sen. Rachel Maddow: Warrantless wiretapping extended with little fanfare. Fight over FISA Amendments Act Moves to the Senate, as the House Passes the Broad, Warrantless Spying Bill. US government says wiretap lawsuit should not proceed. Senate votes to extend foreign surveillance law. The law has helped authorities prevent terrorist plots, says a senatorBut "It's something with enormous potential for abuse," says a member of Cato InstituteThe law, passed in 2008, requires officials to obtain a warrant to spy on any American Opponents say Americans communicating with persons abroad still could be spied on (CNN) -- By a substantial margin, the Senate on Friday passed an extension of a controversial overseas wiretapping program, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
The law has already been reauthorized by the House, and President Obama is expected to sign it. According to Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-California, who is chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, the law, know by its acronynm FISA, has helped authorities prevent terrorist plots. "In the past four years, there have been one hundred arrests to prevent something from happening in the United States," Feinstein said. Sen. Without reauthorization, the law was scheduled to expire Monday, at the end of 2012. Wiretap Bill Passes.
Today, the Senate passed the re-authorization of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Amendments Act (FAA), a bill that gives the National Security Agency power to monitor the international phone calls and emails of Americans. The American Library Association asked library supporters to contact their legislators to advocate for amendments that would increase privacy protections to the law. Prior to the vote on the provision, Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR), Rand Paul (R-KY) and Mike Lee (R-UT) asked for more time for the Senate to debate and consider amendments that would increase privacy protections and add transparency requirements. The FAA is the 2008 law that, among other things, legalized the Bush administration’s warrant-less wiretapping program. As it did in 2008, ALA opposed the warrantless wiretap program because the public is at risk of being needlessly spied upon with little or no legal recourse, as the law reads now.
Like this: Like Loading... Obama Signs Warrantless Wiretap Law Extension. With none of the hoopla that usually accompanies the signing of major legislation, President Obama today signed a five-year reauthorization of the federal government’s warrantless wiretap program enacted in the name of national security. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) allows counter-intelligence officers to monitor overseas phone calls and emails in cases of suspected terror activity. Although the AP report on the closed-door bill signing today claims that “the law does not apply to Americans,” that’s not quite the full story.
As Wired explains, electronic eavesdropping is legally permissible “without a probable-cause warrant so long as one of the parties to the communication is believed outside the United States” and foreign intelligence information is involved. For American citizens per se, the government is required to see a warrant from a special FISA federal court whose rulings are not public. Remember when G.W. President Obama Quietly Renews Warrantless Wiretap Law for 5 Years. U.S. President Barack Obama arrives in the briefing room where he said he was ‘modestly optimistic’ while making a statement on fiscal cliff negotiations following a meeting with Congressional leaders at the White House December 28, 2012 in Washington, DC. (Photo: Getty Images) (TheBlaze/AP) — As everyone’s attention is focused on the slew of taxes set to increase in 2013, President Barack Obama has quietly signed into law a five-year extension to the warrantless intercept program that monitors the overseas activity of suspected spies and terrorists.
The program would have expired at the end of 2012 without the president’s approval, but won final passage in the Senate on Friday before heading to the president’s desk over the weekend. Known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the law allows the government to monitor overseas phone calls and emails without obtaining a court order for each intercept. CBS News elaborates: Sen. Related: Senate Ignores Constitution, Passes Warrantless Wiretap Renewal. Company that Engaged in Criminal Wiretapping Hails Obama’s Wiretap Extension. A WireTap Christmas Carol - WireTap - CBC Player. President Obama Signs Extension of Bush Warrantless Wiretap Program Into Law | ADW News. U.S. Senate passes warrantless wiretap bill extending FISA Amendments by VR. New Udall Opposes Long-Term Extension of Surveillance Law. WATCH LIVE: House committee debates FISA reauthorization. Sen. Mark Udall calls for changes to FISA Amendments Act. FISA oversight must be more transparent, says ACLU, EPIC.
SSCC 93 – Flame, LinkedIn, FISA, Patch Tuesday, border snooping and the BlueHat prize. Flame Developed by the US and Israel, House Judiciary Committee reauthorizes FISA Amendments Act, and More. Sen. Wyden puts FISA extension on hold, calls for Internet Bill of Rights. NSA: It Would Violate Your Privacy to Say if We Spied on You | Danger Room. Supreme Court Justices Address the FISA Amendments Act | Homeland Security | US. NSA's Warrantless Wiretapping Program, Government Moves to Avoid Accountability | Homeland Security | US. NSA won’t say how many of your emails it has read. Your Civil Liberties Are Under Threat Because the DOJ is Duping Congress Over FISA. FISA Correspondence Update | Blog | U.S. Senator Ron Wyden. The FISA Amendments Act Is Clearly Unconstitutional; And Congress Doesn't Care. Judge Napolitano: FISA Extension Shows a Blatant Disregard for the Fourth Amendment. Ask Your Senator for More Debate on Privacy Bill. Senate Wants To Sneak Warrantless Spying Bill Extension Into Law Without Debate; Let's Call Them and Tell Them No.
Senator Chambliss Says There's No Reason To Debate FISA Amendments Act; Just Pass It. Senate to Consider FISA Renewal; Rand Paul to Offer 4th Amendment Guard. Obama Administration Claims It Can’t Be Sued over Indiscriminate Wiretapping. The FBI's 5-year operation to nab a new insider trading class. Lawyer Denounces Wiretaps in Appeal of Galleon Case. NSA’s secretive surveillance program goes to the Supreme Court. Senators Demand DOJ Release Secret Spy Court Rulings | Threat Level. Can Skype 'Wiretap' Your Calls? Congress Must Act After US Government Admits To Unconstitutional Warrantless Wiretapping For the First Time. U.S. COURT RULES AT LEAST ONE F.I.S.A. WIRETAP VIOLATED THE U.S. CONSTITUTION'S 4TH AMENDMENT. Former CIA, DHS Officials Want to Remove Wiretap Restrictions on Cybersecurity – The Netizen Project.
US Surveillance Law Questioned | National News | United States. Massive expansion of domestic spying under Obama.
The battlespace of online piracy. Senate panel votes to extend government’s broader surveillance authority.