Poll: Conservatives are comparing the ACA to the Fugitive Slave Act, is this a sound comparison? Fugitive Slave Acts — History.com Articles, Video, Pictures and Facts. Despite the inclusion of the Fugitive Slave Clause in the U.S. Constitution, anti-slavery sentiment remained high in the North throughout the late 1780s and early 1790s, and many petitioned Congress to abolish the practice outright. Bowing to further pressure from Southern lawmakers—who argued slave debate was driving a wedge between the newly created states—Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793. This edict was similar to the Fugitive Slave Clause in many ways, but included a more detailed description of how the law was to be put into practice. Most importantly, it decreed that slave owners and their “agents” had the right to search for escaped slaves within the borders of free states.
In the event they captured a suspected slave, these hunters had to bring them before a judge and provide evidence proving the person was their property. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 was immediately met with heavy criticism. Whitewash of Trapwire End Users by Major Media.. While the New York Times has indeed finally come forth with a story on TrapWire, their rushed exposé about a story sparked by “speculation” contains references to allegations that are argued directly in emails obtained from Strategic Forecasting, or Stratfor, the intelligence company that was hacked by the Anonymous collective last year. Emails uncovered in the attack were provided to WikiLeaks, who on their part published the trove in installments, including a dump last week.
Thanks to a red flag being raised by independent researcher Justin Ferguson last week, the TrapWire system was linked to Stratfor staffers, in turn causing a colossal investigation to be launched from all corners of the Internet. So far, that probing has proved at least one thing: that the allegations made by both Cubic and sources speaking to the Times are either dead wrong or represent a quickly snowballing attempt at a cover-up.
And what the hubbub is all about: Mr. Facial Recognition and GPS Tracking: TrapWire Company Conducting Even More Surveillance. Declassified NSA files reveal privacy violation: NSA phone records sans cause - Chicago Top News. NSA declassified files are being brought to public knowledge this week, and the findings reveal that the NSA may have violated citizens’ privacy rights after searching through phone records sans reasonable cause. According to Telegraph.co.uk this Wednesday, Sept. 11, the NSA documents weren’t given freely, and it was only through a freedom lawsuit that the information was obtained. The NSA declassified documents were ones that were forced into disclosure due to a federal judge’s order.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation — which acts as a continually growing no-profit organization that supports public free speech and digital privacy rights — recently won their case in a Freedom of Information lawsuit, allowing the files on unauthorized phone records searches to be brought into the national spotlight. The foundation itself released a statement this week that the disclosure of these NSA files was a major “victory” not only for the group, but for the public at large. Ubuntu Edge breaks crowdfunding record. Bernie Sanders: U.S. Spies on Americans. New information. We always knew how bad the Patriot Act was and that this kind of thing, and worse, was included. There are all kinds of bad things in the Patriot Act...but when national security (or, more accurately, when hay can be made out of a national security event) an administration is simply not going to ignore the tools that the people and congress give it.
Obama's administration is not the first and -- as long as the Patriot Act exists -- not the last to data mine via email or telephone. If the people and congress decide it's a bad idea to do this then they need to pass legislation to ban it (actually might be a good result of the attention it's getting now). As much as we'd like him to throw politics and process to the wind and do by executive order what most of us here would do, he's just implementing policy and law set by congress...as he's required to do.
Perhaps some democrats in congress should have filibustered longer to get better changes to the Patriot Act. Piers Morgan Now Claims Obama 'Worse' Than George W. Bush. During Thursday night's edition of CNN's “Piers Morgan Tonight,” the liberal host harshly criticized President Barack Obama and his administration for allowing the National Security Agency to secretly obtain the telephone records of millions of Americans. While interviewing Senator Bernie Sanders, Morgan asked the socialist from Vermont if he believed Obama's actions on surveillance are “worse than anything George W. Bush did.” The CNN host led up to his question by quoting the editorial board of the New York Times, which stated on Thursday that the administration “has now lost all credibility on this issue.” Has what Barack Obama been doing -- and his administration -- not just with all these revelations in the last 24 hours, but also the IRS, going after AP and FOX News, and so on, has what he's been doing worse than anything George W.
Sanders took advantage of the opportunity to criticize the previous Republican president by stating: Sanders: U.S. Should Not Collect Phone Records | The Vermont Standard. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) criticized a secret domestic surveillance program that swept up millions of telephone records on calls by Americans who were not suspected of any wrongdoing. A court order demanding the records be turned over was obtained under a controversial interpretation of a provision in the so-called Patriot Act, which Sanders voted against when it was first enacted in 2001 and when it was reauthorized in 2006 and 2011.
“As one of the few members of Congress who consistently voted against the Patriot Act, I expressed concern at the time of passage that it gave the government far too much power to spy on innocent United State citizens and provided for very little oversight or disclosure. Unfortunately, what I said turned out to be exactly true. “The United States should not be accumulating phone records on tens of millions of innocent Americans. That is not what democracy is about. That is not what freedom is about. Matt Drudge, Bernie Sanders and Ron Paul versus Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Big Brother - The Hill's Pundits Blog. Big Brother is watching your taxes, following your travel, monitoring your email, counting your phone calls, photographing your car, spying on your shopping, invading your privacy, attacking your rights, shadowing your life and deciding whether you are on approved or disapproved lists.
Big Brother is big government united with big business. Big Brother is Barack Obama united with George W. Bush. Opposition to Big Brother unites Matt Drudge with conservative libertarians such as former Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) and liberal libertarians such as Sen. Let's put Big Brother in Guantanamo, so long as there is a Guantanamo. Events after Sept. 11, 2001, took place after I left the leadership, but I was never overwhelmed when Bush tried to create fear, for political reasons, to justify attacks on our liberties. Say what you want about Drudge, but his site has been a compendium of the exploits and abuses of Big Brother. Yes, some secrecy is needed, and some eavesdropping is necessary. Did 'warrantless' wiretaps increase under Obama? Obama’s record on civil liberties hasn’t been stellar, but a Huffington Post headline screaming that Warrantless Electronic Surveillance Surges Under Obama Justice Department seems to misunderstand the meaning of ‘warrantless’, and the piece merely repeats an ACLU press release that seems to make the same mistake.
From the release: The reports that we received document an enormous increase in the Justice Department’s use of pen register and trap and trace surveillance. As the chart below shows, between 2009 and 2011 the combined number of original orders for pen registers and trap and trace devices used to spy on phones increased by 60%, from 23,535 in 2009 to 37,616 in 2011. What are these ‘orders’ the ACLU refers to? Well those would be court orders, otherwise known as warrants. Obtaining a wiretap warrant of any type is intentionally easy. We know that the Bush administration engaged in unlawful intercept on an unprecedented scale in the wake of 9/11. Where the Wiretap Act and WiFi Collide :: #ECPA :: IN RE INNOVATIO IP VENTURES, LLC PATENT LITIGATION.
Is it a violation of the Wiretap Act to intercept data transmitted over a WiFi network? Good question. Recently Google got snared by this question when its Street View Car was reportedly going around mapping all the roads while intercepting data from WiFi networks. A court considering the Google Street View situation was not persuaded that WiFi fit within the definition of a "radio communications. " Um, okay. Recently another court considered the question in a patent litigation case, and had no trouble concluding that WiFi is radio communications, the interception of which does not violate the Wiretap Act.
But first, let's take it from the top. WiFi is a networking protocol that utilizes FCC Part 15 Unlicensed Spectrum. In IN RE INNOVATIO IP VENTURES, LLC PATENT LITIGATION, Dist. According to the Wiretap Act, it is not a violation of the Wiretap Act But what about intercepting other people's communications? According to the Court, in a public park, everyone gets to hear you scream. Sniffing open WiFi networks is not wiretapping, judge says. A federal judge in Illinois has ruled that intercepting traffic on unencrypted WiFi networks is not wiretapping. The decision runs counter to a 2011 decision that suggested Google may have violated the law when its Street View cars intercepted fragments of traffic from open WiFi networks around the country.
The ruling is a preliminary step in a larger patent trolling case. A company called Innovatio IP Ventures has accused various "hotels, coffee shops, restaurants, supermarkets," and other businesses that offer WiFi service to the public of infringing 17 of its patents. Innovatio wanted to use packet sniffing gear to gather WiFi traffic for use as evidence in the case. Federal law makes it illegal to intercept electronic communications, but it includes an important exception. Judge James Holderman ruled that this exception applies to Innovatio's proposed packet sniffing.
Legal scholar Orin Kerr disagrees with Judge Holderman's reasoning. The government listens to Americans, and almost no one cares. By Steven Goldberg In a commentary in The Oregonian on Aug. 19 ("Wondering about wiretaps: On surveillance, feds are listening but not talking"), David Sarasohn notes that a small group of senators, led by Oregon's Ron Wyden, has questioned the implementation of amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) by the National Security Agency. The government's power to listen in on phone calls and emails of U.S. citizens who are outside the U.S., or are communicating with someone outside the U.S., has increased dramatically.
Yet other than these few senators, no one seems to care -- not the NSA, not the Obama administration, not the American people and now, it seems, not the courts. On Aug. 7, the 9th U.S. But, remarkably, AHIF did have proof, as a result of an inadvertent disclosure of a top-secret classified document by the government. More than six years of litigation ensued, with the government first challenging use of the document under the state secrets privilege. Warrantless Wiretap Victims Ask Court to Reconsider Letting Feds Spy Illegally | Threat Level.
A federal appeals court is being asked to reconsider its earlier ruling that the government may spy on Americans’ communications without warrants and without fear of being sued. The August 7 decision by a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the first and only case that successfully challenged President George W. Bush’s once-secret Terrorist Surveillance Program. Jon Eisenberg, the California lawyer who brought the case on behalf of two American attorneys whose conversations were illegally wiretapped without warrants, asked the court to rehear the case with 11 judges, in what is known as an en banc panel. The three-judge appeals court panel ruled the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, adopted in the wake of the President Richard M. So the court dismissed the case and the money damages originally awarded to the two lawyers for a Saudi-based charity. The court has no deadline to decide whether it would reconsider the decision with a larger panel.
Journalist jailed for recording police. Court Decides Warrantless Wiretapping Is OK. Lone Senator Blocks Renewal of NSA Wiretap Program. Excerpt: "The Obama administration wanted a quick, no-questions-asked-or-answered renewal of broad electronic eavesdropping powers that largely legalized the Bush administration's illegal warrantless wiretapping program. ... But Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) has stepped in to stop the bill because the government refuses to say how often the spy powers are being used. " By David Kravets, Wired 15 June 12 he Obama administration wanted a quick, no-questions-asked-or-answered renewal of broad electronic eavesdropping powers that largely legalized the Bush administration’s illegal warrantless wiretapping program. Everything seemed to be going to plan after a Senate committee approved the re-authorization in secret last month. But Sen. Wyden has barred the Senate from a routine vote using a little-used legislative power - called a hold - to block lawmakers from taking a procedural consent vote.
Wyden did the same thing a year ago with the Protect IP Act. How many wiretaps? Ssh, that’s private | Crime Scene. Two senators have been trying to find out how many Americans’ phone calls and e-mails the National Security Agency has intercepted without a warrant, under authority that Congress is now being asked to renew. The NSA doesn’t want to tell them and has come up with a novel explanation for its refusal: It would violate privacy. Not the wiretapping, but revealing, or even estimating, how often it’s been done. It would also cost so much, in time and money, that it would probably interfere with the mission of the NSA, which is mostly classified in any event. This exercise in non-disclosure puts the Obama administration’s stamp on a program that originated with President George W.
Bush. Bush claimed initially that he had inherent constitutional authority to bypass the law, an assertion rejected by a San Francisco federal judge in a case that’s still ongoing. The FISA Amendments Act expires at the end of this year and is up for renewal. 'Secret' Australian Military Bases Revealed. Some wiretaps in Cuyahoga County corruption trial released. CLEVELAND - FBI wiretaps between former Cuyahoga County commissioner political heavyweights took center stage in several county corruption trials. Now, some of those wiretaps have been released. Sex, lies and corruption made up the courtroom drama that has unfolded over the past four years. On one of the wiretaps released between Dimora and contractor Ferris Kleem and a trip to Las Vegas that Kleem bankrolled and Dimora used to steer county contracts to friends.
It was a four day trip in 2008 that included food, gambling money and prostitutes. **WARNING: Wiretaps are graphic and vulgar. "We appreciate your hospitality," Dimora said to Kleem. The Las Vegas trip was again the topic caught on a wiretap between politician J Kevin Kelley and Kleem. Dimora was sentenced to 28 years in prison, Russo to 22 years, and Kleem was sentenced on Friday to 3 years.
Wiretap evidence thrown out in int’l drug ring case. Special wiretap search team to be formed for Turkish PM. How The FBI's Desire To Wiretap Every New Technology Makes Us Less Safe : technology.