NSA - Page 7

France Approves Domestic Spying with ‘Almost No Judicial Oversight’

The Surveillance State faces stiff criticism in the United States. Limiting domestic surveillance, or at least subjecting it to more extensive oversight, is likely to be a prominent feature of several 2016 presidential campaigns. But in France, Parliament just took domestic surveillance up a notch, granting internal intelligence services “their most intrusive domestic spying abilities ever, with almost no judicial oversight,” as The New York Times puts it.

AFP PHOTO / POOL / CHARLES PLATIAU

Cruz Calls for Immediate Passage of USA Freedom Act

In the wake of a ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit on the National Security Agency’s data collection program, Sen. Ted Cruz released a statement calling for immediate passage of the USA Freedom Act.

AP Photo/Andrew Harnik

Jeb Bush Applauds Obama’s NSA Spying Programs

During an interview on Michael Medved’s radio show on Tuesday, Bush heaped praise upon the National Security Agency’s harvesting of cell phone metadata on all Americans, crediting President Obama with expanding the program and maintaining it against fierce criticism from both Left and Right.

AP Photo/J. Pat Carter

Jeb: ‘NSA Being Enhanced’ Best Part of Obama Presidency

On Tuesday’s “Michael Medved Show,” Former Florida Governor and prospective presidential candidate Jeb Bush (R) said that President Obama’s “continuance of the protections of the homeland using the big metadata programs, the NSA being enhanced” has been the best part

J Pat CarterAP

Shots Fired as Driver Rams Gate at NSA Headquarters, At Least One Dead

A vehicle attempted to ram the gate at the headquarters of the National Security Agency in Ft. Meade, Maryland at roughly 9:30 on Monday morning, initiating a confrontation with security forces that ended with shots being fired. At least one uniformed guard appears to have been injured and loaded into an ambulance.

AP Photo/Patrick Semansky

Americans Are Aggressively Pro-Government Spying

We’ve known for years that most Americans support the National Security Agency’s mass surveillance apparatus. Poll after poll shows that about roughly 53 percent of Americans think the government should prioritize investigating terrorism over privacy.

AP Photo/Patrick Semansky

Fugitive ex-U.S. Spy Snowden in Talks on Returning Home

(Reuters) – A Russian lawyer for Edward Snowden said on Tuesday the fugitive former U.S. spy agency contractor who leaked details of the government’s mass surveillance programs was working with American and German lawyers to return home.

AP Photo/dpa,Wolfgang Kumm

Emboldened By Snowden Revelations, China Plays Hardball With U.S. Tech Companies

The New York Times has a depressing article headlined “Mutual Suspicion Mars Tech Trade With China,” whose title buries the lede. The story is more about tech companies suspicious of both China and the Obama Administration. There is a serious information-technology trade war underway, and China is eating Team Obama’s lunch, in part due to continuing fallout from Edward Snowden’s revelations of Obama’s digital surveillance state.

Xinhua/Yao Dawei/AFP

Cyber-War In Syria: How Assad Hacked the Rebellion

Cyber-war is everywhere, most assuredly including the conflicts where physical bullets and bombs are flying. The struggle to topple the Assad regime in Syria, for example, has been “marked by a very active, if only sporadically visible, cyberbattle that has engulfed all sides,” according to a weekend article at the New York Times.

REUTERS/Kacper Pempel/Files

Obama Drops Plan to Store NSA Phone-Snooping Data With Third Parties

The Obama Administration has dropped a plan to outsource the storage of cell-phone metadata to third-party vendors, but the Surveillance State is still very much interested in that data. From a public-relations standpoint, the goal of these post-Snowden reform proposals is to erase the image of phone companies “giving our phone data to the government.” If the companies are storing the data themselves and making it accessible to the government, the public’s comfort level with the process might increase.

smartphone

NSA Hides Illegality in Christmas Document Dump

In response to an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit and the filing of a Freedom of Information Act request, on Christmas Eve, the National Security Agency (NSA) released 12 years of “compliance error” reports that detail its agency’s failures to comply with U.S. law since the 2001 start of the War on Terror. Although the reports are heavily redacted, the sheer volume of supposed “errors” is stunning

Copyright Brooks Kraft/Corbis / APImages