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Judge: FBI Raid on Lawmaker's Office Legal

An FBI raid on a Louisiana congressman's Capitol Hill office was legal, a federal judge ruled Monday.

Chief U.S. District Judge Thomas F. Hogan said members of Congress are not above the law. He rejected requests from lawmakers and Democratic Rep. William Jefferson to return material seized by the FBI in a May 20-21 search of Jefferson's office.

Breitbart, July 10, 2006

CIA has tracked bank transactions in terror hunt

The US Treasury Secretary, John Snow, said a programme that tracks millions of financial transactions is not an invasion of Americans' privacy but "government at its best" and vital to anti-terrorism operations.

Mr Snow said yesterday that the programme, run by the CIA and overseen by the Treasury Department, was "responsible government. It's effective government. It's government that works. It's entirely consistent with democratic values, with our best legal traditions."

The Independent (online), July 23, 2006

N.Y. Times editor: I'd publish it again

"This was a case where clearly the terrorists or the people who finance terrorism know quite well, because the Treasury Department and the White House have talked openly about it, that they monitor international banking transactions. It's not news to the terrorists."

Source: WorldNetDaily, July 2, 2006

FBI Shadowed Playwright Arthur Miller

In the summer of 1956, playwright Arthur Miller married screen idol Marilyn Monroe in a Jewish ceremony, an event of high-level gossip for much of the world and of high-level curiosity for the U.S. government.

"An anonymous telephone call" has been placed to the New York Daily News, an FBI report notes at the time. The caller stated that the "religious" wedding _ Miller was Jewish and Monroe had converted _ was an obvious "cover up" for Miller, who "had been and still was a member of the CP (Communist Party) and was their cultural front man." Monroe also "had drifted into the Communist Party orbit."

Source: Breitbart, June 20, 2006

Police got phone data from brokers

Numerous federal and local law enforcement agencies have bypassed subpoenas and warrants designed to protect civil liberties and gathered Americans' personal telephone records from private-sector data brokers.

These brokers, many of whom advertise aggressively on the Internet, have gotten into customer accounts online, tricked phone companies into revealing information and even acknowledged that their practices violate laws, according to documents gathered by congressional investigators and provided to The Associated Press.

Source: Yahoo News, June 20, 2006

Government Increasingly Turning to Data Mining

The Pentagon pays a private company to compile data on teenagers it can recruit to the military. The Homeland Security Department buys consumer information to help screen people at borders and detect immigration fraud.

Source: The Washington Post (online), June 15, 2006

High Court Backs Police No-Knock Searches

The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that police armed with a warrant can barge into homes and seize evidence even if they don't knock, a huge government victory that was decided by President Bush's new justices.

Source: My Way, June 15, 2006

Pentagon's NSA sets sights on social-network websites

If the prospect of being asked to explain some embarrassing detail about their personal lives by a prospective employer or a future romantic interest isn't enough to deter users of social-networking websites like MySpace.com from posting it online, perhaps this will – the National Security Agency is funding research into mass harvesting what people post about themselves on the Internet.

Source: WorldNetDaily, June 10, 2006

U.S. Court Backs Government Broadband Wiretap Access

A U.S. appeals court Friday upheld the government's authority to force high-speed Internet service providers to give law enforcement authorities access for surveillance purposes.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit rejected a petition aimed at overturning a decision by regulators requiring facilities-based broadband providers and those that offer Internet telephone service to comply with U.S. wiretap laws.

Source: Reuters (online), June 9, 2006

FBI wants internet records kept two years

The Federal Bureau of Investigation wants US internet providers to retain web address records for up to two years to aid investigations into terrorism and pornography, a source familiar with the matter said today.

Source: Stuff (New Zealand), June 2, 2006

National Guard units to be armed, close to border

The head of the U.S. National Guard surprised Border Patrol officials, declaring some of the troops he will send to assist them will work in close proximity to the border, be armed and allowed to fire their weapons if necessary.

Source: WorldNetDaily, May 27, 2006

White House invokes secrets privilege in eavesdropping cases

The Bush administration has asked federal judges in New York and Michigan to dismiss a pair of lawsuits filed over the National Security Agency's domestic eavesdropping program, saying litigating them would jeopardize state secrets.

Source: USAToday (online), May 27, 2006

Suit Seeks to Stop Phone Records Release

A lawsuit filed Monday on behalf of author Studs Terkel and other professionals seeks to stop AT&T from giving customer phone records to the National Security Agency without a court order.

Source: Breitbart, May 22, 2006

FBI Secret Probes: 3,501 Targets in the U.S.

The Department of Justice says it secretly sought phone records and other documents of 3,501 people last year under a provision of the Patriot Act that does not require judicial oversight.

Source: ABC News The Blotter (online), May 16, 2006

BellSouth Says It Gave NSA No Call Records

BellSouth Corp. said Monday its "thorough review" found no indication it gave telephone records to the National Security Agency as part of a federal anti-terrorism surveillance program.

A report last week by USA Today identified BellSouth, along with AT&T Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc., as companies that had complied with an NSA request to turn over tens of millions of customer phone records after the 2001 terror attacks.

Source: Breitbart, May 15, 2006

FBI Rebuffed on Reporter's Files

The family of the late newspaper columnist Jack Anderson yesterday rejected a request by the FBI to turn over 50 years of files to agents who want to look for evidence in the prosecution of two pro-Israel lobbyists, as well as any classified documents Anderson had collected.

Source: The Washington Post (online), April 19, 2006

AT&T, S.F. Group Battle Over White House Wiretaps

AT&T Inc. and an Internet advocacy group are waging in federal court a privacy battle that could expose the reach of the Bush administration's secretive domestic wiretapping program.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation said it obtained documents from a former AT&T technician showing that the National Security Agency is capable of monitoring all communications on AT&T's network.

Source: CBS5 San Francisco, April 13, 2006

Whistle-Blower Outs NSA Spy Room

AT&T provided National Security Agency eavesdroppers with full access to its customers' phone calls, and shunted its customers' internet traffic to data-mining equipment installed in a secret room in its San Francisco switching center, according to a former AT&T worker cooperating in the Electronic Frontier Foundation's lawsuit against the company.

Source: Wired, April 7, 2006

Army Has Authority to Spy on Americans

“Contrary to popular belief, there is no absolute ban on [military] intelligence components collecting U.S. person information,” the U.S.Army’s top intelligence officer said in a 2001 memo that surfaced Tuesday.

CQ Homeland Security, January 30, 2006

Spy Agency Data After Sept. 11 Led F.B.I. to Dead Ends

In the anxious months after the Sept. 11 attacks, the National Security Agency began sending a steady stream of telephone numbers, e-mail addresses and names to the F.B.I. in search of terrorists. The stream soon became a flood, requiring hundreds of agents to check out thousands of tips a month.

Source: The New York Times (online), January 17, 2005

ACLU Sues to Stop Domestic Spy Program

Civil liberties groups filed lawsuits in two cities Tuesday seeking to block President Bush's domestic eavesdropping program, arguing the electronic surveillance of American citizens was unconstitutional.

Source: MyWay, January 17, 2005

Secret Service took thousands of phone records

Project after Oklahoma City tragedy part of Nichols, McVeigh probe

A series of internal documents from the U.S. Secret Service obtained by the McCutain Daily Gazette provide details of a project involving the transfer of thousands of telephone and bank records to a government database with the help of U.S. telephone and financial company executives.

Source: WorldNetDaily, January 5, 2006

Bush Contends Spying Program Vital, Legal

President Bush strongly defended his domestic spying program on Sunday, calling it legal as well as vital to thwarting terrorist attacks, and contended the leak making it public had caused "great harm to the nation."

Source: Breitbart, January 1, 2006

Cookies Are Recipe for Controversy at NSA

The National Security Agency has been inserting files known as cookies onto the computers of individuals who visit the NSA Web site, a violation of federal rules meant to protect privacy.

Source: Sce-Tec Today, December 29, 2005

Powell: 'Nothing Wrong' With Eavesdropping

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell on Sunday supported government eavesdropping to prevent terrorism but said a major controversy over presidential powers could have been avoided by obtaining court warrants. Powell said that when he was in the Cabinet, he was not told that President Bush authorized a warrantless National Security Agency surveillance operation after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

Source: Breitbart, December 25, 2005

Officials Want to Expand Review of Domestic Spying

Congressional officials said Saturday that they wanted to investigate the disclosure that the National Security Agency had gained access to some of the country's main telephone arteries to glean data on possible terrorists.

Source: New York Times (online), December 25, 2005

Secret court modified wiretap requests

Government records show that the administration was encountering unprecedented second-guessing by the secret federal surveillance court when President Bush decided to bypass the panel and order surveillance of U.S.-based terror suspects without the court's approval.

Source: Seattle Pi, December 24, 2005

NSA spy program broader than Bush admitted

The volume of information gathered from telephone and Internet communications by the National Security Agency without court-approved warrants was much larger than the White House has acknowledged, The New York Times reported Saturday.

Source: MSNBC, December 24, 2005

Daschle: Congress Didn't OK Spying Authority

The use of warrantless wiretaps on American citizens was never discussed when Congress authorized the White House to use force against al-Qaida after the Sept. 11 attacks, says former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle. In an article printed Friday on the op-ed page of The Washington Post, Daschle also wrote that Congress explicitly denied a White House request for war-making authority in the United States.

Source: Breitbart, December 23, 2005

U.S. has been secretly testing for radiation

A classified radiation monitoring program, conducted without warrants, has targeted private U.S. property in an effort to prevent an al-Qaida attack, federal law enforcement officials confirmed Friday.

Source: MSNBC, December 23, 2005

Spying Program Snared U.S. Calls

A surveillance program approved by President Bush to conduct eavesdropping without warrants has captured what are purely domestic communications in some cases, despite a requirement by the White House that one end of the intercepted conversations take place on foreign soil, officials say.

Source: New York Times (online), December 21, 2005

Cheney Defends Presidential Powers

Vice President Dick Cheney on Tuesday vigorously defended the Bush administration's use of secret domestic spying and efforts to expand presidential powers, saying "it's not an accident that we haven't been hit in four years."

Source: My Way, December 20, 2005

Bush Acknowledges Approving Eavesdropping

President Bush said Saturday he has no intention of stopping his personal authorizations of a post-Sept. 11 secret eavesdropping program in the U.S., lashing out at those involved in revealing it while defending it as crucial to preventing future attacks.

Source: Forbes (online), December 17, 2005

White House secretly OK'd eavesdropping on Americans

Months after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying, according to government officials.

Source: Deseret Morning News (online), December 16, 2005

Is the Pentagon spying on Americans?

A year ago, at a Quaker Meeting House in Lake Worth, Fla., a small group of activists met to plan a protest of military recruiting at local high schools. What they didn't know was that their meeting had come to the attention of the U.S. military.

A secret 400-page Defense Department document obtained by NBC News lists the Lake Worth meeting as a “threat” and one of more than 1,500 “suspicious incidents” across the country over a recent 10-month period.

Source: MSNBC, December 14, 2005

Air Marshals to Expand Their Mission

Federal air marshals are expanding their work beyond airplanes, launching counterterror surveillance at train stations and other mass transit facilities in a three-day test program.

Source: My Way, December 14, 2005

Rarely used spy satellite monitored Elohim City

The McCurtain Daily Gazette has obtained U.S. Secret Service (USSS) documents revealing for the first time references to the use of a top-secret military satellite by federal investigators in the days after the Oklahoma City bombing.

According to these documents a spy satellite was tasked to gather intelligence at Elohim City * a paramilitary, Christian Identity compound in eastern Oklahoma near Muldrow.

McCurtain Daily Gazette (Oklahoma), December 14, 2005

Pentagon Expanding Its Domestic Surveillance Activity

The Defense Department has expanded its programs aimed at gathering and analyzing intelligence within the United States, creating new agencies, adding personnel and seeking additional legal authority for domestic security activities in the post-9/11 world.

The moves have taken place on several fronts. The White House is considering expanding the power of a little-known Pentagon agency called the Counterintelligence Field Activity, or CIFA, which was created three years ago. The proposal, made by a presidential commission, would transform CIFA from an office that coordinates Pentagon security efforts -- including protecting military facilities from attack -- to one that also has authority to investigate crimes within the United States such as treason, foreign or terrorist sabotage or even economic espionage.

Source: The Washington Post (online), November 27, 2005

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