Monday, February 22, 2010
Former Secretary of State Alexander Haig is now posthumously being recast as the quintessential soldier-patriot. The truth is, he had a dark side: wiretapping for Richard Nixon, facilitating the operations of a military spy ring that stole classified documents from the White House, sabotaging peace negotiations over Vietnam and détente with the USSR, and unduly hastening Nixon’s [...]
“Nothing has stopped the dragnet,” said Cindy Cohn, the EFF’s legal director, whose case had grown to include all of the nation’s leading internet service providers.
The Bush administration and now the Obama administration have neither admitted nor denied the allegations. Instead, they have declared the issue a state secret — one that would undermine the [...]
Filed in News Blurbs
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Also tagged ATT, Big Brother, Congress, Courts, EFF, Intelligence, Law, Mark Klein, Privacy, Retroactive Immunity, Surveillance, Telecoms, TSP, Vaughn Walker
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When it comes to Obama transparency, Electronic Frontier Foundation privacy attorney Kurt Opsahl points out that the chief executive told the American public one thing Wednesday night and a federal appeals court another just a few weeks ago.
The issue at hand surrounds lobbying. “It’s time to require lobbyists to disclose each contact they make on [...]
Filed in News Blurbs
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Also tagged Barack Obama, Courts, DOJ, EFF, Kurt Opsahl, Lobbyists, Retroactive Immunity, Surveillance, Telecoms, Transparency, Warrantless Wiretapping
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You read that right. U.S. District Court Chief Judge Vaughn Walker has dismissed (.pdf) a lawsuit in San Francisco’s federal courthouse against the U.S. government, stating in his ruling that the plaintiffs’ complaint that they were illegally monitored under the Bush Administration’s warrantless wiretap program is shared by too many other American citizens.
At issue is [...]
Thursday, January 21, 2010
The FBI and telecom companies collaborated to routinely violate federal wiretapping laws for four years, as agents got access to reporters’ and citizens’ phone records using fake emergency declarations or simply asking for them.
The Justice Department Inspector General’s internal audit, released Wednesday, harshly criticized how the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Communications Analysis Unit — a counterterrorism [...]
Filed in News Blurbs
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Also tagged Crime, DOJ, Electronic Communications Protection Act, Espionage, FBI, Inspector General, Intelligence, Law, Phone Records, Spying, Surveillance, Telecoms
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Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Surely, the U.S. Congress that is now putting its foot down on private companies cooperating with such abusive spying elsewhere would react very angrily in the face of revelations that it was being done here. Actually, in the face of such revelations less than two years ago, they ended up on a very bipartisan basis [...]
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
Want to know how much phone companies and internet service providers charge to funnel your private communications or records to U.S. law enforcement and spy agencies?
That’s the question muckraker and Indiana University graduate student Christopher Soghoian asked all agencies within the Department of Justice, under a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed a few [...]
Filed in News Blurbs, Technology
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Also tagged Christopher Soghoian, Comcast, Cox Communications, DOJ, FOIA, ISPs, Phone Records, Privacy, Spying, Surveillance, Telecoms, Verizon, Yahoo
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Sunday, November 22, 2009
Former DEA agent Richard Horn, with the help of his attorney, former federal prosecutor Brian Leighton, recently brought the mighty CIA to its knees.
For some 15 years, Horn waged a legal battle in federal court against a former CIA official whom Horn alleged had illegally eavesdropped on him as part of a CIA- and State [...]
Filed in News Blurbs
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Also tagged Arthur Brown, Brian Leighton, Burma, CIA, Courts, DEA, Drug Trafficking, Franklin Huddle, George Tenet, Intelligence, John Rizzo, Myanmar, National Clandestine Service, NCS, Richard Horn, Robert Eatinger, Royce Lamberth, State Secrets Privilege
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Wednesday, November 11, 2009
The U.S. has agreed to pay $3 million to a former government worker who accused officials with the CIA and State Department of spying on him with a bugged coffee table.
Rather than comply with a court order to provide lawyers in the case with what the U.S. government says is classified information, the government has [...]
Filed in News Blurbs
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Also tagged Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation v Obama, Burma, CIA, Courts, DOJ, Horn v Huddle, Law, Myanmar, Richard Horn, State Department, State Secrets Privilege
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Saturday, November 7, 2009
Imagine The Sopranos, The Wire and Gordon Gekko’s Wall Street all rolled into one. You don’t have to: the FBI has just broken one of the largest-ever insider dealing rings in Wall Street. It wire-tapped its way into a seedy world of secret tips, kickbacks and disposable, pre-paid mobile phones. A network including staff of [...]
Filed in News Blurbs
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Also tagged Ethics, FBI, Fraud, Galleon Group, Hedge Funds, IBM, Insider Trading, Intel, Law, Raj Rajaratnam, Stock Market, Wall Street, Zvi Goffer
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Saturday, October 17, 2009
The Obama administration may be on the verge of a major concession in a long-running legal battle over records about so-called telecom immunity.
An email obtained by POLITICO shows that the Obama Administration is preparing for the possible release of some details of the Bush Administration’s lobbying for legislation giving telecommunications companies immunity from lawsuits over [...]
Filed in News Blurbs
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Also tagged Congress, Corporatism, DOJ, EFF, Elena Kagan, FOIA, Immunity, Intelligence, Irv Nathan, Secrecy, Surveillance, Telecoms, White House
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Saturday, October 17, 2009
On a remote edge of Utah’s dry and arid high desert, where temperatures often zoom past 100 degrees, hard-hatted construction workers with top-secret clearances are preparing to build what may become America’s equivalent of Jorge Luis Borges’s “Library of Babel,” a place where the collection of information is both infinite and at the same time [...]
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Four Democratic U.S. senators will introduce a bill to repeal a provision protecting telecommunications carriers from lawsuits targeting their assistance to a controversial U.S. National Security Agency surveillance program.
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The new legislation, called the Retroactive Immunity Repeal Act, would allow lawsuits against telecom providers such as AT&T to resume.
via Senators want to end telecom immunity for [...]
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