Thursday, August 09, 2007
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Wednesday, July 11, 2007
FBI Would Skirt the Law With Proposed Phone Record Program, Experts Say
ABC News reports, “A proposed new FBI program would skirt federal laws by paying private companies to hold millions of phone and Internet records which the bureau is barred from keeping itself, experts say.” “The $5 million project would apparently pay private firms to store at least two years' worth of telephone and Internet activity by millions of Americans, few of whom would ever be considered a suspect in any terrorism, intelligence or criminal matter,” explains the report.
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
New York Plans Surveillance Veil for Downtown
The New York Times reports, “By the end of this year, police officials say, more than 100 cameras will have begun monitoring cars moving through Lower Manhattan, the beginning phase of a London-style surveillance system that would be the first in the United States.” According to the report, “The Lower Manhattan Security Initiative, as the plan is called, will resemble London’s so-called Ring of Steel, an extensive web of cameras and roadblocks designed to detect, track and deter terrorists.”
Court Supports Bush in Wiretap Suit
The Los Angeles Times reports, “A federal appeals court on Friday handed the Bush administration a major victory, ruling that plaintiffs who had challenged its domestic spying program did not have legal standing to do so.” According to the report, “The 2-1 decision by the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati sent the case back to a judge in Detroit, who last year ruled the program unconstitutional. The panel ordered U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor to dismiss the case, but it did not rule on the program's legality.”
Judges OK Warrantless Monitoring Of Web Use
“Federal agents do not need a search warrant to monitor a suspect's computer use and determine the e-mail addresses and Web pages the suspect is contacting, a federal appeals court ruled Friday.” The San Francisco Chronicle reports, “In a drug case from San Diego County, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco likened computer surveillance to the ‘pen register’ devices that officers use to pinpoint the phone numbers a suspect dials, without listening to the phone calls themselves.”
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
Files on Illegal Spying Show C.I.A. Skeletons From Cold War
The New York Times reports, “Long-secret documents released Tuesday provide new details about how the Central Intelligence Agency illegally spied on Americans decades ago, including trying to bug a Las Vegas hotel room for evidence of infidelity and tracking down an expert lock-picker for a Watergate conspirator.” “Known inside the agency as the ‘family jewels,’” the Times explains, “the 702 pages of documents catalog domestic wiretapping operations, failed assassination plots, mind-control experiments and spying on journalists from the early years of the C.I.A.”
Thursday, June 14, 2007
FBI Finds It Frequently Overstepped in Collecting Data
The Washington Post reports, “An internal FBI audit has found that the bureau potentially violated the law or agency rules more than 1,000 times while collecting data about domestic phone calls, e-mails and financial transactions in recent years, far more than was documented in a Justice Department report in March that ignited bipartisan congressional criticism.” According to the report, “The new audit covers just 10 percent of the bureau's national security investigations since 2002, and so the mistakes in the FBI's domestic surveillance efforts probably number several thousand, bureau officials said in interviews.”
FBI Terror Watch List 'Out of Control'
ABC News reports, “A terrorist watch list compiled by the FBI has apparently swelled to include more than half a million names.” According to the report, “A spokesman for the interagency National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), which maintains the government's list of all suspected terrorists with links to international organizations, said they had 465,000 names covering 350,000 individuals.”
Friday, June 08, 2007
Democrats May Subpoena N.S.A. Documents
“Senior House Democrats threatened Thursday to issue subpoenas to obtain secret legal opinions and other documents from the Justice Department related to the National Security Agency’s domestic wiretapping program,” reports The New York Times. “If the Democrats take that step,” according to the report, “it would mark the most aggressive action yet by Congress in its oversight of the wiretapping program and could set the stage for a constitutional showdown over the separation of powers.”
Thursday, June 07, 2007
Official: Cheney Urged Wiretaps
The Washington Post reports that a former senior Justice official told senators yesterday that “Vice President Cheney told Justice Department officials that he disagreed with their objections to a secret surveillance program during a high-level White House meeting in March 2004.” According to the report, “The meeting came one day before White House officials tried to get approval for the same program from then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, who lay recovering from surgery in a hospital, according to former deputy attorney general James B. Comey.”
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