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Retired US official and wife admit spying for Cuba

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

BBC News - By Bbc - Nov. 20 (News) - A retired US state department official and his wife have admitted spying for Cuba for nearly three decades.

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Senators Press Holder to Declassify Key Facts about Patriot Act

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Salem-News.com - Nov. 19 (News Report) - We believe that the information we referenced in those paragraphs – specifically about the use of section 215 – is essential to understanding the full scope of the PATRIOT Act, which is about to be debated in Congress. As we said in June, if you have concerns about declassifying the specific language contained in our letter, we ask that you work with us to find language that conveys enough information to allow for an informed public debate on the PATRIOT Act’s reauthorization

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Obama administration seeks to block wiretap suit

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Associated Press - By Devlin Barrett - Oct. 31 (News Report) - The Justice Department invoked the state secrets privilege Friday to try to stop a lawsuit over Bush-era wiretapping -- the first time the Obama administration has done so under its new policy on such cases. Attorney General Eric Holder announced the decision in a California lawsuit challenging the warrantless wiretapping program begun after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

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Obama to Set Higher Bar For Keeping State Secrets

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By Carrie Johnson - Sep. 23 (News Report) - The Obama administration will announce a new policy Wednesday making it much more difficult for the government to claim that it is protecting state secrets when it hides details of sensitive national security strategies such as rendition and warrantless eavesdropping, according to two senior Justice Department officials.

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Declassified Docs Reveal Military Operative Spied on WA Peace Groups, Activist Friends Stunned

Tue, 28 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Democracy Now - By ANJALI KAMAT, Amy Goodman, - Jul. 28 (News Report) - Newly declassified documents reveal that an active member of Students for a Democratic Society and Port Militarization Resistance in Washington state was actually an informant for the US military. The man everyone knew as “John Jacob” was in fact John Towery, a member of the Force Protection Service at Fort Lewis. The military’s role in the spying raises questions about possibly illegal activity. The Posse Comitatus law bars the use of the armed forces for law enforcement inside the United States.

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Obama’s Military Is Spying on U.S. Peace Groups

Tue, 28 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

TruthDig - By Amy Goodman - Jul. 28 (News Report) - Anti-war activists in Olympia, Wash., have exposed Army spying and infiltration of their groups, as well as intelligence gathering by the Air Force, the federal Capitol Police and the Coast Guard. The infiltration appears to be in direct violation of the Posse Comitatus Act preventing U.S. military deployment for domestic law enforcement and may strengthen congressional demands for a full-scale investigation of U.S. intelligence activities, like the Church Committee hearings of the 1970s.

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UAE Blackberry update was spyware

Tue, 21 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

BBC News - By Ben Thompson - Jul. 21 (News Report) - A software update promoted by United Arab Emirates telecoms firm Etisalat appears to have been surveillance software.

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Spy Memo Author to America: No Apologies for Tapping You

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Wired - By Kim Zetter - Jul. 17 (News Report) - John Yoo, the beleaguered former Justice Department official, hits back at a report slamming the memos he wrote justifying the Bush administration's warrantless surveillance programs.

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Report Says Wiretaps Got Too Little Legal Review

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Eric Lichtbau, James Risen - Jul. 11 (News Report) - The federal report also says that the effectiveness of the warrantless surveillance program approved by President George W. Bush after the Sept. 11 attacks was unclear.

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Report: Too few officials knew of surveillance

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Associated Press - By Pamela Hess - Jul. 11 (News Report) - Not enough relevant officials were aware of the size and depth of an unprecedented surveillance program started under President George W. Bush, let alone signed off on it, a team of federal inspectors general found.

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US tried to gag Binyam Mohamed with plea bargain

Fri, 27 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Daily Telegraph - By Nick Allen - Mar. 27 (News Report) - He would also have been required to abandon a legal attempt to obtain documents which he believed could prove his innocence. Clive Stafford Smith, Mr Mohamed's lawyer, said: "This reflects the way the US government has consistently tried to cover up the truth of Binyam Mohamed's torture.

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Bush Adm. Weighed Restricting 1st Amendment

Wed, 04 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Newsweek - By Michael Isikoff - Mar. 04 (News Report) - In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the Justice Department secretly gave the green light for the U.S. military to attack apartment buildings and office complexes inside the United States, deploy high-tech surveillance against U.S. citizens and potentially suspend First Amendment freedom-of-the-press rights in order to combat the terror threat, according to a memo released Monday.

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Requiem for Purity

Thu, 08 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Citizen News Service - By Shobha Shukla - Jan. 08 (Special Report) - The shocking news of the alleged gruesome death of Dr Iffat Kamal has benumbed my senses. She, a doctor by profession, was allegedly assaulted by her husband in her house at Dundee, Scotland on 10 December 2008, and after battling for ten days, succumbed to her injuries. That she, a professionally qualified and financially independent person became a prey of the brutality of her husband, has once again put a question mark on all the so called shining progress made by Indian women in recent times.

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Total Information Awareness

Thu, 11 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

New Republic - By James Grimmelmann - Dec. 11 (News Analysis) - Barack Obama deployed a campaign database that made the GOP's data-gathering efforts look like the work of amateurs.

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Spying on pacifists, environmentalists and nuns

Tue, 09 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Los Angeles Times - By Bob Drogin - Dec. 09 (News Report) - Maryland officials now concede that, based on information gathered by "Lucy" and others, state police wrongly listed at least 53 Americans as terrorists in a criminal intelligence database -- and shared some information about them with half a dozen state and federal agencies, including the National Security Agency.

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Intelligence Policy to Stay Largely Intact

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Wall Street Journal - By Siobhan Gorman - Nov. 11 (News Report) - President-elect Barack Obama is unlikely to radically overhaul controversial Bush administration intelligence policies, advisers say, an approach that is almost certain to create tension within the Democratic Party.

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What Did Bush Tell Gonzales?

Sat, 27 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Atlantic Monthly - By Murray Waas - Sep. 27 (Special Report) - Although this president is famously known for rarely becoming immersed in the details--even on the issues he cares the most about--Gonzales has painted a picture of Bush as being very much involved when it came to his administration's surveillance program.

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Palin E-Mail Hacker Says It Was Easy

Thu, 18 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Wired - By Kim Zetter - Sep. 18 (News Report) - A person claiming to be the hacker who obtained access to Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's private Yahoo e-mail on Tuesday has posted a supposed first-person account of the hack, revealing the relatively simple steps he says he took to crack the private e-mail of the Republican vice-presidential candidate. The story was briefly posted Wednesday to the 4chan forum where the hack first surfaced. Bloggers have connected the handle of the poster, "Rubico," to an e-mail address, and tentatively identified the owner as a college student in Tennessee.

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New FBI Guidelines: More COINTELPRO?

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0700

The Writing Corner - By Beth Wellington - Sep. 04 (Special Report) - [Disclosure: author is a NewsTrust staff member. The portion quoting Jeanne Roberts was added after her review and hence there is no reference to her relationship to the piece in her review.] At 9:30 a.m. on September 17, the Senate Judiciary Committee will be hearing from Robert S. Mueller, III, Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the wake of complaints. I wait, wondering, what, if anything, will come out of this hearing--how much further will we erode our Constitution and how much further will we descend from our proclamation in our national anthem that we live in the "Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave."

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Why CIA Veterans Are Scared of McCain

Sat, 30 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By Laura Rozen - Aug. 30 (Special Report) - Many current and former US spies expect a McCain administration guided by neoconservatives to treat them with hostility and mistrust. They also say McCain would likely weaken the CIA by giving broad new spying authorities to the Pentagon, which CIA officials believe is more amenable to giving policymakers the intelligence they want, while being subject to less congressional oversight.

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FBI Seeks Sweeping New Powers

Sat, 23 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0700

The Nation - By Aziz Huq - Aug. 23 (Special Report) - In June, the bureau issued guidance to local law enforcement agencies about "suspicious activity" to be recorded and shared with federal authorities. The list includes First Amendment-protected activities, such as expressing "extremist views" and "affiliation" with "extremist organizations." Proposed new regulations would loosen limits on federal-state information sharing by eliminating the requirement that agencies state a reason to know information.

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Flaws Found In Watch List For Terrorists

Fri, 22 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Wall Street Journal - By Siobhan Gorman - Aug. 22 (News Report) - The government's main terrorist-watch-list system is hobbled by technology challenges, and the $500 million program designed to upgrade it is on the verge of collapse, according to a preliminary congressional investigation.

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Citizens' U.S. Border Crossings Tracked

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By Ellen Nakashima - Aug. 20 (News Report) - The federal government has been using its system of border checkpoints to greatly expand a database on travelers entering the country by collecting information on all U.S. citizens crossing by land, compiling data that will be stored for 15 years and may be used in criminal and intelligence investigations.

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U.S. May Ease Police Spy Rules

Sat, 16 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By Spencer S. Hsu, Carrie Johnson - Aug. 16 (News Report) - Quietly unveiled late last month, the proposal is part of a flurry of domestic intelligence changes issued and planned by the Bush administration in its waning months. They include a recent executive order that guides the reorganization of federal spy agencies and a pending Justice Department overhaul of FBI procedures for gathering intelligence and investigating terrorism cases within U.S. borders. Taken together, critics in Congress and elsewhere say, the moves are intended to lock in policies for Bush's successor and to enshrine controversial post-Sept. 11 approaches that some say have fed the greatest expansion of executive authority since the Watergate era.

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Key events in the anthrax episode

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Associated Press - Aug. 07 (News Report) - 2006: March 27: The Supreme Court declines to block Hatfill's suit against the Times. Oct. 23: A federal judge orders the Times to disclose a columnist's confidential sources as part of a libel lawsuit filed over the newspaper's coverage of the 2001 anthrax attacks. Dec. 2: The Times asks a federal judge to dismiss Hatfill's lawsuit. ___

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