USA Freedumb Act: The Timing
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I'm going to do a series of more finished posts on the "compromised" version of Jim Sensenbrenner's…
New "Freedom" Equals Less Protection for All But the Telecoms (Working Thread)
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As a number of outlets are reporting, the House Judiciary Committee will mark-up a Manager's Amendment…
Surveillance Democracy in 'Murka: Shitty Immunity or Less Shitty Immunity
As a number of outlets are reporting, on Wednesday, the House Judiciary Committee will mark up a manager's amendment to the USA Freedom Act. On Thursday, the House Intelligence Committee will mark up the shitty Ruppersberger-Rogers bill.
I'll…
Adel Daoud Challenges the Government's "Treatise" against FISA Review
On Saturday, I pointed to a newly unsealed exhibit in the Adel Daoud case suggesting that the case arose out of an unsolicited referral from a redacted entity based in part on a claim Daoud made comments in an extremist forum about using Inspire…
Cuts to CIA Militias in Afghanistan Tiny Fraction of Force Available to Them
Somehow I had missed Kimberly Dozier's recent move from AP to The Daily Beast. In an article that she published last night, it appears that she is trying to move in on Eli Lake's territory there as chief CIA mouthpiece. From the breathless opening,…
Unread Reports as the Big Data Dump? Not Really.
The very same week the President released his breathless report on Big! Data!, the Washington Post has a story criticizing the sheer number and types of reports Congress requires from the Federal bureaucracy.
It started out with a good idea.…
The Suppressed Inspire-Ation for the Adel Daoud Investigation
According to an FBI 302 recently unsealed in the Adel Daoud case (see this post for background on Daoud), an FBI undercover counterterrorism team first targeted the 18-year old on May 10, 2012 in response to "unsolicited information" from an…
"Facts Matter" Said NSA Yay-Man Michael Hayden Who Told Serial Lies about the Phone Dragnet
I'm not sure if you saw last night's Munk Debate pitting Glenn Greenwald and Alexis Ohanian against Michael Hayden and Alan Dershowitz. I did a whole slew of fact checking and mockery on twitter last night.
But I wanted to pay particular…
Confirmed: Obama's Dragnet "Fix" Isn't About Us
After Obama rolled out his phone dragnet fix, I noted the real reason he was doing it was not so much a concern for civil liberties, but rather a recognition that by outsourcing the data to providers, it would solve the legal-technical problems…
The Qazi Brothers: The Craziest Bit of Blatant Parallel Construction to Protect FAA
On Monday, the government submitted unclassified and classified motions asking Magistrate Judge John O'Sullivan to reconsider his order that the government defend the constitutionality of the FISA Amendments Act in their case against Raees…
The NSA's Retroactive Discovery of Tamerlan Tsarnaev
In the days after the Boston Marathon attack last year, NSA made some noise about expanding its domestic surveillance so as to prevent a similar attack.
But in recent days, we've gotten a lot of hints that NSA may have just missed Tamerlan…
The Promise [sic] of Big Data
22 pages into the White House report on Big Data, this paragraph appears:
Government keeps the peace. It makes sure our food is safe to eat. It keeps our air and water clean. The laws and regulations it promulgates order economic and political…
The Triage Document
Accompanying a new story on GCHQ/NSA cooperation yesterday, the Intercept released one of the most revealing documents about NSA spying yet. It describes efforts to use Identifier Scoreboard to triage leads such that analysts spend manual time…
A 2nd Amendment Right to Bear Drones
The FAA is cranky that a journalist took footage of the tornado in Arkansas the other day with a drone.
That footage, taken by storm chaser and photographer Brian Emfinger on Sunday, is now being investigated by federal aviation officials,…
3 Different Inspectors General Say There Is More, Secret, Information on the Tsarnaev Brothers' Mother
The Senate Homeland Security Committee is having a hearing on the joint IG Report on the Boston Marathon attack.
Most of the questions will be in closed session, including one Tom Coburn plans to ask about whether the government tracks travel…
US, UK Just Can't Stop Hiding Prisoners in Afghanistan
It is a tradition that goes back to the very start of the Great War on Terror. Secret detention of prisoners has been both a central feature of the US approach to its response to terrorism and a rallying point for the creation of new enemies.…
The IP Police Armed with Internet Vulnerabilities
The White House Cybersecurity Coordinator, Michael Daniel, has a post purporting to lay out "established principles" on when the Administration would and would not disclose software and hardware vulnerabilities.
I've got a more thorough…
Torture for US, Retire With Impunity
Torturing on behalf of the United States appears to be a career move that results in a comfortable lifestyle after moving on from government service. Jose Rodriguez, who both ordered up torture and then personally destroyed video evidence…
US Moves to Catch Horses Just After They Escape the Barn
After Zine El Abidine Ben Ali was overthrown, Tunisians started looking for the money he looted from Tunisia and discovered much of it was in our allies' pockets.
After Hosni Mubarak was overthrown, the US started looking around for the…
The Verizon Publicity Stunt, Mosaic Theory, and Collective Fourth Amendment Rights
On Friday, I Con the Record revealed that a telecom -- Ellen Nakashima confirms it was Verizon -- asked the FISA Court to make sure its January 3 order authorizing the phone dragnet had considered Judge Richard Leon's December 16 decision that…