Bush lawyer tangles with judge over wiretaps / Attorney won't say if Congress can limit president's power
A Bush administration lawyer resisted a San Francisco federal judge's attempts Wednesday to get him to say whether Congress can limit the president's wiretap authority in terrorism and espionage cases, calling the question simplistic.
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Annals of Surveillance: State Secrets: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker
The government had evidently passed along proof of surveillance to the targets of that surveillance, and supplied the Oregon branch of Al Haramain—a suspected terrorist organization—with ammunition to challenge the constitutionality of the warrantless
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Newly Unredacted Documents Confirm Lack Of Oversight Of Military’s Domestic Surveillance Powers | NYCLU
On the heels of an internal report criticizing the FBI for abusing its power to issue National Security Letters (NSLs), newly unredacted documents released today as a result of an American Civil Liberties Union and New York Civil Liberties Union lawsuit r
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ACLU Blog: Quantico circus
Today the Washington Post took us further into the Quantico Circuits and the problems inherent within. The circuits link together the FBI and phone companies and are used during wiretap investigations. Last month, a whistleblower named Babak Pasdar came f
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ShaneHarris.net: Surveillance Standoff
No one should believe that real-time government surveillance of the communications network is an idea born of the 9/11 attacks or that it results solely from the Bush administration's aggrandizing of executive power. The legal arguments that the governmen
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FBI Data Transfers Via Telecoms Questioned - washingtonpost.com (4/8/08)
When FBI investigators probing New York prostitution rings, Boston organized crime or potential terrorist plots anywhere want access to a suspect's telephone contacts, technicians at a telecommunications carrier served with a government order can, with th
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2001 White House Memo O.K.'d Spying, More (4/3/08)
For at least 16 months after the Sept. 11 terror attacks in 2001, the Bush administration believed that the Constitution's protection against unreasonable searches and seizures on U.S. soil didn't apply to its efforts to protect against terrorism.
Th
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Pentagon Is Expected to Close Intelligence Unit - New York Times (4/2/2008)
The Pentagon is expected to shut a controversial intelligence office that has drawn fire from lawmakers and civil liberties groups who charge that it was part of an effort by the Defense Department to expand into domestic spying.
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Michael Mukasey's tearful lies - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com
Mukasey's new claim that FISA's warrant requirements prevented discovery of the 9/11 attacks and caused the deaths of 3,000 Americans is disgusting and reckless, because it's all based on the lie that FISA required a warrant for targeting the "Afghan safe
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SAN FRANCISCO / Mukasey backs Bush efforts on wiretapping (3/28/08)
Before the 2001 terrorist attacks, he said, "we knew that there had been a call from someplace that was known to be a safe house in Afghanistan and we knew that it came to the United States. We didn't know precisely where it went. You've got 3,000 people
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FBI director grilled on use of increase in funding level (4/1/08) -- www.GovernmentExecutive.com
House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey, D-Wisc., wagged a finger at FBI Director Robert Mueller Tuesday, expressing concern with "numerous occasions on which money has been wasted and authority has been abused" at the agency, whose budget has
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ACLU: Military skirting law to spy (4/2/08)
The military is using the FBI to skirt legal restrictions on domestic surveillance to obtain private records of Americans' Internet service providers, financial institutions and telephone companies, the ACLU said Tuesday.
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FBI's $500 Million Wiretap Retrofitting Fund Empty | Threat Level from Wired.com
The FBI has gone through nearly all of its $500 millon budget for making old telephone switches wiretap friendly, but an FBI survey showed that nearly 40 percent of the nation's switches still aren't up to federal wiretapping standards, according to a new
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JURIST - Forum: FISA Fight: The Congressional Battle Over Warrantless Surveillance
The Bush Administration’s warrantless surveillance program has stymied Congress since its revelation in 2005. Should Congress legitimize the program through legislation, essentially gutting existing restrictions on domestic surveillance and concentratin
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Debate and Protest at Spy Program’s Inception - New York Times (3/30/08)
The National Security Agency’s eavesdropping program sparked heated legal concerns and silent protests inside the Bush administration within hours of its adoption in October 2001, according to current and former government officials.
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Groups urge court to end use of national security letters (3/20/08) -- www.GovernmentExecutive.com
A pair of watchdog groups urged a federal appeals court Wednesday to strike down a section of a 22-year-old surveillance law which, under a PATRIOT Act expansion, lets the FBI obtain private records about citizens' communications without court approval as
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NSA shifts to e-mail, Web, data-mining dragnet | The Iconoclast - politics, law, and technology - CNET News.com
Recent evidence suggests that the NSA has been focusing on widespread monitoring of e-mail messages and text messages, recording of Web browsing, and other forms of electronic data-mining, all done without court supervision. Taken together, those activiti
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Julian Sanchez | Wiretapping's True Danger
As the battle over reforms to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act rages in Congress, civil libertarians warn that legislation sought by the White House could enable spying on "ordinary Americans." Others, like Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), counter that
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'State secrets' privilege fuels surveillance bill battle | csmonitor.com (3/18/08)
House Democrats are hunkering down for a long siege with President Bush over his administration's terrorist surveillance program. Democrats are aiming to rein in the White House's power to wiretap without a warrant and assert "state secrecy" in key court
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FBI Found to Misuse Security Letters - washingtonpost.com (3/15/08)
The FBI has increasingly used administrative orders to obtain the personal records of U.S. citizens rather than foreigners implicated in terrorism or counterintelligence investigations, and at least once it relied on such orders to obtain records that a s
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