Steve Neavling ticklethewire.com New FBI Director James Comey may have to make big cuts to the bureau’s budget because of a government shutdown and last year’s sequester. The ACLU has some ideas about “programs that deserve to get the axe, because they’re ineffective, undermine innocent Americans’ privacy and civil liberties, or simply offend American values.”…
Steve Neavling ticklethewire.com Lawmakers are trying to expand the surveillance powers of intelligence agencies to make spying more seamless when a terror suspect enters the U.S., the Associated Press reports. The idea is to close the gap between NSA and FBI electronic surveillance, which occurs because of different legal standards between the two agencies. That…
Steve Neavling ticklethewire.com When federal judges repeatedly complained about the government misleading them about NSA’s secret domestic surveillance, the Justice Department never sprang into action, the USA Today reports. According to the USA Today, newly released records show the Justice Department’s internal ethics watchdog never investigated allegations of the NSA having surveillance on Americans’ phone…
Bill Piper The Seattle Times Note: Piper is the director of national affairs for the Drug Policy Alliance This year is the 40th anniversary of the Drug Enforcement Administration. Already plagued by scandals, the agency has recently been revealed to be collaborating with the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency to spy on…
Steve Neavling ticklethewire.com A lawsuit alleging that the National Security Agency violated the constitutional rights of U.S. citizens now includes claims against new FBI Director James Comey, Bloomberg reports. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which filed the original lawsuit in July, alleges the NSA, with the help of the Justice Department and FBI, surreptitiously collected information…
Steve Neavling ticklethewire.com The NSA has surreptitiously succeeded in unscrambling encryption that protects people’s privacy online, the New York Times reports. It’s the latest discovery from documents leaked by NSA contractor Edward Snowden. According to the Times, the NSA has been able to undermine coding to access information ranging from personal e-mails to medical records….
Steve Neavling ticklethewire.com Revelations that the DEA uses NSA data to investigate non-terrorism cases against Americans has prompted a coalition of two dozen civil rights groups to call for congressional hearings, Reuters reports. The call for hearings comes after Reuters revealed that the DEA uses telephone surveillance from the NSA to build criminal cases against…
Steve Neavling ticklethewire.com AT&T agreed to provide the DEA with real time access to an unprecedented amount of phone records as part of a recently revealed partnership, The Atlantic reports. Since 2007, the DEA has had access to every call that goes through AT&T’s switchboard, The Atlantic wrote. The phone company even provided four employees…
