Category Archives: Civil Liberties

For those following along at home, briefs were due today in the rearguard actions relating to allegations of domestic spying by the NSA. After the case was filed, Congress passed a peculiar statute that may have immunized the carriers for illegal wiretapping carried out at government order. The validity of that amendment is currently being litigated, and the supplemental briefs requested by Judge Walker in “In re National Security Agency Telecommunications Records Litigation, Mdl No. 1791” are now available online thanks to James S. Tyre:

• Telecoms' brief
• Government's brief
• EFF's brief

Previous posts at

• Judge Walker's Probing Questions in Telco Immunity Case (Dec. 08)
• EFF Fighting the Good Fight on Wiretap Case Immunity (Nov. 08)

This Cobert Report item, Nailed 'Em – Amtrak Photographer had me in stitches.

Except like so much humor in this area it's not so funny when you think about it.

It's important to get to the bottom of this one.

Threat Level from Wired.com, Whistleblower: NSA Targeted Journalists, Snooped on All U.S. Communications,

Just one day after George W. Bush left office, an NSA whistleblower has revealed that the National Security Agency's warrantless surveillance program targeted U.S. journalists, and vacuumed in all domestic communications of Americans, including, faxes, phone calls and network traffic.

Russell Tice, a former NSA analyst, spoke on Wednesday to MSNBC host Keith Olbermann. Tice has acknowledged in the past being one of the anonymous sources that spoke with The New York Times for its 2005 story on the government's warrantless wiretapping program.

After that story was published, President Bush said in a statement that only people in the United States who were talking with terrorists overseas would have been targeted for surveillance.

But Tice says, in truth, the spying involved a dragnet of all communications, confirming what critics have long assumed.

“The National Security Agency had access to all Americans' communications,” he said. “Faxes, phone calls and their computer communications. … They monitored all communications.”

For those who came in late, the Wikipedia article on Russel Tice makes interesting reading.

This is fairly amazing: Justice Dept. snubs federal judge's ruling.

In a parting shot, the Bush administration's Justice Department shrugged off a San Francisco federal judge's order to make a classified document available to lawyers for an Islamic group challenging the legality of the outgoing president's secret wiretapping program.

National security officials, not judges, must decide whether private citizens – even those with security clearances – are entitled to see classified material, Justice Department lawyers said in a filing Monday night.

…

At the heart of the case is a document that purportedly showed the government monitored Al-Haramain's overseas calls in 2004 before classifying it as a terrorist group. The National Security Agency accidentally sent a copy to Al-Haramain in 2005, but the Islamic group, a charity that has since ceased operations, returned the document at the agency's request and is barred from revealing its contents.

Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker ruled Jan. 5 that Al-Haramain could proceed with its case, saying government statements showed that the group had probably been wiretapped.

…

Government lawyers asked Walker's permission to appeal his ruling to the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco – an appeal they had already filed without his permission Friday – and did not say explicitly that they would withhold the classified document regardless of his orders.

One to watch to see if the new administration takes a different view. The next hearing is tomorrow.

Miami blogger Carlos Miller has the latest dispatch from the war against photography in public places, Amtrak photo contestant arrested by Amtrak police in NYC's Penn Station.

Will the Obama admin calm people down when it comes to seeing terrorists under the bed? It won't be easy.