Fourth Amendment

See the following -

In Secret, Court Vastly Broadens Powers Of N.S.A.

Eric Lichtblau | New York Times | July 6, 2013

In more than a dozen classified rulings, the nation’s surveillance court has created a secret body of law giving the National Security Agency the power to amass vast collections of data on Americans while pursuing not only terrorism suspects, but also people possibly involved in nuclear proliferation, espionage and cyberattacks [...]. Read More »

In Secret, Court Vastly Broadens Powers Of N.S.A.

Eric Lichtblau | The New York Times | July 6, 2013

In more than a dozen classified rulings, the nation’s surveillance court has created a secret body of law giving the National Security Agency the power to amass vast collections of data on Americans while pursuing not only terrorism suspects, but also people possibly involved in nuclear proliferation, espionage and cyberattacks, officials say. Read More »

Judge Doubts NSA Program Is Constitutional-But Upholds It Anyway

Brendan Sasso | Nextgov.com | June 4, 2014

A federal judge in Idaho upheld the NSA's controversial phone surveillance program Tuesday.  But Judge B. Lynn Winmill seemed to invite the Supreme Court to overturn his decision...

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Larry Ellison, NSA Database Supplier, Approves Of NSA Surveillance

Philip Bump | The Atlantic Wire | August 13, 2013

Larry Ellison is exceedingly rich and powerful. He is the third-most-wealthy person in the United States and runs Oracle, the database giant. And yet somehow, as he revealed during an interview on CBS Tuesday morning, he is hopelessly uninformed on the ramifications of NSA surveillance. Or, perhaps willfully uninformed. After all, the NSA is an Oracle client, which CBS didn't mention. Read More »

Lawmakers Re-Introduce GPS Protection Bill Against Government Spying

Cyrus Farivar | Ars Technica | March 21, 2013

Just two days after new legislative reform on e-mail privacy was re-introduced in Congress, another privacy bill was brought back from years past. Read More »

Media Hypocrisy: When DC Insiders Leak Gov't Talking Points About NSA, No One Has A Cow

Mike Masnick | Techdirt | July 1, 2013

If you haven't seen it yet, Glenn Greenwald gave a fantastic speech last week about all of the NSA surveillance leaks. [...] I wanted to highlight one key point, in which Greenwald discusses how the leaks haven't just outed the NSA surveillance, but the subservience of the DC press to the government they cover. Read More »

New Surveillance Whistleblower: The NSA Violates The Constitution

Conor Friedersdorf | The Atlantic | July 21, 2014

John Napier Tye is speaking out to warn Americans about illegal spying. The former State Department official, who served in the Obama administration from 2011 to 2014, declared Friday that ongoing NSA surveillance abuses are taking place under the auspices of Executive Order 12333, which came into being in 1981, before the era of digital communications, but is being used to collect them promiscuously...

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No Place To Hide: A Conservative Critique Of A Radical NSA

Conor Friedersdorf | The Atlantic | May 14, 2014

Glenn Greenwald's new book is far more grounded in traditional American norms, laws, and values than the surveillance programs it is critiquing...

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Revealed: The NSA’s Secret Campaign to Crack, Undermine Internet Security

Jeff Larson, Nicole Perlroth, Scott Shane | ProPublica, New York Times | September 5, 2013

Newly revealed documents show that the NSA has circumvented or cracked much of the encryption that automatically secures the emails, Web searches, Internet chats and phone calls of Americans and others around the world. The project, referred to internally by the codename Bullrun, also includes efforts to weaken the encryption standards adopted by software developers. Read More »

Snowden Saw What I Saw: Surveillance Criminally Subverting The Constitution

Thomas Drake | The Guardian | June 12, 2013

What Edward Snowden has done is an amazingly brave and courageous act of civil disobedience. Read More »

The Digital Panopticon

Josh Sager | The Progressive Cynic | June 25, 2013

If the American people sit back and let a digital panopticon be constructed by our government, we will have a nearly impossible time destroying it. The fear which can be created through the threats of constant surveillance and draconian persecution by a government (ex. using the Espionage Act to put leakers away for life) is a powerful mechanism of control that can paralyze an entire population. Read More »

The White House Big Data Report: The Good, The Bad, And The Missing

Jeremy Gillula and Kurt Opsahl and Rainey Reitman | Electronic Frontier Foundation | May 4, 2014

Last week, the White House released its report on big data and its privacy implications, the result of a 90-day study commissioned by President Obama during his January 17 speech on NSA surveillance reforms. Now that we’ve had a chance to read the report we’d like to share our thoughts on what we liked, what we didn’t, and what we thought was missing...

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When It's At The Border, Your Data Is Fair Game — Even On Your Laptop

Philip Bump | The Atlantic Wire | September 10, 2013

Americans are protected from warrantless search in America — but not at the nation's borders. The imaginary line separating the United States from the rest of the world has become a critical demarcation for the privacy of the country's citizens, as new documents from the ACLU and the ongoing Snowden leaks make clear. Read More »

When Will Our Email Betray Us? An Email Privacy Primer In Light Of The Petraeus Saga

Hanni Fakhoury, Kurt Opsahl, and Rainey Reitman | Electronic Frontier Foundation | November 14, 2012

The unfolding scandal that led to the resignation of Gen. David Petraeus, the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, started with some purportedly harassing emails. [...] After the FBI kicked its investigation into high gear, it identified the sender as Paula Broadwell. [...] We've received a lot of questions about how this works—what legal process the FBI needs to conduct its email investigation. The short answer? It's complicated. Read More »

Why CISPA Is Worse Than SOPA

Rebecca Greenfield | The Atlantic Wire | April 27, 2013

Following the SOPA/PIPA uproar that splashed across the Internet earlier this year, we now have another cyber-security bill that threatens American Web browsing privacy, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, otherwise known as CISPA. Read More »