The sorry affair of David Petraeus and a cast of thousands of emails, Tampa-area socialites, and jokes about the book title “All In” really showed the power of the FBI as part of the architecture of the government surveillance state, able to snoop on almost every private email communication of every citizen, often without a [...]

This David Petraeus sex scandal has, as is usually the case, launched thousands of columns claiming to understand intimate details about the mental states of everyone involved, striking moral tones about who can be blamed and what it means for the moral fabric of family life in America, the military, what have you. But the [...]

Yesterday, the Supreme Court shut the door on a legal odyssey that lasted over six years, when they refused to reopen a case attempting to hold private telecommunications companies accountable for their participation in the Bush Administration’s warrantless wiretapping program. The justices, without comment, declined to review a lower court’s December decision (.pdf) dismissing the [...]

A disturbing new Senate report highlights anti-terrorism “fusion centers,” which were designed to allow state, local and federal investigators to share information about terrorism. Instead, says the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, the centers have produced useless intelligence information and proven a waste of money. “The subcommittee investigation could identify no reporting which uncovered a [...]

Today, the House will vote on the extension of the FISA Amendments Act, a bill that was well-known to most Americans, especially on the left, in 2008, but which has gotten little if any notice these days. The bill not only granted retroactive immunity to telecom companies that cooperated in the warrantless surveillance of US [...]

The Republican National Convention in Tampa will be the first national political convention to be surveilled by unmanned drones, from the air and on the ground. This will mark the first time unmanned aerial vehicles will patrol the skies over a national convention, according to an engineer with a Naples company that builds and will [...]

The Senate will vote on a cybersecurity bill that’s taken years to get to the floor. The House has already passed a bill known as CISPA, which raised the ire of privacy and technology activists. Even the White House threatened a veto. Now the Senate will get their turn, after a series of maneuvers designed [...]

Eric Lichtblau, one of the reporting team who exposed President Bush’s warrantless surveillance program, takes a look at its aftermath; with telecoms receiving immunity, police departments feel no compunction against tracking people by their cell phone. Law enforcement tracking of cellphones, once the province mainly of federal agents, has become a powerful and widely used [...]

In a move sure to generate condemnation all over Washington, it turns out that Iran used a surveillance plane to take photos and video of a US aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf! I mean, how could they illicitly spy on a sovereign nation like that? An Iranian surveillance plane has recorded video and photographed [...]

After posting 1,200 National Guard troops at the US-Mexico border to stop crossings of undocumented immigrants, the Department of Homeland Security will draw down those forces by 75% and shift the mission considerably: The drawdown, which the department characterized as a “transition,” will begin in January and should be completed by March. Several lawmakers told [...]

Over the Thanksgiving break, a relative of mine showed me his Android phone, and a new app that had recently popped up on it without his consent. He could not get it to go away, and according to him it was some kind of tracking facilitator. I forgot about this until I read Al Franken’s [...]