Patriot Act on life support – Julian Hattem

A stalemate in the Senate would leave the FBI and National Security Agency (NSA) without powers they have used to track terrorists for years, say supporters of the Patriot Act. Without action by the end of the month, key provisions of the Patriot Act will expire, which Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) argues would put the United States at …

Reversing Grassroots Win, US Senate Approves Fast Track Trade Measure – Deirdre Fulton

Progressives reacted with dismay as the U.S. Senate on Thursday approved a motion to begin debate on the Fast Track authority President Barack Obama needs to advance controversial trade deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). The measure passed 65-33. Senate Democrats blocked the first attempt to proceed on the trade legislation on Tuesday, butbacktracked in the wake of further negotiations—and intense pressure from …

‘Fake’ Reform: Little to Celebrate as USA Freedom Act Passes House – Jon Queally

Though the overwhelming and bipartisan passage of the USA Freedom Act in the House of Representatives on Wednesday portends the end of the NSA’s mass collection of Americans’ private telephone records, civil liberties groups found little else to celebrate as the ultimate passage of the bill, which now heads to the Senate, would re-authorize a number of worrisome programs by extending the …

A Nation of Snitches – Chris Hedges

A totalitarian state is only as strong as its informants. And the United States has a lot of them. They read our emails. They listen to, download and store our phone calls. They photograph us on street corners, on subway platforms, in stores, on highways and in public and private buildings. They track us through our electronic devices. They infiltrate …

World’s first anti-propaganda search engine launching soon that favors Independent Media while banning government and corporate disinfo – Mike Adams

For the last six months, I have been working hard on the development of a breakthrough search engine that will finally offer a credible search alternative to the NSA-funded, surveillance-state search engines currently dominating the web. Next week, I’ll be opening the webmaster URL submit page for the world’s first independent, anti-propaganda search engine that filters out corporate propaganda and …

The Lasting Pain from Vietnam Silence – Ray McGovern

Ecclesiastes says there is a time to be silent and a time to speak. The fortieth anniversary of the ugly end of the U.S. adventure in Vietnam is a time to speak – and especially of the squandered opportunities that existed earlier in the war to blow the whistle and stop the killing. While my friend Daniel Ellsberg’s leak of the Pentagon …

Highlighting Double-Standard, Probe Shows Germany Spied on EU Neighbors for NSA – Nadia Prupis

Though German Chancellor Angela Merkel raised loud objections when it was revealed that the NSA had been monitoring her private communications, a new inquiry by the German parliament revealed last week that the spy agency under Merkel’s command conducted secret operations against its EU neighbors on behalf of the US government. Germany’s national intelligence agency, Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), helped the NSA …

National Security Whistleblowers Call for Repeal of Patriot Act – Lauren McCauley

Prominent national security whistleblowers are calling for the full repeal of the USA Patriot Act, charging that under that legislation the federal government has decimated the U.S. Constitution and warning that unless action is taken, there is no end in sight to government secrecy and manipulation. The group, which included former National Security Agency (NSA) official William Binney and Pentagon …

A Psychedelic History of the CIA – JEFFREY ST. CLAIR and ALEXANDER COCKBURN

On June 17, 1999 the state of Texas put to death by lethal injection John Stanley Faulder, a Canadian who had been convicted in 1977 of murdering Inez Phillips, an oil heiress. Faulder’s case received more press attention than most executions these days, mainly because the Canadian government tried to intervene on his behalf and urged Texas governor George W. …

U.S. secretly tracked billions of calls for decades

The U.S. government started keeping secret records of Americans’ international telephone calls nearly a decade before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, harvesting billions of calls in a program that provided a blueprint for the far broader National Security Agency surveillance that followed. For more than two decades, the Justice Department and the Drug Enforcement Administration amassed logs of virtually all …