SECRECY & THE SECURITY STATE - page 41

With the House and Senate at odds over what to do with expiring surveillance authorities, it’s likely Congress is headed toward another “cliff” of its own making, which is exactly what reformers want to push the legislative branch over. “It’s time for the Senate to act,” Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-Ohio) told reporters Thursday, needling his counterpart in the Senate to take up the USA Freedom Act, legislation that passed the House on Wednesday. The measure makes modest reforms to the NSA’s bulk…

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A report published on Tuesday by the Pentagon’s Office of Inspector General confirmed that a branch of the US military operates an enormous law enforcement database containing hundreds of millions of records of interactions between cops and citizens. The IG investigation described the info depository, run by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, as containing more than 506 million police records, including information about American citizens who’ve committed crimes as insignificant as driving infractions. The probe was launched in response to a March 2014 Washington Examiner…

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Americans peacefully protesting the push to construct the Keystone XL pipeline had their activities monitored for nearly two years by the FBI, which, in turn, shared some of the information with the corporation seeking to build the massive piece of oil industry infrastructure, according to documents revealed for the first time on Tuesday. The documents, released as a result of a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the Guardian and Earth Island Journal, show that the FBI’s Houston office promised to share with TransCanada…

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Attorney General Loretta Lynch said Thursday that she is looking at “finding ways to bolster” crackdowns under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act. In a back and forth at a senate appropriations subcommittee hearing with a lawmaker who represents a city seen as a hotbed for violent crime, Lynch noted that Justice Department Criminal Division head Leslie Caldwell and Deputy Chief for Policy and RICO Review Doug Crow “are committed to this as well.” She also commented that she had spoken to the…

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The day after a major news publication alleged that the FBI was flying surveillance flights over a restive West Baltimore, the White House decided to keep its mouth shut on the tactic—one, it is alleged, that violated the Constitutional rights of thousands of Americans. “For those kinds of questions, I’d refer you to law enforcement,” White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest told a reporter Wednesday afternoon during the second rounding of questioning on a story first reported Tuesday night by the Washington Post. Relying on…

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