SECRECY & THE SECURITY STATE - page 45

Testifying on budget matters at a House Armed Services subcommittee hearing on Thursday, Douglass Loverro, the assistant secretary of defense for space policy, warned that US dominance over the final frontier is being challenged, and called for a massive uptick in spending on outer space security. “We no longer can view space as a sanctuary,” he told lawmakers. “Potential adversaries understand our reliance on space and want to take it away from us—we won’t let them,” Loverro added, noting that his department’s budget request for…

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FBI Director James Comey on Wednesday called on Congress to pass legislation that would undermine the ability of Americans to securely communicate. Calling the use of encrypted phones and computers a “huge problem” and an affront to the “rule of law,” Comey, painted an apocalyptic picture of the world if the communications technology isn’t banned. “We’re drifting to a place where a whole lot of people are going to look at us with tears in their eyes,” he told the House Appropriations Committee, describing a…

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After Edward Snowden’s disclosures publicly revealed the existence of a vast array of US spying methods and programs, one could be forgiven for thinking there aren’t more media for American intelligence services to tap. But some officials at the Pentagon are pointing out, and lamenting, the lack of American eyes and ears on the final frontier. Admiral Cecil Haney, leader of US Strategic Command, on Tuesday urged the Pentagon to develop a more advanced intelligence program to monitor activity in outer space. The head of…

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A prominent Muslim civil rights group is calling on Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) to cancel his scheduled appearance this week alongside a man widely decried as a bigot. The Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) on Tuesday said the newly-announced Republican presidential candidate risks doing damage to his reputation by speaking alongside Robert Spencer, an author and director of the blog “Jihad Watch.” “If Senator Cruz believes that he can campaign for president while sharing center stage with a professional hate monger like Robert Spencer,…

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Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) found himself on Tuesday facing off with another high profile opponent of his stubborn resistance to sentencing reform, as the President’s Deputy Attorney General nominee praised legislation held up by Grassley in committee. Sally Yates lauded the bill, citing her work experience as a US Attorney in Atlanta on a Justice Department pilot program. “I believe that the Smarter Sentencing Act, if passed, will make our country much safer,” she noted at a hearing that was more about…

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Weapons manufacturers’ new favorite son in the Senate on Monday suggested that Congress should be passing a defense budget approaching $1 trillion. Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.)–the architect of the letter sent by 47 Senate Republicans to the Iranian government as a means of undermining multilateral nuclear negotiations–outlined a fatalistic view informing the need for increased militarization, and railed against sequestration cuts. “Our experiment with retreat must end,” Cotton told an audience at the Senate Hart Office Building–an event organized by the far-right wing Foreign Policy…

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Attorney General Eric Holder continues to resist Senators’ efforts to glean more information about federal law enforcement agencies’ domestic surveillance tools—apparatuses that reportedly have, in part, been built with help from the Central Intelligence Agency. The Chairman and Ranking Member of the Senate’s Judiciary Committee, Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) wrote to the Attorney General last week, asking for more information on cellphone scanning technology. The letter was published Monday. According to recent reports by the Wall Street Journal, the technology is in…

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President Obama is expected to quietly back off plans to roughly half the size of the US military contingency in Afghanistan by 2016. A litany of problems besetting Afghan security forces are making the Commander-in-chief strongly consider an about-face. The move would be at such odds with prior statements that “there might not be a public announcement on troop numbers to avoid potential criticism,” The New York Times reported. “Many of the roughly 10,000 troops and thousands of civilian contractors in Afghanistan would be needed…

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The Obama administration last year improperly denied one out of every three Freedom of Information Act requests that it rejected, according to an analysis published Wednesday by The Associated Press. The moves to deny the release of records were eventually overturned when challenged, but the initially wrong-headed censorship rate was the highest it has been in five years. The top Senate Democrat who oversees judicial issues, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) reiterated his calls to pass FOIA reform in the wake of the report. “As the data…

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