Documents Show Court Gave NSA Broad Leeway in Surveillance

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Photo Credit: Cliff Owen / APBy ELLEN NAKASHIMA AND BARTON GELLMAN.

Virtually no foreign government is off-limits for the National Security Agency, which has been authorized to intercept information “concerning” all but four countries, according to top-secret documents.

The United States has long had broad no-spying arrangements with those four countries — Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand — in a group known collectively with the United States as the Five Eyes. But a classified 2010 legal certification and other documents indicate the NSA has been given a far more elastic authority than previously known, one that allows it to intercept through U.S. companies not just the communications of its overseas targets but any communications about its targets as well.

The certification — approved by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and included among a set of documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden — lists 193 countries that would be of valid interest for U.S. intelligence. The certification also permitted the agency to gather intelligence about entities including the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the European Union and the International Atomic Energy Agency.

The NSA is not necessarily targeting all the countries or organizations identified in the certification, the affidavits and an accompanying exhibit; it has only been given authority to do so. Still, the privacy implications are far-reaching, civil liberties advocates say, because of the wide spectrum of people who might be engaged in communication about foreign governments and entities and whose communications might be of interest to the United States.

“These documents show both the potential scope of the government’s surveillance activities and the exceedingly modest role the court plays in overseeing them,” said Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union, who had the documents described to him.

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Google Rebuffed by U.S. High Court on Privacy Lawsuit

By Greg Stohr.

The U.S. Supreme Court rejected an appeal by Google Inc. (GOOG), leaving the company to face lawsuits accusing it of violating a federal wiretapping law by secretly collecting personal data while developing its Street View maps.

The justices today left intact a federal appeals court ruling that the U.S. Wiretap Act protects the privacy of information on unencrypted in-home Wi-Fi networks.

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Corsi: Primary Victories Prove the Tea Party in America is Alive and Well

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Photo Credit: APNow that Tea Party is winning elections, the Tea Party is alive and well, despite any and all reports to the contrary.

The truth is the establishment GOP in Washington and the mainstream media know this, and both are running in fear.

This is why the Wall Street Journal publishes an article by GOP establishment fund-raiser Karl Rove with a headline proclaiming the Tea Party has taken a beating.

What’s evidence for that claim?

As Tea Party Loyalists might well expect, Rove keys off Mississippi’s Sen. Thad Cochran pulling off a surprise upset against Tea Party challenger Chris McDaniel by 1,386 votes, a mere 0.5 percent of the 313,443 votes cast.

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Boy's Death Highlights Danger of Border Crossings

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Photo Credit: APWhen authorities found an 11-year-old Guatemalan boy’s body about a mile from Texas’ southern border, they also discovered his brother’s Chicago phone number scribbled on the inside of his belt buckle.

The boy, wearing “Angry Birds” jeans, black leather boots and a white rosary around his neck, had apparently gotten lost on his way north from his native country and was found about two weeks ago, alone in the brush less than a mile from the nearest U.S. home, a South Texas sheriff said Monday.

While hundreds of immigrants die crossing the border each year, the discovery of Gilberto Francisco Ramos Juarez’s decomposed body in the Rio Grande Valley on June 15 highlights the perils unaccompanied children face as the U.S. government searches for ways to deal with record numbers of children crossing into the country illegally.

“Down here finding a decomposed body … we come across them quite often,” Hidalgo County Sheriff Eddie Guerra said, adding that this was the first child immigrant his office has found since he became sheriff in April. “It’s a very dangerous journey.”

More than 52,000 unaccompanied children have been apprehended entering the U.S. illegally since October, creating what President Barack Obama has called an “urgent humanitarian situation.” On Monday, Obama asked Congress for more money and additional authority to deal with the surge of youths, mostly from Central America. Obama wants flexibility to speed the youths’ deportations and $2 billion to hire more immigration judges and open more detention facilities.

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Why Democrats Insist On Lying about How ‘Poor’ They Are

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Photo Credit: NY PostHillary Clinton claimed that, at the moment she and her husband were signing up for $18 million in book deals, that they were “dead broke.”

Harry Reid (who lives in the Ritz-Carlton Hotel) said liberals are getting bullied by Republican billionaires but the Democratic Party “doesn’t have many billionaires” behind it.

Joe Biden (family earnings: $407,000 last year plus a free house, driver, meals, etc.) claims he “I don’t own a single stock or bond. . . . I have no savings accounts . . . I’m the poorest man in Congress.” (Triple fail: Joe isn’t poor, isn’t in Congress and wouldn’t be the poorest member of it if he were.)

Right here in New York, we’ve learned that City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito, the daughter of a wealthy doctor who left a $6.7 million inheritance, took advantage of a no-interest loan intended for underprivileged New Yorkers to buy a Harlem townhouse. Then she forgot to declare the rental income on required city disclosure forms. The townhouse you and I helped buy her for $240,000 is today worth $1.2 million.

The more Democrats insist on their proletarian cred, the more absurd it gets. They’re no longer just holier than thou: Now they’re prolier than thou.

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Conservative Legend Slams GOP as ‘Party of Stupid’

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Photo Credit: WNDBy Joe Kovacs.

A conservative legend responsible for the election of countless Republicans to office is now blasting today’s GOP as “the Party of Stupid” for letting left-leaning media outlets control presidential debates.

“If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over while expecting a different result, welcome to the nut house of the establishment media-sponsored Republican presidential debates,” says Richard Viguerie in his brand-new book, “Takeover.”

“What would you call a political party that hands the power to set the agenda during its presidential primaries to its sworn enemies in the liberal media, then doubles down to give the power to set the agenda in the waning days of the general election to a self-perpetuating ‘commission’ of Washington, D.C., progressive insiders? Some people might call that the national Republican Party – I call it the Party of Stupid.”

Viguerie, whose mission in “Takeover” is for true conservatives to take back control of the GOP from moderate and even-left leaning Republicans, says the way the national media outlets such as CNN or PBS handle debates puts Republicans at an immediate disadvantage.

“It isn’t by fabricating news or outright lying; it is by selecting questions that set the agenda on liberal terms and presuppose the outcome favored by liberals – or by editing out the conservative viewpoint or facts that tend to support the conservative viewpoint.

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Photo Credit: TownHall Conservatives, Losing One Battle Doesn’t Mean We Have Lost The War

By Kurt Schlichter.

I was furious that Thad Cochran slimed his way to victory, but every time we hardcore conservatives lose a battle, it seems a contingent of bitter-enders starts up about how the Republicans and Democrats are exactly the same, and how they’ll refuse to vote in the general, and how they’ll take their collective ball and go home.

That’s crazy talk. We can get even with the GOP establishment later; we need to beat the Democrats first.

Now, many of my good friends disagree with me here, but I respect them enough to say what I think. And I think that when we focus on the establishment’s antics in Mississippi instead of focusing on November, we make Barack Obama happier than if he got to play 18 holes with the ghost of Karl Marx.

Let us assume that Thad Cochran didn’t play fair. Now let me assume the role of your father:

Life is not fair.

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Obama’s ‘Woe is Me’ Attitude

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Photo Credit: Getty ImagesSay this for President Obama: He’s got an uncanny ability to block out distractions and keep his eye on the ball.

Facing a horrific expansion of terrorism in the Mideast, a meltdown of public support at home and major rebukes by the Supreme Court, the president remains fixated on No. 1.

“I’m finding lately I just want to say what’s on my mind,” he told a Minneapolis audience Friday, and then ticked off a series of complaints about — surprise — Republicans.

“They don’t do anything, except block me and call me names,” he said. “If they were more interested in growing the economy for you and the issues that you are talking about instead of trying to mess with me, we would be doing a lot better.”

He wasn’t finished: “The critics, the cynics in Washington, they’ve written me off more times than I can count. But cynicism doesn’t invent the Internet. Cynicism doesn’t give women the right to vote.” There you have it: the presidential mind in Year 6. Don’t cry for Argentina — cry for me!

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Sheriff Joe to Obama: Deploy U.S. Military to Mexico

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Photo Credit: WNDPresident Obama should deploy the U.S. military across the Mexican border to work bilaterally to curb illegal immigration, declared Maricopa County, Arizona, Sheriff Joe Arpaio in a radio interview Sunday.

“If we are worried about the danger, then I would send the military across the border, work with their military bilaterally and get the job done,” said Arpaio. “That’s what I would do and we’d clean up this mess.”

“Of course, you have to get the Mexican president to OK it,” he added. “I would just go in there and have a few drinks with him and get the job done.”

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Prolific Historian: The Irony of Obama Feigning Peace Could Cause War (+audio)

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Photo Credit: APTo one prominent historian and world observer, President Obama’s policies are raising the stakes for war, as well as extinguishing opportunities for our youth as the country gets more Europeanized.

When President Obama abdicates American world leadership, knowingly or not, he raises the likelihood that in the next two years, belligerents around the globe may take more risks because America is no longer likely to respond. What kind of risks are there for the country?

Victor Davis Hanson of the Hoover Institution says these risks could include, “I will cross the 38th parallel. I’m going to readjust this settlement in Cypress. I’m going to bully Japan, or Taiwan is ripe for invasion, or maybe we can take another Soviet republic back into Russia, or South America, there’s areas for aggrandizement.”

Confusing America’s former allies and adversaries, President Obama’s rejection of American exceptionalism has consequences not readily realized. Hanson says in this new 26 minute video interview with The Daily Caller filmed on June 10, “The irony is that Obama wants to be the global peacemaker, but by projecting this image of ambivalence, he’s going to be the global war-maker, if he’s not careful.”

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Thousands Go Without Water as Detroit Cuts Service for Nonpayment

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Photo Credit: Jessica J. Trevino / APIt has been six weeks since the city turned off Nicole Hill’s water.

Dirty dishes are piled in the sink of her crowded kitchen, where the yellow-and-green linoleum floor is soiled and sticky. A small garbage can is filled with water from a neighbor, while a bigger one sits outside in the yard, where she hopes it will collect some rain. She’s developed an intricate recycling system of washing the dishes, cleaning the floor and flushing the toilet with the same water.

“It’s frightening, because you think this is something that only happens somewhere like Africa,” said Hill, a single mother who is studying homeland security at a local college. “But now I know what they’re going through — when I get somewhere there’s a water faucet, I drink until my stomach hurts.”

Hill is one of thousands of residents in Detroit who have had their water and sewer services turned off as part of a crackdown on customers who are behind on their bills. In April, the city set a target of cutting service to 3,000 customers a week who were more than $150 behind on their bills. In May, the water department sent out 46,000 warnings and cut off service to 4,531. The city says that cutting off water is the only way to get people to pay their bills as Detroit tries to emerge from bankruptcy — the utility is currently owed $90 million from customers, and nearly half the city’s 300,000 or so accounts are past due.

But cutting off water to people already living in poverty came under criticism last week from the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, whose experts said that Detroit was violating international standards by cutting off access to water. “When there is genuine inability to pay, human rights simply forbids disconnections,” Catarina de Albuquerque, the office’s expert on the human right to water and sanitation, said in the communique.

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Texas Ranchers Under Attack

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Photo Credit: Ryan LovelaceTexas Ranchers Under Attack, Overrun by Illegal Immigrants

Ronnie Osburn was preparing to talk to National Review Online Thursday about lawlessness in his border community when his home was broken into.

Osburn, a rancher who lives just south of a Border Patrol checkpoint in Brooks County, Texas, says he stepped away for about 45 minutes, and when he returned somebody had trashed his house. The trespassers shattered his gun case, leaving a trail of blood throughout the house, but dropped the guns near the kitchen before scattering out the back door. They had searched through the house, opened drawers, and even left a heap of uncooked bacon in a frying pan on the stove.

Ranchers in South Texas say they are seeing a greater criminal element among illegal immigrants trespassing through their property. U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers responded to the situation. Although no arrests have been made, a Brooks County sheriff’s deputy tells National Review Online the break-in involved “undocumented crossers.” At one point a Border Patrol agent said he thought the trespassers had been spotted about a half-mile north of the ranch, headed in the same direction as the Border Patrol checkpoint near Falfurrias.

Border Patrol agents carrying AR-15s and 12-gauge pumps searched the property with Osburn, who also had an AR-15, looking for any sign of the trespassers. After scanning his backyard, Osburn discovered three shoes left behind, and Border Patrol agents said they expected the burglars were less than a mile away.

“Welcome to South Texas,” Osburn tells me while extending his hand.

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