Kerry Comments Add to Mystery About Rogue CIA Agent Missing in Iran

/2 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

The intrigue over the rogue CIA agent last seen six years ago in Iran intensified Sunday with an accusation about a cover-up, Secretary of State John Kerry rejecting allegations the United States has abandoned the search and Iran distancing itself from the mystery.

Kerry expressed hope the new Iranian government would provide information on the whereabouts of the 65-year-old Robert Levinson and pushed back on the argument that the U.S. has stopped looking for the retired FBI agent.

“To suggest that we have abandoned him or anybody has abandoned him is simply incorrect, and not helpful,” he told ABC’s “This Week.” “I think the Iranian government has the ability to help us here, and we hope they will.”

Meanwhile, Iran Foreign Minister Javad Zarif told CBS’ “Face the Nation” that Levinson is not being held by the government and that he has “no idea” about who might have him.

Still, Zarif said his country “will certainly discuss” Levinson’s return should he be found.

Read more from this story HERE.

NSA Officials Consider Edward Snowden Amnesty in Return for Documents

/6 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: Sunshinepress/Getty Images

Photo Credit: Sunshinepress/Getty Images

National Security Agency officials are considering a controversial amnesty that would return Edward Snowden to the United States, in exchange for the extensive document trove the whistleblower took from the agency.

An amnesty, which does not have the support of the State Department, would represent a surprising denouement to an international drama that has lasted half a year. It is particularly unexpected from a surveillance agency that has spent months insisting that Snowden’s disclosures have caused vast damage to US national security.

The NSA official in charge of assessing the alleged damage caused by Snowden’s leaks, Richard Ledgett, told CBS News an amnesty still remains controversial within the agency, which has spent the past six months defending itself against a global outcry and legislative and executive proposals to restrain its broad surveillance activities.

“My personal view is, yes, it’s worth having a conversation about,” Ledgett, who is under consideration to become the agency’s top civilian, said in an interview slated to air Sunday evening on 60 Minutes. “I would need assurances that the remainder of the data could be secured, and my bar for those assurances would be very high. It would be more than just an assertion on his part.”

Snowden is in Russia, having been granted a year-long asylum that has sparked international intrigue. In June, the Justice Department filed a criminal complaint charging the 30-year old former contractor with theft of government property, unauthorized communication of national defense information and “wilful communication of classified communications intelligence information to an unauthorized person”, although he has not yet been indicted.

Read more from this story HERE.

By Cracking Cellphone Code, NSA has Capacity for Decoding Private Conversations

/0 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: Francisco Seco/AP

Photo Credit: Francisco Seco/AP

The cellphone encryption technology used most widely across the world can be easily defeated by the National Security Agency, an internal document shows, giving the agency the means to decode most of the billions of calls and texts that travel over public airwaves every day.

While the military and law enforcement agencies long have been able to hack into individual cellphones, the NSA’s capability appears to be far more sweeping because of the agency’s global signals collection operation. The agency’s ability to crack encryption used by the majority of cellphones in the world offers it wide-ranging powers to listen in on private conversations.

U.S. law prohibits the NSA from collecting the content of conversations between Americans without a court order. But experts say that if the NSA has developed the capacity to easily decode encrypted cellphone conversations, then other nations likely can do the same through their own intelligence services, potentially to Americans’ calls, as well.

Encryption experts have complained for years that the most commonly used technology, known as A5/1, is vulnerable and have urged providers to upgrade to newer systems that are much harder to crack. Most companies worldwide have not done so, even as controversy has intensified in recent months over NSA collection of cellphone traffic, including of such world leaders as German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

The extent of the NSA’s collection of cellphone signals and its use of tools to decode encryption are not clear from a top-secret document provided by former contractor Edward Snowden. But it states that the agency “can process encrypted A5/1” even when the agency has not acquired an encryption key, which unscrambles communications so that they are readable.

Read more from this story HERE.

Sister Wives: Judge Rules Key Parts of Utah Anti-Polygamy Law Unconstitutional

/5 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: AP Photo/TLC, Bryant Livingston

Photo Credit: AP Photo/TLC, Bryant Livingston

Advocacy groups for polygamy and individual liberties are hailing a federal judge’s ruling that key parts of Utah’s polygamy laws are unconstitutional.

Advocacy groups for polygamy and individual liberties on Saturday hailed a federal judge’s ruling that key parts of Utah’s polygamy laws are unconstitutional, saying it will remove the threat of arrest for those families.

U.S. District Judge Clark Waddoups said in the decision handed down Friday that a provision in Utah law forbidding cohabitation with another person violated the First Amendment right of freedom of religion.

The ruling was a victory for Kody Brown and his four wives who star in the hit TLC reality show “Sister Wives” and other fundamentalist Mormons who believe polygamy brings exaltation in heaven.

The Brown family filed their lawsuit in July 2011 and fled Utah for Las Vegas last year under the threat of prosecution.

Read more from this story HERE.

GOP’s ‘Young Guns’ Program Backs Pro-Abortion, Pro-Gay Marriage Candidates for Congress

/7 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

Although the Republican Party Platform opposes abortion and same-sex marriage, the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) is backing and promoting through its “Young Guns” program two congressional candidates who are homosexual, and who support same-sex marriage and abortion.

In addition, one of the “Young Guns” candidates, Carl DeMaio, has received $15,000 from the political arm of House GOP leaders Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.) and Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), while the other candidate, Richard Tisei, “has won the support of the entire House Republican leadership, including a $5,000 check from the PAC run by the vice-presidential nominee, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.),” reported the Washington Post.

Richard Tisei, who is “married” to his male partner Bernie Starr, in Edgartown, Mass., is running for a congressional seat in the 6th District in the Bay State. Carl DeMaio is running for a congressional seat out of San Diego, Calif.

DeMaio, who is openly gay, supports abortion and same-sex marriage. In a press release, he said, “I see myself as a ‘new generation Republican’ who wants to challenge the party to focus on pocket-book, economic and quality of life issues in a more positive and inclusive way, rather than issues that are, frankly, none of the government’s business in the first place.”

Tisei supports same-sex marriage and is pro-abortion, having received a 100% rating from NARAL Pro-Choice Massachusetts. The NRCC is spending money on television ads attacking Tisei’s opponent, Rep. John Tierney (D-Mass.), as is YG Action, a political action committee founded by former aides to House Minority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.), reported the Washington Post.

Read more from this story HERE.

‘Complete Waste’: Army Corps Flushed $5.4M on ‘Unusable’ Trash Incinerators, Probe Finds

/2 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: Fox News

Photo Credit: Fox News

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers paid $5.4 million for shoddy trash incinerators that were delivered years behind schedule and never used, leaving soldiers at an Afghanistan base with no other option than to keep burning waste in open-air pits, according to an internal probe.

The report from Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction John F. Sopko was released Monday. It found the failure to complete the trash incinerators left soldiers exposed to potential health hazards from the burn pits, and taxpayers, once again, with nothing to show for a multimillion-dollar investment.

“This project appears to have been a complete waste,” Sopko said in a statement to FoxNews.com. “Even worse, the open-air burn pit used instead of the incinerators put the health of our troops at risk.”

The base where the units were sent — Forward Operating Base Sharana in southeastern Afghanistan — was turned over to the Afghan government in October. According to the report, officials now expect the unused incinerators to be salvaged for “scrap.”

Sopko’s scathing report, the latest in a series of critical findings on Afghanistan spending, accused the Army Corps of paying the contractor in full for incinerators that were not only finished more than two years behind schedule but riddled with operational problems that rendered them “unusable.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Chairman Senate Armed Services Cmte: We’ll Review Murray-Ryan’s Cuts to Military Retirees

/9 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: DVIDSHUB

Photo Credit: DVIDSHUB

After howls of protest from military groups over pension cuts in a House budget deal, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee Friday promised to review the slash, the Military Times reported.

Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., said his committee review along with an ongoing survey by a military commission may “further bear on this issue,” the newspaper said.

“A number of concerns have been raised about the provision in the Murray-Ryan budget agreement,” Levin said in a statement.

“The Senate Armed Services Committee is going to review this change after we convene next year, before it takes effect in December 2015.”

The provision would restrict the annual pay adjustment of military pensions for working-age military retirees to 1 percentage point less than the rise in consumer prices.

Read more from this story HERE.

Thousands of HealthCare.gov Sign-Ups Didn’t Make it to Insurers

/0 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: Washington Post

Photo Credit: Washington Post

Enrollment records for close to 15,000 HealthCare.gov shoppers were not initially transmitted to the insurance plans they selected, according to a preliminary federal estimate released Saturday.

While these cases pose a challenge for the Obama administration, officials say they believe the situation is improving. Since early December, fewer than 1 percent of HealthCare.gov enrollments did not make their way to health insurance plans.

“The vast majority of the work is retroactive,” Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) spokeswoman Julie Bataille said in an interview Friday. “We’re making sure that as we do the intense data reconciliation, we identify the things that need to be resolved so consumers can confirm they’re enrolled.”

The preliminary estimate that fewer than 15,000 enrollments failed to reach carriers comes from a recently completed federal analysis that compared the number of shoppers who clicked “enroll” with the number of digital files HealthCare.gov fired off to health-insurance plans.

That analysis does not generate a list of specific shoppers whose enrollment files were never sent, but rather provides a ballpark estimate of the discrepancy between enrollments finished and reports generated. The federal government does not have a list of people whose sign-up forms were never sent to their insurer.

Read more from this story HERE.

Obama Wins Politifact’s ‘Lie of the Year’ Award (+video)

/9 Comments/in , /by

Screen shot 2013-12-14 at 1.16.51 AMIt was a catchy political pitch and a chance to calm nerves about his dramatic and complicated plan to bring historic change to America’s health insurance system.

“If you like your health care plan, you can keep it,” President Barack Obama said — many times — of his landmark new law.
But the promise was impossible to keep.

So this fall, as cancellation letters were going out to approximately 4 million Americans, the public realized Obama’s breezy assurances were wrong.

Boiling down the complicated health care law to a soundbite proved treacherous, even for its promoter-in-chief.  Obama and his team made matters worse, suggesting they had been misunderstood all along. The stunning political uproar led to this: a rare presidential apology.

For all of these reasons, PolitiFact has named “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it,” the Lie of the Year for 2013. Readers in a separate online poll overwhelmingly agreed with the choice. (PolitiFact first announced its selection on CNN’s The Lead with Jake Tapper.)

Read more from this story HERE.

Judge Says Waiting Period ‘Burdens’ 2nd Amendment

/7 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: WND

Photo Credit: WND

A federal judge in California has ruled in a Second Amendment case that a state-imposed waiting period to take possession of a firearm is a burden on the constitutional right to keep and bear arms.

The ruling came in a challenge brought by the Second Amendment Foundation to the state’s mandatory 10-day waiting period to obtain firearms. The case, Silvester v. Harris, continues.

It was Senior Judge Anthony Ishii of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California who said in an 11-page decision that California Attorney General Kamala Harris “argues that the WPL (Waiting Period Law) is a minor burden on the Second Amendment, [but] plaintiffs are correct that this is a tacit acknowledgement that a protected Second Amendment right is burdened.”

He wrote: “The court concludes that the WPL burdens the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms.”

Alan Gottlieb, SAF executive vice president, said the statement is important.

Read more from this story HERE.