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Army’s Giant Surveillance Blimp to Start Tracking Objects in DC Region

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While Congress debates the merits of spending tens of millions of dollars to add missile interceptors on the East Coast while increasing the number already in place out West, a long-running developmental Army radar system is packing up and heading for Maryland.

From May 4 to June 14, Raytheon’s JLENS, or Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Netted Sensor System, was put through its paces by about 100 soldiers during user assessment tests out in Utah, but the company announced today that the 74-foot-high tethered airship is now headed to the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland for a more ambitious operational assessment run by the US Northern Command.

The soldiers who were trained up to use the system in Utah will make the trip with the airship, but since JLENS will be running on a 24/7 basis once on the East Coast—and tracking anything that flies, drives, or floats near the National Capital Region—more soldiers will be trained to operate it before the assessments kick off in 2014.

Read more from this story HERE.

Obstruction? NSA Says It Can’t Search Its Own Emails

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Photo Credit: George Frey/GettyThe NSA is a “supercomputing powerhouse” with machines so powerful their speed is measured in thousands of trillions of operations per second. The agency turns its giant machine brains to the task of sifting through unimaginably large troves of data its surveillance programs capture.

But ask the NSA, as part of a freedom of information request, to do a seemingly simple search of its own employees’ email? The agency says it doesn’t have the technology.

“There’s no central method to search an email at this time with the way our records are set up, unfortunately,” NSA Freedom of Information Act officer Cindy Blacker told me last week.

The system is “a little antiquated and archaic,” she added.

I filed a request last week for emails between NSA employees and employees of the National Geographic Channel over a specific time period. The TV station had aired a friendly documentary on the NSA and I want to better understand the agency’s public-relations efforts.

Read more from this story HERE.

And You Thought the NSA was Bad: Obamacare Data Hub a ‘Honey Pot’ for Leftist ID Thieves, Warn Critics (+videos)

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Photo Credit: National Review Obamacare’s Branch of the NSA

By John Fund. President Obama has had a poor record of job creation, but at least one small economic sector is doing well: community organizing.

The Department of Health and Human Services is about to hire an army of “patient navigators” to inform Americans about the subsidized insurance promised by Obamacare and assist them in enrolling. These organizers will be guided by the new Federal Data Hub, which will give them access to reams of personal information compiled by federal agencies ranging from the IRS to the Department of Defense and the Veterans Administration. “The federal government is planning to quietly enact what could be the largest consolidation of personal data in the history of the republic,” Paul Howard of the Manhattan Institute and Stephen T. Parente, a University of Minnesota finance professor, wrote in USA Today. No wonder that there are concerns about everything from identity theft to the ability of navigators to use the system to register Obamacare participants to vote.

HHS secretary Kathleen Sebelius wasn’t satisfied with the $54 million in public funds allocated for navigators this year, so she tried to raise money from health-industry executives for Enroll America, the liberal nonprofit group leading the PR push for Obamacare. She had to retreat under withering criticism that she was shaking down companies that were dependent on government, a clear conflict of interest.

Because 34 states have declined to set up their own insurance “exchanges,” the job of guiding exchange enrollees in those states has been left to Washington. The identity of the groups who will get the Sebelius grants isn’t yet known, but Politico reports they are likely to include Planned Parenthood, senior-citizen advocacy organizations, and churches. Read more from this story HERE.

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Obamacare data hub a ‘honey pot’ for ID thieves, warn critics

By Paul Bedard. The data hub President Obama’s health care team is creating to exchange personal health and financial information on Obamacare users will be a ripe target for computer hackers and identity thieves, charge critics who claim it hasn’t been tested for security flaws.

“It’s the greatest collection of private identification information ever assembled on Americans that will be put into one place,” said Rep. Patrick Meehan, who chairs a House cybersecurity subcommittee. “It is every bit of sensitive information one would need to know to completely take over the identification of a person,” said the Pennsylvania lawmaker.

The Obamacare data hub, he added, “creates a honey pot and the day that it goes online it is going to be a target for hackers and others and they are unprepared to protect the system.”

At an oversight hearing last week, administration officials said that the hub, still under creation, will be used to verify Obamacare applications. It will share information among federal agencies, like the IRS, and state agencies. A separate system will keep store key information such as income, Social Security numbers, email addresses, and even pregnancy status of Obamacare users.

Officials called on the public and Congress to “trust” that the information will be protected from hackers, but several lawmakers balked. Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: Getty ImagesMidlands Voices: Stop Obamacare in its tracks

By Ben Sasse. The author has served as chief of staff for the U.S. Justice Department’s Office of Legal Policy and as assistant U.S. secretary of Health and Human Services under President George W. Bush. Currently president of Midland University, he has been exploring a U.S. Senate candidacy.

Obamacare is a ticking time bomb for Democrats in the 2014 elections. Nobody knows this better than President Barack Obama, which is why over the Fourth of July holiday weekend he unilaterally decided to delay its controversial employer mandate provision until after the midterm elections.

No wonder: The $2,000 per-worker fine is disastrously unpopular. Already, employers are laying off workers and dramatically cutting others’ hours in an effort to skirt the new penalty. The fact that this perfectly predictable development surprises many in Washington only underscores that they didn’t really read this 2,300-page monstrosity before they passed it.

Desperate for any appearance of victory, Republican leaders have decided to match the president’s delay with one of their own: proposing legislation to delay for a year the mandate for individuals. Perhaps useful, perhaps not. Well-meaning people can differ about legislative strategy.

But if Republicans don’t have a larger plan to actually oppose this unprecedented power grab in a way the American people will understand, then they will have given up the ghost on actually turning back the slew of new job-killing bureaucracies. Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: Getty ImagesGOP Senator says coalition to block and defund Obamacare is growing, names names

By Becket Adams. U.S. Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) told TheBlaze Monday he has recruited more than a dozen Senate Republicans to help him defund President Barack Obama’s landmark health care law.

Fifteen Republican senators, including Sens. Marco Rubio (Fla.), Ted Cruz (Texas), John Cornyn (Texas), Rand Paul (Ky.), James Inhofe (Okla.), David Vitter (La.), Roger Wicker (Miss.), John Thune (S.D.), and Chuck Grassley (Iowa), will block a continuing resolution to keep the government funded beyond Sept. 30 if it includes funding for Obamacare, Lee said.

“The president has said that he’s not willing and not able to enforce Obamacare as it was written,” Sen. Lee told TheBlaze in a phone interview. “And so he has chosen instead to enforce this law selectively.”

“He has picked out two things that he has said he won’t enforce. One is the employer mandate and the other is the requirement that the government obtain some kind of proof for those who are claiming eligibility for Obamacare exchange subsidies,” he added.

The senator continued, arguing that the president “doesn’t have the power” to selectively enforce and amend laws passed by Congress. Read more from this story HERE.

How Secrecy Erodes Democracy

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Photo Credit: ReutersIn early June, leaked documents revealed that the U.S. government was collecting the details — if not the content — of virtually every call that every American made. President Barack Obama claimed that the PATRIOT Act gave him the authority to know whom we called, when and how long we talked.

This claim came from the same man who, as a senator, wrote, “We believe the government should be required to convince a judge that the records they are seeking have some connection to a suspected terrorist or spy.”

It appears the president now believes we are all connected to terrorists. It’s as if he’s playing Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon with our civil liberties.

Congress passed the PATRIOT Act in 2001 after a vociferous public debate. To protect against abuses, the act was scheduled to sunset — it would expire if Congress did not renew it after five years.

When it was reauthorized in 2006, Congress sought to limit the government’s warrantless access to records. Under the revised law, the government can obtain records if a court determines they are relevant to an authorized investigation into international terrorism or foreign spying.

Read more from this story HERE.

GOP Allows NSA, Syria Debate

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Photo Credit: APA long-delayed Pentagon appropriations bill is heading to the floor after the House Rules Committee voted Monday night to allow a structured debate including amendments related to NSA surveillance at home and the flow of military aid overseas in the Mideast.

Altogether, 100 amendments are promised consideration, but those affecting the NSA — funded in the bill — and military aid to anti-government forces in Syria are clearly the most sensitive politically for the Republican leadership.

Indeed, conservatives led by Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.) had threatened to defeat the rule if votes were not permitted on a bipartisan proposal to narrow the ability of the NSA to collect private call records and metadata on telephone customers in the U.S.

“It’s not a partisan issue. It’s something that cuts across the entire political spectrum,” Amash told the Rules panel. And he argued that the amendment seeks only to rein in the NSA’s “blanket authority” under the PATRIOT Act to collect records and the metadata.

Read more from this story HERE.

Your Place in the Database

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Photo Credit: American ThinkerRegarding the American surveillance state, it seems that the truth comes out a little at a time. We learned about the FBI’s Carnivore in the 1990s, which the copied internet data of people whom the agency deemed “reasonably suspicious.” In September 2001, we saw the worst attacks on America since Pearl Harbor. September 11 left a unified country in its wake, but unfortunately, it was also a country more acquiescent than ever to big government. The PATRIOT Act was quickly shuttled through the lawmaking process, and life went on. We found out about NSA domestic wiretapping from a brave AT&T whistleblower in 2006. The program was given the formality of legality (though not constitutionality) in 2007. Would it have been had no one blown the whistle?

The surveillance state became even more unsettling with the Change of 2009, no less after political campaigning by the victor against domestic spying. We found out in 2009 that returning veterans were being targeted as possible extremists by the “Vigilant Eagle” program, a name positively Orwellian in its irony. The floodgates opened in 2013 once Obama’s re-election was secured. We found out that our government scans all domestic cell phone metadata (phone numbers, recipients, times), all letter and package labels are scanned and saved, and the NSA has agreements with every major internet provider to provide backdoor access to customers’ information (see PRISM). Even our credit card activity is analyzed. Of course, those are just high points. The entire last decade we have heard warnings from whistleblowers such as William Binney, as well as periodic admissions from U.S. officials of intelligence oversteps, which they falsely claim are immediately corrected.

One must wonder how the people of this nation would have reacted had all of this come out at once. Perhaps it is wishful thinking to hope that we would have shown a tenth the gumption of the Egyptians, who in July 2013 unceremoniously flung their Islamist government to the side. They took to the streets in outrage against tyrants at just the time we learned of the sickening scope of our national government’s spying. We meekly sat by. As each little bit of this diabolical system is leaked, it is palatable enough to warrant only a minor outrage, and then life goes on, albeit with a new normal. Tiny violations of our 4th-Amendment right against unreasonable search and seizure, and our 5th-Amendment right against self-incrimination, keep piling up, until it seems that those rights have bled to death from a thousand cuts. If Americans are the proverbial frog in the pot of water, the temperature has been ratcheted to a near-boil.

The Relational Database

For me, the most stomach-churning signpost on our nation’s road to tyranny has been the completion of the Utah Data Center. The center holds data on the scale of yottabytes. One yottabyte could account for 30 million gigabytes per U.S. man, woman, and child. It’s a staggering capacity. Now, for Americans, the camera is always rolling, creating a record of our every digital move. It reminds one of The Truman Show, a movie in which Jim Carrey’s entire life was filmed and broadcast as entertainment without him knowing it.

Because of the power of relational databases, and the laws governing internet service provider record-keeping, anything stored in the data centers (there are many across the nation, the Utah Center being the largest and most recent) can be tied to us directly. When tied to other sources of government data, it’s a more complete picture of our life than most of us could even provide about ourselves. The websites we browse, the comments we make, the e-mails we send, the phone calls to friends, the internet purchases, the Facebook associations, and most everything else you can think of are easily tied together.

Read more from this story HERE.

Bill Co-Sponsored by Mike Lee to Require Search Warrants for Fed’s Access to Your Email Gaining Steam

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Photo Credit: Social BIz SolutionsThe chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee is pushing to fast-track legislation that would require police to obtain a warrant before accessing emails and other private online messages.

Sen. Patrick Leahy’s (D-Vt.) goal is for the Senate to unanimously approve his bill before the August recess, according to one of his committee aides. Any opposition could delay a vote until after Congress returns in the fall.

He has secured unanimous support from his fellow Democrats and is in negotiations with Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), the Judiciary Committee’s ranking member, and other Republicans to address their concerns.

Leahy’s aide claimed that even if a floor vote is delayed until after the recess, they are already “way past” the 60 votes they would need to overcome a filibuster and approve the bill, which is co-sponsored by Republican Sen. Mike Lee (Utah).

Gregory Nojeim, a senior counsel for the Center for Democracy and Technology and a supporter of stronger privacy protections, said that the news of the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs has given Leahy’s bill a new boost of momentum.

Read more from this story HERE.

Obama Deploying Drones Around U.S.

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Photo Credit: WNDBy Steve Peacock. The deployment of federal drones in and around U.S. shores represents one of the Obama administration’s next steps in the nation’s expanded use of unmanned aircraft systems for surveillance purposes.

The Office of National Marine Sanctuaries, or ONMS, recently acquired Puma UAS – a type of drone that the U.S. Navy also uses – for operations off the coast of Los Angeles.

ONMS now is enlisting contractor support in expanding UAS use in California, Hawaii, Florida, and Washington state. Vendors experienced in working with law enforcement and military personnel are needed for this endeavor, according to a solicitation that WND located through routine database research.

The Puma drones – which are small enough to launch by hand – will be used by ONMS to enforce federal regulations, the document says.

The ONMS drone project will focus on Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary located northwest of LA. However, the contractor also will assist Puma UAS operations at Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument Midway in Hawaii, Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary, and Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary in Washington. Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: LA TimesJudge torn over lawsuit in drone strike that killed Americans

By Michael Doyle. Courts cannot second-guess drone strikes that kill U.S. citizens overseas, an Obama administration lawyer argued Friday.

A Republican-appointed judge sounded dubious about the expansive claim, saying she was “really troubled” by assertions that courts are completely shut out of the drone strike debate. But for other legal reasons, the judge also sounded hesitant about a lawsuit targeted at top military and intelligence officials for violating the constitutional rights of U.S. citizens blown up in foreign lands.

“There are instances where wrongs are done, but for one reason or another they cannot be remedied in a civil suit,” U.S. District Court Judge Rosemary M. Collyer said.

The American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights, representing a family member, have sued former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and other former officials over the two separate drone strikes that killed three U.S. citizens in Yemen. The Obama administration wants the lawsuit dismissed.

The lawsuit is the latest challenge to the administration’s secretive war-fighting practices that have mobilized skeptics on both the right and the left. ERad more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: U.S. Air ForceU.S. military drone surveillance is expanding to hot spots beyond declared combat zones

By Craig Whitlock. The steel-gray U.S. Air Force Predator drone plunged from the sky, shattering on mountainous terrain near the Iraq-Turkey border. For Kurdish guerrillas hiding nearby, it was an unexpected gift from the propaganda gods.

Fighters from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, filmed the charred wreckage on Sept. 18 and posted a video on YouTube. A narrator bragged unconvincingly that the group had shot down the drone. But for anyone who might doubt that the flying robot was really American, the video zoomed in on mangled parts stamped in English and bearing the label of the manufacturer, San Diego-based General Atomics.

For a brief moment, the crash drew back the curtain on Operation Nomad Shadow, a secretive U.S. military surveillance program. Since November 2011, the U.S. Air Force has been flying unarmed drones from Incirlik Air Base in Turkey in an attempt to suppress a long-simmering regional conflict. The camera-equipped Predators hover above the rugged border with Iraq and beam high-resolution imagery to the Turkish armed forces, helping them pursue PKK rebels as they slip back and forth across the mountains.

As the Obama administration dials back the number of drone attacks in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen, the U.S. military is shifting its huge fleet of unmanned aircraft to other hot spots around the world. This next phase of drone warfare is focused more on spying than killing and will extend the Pentagon’s robust surveillance networks far beyond traditional, declared combat zones.

Over the past decade, the Pentagon has amassed more than 400 Predators, Reapers, Hunters, Gray Eagles and other high-altitude drones that have revolutionized counterterrorism operations. Some of the unmanned aircraft will return home with U.S. troops when they leave Afghanistan. But many of the drones will redeploy to fresh frontiers, where they will spy on a melange of armed groups, drug runners, pirates and other targets that worry U.S. officials. Read more from this story HERE.

Courageous CEO Discloses that the Secret FISA Court Ordered His ISP to Install Black Box to Copy Data

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Photo Credit: FlickrIn the wake of the Snowden revelations, this courageous CEO of a small Internet Service Provider (ISP) in Utah decided to go public with what one of the US’s secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Courts ordered him to do. The CEO is outraged over this apparent violation of the Bill of Rights. Here’s part of his statement:

[The federal agents] came in and showed me papers. It was a court order from the FISC (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court) for the intercept, with the agent’s name… and the court’s information. I think it was three or four pages of text. They wouldn’t let met me copy them. They let me take notes in regards to technical aspects of what they wanted to do…

It was open ended. I called six months into it and said, “How long is this going to go on?” and they said, “I don’t know.” I went on for nine months. If it were still there, I would have probably smashed it by now. There have been no [related] arrests that I have heard of…

These programs that violate the Bill of Rights can continue because people can’t go out and say, “This is my experience, this is what happened to me, and I don’t think it is right”…

We run a Tor node, in some ways as an affirmation of our belief that there are legitimate reasons for being anonymous on the internet. That is where the majority of requests come in from these days. Some illegal traffic comes in through Tor node and we get a federal request through the FBI or DOJ (Department of Justice). I respond to them and say that this is a Tor node [and therefore inaccessible, even to the ISP]; that is usually the end of it. They realize what that is, and it is a dead end.

I am in a little bit of a different situation than large companies. I don’t have a board of directors to answer to. A number of [larger] companies are getting paid for the information. If you go establish a tap on Google’s network, they will charge X amount per month. Usually the government pays it. It isn’t worth it to me to do that kind of wholesale monitoring at any price, and lot of companies disagree with that, because it is a financial issue for them. [They say] if it is worth this much profit, let’s go for it. The return for standing up for people’s constitutional rights and privacy is much greater and more satisfying.

Secret Court OKs Continued US Phone Surveillance Program for Another Three Months (+video)

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By Fox News. The secret intelligence court that signs off on giving the U.S. government the authority to monitor hundreds of millions of telephone records has renewed the government’s request to do so for another three months.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence announced Friday its authority to maintain the program expired on July 19 and that the government had sought and received a renewal from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court.

National Intelligence Director James Clapper announced the new order.

The surveillance program has been under intense scrutiny since June, when former CIA employee and National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden leaked details of two top secret U.S. surveillance programs that critics say violate privacy rights. Read more from this story HERE.

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Secret Court Renews NSA’s Phone Records Collection

By Todd Beamon. The FISA Court in Washington oversees U.S. surveillance programs. It consists of 11 federal judges, all whom have been appointed by Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts.

The White House disclosed the FISA’s stamp of renewed approval of the court order in an effort at greater transparency after former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden leaked details of the National Security Agency’s secret U.S. surveillance programs to the media.

But bipartisan criticism continues to mount on Capitol Hill over the NSA’s collection and stockpiling of millions of Americans’ phone records without individual warrants or suspicions of connections to terrorism.

“By renewing the FISA court order, the Obama administration would reconfirm its support for the dragnet collection of telephone metadata, despite public outcry,” Rep. James Sensenbrenner, a Wisconsin Republican and a senior member of the House Judiciary Committee, told The Guardian newspaper of London.

Meanwhile, Sen. Jeff Merkley, an Oregon Democrat, said the White House should have let the Verizon order expire. Read more from this story HERE.