Free Talk Live

Though it was voted down by congress in 2003 due to privacy concerns, the NSA's new data center, now being constructed in Utah, will intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of domestic communications including private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as personal data trails such as parking receipts, travel itineraries, and bookstore purchases.

The National Counterterrorism Center has been granted sweeping new authority to store and monitor massive datasets about innocent Americans.
The guidelines allow the NCTC, for the first time, to keep data about innocent U.S. citizens for up to five years, using “predictive pattern-matching,” to analyze it for suspicious patterns of behavior. The data the counterterrorism center has access to includes “entire government databases—flight records, casino-employee lists, the names of Americans hosting foreign-exchange students and many others.”

On a remote patch of Kansas prairie believed to fall outside the range of U.N. spy satellites, construction is finally complete on the long- awaited 9/11 Truther Memorial, sources confirmed Wednesday.

The Wall Street Journal today published an in-depth review of a new, relatively unknown program run by the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC). Although we have been warning about the dangers of the program for months, and I testified before Congress about the issue in July, the Journal’s story conveys how controversial the program was even inside the government. It also describes the broad scope of new authority the government is granting itself.

William Binney is among a group of N.S.A. whistle-blowers, including Thomas A. Drake, who have each risked everything — their freedom, livelihoods and personal relationships — to warn Americans about the dangers of N.S.A. domestic spying; A top-secret program he says is broadly collecting Americans' personal data.

A book published earlier this month, "Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry," contains revelations about the NSA's snooping efforts, based on information gleaned from NSA sources. According to a detailed summary by Shane Harris at the Washingtonian yesterday, the book discloses that a codename for a controversial NSA surveillance program is "Ragtime" -- and that as many as 50 companies have apparently participated, by providing data as part of a domestic collection initiative.

The Center for Copyright Information (CCI) is part of the group's controversial "graduated response" effort: a partnership between Verizon, AT&T, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, the MPAA, RIAA, and others that will enforce copyright claims against customers by serving them with warnings and escalating penalties.

Gaining entry to some movie theaters lately gives patrons an experience that is on par with going through a TSA security checkpoint at the airport. Then once you’ve gained access, there are cameras strategically positioned that record your every move. Unfortunately, the extent to which these companies monitor movie-goers is only going to get worse.

SEOUL—Shoppers at the new International Finance Center Mall in Seoul can find their way around the four-story complex by approaching one of 26 information kiosks. When they do, they also are being watched.