WASHINGTON (CN) – A federal judge dismissed most, but not all, of the National Security Agency's requests to dismiss a reporter's FOIA request on federal surveillance of judges.
Jason Leopold, formerly with Al-Jazeera America and now with Vice News, filed two FOIA requests for NSA and FBI "surveillance of federal and state judges." Continue>>>
======
[…]
Over at The Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf has an excellent piece on Jason Leopold's FOIA lawsuit to obtain former NSA chief Keith Alexander's financial disclosure statements.
[…]
Read More… from Opinion: NSA Chief Keith and the Revolving Door
From Courthouse News Service: WASHINGTON (CN) – The once-secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has mishandled demands to reveal the government's attempted justifications of its program of collecting the call and email data of Americans, a media coalition said.
Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press filed the amicus brief with the FISC, just before Thanksgiving last week, alongside Bloomberg, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Courthouse News Service and 21 other media organizations.
[…]
Read More… from Media outlets push FISC for info on secret government surveillance
From First Amendment Coalition: A year or two from now, when investigators have taken stock of all the revelations in the NSA records released by Edward Snowden, the verdict is likely to be that the exposed NSA surveillance activities were NOT unlawful.
[…]
From Delmarva Public Radio: Since former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden leaked classified information about the agency’s intelligence-gathering activities last summer, the NSA has been bombarded with requests for its records.
USA Today this week said the agency received more than 2,500 requests for records from July to September, compared to about 250 from January to March.
[…]
Read More… from Want a file from the NSA? You can ask, but you might not get it
From U.S. News: Want to know which companies are protecting your data property against interception by spies at the National Security Agency or hackers who might be able to snoop your email on public wireless signals?
Google, Dropbox, Sonic.net and SpiderOak are the Web companies that met all five of the communications encryption steps recommended by a newly-released survey from the Electronic Frontier Foundation digital rights advocacy group.
[…]
Read More… from Google, SpiderOak encrypt best against NSA, report says
From Watchdog.org: A special committee ordered by President Obama to review the legality of the National Security Agency’s spying programs will not be subject to government transparency laws.
The president created the NSA review group in August and publicly promised it to be an “independent review” of NSA programs revealed by leaks from whistleblower Edward Snowden. Obama promised that the committee would be a “high-level group of outside experts to review our entire intelligence and communications technologies.”
[…]
Read More… from ‘Independent review’ of US spying policy not subject to open-records law
From The New York Times: WASHINGTON — Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor, said in an extensive interview this month that he did not take any secret N.S.A. documents with him to Russia when he fled there in June, assuring that Russian intelligence officials could not get access to them.
[…]
Read More… from Snowden says he took no secret files to Russia
From The Daily Caller: The American Civil Liberties Union is suing the Department of Justice in regards to whether a criminal suspect was placed under NSA surveillance.
On Thursday, the ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit to obtain the U.S. government policy for notifying criminal defendants that they are being monitored by the government.
Visit The Daily Caller for more.
======
[…]
Read More… from ACLU sues DOJ, demands to know whether suspects were placed under NSA surveillance
From Journal Gazette: WASHINGTON – In the recent stream of disclosures about National Security Agency surveillance programs, one document, sources say, has been conspicuously absent: the original – and still classified – judicial interpretation that held that the bulk collection of Americans’ data was lawful.
[…]
Read More… from Lawmakers, groups urge secret court to reveal papers justifying NSA records programs
