Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
The Senate passed the USA Freedom Act today by 67-32, marking the first time in over thirty years that both houses of Congress have approved a bill placing real restrictions and oversight on the National Security Agency’s surveillance powers. The weakening amendments to the legislation proposed by NSA defender Senate Majority Mitch McConnell were defeated,…
Judicial Watch has – for many years – obtained sensitive U.S. government documents through freedom of information requests and lawsuits. The government just produced documents to Judicial Watch in response to a freedom of information suit which show that the West has long supported ISIS. The documents were written by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency…
The revelations contradict the official line of Western government on their policies in Syria, and raise disturbing questions about secret Western support for violent extremists abroad, while using the burgeoning threat of terror to justify excessive mass surveillance and crackdowns on civil liberties at home. Among the batch of documents obtained by Judicial Watch through…
Forget the White House’s doomsday talk about American intelligence going blind. Thanks to backdoor provisions and alternate collection schemes, U.S. spies will keep on snooping. President Obama and his top national security officials spent the past few days warning that once intelligence-gathering authorities in the Patriot Act expired just after midnight Sunday, the United States…
Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee joked earlier in the year he wished he could have pretended to be transgender in high school “when it came time to take showers in PE.” Huckabee made the comments at the 2015 National Religious Broadcasters Convention in Nashville, Tennessee, earlier this year but the comments were uploaded to YouTube…
(Photo: Photick/shutterstock.com) In 1961, when a KGB counterintelligence officer showed up at a CIA station in Helsinki, Jeanne Vertefeuille held the keys to the office safe. “Responsibility for office funds was part of my normal administrative duties,” the former CIA officer writes in Circle of Treason, the book she co-authored in 2013, “and therefore I could…
Did you know marriage equality is a mainstream thing these days? Polling released Monday shows that fully 56 percent of Americans are more than ready for the Supreme Court to do gay marriage to the entire country, and those numbers grow every single year. So you’d think a commercial featuring a gay Republican military doctor who really wants…
After years of using delaying tactics and last minute deadlines to push last minute Senate votes, Mitch McConnell’s attempt to use building deadline pressure to extend, with some modification, three of the more controversial Patriot Act provisions failed late Sunday night. The bill to do so is the USA Freedom Act. It is still likely…
Need more proof of the role Facebook is playing in the distribution of news? Among Americans born between 1981 and 1996 — a.k.a millennials — 61 percent get political news from Facebook in a given week, versus 37 percent who get it from local TV. That’s according to a new Pew Research Center study released…
Photo Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, grudgingly approved debate on the House bill. Credit Zach Gibson/The New York Times WASHINGTON — The government’s authority to sweep up vast quantities of phone records in the hunt for terrorists expired at 12:01 a.m. Monday after Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, blocked…