Search Results
Search this site
Matching entries from TPMMuckraker
Colbert On GPS Story: Sprint Can't Replace Patriot Act On Its Own (VIDEO)
Stephen Colbert tackled the cellphone surveillance story we've been telling you about last night, riffing on corporate America's growing role in police surveillance.
How Easy Is It For The Police To Get GPS Data From Your Phone?
Police can in some cases track cell phone location by merely telling a court that the information is relevant to an investigation, a legal expert tells TPM -- a fact that may partly explain how law enforcement racked up 8...
Police Tapped Sprint Customer GPS Data 8 Million Times In A Year
Under a new system set up by Sprint, law enforcement agencies have gotten GPS data from the company about its wireless customers 8 million times in about a year, raising a host of questions about consumer privacy, transparency, and oversight of how police obtain location data.
Obama Adopts Bush's State Secrets Position -- And Exact Language -- In NSA Spying Case
It looks like the Obama Administration is invoking the state secrets privilege in a lawsuit alleging illegal surveillance by the National Security Agency -- and it's using the exact wording used by the Bush Administration two years ago in the very same case.
Feds: Zazi Bought Beauty Products To Build Bomb
Prosecutors have detailed the steps that Najibullah allegedly took to create a bomb -- involving shopping online and in person for beauty and home-improvement products that contained chemicals needed for an explosive device.
ACLU And Nadler: New State Secrets Policy Falls Short
An ACLU lawyer and Rep. Jerry Nadler say the Obama administration's new state secrets policy falls short of what's needed to adequately rein in executive power and reestablish the rule of law. Both want legislation to fix the problem.
Only Yoo: Report Details Bush White House Use Of Hand-Picked DOJ Lawyer To Justify Warrantless Wiretapping
The fact that John Yoo was the only Justice Department OLC official who was "read into" the surveillance program -- even though he wasn't the head of OLC at the time -- has already been noted by others looking through...
CIA Vet: Agency Doesn't Need Secret Program To Target al Qaeda
Earlier today, we raised a few questions about the notion that the secret CIA program that Dick Cheney reportedly withheld from Congress concerned an effort to kill or capture al Qaeda leaders. And now a top counter-terror expert is doing...
New Info Brings More Questions On Secret CIA Program
We've gotten some more information in recent days about that secret CIA program that the agency withheld key information from Congress about, and that CIA director Leon Panetta promptly shut down when he learned about it last month. But the...
Bush Personally Sent Card And Gonzo To Ashcroft's Hospital Bed
This great catch by Marcy Wheeler might be the most shocking nugget of all from the IGs report on surveillance. The report goes into some detail about that famous visit made by Andy Card and Alberto Gonzales to then-AG John...
WH Counsel Gonzo To DOJ: When We Said We Cared About Your Legal Opinions On Surveillance, We Didn't Really Mean It
Another great nugget from that just-released inspector generals' report on surveillance... Check out the amazing 2004 letter from Alberto Gonzales, at the time the White House counsel, to then-Deputy Attorney General James Comey, who had raised "serious issues" about the...
Was Bush Kept In The Dark On DOJ Concerns About Surveillance?
One passage on the IGs report on surveillance suggests something that perhaps shouldn't come as a surprise -- that President Bush was kept in the dark by members of the White House staff about about serious objections to the surveillance...
White House Slipped In Key Passage To CIA Threat Assessment, Justifiying Surveillance
Perhaps the key passage -- or at least the most interesting one -- from the just released inspectors general report on warrantless wiretapping is this one:...
Earthgrains, The Wholesome New Poster Child For The "Extreme Anti-Union" Movement
A Cornell survey of trends in union intimidation released today is likely to provide labor supporters some critical talking points in their endless struggle to pass a "card check" bill aimed at making said tactics tougher to pull off. It's...
Lawmaker: CIA Already Being Probed For Misleading Congress
As they go after Nancy Pelosi over those CIA briefings, Republicans have been putting the burden of proof on the Speaker, suggesting that it's all but unheard of for the CIA to mislead others in government. But in fact, the...
Is The Most Forceful Advocate For Probing Torture ... Dick Cheney?
This goes way beyond strange bedfellows. But it looks like Dick Cheney has emerged as the single most forceful proponent of a full investigation of the Bush administration's torture policies. In an interview on CBS's Face The Nation yesterday, the...
Parsing Goss's Role In The Harman Story
It's worth trying to clear up some of the confusion on a key point that came out of yesterday's post. We wrote that, after reading the transcript of Jane Harman's wiretapped conversation with the suspected Israeli agent, then-CIA director Porter...
Harman Hires Lanny Davis As Spin-Meister
Jane Harman has hired Lanny Davis as a "media adviser" to help her deal with the fallout from the AIPAC story, reports Laura Rozen at Foreign Policy. Hiring Davis suggests Harman -- who embarked on a media blitz last week,...
Why Did The NSA--And Not The FBI--Conduct The Wiretap Which Snagged Harman?
Sunday's bombshell article by Jeff Stein--and the New York Times' helpful follow up piece--open up so many new lines of inquiry it's hard to know where to begin. But a few things definitely stuck out at us. One question we...
The Daily Muck
Armed guards who once worked for the defense contracting company Blackwater Worldwide -- now renamed "Xe" -- will remain in Iraq much longer than was previously reported, government officials told the AP Monday. Xe guards will continue work in Southern...
