F.B.I. Says It Obtained Reporters’ Phone Records
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
Published: August 8, 2008

WASHINGTON — The Federal Bureau of Investigation said Friday that it had improperly obtained the phone records of reporters for The New York Times and The Washington Post in the newspapers’ Indonesia bureaus in 2004.

Robert S. Mueller III, director of the F.B.I., disclosed the episode in a phone call to Bill Keller, the executive editor of The Times, and apologized for it. He also spoke with Leonard Downie Jr., the executive editor of The Washington Post, to apologize.

F.B.I. officials said the incident came to light as part of the continuing review by the Justice Department inspector general’s office into the bureau’s improper collection of telephone records through “emergency” records demands issued to phone providers.

The records were apparently sought as part of a terrorism investigation, but the F.B.I. did not explain what was being investigated or why the reporters’ phone records were considered relevant.

Cellphone Tracking Powers on Request - Secret Warrants Granted Without Probable Cause By Ellen Nakashima Friday, November 23, 2007; A01

Federal officials are routinely asking courts to order cellphone companies to furnish real-time tracking data so they can pinpoint the whereabouts of drug traffickers, fugitives and other criminal suspects, according to judges and industry lawyers.

In some cases, judges have granted the requests without requiring the government to demonstrate that there is probable cause to believe that a crime is taking place or that the inquiry will yield evidence of a crime. Privacy advocates fear such a practice may expose average Americans to a new level of government scrutiny of their daily lives.

Elliot D. Cohen: Senate Judiciary Poised to Pass Total Information Awareness Bill Mon, 2007-11-12 A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION by Elliot D. Cohen
Amid public outcry, in 2003, Congress defunded the Bush Administration's Total Information Awareness (TIA) project, a massive Orwellian technology-driven surveillance and data mining initiative. Now, it is attempting to pass through the FISA Amendments Act of 2007 (S. 2248), a bill that would affectively give legal standing and retroactive legal immunity to a major component of this project...

Ain't this a BUNCH of TOTAL BS?

U.S. official: Privacy must be redefined - Residents need to adjust to loss of anonymity, government leader says updated 7:41 p.m. ET, Sun., Nov. 11, 2007
WASHINGTON - As Congress debates new rules for government eavesdropping, a top intelligence official says it is time that people in the United States changed their definition of privacy.

Privacy no longer can mean anonymity, says Donald Kerr, the principal deputy director of national intelligence. Instead, it should mean that government and businesses properly safeguard people’s private communications and financial information.

Kerr’s comments come as Congress is taking a second look at the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act...

Report: Gonzales knew of FBI violations
By LAURIE KELLMAN,Tue Jul 10, 7:16 PM ET
WASHINGTON - Democrats raised new questions Tuesday about whether Attorney General Alberto Gonzales knew about FBI abuses of civil liberties when he told a Senate committee that no such problems occurred.

Lying to Congress is a crime, but it wasn't clear if Gonzales knew about the violations when he made his statements to the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Gonzales Was Told of FBI Violations - After Bureau Sent Reports, Attorney General Said He Knew of No Wrongdoing By John Solomon Tuesday, July 10, 2007; A01
As he sought to renew the USA Patriot Act two years ago, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales assured lawmakers that the FBI had not abused its potent new terrorism-fighting powers. "There has not been one verified case of civil liberties abuse," Gonzales told senators on April 27, 2005.

Six days earlier, the FBI sent Gonzales a copy of a report that said its agents had obtained personal information that they were not entitled to have. It was one of at least half a dozen reports of legal or procedural violations that Gonzales received in the three months before he made his statement to the Senate intelligence committee, according to internal FBI documents released under the Freedom of Information Act...

It Can Happen Here By Marie Cocco
Posted on Jun 12, 2007
WASHINGTON—There was a time when the dark, political drama was my preferred weekend movie. That was before kids and suburbs and serial viewings of “Shrek.”

The films were almost always about some exotic country gripped in a vise of poverty and dictatorship, where human life is cheap and strongmen unaccountable for crimes that shock the conscience. The genre was popularized in the 1982 film “Missing,” by the master director Costa-Gavras. It was a fictionalized account of the kidnapping and murder of a young American journalist in Chile, and the political awakening that his conservative father and the journalist ‘s wife undergo when they come to understand that the American government refuses to aide their search and somehow appears complicit in the horrors they see unfolding around them.

No matter where these dramas were set—in Latin America or in Africa or the Soviet Union or Northern Ireland—you would leave the theater stunned and silent, for a time. But safe, it seemed, in the knowledge that it could not happen here. Now it has...