A look at the NSA’s Dark Star Data Center.
In “Hollywood Hypocrites,” NRA News Commentator Colion Noir takes on Hollywood’s culture of holier-than-thou hypocrisy.
(CBS News) CBS News has uncovered documents that show the State Department may have covered up allegations of illegal and inappropriate behavior within their ranks.
The Diplomatic Security Service, or the DSS, is the State Department’s security force, charged with protecting the secretary of state and U.S. ambassadors overseas and with investigating any cases of misconduct on the part of the 70,000 State Department employees worldwide.
CBS News’ John Miller reports that according to an internal State Department Inspector General’s memo, several recent investigations were influenced, manipulated, or simply called off. The memo obtained by CBS News cited eight specific examples. Among them: allegations that a State Department security official in Beirut “engaged in sexual assaults” on foreign nationals hired as embassy guards and the charge and that members of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s security detail “engaged prostitutes while on official trips in foreign countries” — a problem the report says was “endemic.”
The memo also reveals details about an “underground drug ring” was operating near the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad and supplied State Department security contractors with drugs.
Aurelia Fedenisn, a former investigator with the State Department’s internal watchdog agency, the Inspector General, told Miller, “We also uncovered several allegations of criminal wrongdoing in cases, some of which never became cases.”
In such cases, DSS agents told the Inspector General’s investigators that senior State Department officials told them to back off, a charge that Fedenisn says is “very” upsetting.
CBS News has the full article
The source behind the Guardian’s NSA files talks to Glenn Greenwald about his motives for the biggest intelligence leak in a generation.
(Bloomberg) — James Bamford, a bestselling author on U.S. intelligence agencies, discusses the need for data collection, but questions just how big the scope and reach needs to be in the fight against terrorism. He speaks on Bloomberg Television’s “Bloomberg Surveillance.”
US whistleblower ‘defending liberty’
An ex-CIA employee has said he acted to “protect basic liberties for people around the world” in leaking details of US phone and internet surveillance. Edward Snowden, 29, was revealed as the source of the leaks at his own request by the UK’s Guardian newspaper. Mr Snowden, now believed to be in Hong Kong, said he had an “obligation to… Read more →
On the heels of a series of reports detailing the U.S. government’s practice of tracking private citizens’ phone and internet use, President Obama on Friday sought to downplay the invasiveness of the procedure, assuring a California audience that “nobody is listening to your phone calls,” and that any data tracking is governed by comprehensive oversight spanning all three branches of U.S. government.
“Nobody is listening to your telephone calls,” Mr. Obama said, speaking at an event touting his health care law in California. “That’s not what this program is about.”
CBS News has the full article
Rallies in Turkey that began on May 31 have spread across the country. Police fired tear gas and water cannons at the initial protesters who turned out against the plan to covert Istanbul’s main Gezi Park into a shopping center. The demonstrations then mushroomed into angry riots against the authorities and the police’s response. Over 3,000 people have been injured in clashes, and at least two have died.
Government Storing Vast Phone, Email Data At NSA Data Center In Utah
The federal government may store private phone records ,and Internet data that it has seized through the Prism program, in the National Security Agency’s Utah Data Center that is being built and set to open this fall. The UK Guardian reported on Wednesday that the Obama administration had obtained a secret court order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court forcing Verizon to… Read more →
Former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton discusses the Obama administration and implications of the United States signing the U.N. Arms Trade Treaty.
