“The FISC is forced to rely upon the accuracy of the information that is provided to the Court,” U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton said in a written statement to The Washington Post. “The FISC does not have the capacity to investigate issues of noncompliance, and in that respect the FISC is in the same position as any other court when it comes to enforcing [government] compliance with its orders.”   read more

Created in 2007 following a recommendation by the 9/11 Commission, PCLOB has done little if anything for six years. Finally, though, PCLOB has its first-ever executive director, Sharon Bradford Franklin. With Franklin and others in place, the board finally held a public hearing (on July 9) to discuss the NSA’s surveillance programs exposed by whistleblower Edward Snowden.   read more

Vermont has sought to prevent the Vermont Yankee reactor, whose original 40-year license expired in March 2012, from being re-licensed, but the court ruled that federal regulation of nuclear power safety preempts state authority over safety completely. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has already re-licensed the plant for another 20 years.   read more

“Unbeknown to millions of people, on a daily basis and for years, Google has systematically and intentionally crossed the ‘creepy line’ to read private email messages containing information you don’t want anyone to know, and to acquire, collect, or mine valuable information from that mail,” the complaint says. Google has defended its actions by claiming the plaintiffs are trying to criminalize “ordinary business practices” that have been part of Gmail since the beginning.   read more

“If they aren’t placed in a juvenile detention facility, the child could run back to the prostitution scenario.” What often happens is police will charge the children with prostitution, just so they can be detained until some kind of social welfare housing becomes available.   read more

Clapper has already lied to Congress about NSA spying,” wrote Coor Friedersdorf of The Atlantic, referring to when Clapper told lawmakers the government was not collecting phone records of Americans, which was not true, as whistleblower Edward Snowden demonstrated by releasing classified National Security Agency records.   read more

On March 22, about 50 activists set out to block the company’s gates. But some of them didn’t make it that far, as police pulled over their cars. Other officers were waiting at the gates for the rest of the demonstrators who showed up early that morning to begin unloading equipment. The protest was called off, and the group was left dumbfounded over how the police could have known about their plans.   read more

A complex catastrophe is defined as: “Any natural or man-made incident, including cyberspace attack, power grid failure, and terrorism, which results in cascading failures of multiple, interdependent, critical, life-sustaining infrastructure sectors and causes extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage or disruption severely affecting the population, environment, economy, public health, national morale, response efforts, and/or government functions.”   read more

Davis recommends shrinking the general officer corps. He notes that in 1945, at the end of World War II, 2,000 general and flag officers led a force of about 12 million. Today, although there are only 1.4 million U.S. troops, there are 900 generals and admirals.   read more

In Barnhart, Texas, residents turn on their taps and get nothing, a product of shale gas fracking operations that have drained water from underground wells. In the nearby county of Crockett, fracking uses up to 25% of the water, according to the groundwater conservation district.   read more

Determined to not repeat the embarrassing Edward Snowden affair, the National Security Agency (NSA) is eliminating 90% of its system administrators and replacing them with machines. Snowden was a contract employee and system administrator for Booz Allen Hamilton who used his top-secret security access to NSA computers and databases to divulge classified operations about domestic snooping on Americans.   read more

“The Government cannot, under any circumstance, affirmatively mislead the Court,” Judge Carney wrote. But the Ninth Court of Appeals said that wasn’t true and reversed his ruling. You can, apparently lie to a judge if later on you admit you lied. The FBI had initially released eight heavily-redacted pages of information in response to the lawsuit brought against them and said that was all there was. But eventually they coughed up another 100 pages of equally heavily-redacted documents.   read more

The courts rejected efforts to assign liability according to company market shares, out of fear that this approach “risks exposing these defendants to liability greater than their responsibility and may allow the actual wrongdoer to escape liability entirely,” as the Missouri Supreme Court put it in 2007. That court, apparently, thought that letting all the wrongdoers escape liability entirely was a better alternative, and most other courts have agreed.   read more

By reducing the case to whether or not O’Connor had been “hired,” the Court also reduced the entire employment relationship to a question of money: “Where no financial benefit is obtained by the purported employee from the employer, no ‘plausible’ employment relationship of any sort can be said to exist.” The Court did not explain why the promised educational benefits of the internship were not sufficient to serve as O’Connor’s remuneration.   read more

Until last week, Lavabit, which was used by NSA whistleblower Edward J. Snowden, and Silent Circle, a fast-growing startup, provided encrypted email services for those who wanted extra privacy. Based on the carefully worded statements of company owner Ladar Levison, Lavabit likely received a secret search order relating to Snowden and is choosing to shut down to avoid being “complicit in crimes against the American people.”   read more

On August 3, 2012, a wooded area around Bayou Corne, south of Baton Rouge, dissolved into liquefied muck from oil and natural gas that was 422 feet deep and 372 feet wide. Now, the sinkhole has grown to 24 acres. The state of Louisiana and local residents are suing Texas Brine Company LLC for the environmental damage caused by the massive sinkhole, which materialized after a salt dome cavern operated by the company collapsed.   read more