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Privacy march, Washington D.C, 2013. Credit: James Bovard

U.S. intelligence agencies are telling us not to worry about the FISA Amendments Act, a 2008 law that allows the NSA to tap into the communications of non-U.S. persons who are outside the U.S., even though this lawsidestepsthe Fourth Amendment as it allows the NSA to record the emails and phone calls of U.S. citizens who happen to be communicating with people overseas.

How many American citizens is the government listening in on? We dont know, as the intelligence agencies told Congress they cant say just how many American citizens theyve eavesdropped on (without warrants).

Despite this, they say Congress should just renew the controversial section 702 of the Act before it expires in December; in fact, they want it to be made permanent law.

Congress would probably do this too if it wasnt for the fact that theyve recently learned their privacy is also at stake. Recent unmaskings show that even a congressmans conversations with a foreign official might go public with their names un-redacted. Then, even if the member of Congress didnt do anything wrong, what they said and whom they spoke with could quickly be taken out of context by the media outlets that root for the opposing team.

We cannot live in fear of our own intelligence community, said Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY). They have such power to suck up every bit of every transmission, every communication we ever made. We cant just have them willy-nilly releasing that to the public.

In this case Paul is not a lone gadfly. Politicians from Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, to Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), arent so keen about what this law can do to them. Theyve learned that this is a new age when elected officials, not just privacy advocates, fear not just leaked facts, but innuendo and out-of-context spin from off-camera conversations or email exchanges.

Some Republicans even used a debate at a recent congressional hearing to suggest Obama administration officials had purposely unmasked elected officials and then leaked the info to harm Trump administration officials. Specifically, former National Security Advisor Susan Rice and former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power have been accused of unmasking Trump administration officials and expanding who could see the documents in an effort to get them to leak.

All of this is very new and confusing to our politicians. But, as fiction can gaze just beyond the headlines to show us where we are going and how we might keep our freedom in this changing world, my novel Kill Big Brother takes this plot to its dramatic end. What I found while researching and writing the book is there are ways to keep our intelligence agencies strong enough to protect us while keeping our freedom.

This begins with enforcing a change in mindset. Too often our intelligence agencies, as law enforcement will, have their eyes so fixed on the problemsterrorism, ransomware wielded by criminal syndicatesthey lose sight of the freedom they are supposed to be protecting.

So what should Congress do with Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act?

First, they shouldnt make it permanent law, as Congress needs to revisit this issue periodically as events and technology change.

Next, Congress should require the intelligence agencies to report by specified dates how many U.S. citizens have been listened to or have had their emails viewed as a result of this provision in the lawand not just general numbers, but real data. The law sunsets in December, so Congress should use this deadline to pressure the intelligence community to get these answers now.

Congress should then update the law by setting up a legal apparatus that will help to quickly, in this modern world, give the NSA and more the ability to get approval or to, in some cases, get approval within a certain time period after the fact for listening in on communications that might include U.S. citizens. Yes, this means stripping away the NSAs ability to listen away with no checks or balances from Congress or the courts. The Fourth Amendment protections need to be respected. If technology makes it possible for the NSA to listen in on conversations,then the NSA, with all of its vast resources, can propose ways for technology to help create a fast approval and oversight process.

Civil libertarians shouldnt forget that U.S. intelligence agencies have an almost impossible task. They have to find terrorists and others who are plotting to do us harm in an age when encryption and other technologies allow even unsophisticated criminals to hide their communications. But then, history is also a teacher heresimply empowering secretive government organizations can lead to some undesirable places.

Also, encryption and other technologies have become an important part of modern commerce. There is no turning back the clock. What it comes down to is that good police work is called for, not broad new powers for a Big Brother state.

Few Americans now know that under Section 702 the FISA Amendments Act the government now collects millions of communications annually from American citizens, according to research done by The Washington Post. Part of the way the NSA does this is by temporarily copying internet traffic going in and out of the U.S. As a result, they are copying and potentially searching emails between journalists and their sources, communications protected by attorney-client privilege, and lawful conversations elected officials are having with foreigners.

Just imagine if a new Edward Snowden leaked this data, information that currently can be used in domestic criminal and civil proceedings, without a warrant. Our right to communicate privately, via Fourth Amendment protections, is paramount to our freedom; also, the First Amendment right to free speech is dampened by this lack of privacy. The U.S. intelligence agencies should be reminded that telling us to give up what they are supposed to be protecting also kills our liberty.

Frank Miniter is the author ofKill Big Brother, a novel that shows how we can keep our freedom in this digital age.

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We Can't Live in Fear of Our Own Intelligence Community - The American Conservative

Whether youre a small business, fast-growing startup or a global enterprise, finding the best processes and tools to make your organization run efficiently is essential to success. But so is making the most of your resources, and that means finding easy project management software and workflow management tools that are powerful but also cost effective.

Wrike is continuously referenced as the best free project management software tool. Whether you are an SME with five or less users or a larger enterprise that wants to get a true experience of a quality project management tool without an upfront investment, sampling Wrikes free package is worthwhile for a variety of reasons.

With a free trial of Wrikes tools for project management, youll get access to the following features;

Lets take a look at four of these features in a little more detail so you can see just how much flexibility and functionality is given for free.

Straight off the bat, it has to be thoroughly appreciated that Wrikes free package allows users to create unlimited projects. Perhaps the most frustrating element of other free project management tools and trials is that users are only permitted to work with a limited number of projects.

To truly experience the benefits and features of a project management tool, you need the flexibility to trial a number of projects in action at once and Wrike offers one of the very few free packages that enable users to do just that.

In addition to a limitation on the number of projects that users of free project management tools can work with, there also tends to be a severe limitation on the features they have access to when using a free trial or free package.

Users of Wrikes free package get access to simple to use task management features, activity dashboards, and reports as well as a real-time activity stream.

The level of integrations that a project management tool offers has a critical effect on the impact the solution can have on your teams productivity. Wrikes free plan offers 30+ integrations and a number of those key integrations are available to free users.

Some of the most frequently utilized productivity apps such as Google Drive, DropBox, OneDrive, Office 365 and iCal can all be integrated with Wrike as a part of your free package enabling users to get a taste for how such flexible integrations can significantly accelerate productivity levels.

File sharing and storage is a daily requirement of project teams yet free tools often limit their file storage capacity to no more than 250mb, meaning their use of the tool is capped within just a few weeks or even days of use. The free Wrike package offers up to 2gb of storage space with further storage capacity facilitated through the tools free integrations with cloud storage solutions such as Google Drive, OneDrive, and DropBox.

Nothing in life is free, they say. Well, you certainly get a lot for free with Wrike. Of course, it is a free plan so it does have limitations in comparison to the paid version. That said; a lot of small businesses wouldnt need access to Wrikes premium advanced features and could totally thrive on using the free version.

If youve already tried the free version and youd like to know what could possibly be offered with the paid version, the following are just some of the added features;

Choosing a project management tool can be tough but the range of features, functionality and friendly user experience that the free Wrike package enables provides a true experience of the tool.

And, if your business can thrive using the free version, keep doing so until you get to the point where the added features such as time-tracking and app integrations make sense for your business.

Wrike makes managing a project online easy. You can boost your productivity, reduce your waste, and significantly improve your business performance by signing up for Wrikes free version today!

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Why is Wrike the best free project management software? - Techworm

When a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit decided an important gun rights case last week, some advocates were already thinking ahead.

Clark Neily of the Cato Institute told my colleague Ann E. Marimow that the 2-to-1 ruling against the Districts requirement of a good reason to obtain a permit to carry a gun in public was thoroughly researched and carefully reasoned.

[Appeals court blocks D.C.s concealed carry law]

It would make an ideal vehicle for the Supreme Court to finally decide whether the Second Amendment applies outside the home, Neily said.

As if.

The fact is the justices have shown a remarkable lack of interest in deciding that issue, or in expanding upon their landmark 2008 decision in District of Columbia v. Heller. They have had multiple chances to define with specificity what the Second Amendment protects beyond Hellers guarantee of individual gun ownership in ones home, and they have declined each opportunity.

Just last month, the court decided to stay out of a similar case from California, where the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit decided that the Second Amendment does not protect the right to carry a concealed weapon in public.

[Supreme Court declines to review California concealed-carry law]

Declining to even review the ruling brought an impatient rebuke from Justice Clarence Thomas.

It reflects a distressing trend: the treatment of the Second Amendment as a disfavored right, wrote Thomas, who was joined by Justice Neil M. Gorsuch.

Thomas said he found the 9th Circuits ruling indefensible.

But even if other members of the court do not agree that the Second Amendment likely protects a right to public carry, the time has come for the court to answer this important question definitively. Twenty-six states have asked us to resolve the question presented, he wrote.

Circuit Judge Thomas B. Griffith acknowledged the absence of clear direction at the beginning of his opinion last week on the D.C. permit procedure.

Constitutional challenges to gun laws create peculiar puzzles for courts, he wrote, because they require balancing the highest goal of government protecting innocent lives against individual rights bestowed by the Constitution.

The Supreme Court, he observed, has offered little guidance.

The courts first in-depth examination of the Second Amendment is younger than the first iPhone, Griffith wrote. And by its own admission, that first treatment manages to be mute on how to review gun laws in a range of other cases.

By listening closely to what the court had to say in Heller, Griffith and Judge Stephen F. Williams blocked the Districts law as a violation of a core Second Amendment protection.

The law requires those seeking a permit to carry a concealed firearm to show that they have good reason to fear injury or a proper reason, such as transporting valuables. Living in a high-crime area shall not by itself qualify as a good reason.

As of July 15, D.C. police had approved 126 concealed-carry licenses and denied 417 applicants.

Judge Karen LeCraft Henderson came up with a very different interpretation from her colleagues. Heller blessed the Districts regulation, she wrote, because of the citys unique security challenges as the nations capital and because the permit process does not affect the right to keep a firearm at home.

The sole Second Amendment core right is the right to possess arms for self-defense in the home, Henderson wrote.

She added that by characterizing the Second Amendment right as most notable and most acute in the home, the Supreme Court necessarily implied that that right is less notable and less acute outside the home.

She noted that her colleagues had put on blinders to the historical analyses of the D.C. Circuits sister circuits: All who have considered the issue concluded that restrictive state regulations on carry permits are constitutional.

There arent many states with such stringent requirements Maryland, New Jersey and New York are among them. They are outliers, said attorney Alan Gura, a go-to Second Amendment lawyer who successfully argued Heller at the Supreme Court and the D.C. case, Wrenn v. District of Columbia, as 44 states allow citizens to claim their rights.

As is its custom, the Supreme Court has not given reasons when it declined to review the lower court decisions upholding the state restrictions. That unanimity, though, could be one reason the Supreme Court has not gotten involved.

The court most often steps in when there is a conflict in the lower courts. The D.C. Circuits panel decision creates that for now.

The city has not decided on its next legal move, but it seems likely to ask the full D.C. Circuit to review the panels decision. As David Kopel, a University of Denver law professor and gun rights activist notes, when Heller was decided in that court a decade ago, the full circuit declined to review and overturn the panels groundbreaking endorsement of an individual right to gun ownership.

But the court has changed dramatically since then. It is more liberal now, with a majority of judges appointed by Democratic presidents.

If the full D.C. Circuit joined its sister circuits in upholding the good reason requirement, gun rights activists would be back to the Supreme Court, again asking for review.

As Thomass dissent indicates, there is some division on the court on the matter, and reasons for why the justices have not stepped in are a matter of speculation.

Perhaps a solid majority agrees the lower courts have read Heller correctly and that it leaves space for jurisdictions to impose stringent requirements for carrying a gun outside the home.

Or perhaps the court remains closely divided Heller was decided on a 5-to-4 vote and the justices simply have little appetite for tackling the controversial matter of guns in the absence of a lower court disagreement that would force their hands.

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D.C. gun ruling again raises an issue the Supreme Court has been ... - Washington Post

In a sign of the growing schism between the region and Brussels Hungary and Slovakia launched scathing attacks on the European Court of Justice (ECJ) accusing it of political activism.

Yesterday the courts advocate general, Yves Bot, issued an opinion urging judges to reject the two countries application to strike out the EUs migrant resettlement programme.

Eurocrats want member states to resettle 160,000 refugees from Greece and Italy under a forced allocation system, which was voted through in 2015 despite opposition from Eastern countries.

GETTY

Hungary and Slovakia, supported by Poland, refused to take in their share and instead launched a legal battle to try and prove that the system is a breach of their sovereignty.

But yesterday French official Mr Bot dealt that effort a serious blow with the publication of his recommendation, which raised eyebrows due to its highly political nature.

The advocate general accused the two countries of failing to show solidarity with other member states and said they were politically duty bound to a fair sharing of burdens.

GETTY

But his opinion drew a furious response from Budapest and Bratislava, who vowed to carry on fighting the quota scheme and launched stinging attacks on the Luxembourg court.

A spokesman for Slovakian prime minister Robert Fico was unrepentant, fierily stating that the premier reiterates that he will never accept any mandatory quotas.

And Hungarian justice minister Pal Volner went on the attack against activist European judges, saying it would be very sorry if the court decides to become part of the political process.

He accused the EU of a deliberate attempt to upset and jeopardise the European peoples peace and security as part of a forced process of unknown origin.

We will never accept any mandatory quotas

Slovakian Government

And he raged: The main elements of this statement are political, which are practically used to disguise the fact that there are no legal arguments in it.

Our legal position is unchanged. If the court bases its decision on the law then we will welcome it positively and we will be very sorry if the court decides to become part of the political process.

In his opinion published yesterday, French official Mr Bot unequivocally stated that judges at the ECJ should dismiss the actions brought by Slovakia and Hungary when they come before them later this year.

He rejected claims by Hungary and Slovakia that the quota scheme should have been put to national parliaments, and not just decided by EU leaders, and that MEPs should have been handed a greater role in shaping it.

And the magistrate said the fact that the fact the decision was not adopted unanimously did not invalidate it, because the Commission did not object to amendments leaders had made to the initial proposal.

Mr Bot wrote: The contested decision automatically helps to relieve the considerable pressure on the asylum systems of Italy and Greece following the migration crisis in the summer of 2015 and that it is thus appropriate for attaining the objective which it pursues.

The limited efficacy can be explained by a series of factors including the partial or total failure of certain Member States (including Slovakia and Hungary) to implement the contested decision, which is contrary to the obligation concerning solidarity and the fair sharing of burdens, to which the Member States are subject in the area of asylum policy.

Judicial activism at the ECJ has become an issue of increasing concern amongst member states and is seen as one of the key reasons why Britain is determined to leave the jurisdiction of the court after 2019.

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'We will NEVER accept' Eastern Europe launches FURIOUS fightback against EU migrant ruling - Express.co.uk

As part of his administrations effort to crack down on illegal immigration, President Donald Trump is asking Congress foran additional 10,000 Immigration and Customs Enforcementofficers as well as more immigration judges to rule on deportation cases.

The Hill reported thatTrump is set to give alaw enforcement and immigration policy speech on Friday in Long Island, N.Y., that will focus on defeating the violent El SalvadoranMS-13 gang, notorious for drug and human trafficking.

According to an unnamed top U.S. official, The Hill said, Trumps speech will focus on affirming the administrationssupport for law enforcement agencies both big and small. The speech will also tackle illegal immigration, which the Trump administration believes is the primary source of MS-13 recruitment.

Migration is the principal factor that is responsible for MS-13, the official said, adding that Trump wanted todemonstrate humanitarian consequences of failing to enforce immigration laws.

According to The Hill, Trump will back up his rhetoricby requesting 10,000 more ICE agents and a substantial amount of immigration judges from Congress. On the legislative side, Trump will request the passage of Kates Law, which will increase penalties to illegal immigrants who return to the U.S. after having been deported previously.

The official told The Hill thatTrump will also ask for a bill against sanctuary cities, as well as further funding for his promised border wall.

The official noted that ICE has already undergone big changes since Trumps takeover from the Obama administration, pointing to the fact that suspected gang members have already been quickly removed from the country, whether they have a past criminal record or not.

If you are a gang member, you are a priority for removal. Full stop, the official said, addingthat the policies are politically incorrect, but law enforcement-wise, very correct.

National Border Patrol Council President Brandon Judd said in an interview on C-SPAN earlier this month that under Trump,the drop in illegal immigration has been miraculous. Judd toldC-SPANs Washington Journal hostPedro Echevarria that border enforcement agents have noted a 53 percent drop in illegal immigrants attempting to make it across the border from last year.

The Trump administration set its sights on MS-13 in April when Trump blamed former President Barack Obama for fostering its growth with his immigration policies.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions traveled to El Salvador to learn how to better combat MS-13from the El Salvador government, as well as former MS-13 members. Reportedly, Sessions and Trump learned that the gang heavily relies on illegal immigrants to fill their ranks.

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Trump wants 10000 more ICE agents to combat illegal immigration and stop MS-13 - TheBlaze.com