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Founding Fathers Thomas Jefferson and John Adams warned that an educated and well informed citizenry is vital to the survival of our democracy. Now, at both the state and national levels, serious efforts are being made to limit the information available to us.

Here in Wisconsin, Gov. Scott Walker has proposed in his budget that the Wisconsin Natural Resources magazine be discontinued after 100 years of publication. Interestingly, this magazine costs the taxpayers nothing. Why then is it included in the budget? The Walker administration has already moved to take phrases such as global warming and climate change out of state publications in an effort to limit the information citizens receive. This is just another attempt to do the same.

At the national level, President Donald Trump wages a war on the media, going so far as to ban news organizations that criticize him and his policies from press briefings. Im sure every one of us has a few media outlets we do not like. But whether they shout at us from the left or the right, our democracy will survive them. What it cannot survive is a news media that works only to support the sitting majority -- in other words, a government controlled news media.

-- Jane Noffke, Madison

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Government shouldn't control the news media -- Jane Noffke - Madison.com

Many argue that we are now connected more than ever. Human beings can have conversations with one another in an instant regardless of location or time zone thanks to social media. American psychologists recently determined, however, that social media sites have only intensified experiences of social isolation.

Psychologists at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine examined the use of Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Snapchat, and Tumblr. The team questioned 2,000 adults between the ages of nineteen and thirty-two. The study concluded that adults who spend more than two hours a day on social media were more than twice as likely to have feelings of loneliness.

The team theorizes that adults who spend more time on social media in turn spend less time on real-world interactions. Users can also feel excluded if they see pictures of their friends at an event that they were not invited to. To top it off, people tend to only post the best parts of their life on social media. Most who spend more time on sites like Instagram and Facebook are only looking at idealized versions of another persons life.

This is not the first time, and certainly will not be the last time, that the Internet is blamed for a variety of social ills. One 2014 study debunked the rumor that video games themselves caused violence, but revealed losing a game can increase aggression.

Read more from the original source:
Psychologists Claim Social Networking Sites Cause Higher Levels Of Loneliness - Hot Hardware

The CIA and Departments of Justice and Treasury are being sued by a prominent legal organization for their role in leaking highly classified material as part of an effort to undermine the credibility of former Trump administration National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, according to an announcement.

Judicial Watch, known for its role in exposing former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server, announced on Monday that it has sued several federal agencies for information related to Flynn's discussions with Russian officials before he officially entered the White House.

Flynn was forced to resign from the White House for apparently misleading President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence about the substance of these conversations.

However, theWashington Free Beaconand multiple other news outlets havereportedon a campaign by former Obama administration officials and loyalists to spread highly classified information in a bid to handicap the Trump administration.

In addition to Flynn, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and White House adviser SebastianGorkahave been the subject of multiple leaks aimed at jeopardizing their positions in the administration.

Click for more from The Washington Free Beacon.

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CIA, DOJ sued over leaks of classified info about former NSA Flynn - Fox News

A former NSA intelligence analyst poured cold water on President Donald Trumps statements that former President Barack Obama has his phone lined taped, saying the intelligence community considers Trumps charges to be a kooky fantasy.

Writing for the Observer, ex-analyst John Schindler said that there are already enough questions about the Trump administrations ties to the Russians to warrant a full investigation, but that the presidents foray into a massive conspiracy involving Obama and the highest levels of the intel community is absurd.

Calling Trumps allegations against Obama on Twitter, the most bizarre public statements from any American president, Schindler took up what little specifics Trump provided and spoke with his contacts at the NSA who unanimously dismissed them as a presidential fantasy.

Lets be perfectly clear here: The scenario painted by President Trump of his predecessor tasking the IC with wiretapping Trump Tower simply could not have happened without a far-reaching and highly illegal conspiracy involving the White House and several of our spy agencies, above all the National Security Agency, Schindler wrote. My friends still at NSA, where I served as the technical director of the Agencys biggest operational division, have told me without exception that Trumps accusation is wholly false, a kooky fantasy.

Schindler, who has an extensive background in domestic surveillance, explained how improbable Trumps allegations were.

In the first place, the White House doesnt ask for such wiretaps, ever; such requests come directly from NSA, the FBI, or the Justice Department. Involvement of any White House in such highly classified requests would immediately set off enormous red flags in the IC and DoJ due to their glaringly politicaland therefore illegalaim, he explained.

Having worked with a lot of FISA collection during my time in the spy business, I can state without reservation that President Trumps accusations are so inherently implausible as to render them an absurdity Schindler continued. He needs to offer hard evidence for such incendiary claims or back down publicly, preferably with an apology to his predecessor, whom he has maligned without cause.

The former analyst did leave the door open to the notion that there might be wiretaps at Trump Tower just not ones aimed specifically at Trump and none involving Obama.

Its very plausible that NSA and other spy agencies intercepted Kremlin communications which might have incidentally involved associates of our current president, he explained. But neither Donald Trump nor his surrogates were being spied on as themselves. If they didnt realize their shady Russian friends might be considered foreign intelligence targets by NSA and other Western intelligence services, thats on them.

According to Schindler, if Trump hoped that his wild allegations about Obama will make the Russian contact with administration officials scandal go away, he couldnt have been more wrong.

Whats certain is that KremlinGate isnt going away, and the presidents bizarre efforts to make his links to Moscow a non-story have only made it a bigger one he concluded. Now the media is more curious than ever about Trumps Russian connections, and no amount of chanting fake news will alter that. Neither will Team Trumps obsession with the alleged deep state save them from awkward questions.

You can read the whole piece here at the Observer.

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Ex-NSA analyst: Intel community thinks Trump's wiretapping paranoia about Obama is a 'kooky fantasy' - Raw Story

Considering the new administration has stepped up its ousting of immigrants, expressed its disinterest in pursuing civil rights investigations of the nation's law enforcement agencies, applauded asset forfeiture, and declared war on leakers, it comes as no surprise the White House supports a clean reauthorization of Section 702 surveillance.

The Trump administration does not want to reform an internet surveillance law to address privacy concerns, a White House official told Reuters on Wednesday, saying it is needed to protect national security.

The announcement could put President Donald Trump on a collision course with Congress, where some Republicans and Democrats have advocated curtailing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, parts of which are due to expire at the end of the year.

Section 702 has dodged reform efforts, thanks in part to the intelligence community's unwillingness to discuss anything about it. Repeated requests by representatives for the NSA to come up with an estimate of how many US persons' communications are swept up "inadvertently" have been met with shrugs and stalling. Five years after he was first asked, James Clapper promised to have something put together "soon." We're still waiting.

Not helping the matter is the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board's evaluation of the program. After finding the Section 215 phone metadata program both useless and illegal, it had very little to say about the NSA's internet backbone dragnet. The best it could offer was that it was likely legal and any collection of US persons' communications was probably "inadvertent." It agreed the massive collection program ran right up against the edges of the Fourth Amendment, but didn't cross it -- at least as far as it was willing to examine.

Unfortunately, there will be no follow-up arriving before the reauthorization period closes. The PCLOB is mostly dead and unlikely to be revived by an administration looking for a no-questions-asked rubber stamping of Section 702's five-year renewal. Given that the unanswered questions about domestic surveillance weren't answered in time for the 2012 renewal debate, it's highly probable the Director of National Intelligence's office won't be providing these numbers to Congressional representatives ahead of the December deadline.

Hopefully, there will be a more organized push back against a clean reauthorization. Thanks to multiple leaks, Congressional representatives should actually have some idea how much domestic surveillance occurs under this statute. It's more critical than ever that the program receive a detailed examination before the vote, considering the outgoing president gave more than a dozen federal agencies access to unminimized data/communications collected by the NSA.

And Trump himself has seen no reason to roll that sharing back, despite his antipathy towards much of Obama's orders and legislation. Ironically, his Saturday morning tweetstorm griping about the Trump Tower being "wire tapped" by Obama ahead of the November election. Once again, Trump has offered no proof of this claim, but even if taken at face value, it would be the byproduct of the Section 702 program he has stated he wants renewed with no changes. Communications with foreign persons is fair game under Section 702, even if the communications originate in the US. The FBI's acquisition of these communications (if that's what has happened) is specifically approved by the recent data-sharing program. Perhaps Trump might want to take a closer look at the program before attempting to shove it past inquistive legislators.

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Trump Administration Wants A Clean Reauthorization For NSA Surveillance - Techdirt