bush

Author of Torture, Spy Memos Was Just Doing His Job

The government lawyer who wrote memos authorizing the Bush administration to engage in torture and warrantless surveillance says he was just doing his job, according to a recent interview. Asked by the New York Times if he regretted writing the torture memos, former Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo replied, “No, I had to write them. It was my job.

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Monday, January 4th, 2010 P2P News No Comments

TweeBating – online, real time

Last week I sat around a large table on the top floor of Bush House in London with about twenty other people while we talked about the ways radio is changing and tried to imagine how English-language programming on BBC World Service could take advantage of the online, multimedia world that is emerging around us. I was invited because I appear on Digital Planet each week to think out loud about the impact of technology on our lives, but this was an internal BBC meeting rather than an open seminar, and the discussion was never intended to be made public. That didn’t stop one of the other attendees, technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones, from recording a segment of the introductory remarks that Ben Hammersley, the associate editor of Wired UK, made and posting it online via AudioBoo.

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Thursday, November 19th, 2009 P2P News No Comments

Bush Concerned Successor Might Revoke Telco Spy Immunity

The George W. Bush administration expressed concern future administrations might not use the legal amnesty it wanted to give the nation’s telecommunication companies that were being sued for assisting the president’s warrantless, electronic wiretapping program, according to internal documents released Thursday. The documents, unearthed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation via a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, also suggest the administration was wary it might first have to concede that the telcos were complicit in the alleged dragnet surveillance to garner congressional support for the amnesty bill.

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Friday, November 13th, 2009 P2P News No Comments

Government Settles for $3 Million in Spying Coffee Table Suit

The U.S. has agreed to pay $3 million to a former government worker who accused officials with the CIA and State Department of spying on him with a bugged coffee table. Rather than comply with a court order to provide lawyers in the case with what the U.S.

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Tuesday, November 10th, 2009 P2P News No Comments

Lawmakers Cave to FBI in Patriot Act Debate

Powerful Senate leaders on Thursday bowed to FBI concerns that adding privacy protections to an expiring provision of the Patriot Act could jeopardize “ongoing” terror investigations. In an about-face, Sen. Patrick Leahy removed privacy protections in a key Patriot Act provision up for renewal before the Senate Judiciary Committee, which the Democrat of Vermont chairs.

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Thursday, October 1st, 2009 P2P News No Comments