Court Tells Homophobic County Clerk She Must Issue Marriage Licenses To Same-Sex Couples

Editors | Queerty | August 27, 2015

A federal appeals court has upheld a ruling ordering a Kentucky county clerk to issue marriage licenses to gay couples.

Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis objects to same-sex marriage for religious reasons. She stopped issuing marriage licenses the day after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned state bans on same-sex marriage.

Two gay couples and two straight couples sued her. A U.S. district judge ordered Davis to issue the marriage licenses, but later delayed his order so that Davis could have time to appeal to the 6th circuit. Wednesday, the appeals court denied Davis’ request for a stay.

“It cannot be defensibly argued that the holder of the Rowan County Clerk’s office, apart from who personally occupies that office, may decline to act in conformity with the United States Constitution as interpreted by a dispositive holding of the United States Supreme Court,” judges Damon J. Keith, John M. Rogers and Bernice B. Donald wrote for the court. “There is thus little or no likelihood that the Clerk in her official capacity will prevail on appeal.”

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Court files: NSA engaged in “systematic overcollection”

Natasha Lennard | Salon | Social Reader | November 19, 2013

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper       (Credit: Reuters/Kevin Lamarque)

Newly declassified (although heavily redacted) government documents revealed for the first time last Monday how the secretive FISA court enabled the NSA to begins its vast dragnet program surveilling Americans’ online metadata.

The FISA files illustrate how the spy agency’s mass surveillance practices were inscribed into law, but also highlight how even the FISA judges were concerned and surprised by the extent of the dragnet spycraft. Court orders also released Monday show that the NSA “systematically” skirted the rules by engaging in consistent “overcollection.”

One court document published shows how a FISA judge ruled, along with a single 1979 Supreme Court decision on which the NSA still relies, that metadata should enjoy no Fourth Amendment protection. This, despite the fact that technologists have agreed that metadata provides an immense amount of information on persons and their networks.

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Documents Show NSA Violated Court Orders on Collection of Phone Records

Dianne Feinstein, member of the United States Senate. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Ali Watkins and Jonathan S. Landay | McClatchy | Reader Supported News | August 3, 2013

National Security Agency officials violated secret federal court orders authorizing the daily collection of domestic email and telephone data from hundreds of millions of Americans, according to previously top-secret documents made public Wednesday by the Obama administration.

The documents didn’t disclose specific details of the violations. But they said that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court imposed temporary restrictions on the programs after it learned of the violations until it was satisfied the NSA had revamped its procedures to conform to court requirements.

Several senior members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, when approached about the breaches, said they were aware of them but declined to answer questions about their nature.

“I don’t know why you need to ask me,” said the panel’s chairwoman, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif.

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FBI Taps Hacker Tactics to Spy on Suspects

English: The Seal of the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation. For more information, see here. Español: El escudo del Buró Federal de Investigaciones (FBI). Para obtener más información, vease aquí (Inglés). (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Jennifer Valentino-Devries, Danny Yadron | The Wall Street Journal | Reader Supported News | August 2, 2013

Law-Enforcement Officials Expand Use of Tools Such as Spyware as People Under Investigation ‘Go Dark,’ Evading Wiretaps

Law-enforcement officials in the U.S. are expanding the use of tools routinely used by computer hackers to gather information on suspects, bringing the criminal wiretap into the cyber age.

Federal agencies have largely kept quiet about these capabilities, but court documents and interviews with people involved in the programs provide new details about the hacking tools, including spyware delivered to computers and phones through email or Web links – techniques more commonly associated with attacks by criminals.

People familiar with the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s programs say that the use of hacking tools under court orders has grown as agents seek to keep up with suspects who use new communications technology, including some types of online chat and encryption tools. The use of such communications, which can’t be wiretapped like a phone, is called “going dark” among law enforcement.

A spokeswoman for the FBI declined to comment.

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Secret Court Lets NSA Extend Its Trawl of Verizon Customers’ Phone Records

The seal of the U.S. National Security Agency. The first use was in September 1966, replacing an older seal which was used briefly. For more information, see here and here. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Ed Pilkington | Guardian UK | Reader Supported News | July 20, 2013

Latest revelation an indication of how Obama administration has opened up hidden world of mass communications surveillance.

The National Security Agency has been allowed to extend its dragnet of the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon through a court order issued by the secret court that oversees surveillance.

In an unprecedented move prompted by the Guardian’s disclosure in June of the NSA‘s indiscriminate collection of Verizon metadata, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) has publicly revealed that the scheme has been extended yet again.

The statement does not mention Verizon by name, nor make clear how long the extension lasts for, but it is likely to span a further three months in line with previous routine orders from the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (Fisa).

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Secret to PRISM Success: Even Bigger Data Seizure

Stephen Braun, Anne Flaherty, Jack Gillum, Matt Apuzzo | Associated Press | Reader Supported News | June 17, 2013

What makes Prism shine? National Security Agency’s megadata collection from Internet pipeline

In the months and early years after 9/11, FBI agents began showing up at Microsoft Corp. more frequently than before, armed with court orders demanding information on customers.

Around the world, government spies and eavesdroppers were tracking the email and Internet addresses used by suspected terrorists. Often, those trails led to the world’s largest software company and, at the time, largest email provider.

The agents wanted email archives, account information, practically everything, and quickly. Engineers compiled the data, sometimes by hand, and delivered it to the government.

Often there was no easy way to tell if the information belonged to foreigners or Americans. So much data was changing hands that one former Microsoft employee recalls that the engineers were anxious about whether the company should cooperate.

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Secret Court Ruling Put Tech Companies in Data Bind

CLAIRE CAIN MILLER | New York Times | June 13, 2013

SAN FRANCISCO — In a secret court in Washington, Yahoo’s top lawyers made their case. The government had sought help in spying on certain foreign users, without a warrant, and Yahoo had refused, saying the broad requests were unconstitutional.

The judges disagreed. That left Yahoo two choices: Hand over the data or break the law.

So Yahoo became part of the National Security Agency’s secret Internet surveillance program, Prism, according to leaked N.S.A. documents, as did seven other Internet companies.

Like almost all the actions of the secret court, which operates under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the details of its disagreement with Yahoo were never made public beyond a heavily redacted court order, one of the few public documents ever to emerge from the court. The name of the company had not been revealed until now. Yahoo’s involvement was confirmed by two people with knowledge of the proceedings. Yahoo declined to comment.

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Proposed Kansas law could ‘quarantine’ people living with HIV and AIDS

PinkNews.co.uk Staff Writer | PinkNews.co.uk | March 27, 2013

A proposed Kansas law could lead, claim campaigners, to people living with HIV or AIDS to effectively being quarantined.

The law would negate the need for a firefighter or paramedic to secure a court order to test a victim’s blood for infectious diseases. If tested positive for HIV, these victims would be able to be quarantined.

The proposed law would overturn a ban on the practice passed in 1988.

“They didn’t get that whole idea of being discriminated against,” said Cody Patton of Positive Directions said. “They didn’t get that that stuff still happens today. My concern is that there’s a lot of people in this state that are still fearful of HIV that don’t look at factual information.”

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