Surveillance

Appearing as a guest on Monday's The Nightly Show on Comedy Central, during a discussion of recent mass shootings, CNN host Ashleigh Banfield declared that it is "amazing" that, although "those who support gun ownership and gun rights" treat the Second Amendment as "unassailable," they wish to "tear apart the Fourth Amendment" to fight terrorism. Near the end of the show, after The Nightly…

Two U.S. Senators -- one Republican, the other a socialist who votes with the Democrats -- are outside candidates for president. Both were profiled in Monday's New York Times, but with quite different results. While Rand Paul's anti-surveillance crusade was caricatured as cynical "sloganeering," socialist Bernie Sanders' modest Iowa crowds (100 people instead of 50?) were hailed as a liberal…

Not the endorsement someone heading into the Republican primaries would normally want, but it's the one Rand Paul got.  On today's This Week [hosted by Jonathan Karl in the absence of Stephanopoulos], far-left Rep. Keith Ellison declared that on a variety of issues he is "proud to stand" with Rand Paul. Roll the video and watch Bill Kristol look on beningly as Ellison praises Paul.  Let's read…

The Wednesday editions of ABC’s World News Tonight and CBS Evening News ignored the news that Republican Senator and 2016 presidential candidate Rand Paul (Ky.) launched a new marathon speech on the Senator floor hours earlier in protest of the federal government’s collection of phone records. While ABC and CBS failed to cover this story, NBC Nightly News offered a 26-second news brief on the…

Plenty of opinion to go around on whether ex-intelligence contractor Edward Snowden is a traitor or candidate for canonization. But a liberal radio host who clearly opts for the latter is unwilling to concede that it wasn't just Americans who learned previously classified information about government surveillance and data mining from Snowden's leaks to the media in 2013.  

New York Times campaign reporter Jeremy Peters on Tuesday lent libertarian-Republican Sen. Rand Paul some slight, cynical support toward his attempt to repeal the Patriot Act, yet maintained his personal hostility toward both the GOP, which "demands fealty to hawkish dogma on national security and defense," and the candidate himself, who "can't stop swearing" and whose "mouth gets him in trouble…

On Sunday night, HBO’s John Oliver aired his exclusive interview with Edward Snowden and repeatedly mocked the intelligence of the American public. During the interview, Oliver claimed that when it comes to foreign surveillance, Americans “don’t give any remote sh** about [it].” 

On Thursday night, the “big three” of ABC, CBS, and NBC each covered the news that the United States-backed government in Yemen had fallen after rebels stormed the capital city of Sana’a and surrounded the presidential palace on Tuesday.  While the networks gave this story airtime, they only gave it to the tune of one minute and 59 seconds and avoided any mention of how President Obama had, just…

Andrea Mitchell, NBC News Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent and host of MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell Reports, sat down with Gerard Araud, France’s Ambassador to the United States, on Monday afternoon to discuss the fallout from last week’s terrorist attack on a French satirical newspaper. While the majority of the interview focused on the intelligence risks facing France following the attack, the…

Fox News's Howard Kurtz reported on Monday that former CBS correspondent Sharyl Attkisson filed a lawsuit against the Justice Department and the U.S. Postal Service over the hacking of her computers. Kurtz noted that Attkisson "alleges that three separate computer forensic exams showed that hackers used sophisticated methods to surreptitiously monitor her work between 2011 and 2013." The…

Kristen Welker, NBC News White House Correspondent, served as fill-in host on MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell Reports Thursday afternoon and took the opportunity to badger Congressman Peter King (R-N.Y.) over the Democratic Senate Intelligence Committee report on the CIA’s use of enhanced interrogation techniques on suspected terrorists. Speaking to her Republican guest, Welker asked “some of the…

On Wednesday night, the major broadcast networks failed to report on news that an internal memo was sent to members of the intelligence community by Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper praising their efforts on identifying the rise of ISIS after President Barack Obama blamed them for not doing so in an interview on Sunday’s 60 Minutes. The memo was able to be obtained by Fox…

On Wednesday, NBC's Today devoted a nearly four-minute segment to promoting a fawning interview that Wired magazine conducted with NSA leaker Edward Snowden. Despite introducing the story by labeling Snowden as "the man U.S. officials have called a traitor and a coward," co-host Willie Geist went on to proclaim: "Out from the shadows...in front of the flashbulbs. Appearing at times exhausted,…