NSA’s Most Contentious Surveillance Program Quietly Canceled, Says Top House Aide

The National Security Agency’s (NSA) most controversial program, which collected millions of U.S. citizens’ communication records, was quietly canceled six months ago, according to a top House aide. Originally exposed in 2013 by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, the NSA’s surveillance program gathered telecommunication records of citizens indiscriminately and in bulk. Ruled illegal by a federal appeals court in 2015, the program restricted its collection of data only to that which is relevant to investigation under the USA Freedom Act. Set to expire at the end of this year, Luke Murry, the National Security Advisor to Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, spoke about the Trump administration’s lack of use with the program and cast doubt on the act’s renewal on a Lawfare podcast. “The administration actually hasn’t been using it for the past six months because of problems with the way in which that information was collected and possibly collected on US citizens, [and] in the way that was transferred from private companies to the administration … I’m actually not certain that the administration will want to start that back up,” Murry said.''

Downplaying Murry’s comments, Matt Sparks, a spokesman for McCarthy’s office, told the New York Times that the security advisor “was not speaking on behalf of administration policy or what Congress intends to do on this issue.” The problems within the program created “technical irregularities” between data the NSA received from telecommunication service providers, which resulted in the agency receiving data it was not authorized for. To fix the issue, the NSA announced last year that it was deleting all call records since 2015.

https://www.dailycaller.com/2019/03/05/nsa-program-canceled-six-months-ago/

Masterpiece Cakeshop And Colorado Call Truce In Harassment, Discrimination Dispute

Christian baker Jack Phillips and the Colorado Civil Rights Commission (CCRC) have resolved a legal dispute that set Phillips’ religious beliefs against the state’s public accommodations law. The deal, announced Tuesday afternoon, provides that the Commission will close an ongoing anti-discrimination probe of Phillips’s Masterpiece Cakeshop if Phillips withdraws a federal lawsuit alleging state officials were subjecting him to a concerted campaign of harassment.

“After careful consideration of the facts, both sides agreed it was not in anyone’s best interest to move forward with these cases,” Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser said in a statement. “The larger constitutional issues might well be decided down the road, but these cases will not be the vehicle for resolving them.” The Supreme Court found that the Commission’s first action against Phillips was infected with anti-religious animus. The June 2018 judgment was 7-2. The case arose when Phillips refused to create a custom wedding cake for a gay couple, Charlie Craig and David Mullins. The Court did not decide whether business owners can claim a religious exemption to public accommodations laws, a provocative question that remains unresolved.

The state issued a second probable cause finding against Phillips three weeks after the high court’s ruling. In that instance, a prospective customer called Autumn Scardina filed a complaint after Phillips declined to create a cake celebrating a gender transition, consistent with his beliefs about the immutability of sex. Phillips believes Scardina made other requests for custom baked goods, including cakes featuring dildos and images of the occult.

In turn, Phillips sued nine state officials, alleging a number of constitutional violations. His lawsuit argued the CCRC was enabling harassment of his business by pursuing complaints from possible bad faith actors. “We hope that the state is done going along with obvious efforts to harass Jack,” said the Alliance Defending Freedom’s (ADF) Jim Campbell, who represents Phillips. “He shouldn’t be driven out of business just because some people disagree with his religious beliefs and his desire to live consistently with them.” Though the state’s case is now closed, the Colorado AG says Scardina can still file a lawsuit against Phillips. Both sides will pay their own attorney’s fees. ADF said their case was strengthened when they found evidence that the CCRC failed to heed the Supreme Court’s 2018 decision. Writing for the majority, Justice Anthony Kennedy condemned Commissioner Diann Rice for comparing Phillips’s stated religious objections to defenses of slavery and the holocaust.

At a commission meeting shortly following the Court’s decision, Commissioners Rita Lewis and Carol Fabrizio expressed support for Rice and her sentiments. ADF only recently became aware of those statements. Lewis and Fabrizio still sit on the Commission. The CCRC ratified the state’s agreement with Masterpiece Cakeshop by unanimous vote Tuesday morning. One Colorado, an advocacy group for LGBT rights, noted the agreement does not affect enforcement of Colorado’s public accommodations law. “Despite the mutual agreement between the State of Colorado and Masterpiece Cakeshop, the law is still the law. No matter who you are, who you love, or what you believe, Coloradans across our state — including LGBTQ Coloradans and their families — are still protected under Colorado law from discrimination in the areas of employment, housing, and public accommodations,” said executive director Daniel Ramos.

https://www.dailycaller.com/2019/03/05/jack-phillips-masterpiece-colorado/

MS-13 Member Among 6 Arrested In Arizona Drug Raid

One member of MS-13 and five others were arrested during a drug bust in Arizona on Friday. A Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and Scottsdale Police Department joint-task force concluded a lengthy investigation into a drug trafficking ring in Mesa, Arizona — a suburb of Scottsdale — on Mar. 1. The state approved warrants that allowed agents and investigators to search four different homes, leading to six arrests. Officials say two kilograms of cocaine, 1,000 pills suspected to contain fentanyl, $28,000 in cash, 16 weapons, stolen firearms, body armor and thousands of rounds of ammunition were seized by enforcement agents during the raid. One of the arrested suspects, Jose Gonzalez-Ramos, admitted to being a member of the violent Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) gang after he was taken into custody on Friday.

“The safety and protection of American citizens by targeting drug traffickers, violent gang members and other criminal organizations is our highest priority,” said Special Agent in Charge of DEA in Arizona Doug Coleman. “These criminals who prey on our communities will be discovered, and along with our law enforcement partners, the men and women of DEA will bring them to justice.” Yasary Bejarano, Luis Adrian Gonzalez Perez, Carlos Daniel Pineda Martinez, Jorge Marin Cuevas and John Hernandez Vera were also arrested in the raid. The Maricopa County Attorney’s Office will prosecute the six suspects, who have been charged with multiple state drugs and weapons charges including possession of weapons, narcotic drug possession, money laundering and conducting an illegal enterprise.

https://www.dailycaller.com/2019/03/05/ms-13-member-arrested-drug-raid/

>>5533399

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Google’s Annual Pay Equity Analysis Finds More Men Than Women Were Underpaid In 2018

Google’s 2018 “pay equity analysis” published Monday compares the salaries of its employees and found that men were underpaid in relation to women last year. “Compensation should be based on what you do, not who you are,” the study begins, but the New York Times highlighted the fact that the study explains how Google provided $9.7 million in “adjustments” to 10,677 employees. Men account for roughly 69 percent of the employees at the tech giant, but the number of men who make up the 10,677 total is unclear. The study admits that lower-level software engineer “men were flagged for adjustments because they received less discretionary funds,” or funds that are not designated for a specific purpose and can be used later, “than women.” The 2018 analysis also includes a“new hire analysis” to mark discrepancies in offers to recently hired, which accounted for 49 percent of the total $9.7 million adjustment amount.

https://www.dailycaller.com/2019/03/04/google-pay-analysis-men-underpaid/

Chinese Hackers Allegedly Hacking U.S. Universities Tied To Naval Research

Chinese hackers have been targeting U.S. universities to steal research about military equipment, security experts said. Most of the universities were studying undersea technologies, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday, some under contracts with the Navy. The schools include Penn State and Duke University. The same group of Beijing hackers is suspected to have previously stolen information from Navy contractors. The hackers are known as Temp.Periscope, Leviathan or Mudcarp. The hackers took advantage of academic researchers not noticing that emails pretending to be from peers at other institutions were actually “phishing” attempts or contained malware. Infected files then spread, for example, from the University of Hawaii’s Applied Research Laboratory to Penn State. “They are a full-fledged operation,” Ben Read, senior manager for cyber espionage analysis at FireEye, told the Wall Street Journal. “And they are not going anywhere.”

Many of the schools are linked to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, a Massachusetts research institute that located the sunken Titanic and partners with the Naval Undersea Warfare Center. The team is suspected of hacking a warfare center contractor and stealing plans for a supersonic anti-ship missile. The cybersecurity firm iDefense said it identified breaches of universities by noticing that the schools’ servers were pinging China. When it comes to cyber-attacks, while much of America’s attention has focused on Russia, China has allegedly quietly built a formidable operation.

The Intelligence Community Inspector General reportedly detected similar pings from Hillary Clinton’s amateur computer server to China that caused every email to be blind-copied to a Chinese group. The country hacked the Office of Personnel Management, which houses the roster of federal employees, in 2015. Democratic California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, had an alleged Chinese spy on her payroll for decades.

During a 2018 congressional hearing on China’s activities in U.S. universities, FBI Director Christopher Wray said “I think the level of naïveté on the part of the academic sector about this creates its own issues.” “One of the things we’re trying to do is view the China threat as not just a whole-of-government threat but a whole-of-society threat on their end, and I think it’s going to take a whole-of-society response by us. So it’s not just the intelligence community, but it’s raising awareness within our academic sector.”

https://www.dailycaller.com/2019/03/05/chinese-hackers-universities-naval-research/