The Electronic Frontier Foundation has uncovered widespread violations stemming from FBI intelligence investigations from 2001 to 2008, according to a report released Wednesday. It documents alarming trends in the Bureau’s intelligence investigation practices, suggesting that FBI intelligence investigations have compromised the civil liberties of American citizens far more frequently, and to a greater extent, than was previously assumed.

Using documents obtained through Freedom of Information Act litigation, the report finds:

• Evidence of delays of 2.5 years, on average, between the occurrence of a violation and its eventual reporting to the Intelligence Oversight Board;

• Reports of serious misconduct by FBI agents including lying in declarations to courts, using improper evidence to obtain grand jury subpoenas, and accessing password-protected files without a warrant;

• Indications that the FBI may have committed upwards of 40,000 possible intelligence violations in the 9 years since 9/11;

“The report underscores the need for greater transparency and oversight in the intelligence community,” Mark Rumold said. “As part of our ongoing effort to inform the public and elected officials about abusive intelligence investigations, we are distributing copies of the report to members of Congress.”

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Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, the man behind the publication of more than a 250,000 classified U.S. diplomatic cables, could face spying charges in the U.S. related to the Espionage Act, Assange’s lawyer said on ABC News.

“Our position of course is that we don’t believe it applies to Mr. Assange and that in any event he’s entitled to First Amendment protection as publisher of Wikileaks and any prosecution under the Espionage Act would in my view be unconstitutional and puts at risk all media organizations in the U.S.,” Assange’s attorney Jennifer Robinson told ABC News.

Robinson said they’re hearing from lawyers in the U.S. that an indictment of Assange could be imminent.

Assange is already in custody in London on sexual assault charges including rape originating out of Sweden. He is being held in solitary confinement with restricted access to a phone and his lawyers, Robinson said.

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The Spy Factory: Not for the Paranoid

The warrantless wiretapping controversy has taken a few twists and turns since President George W. Bush left office — and The Spy Factory premiered last winter on NOVA.

The show, which will be rebroadcast tonight on most PBS stations, reported on the National Security Agency’s surveillance of vast streams of data — phone conversations, emails, faxes — from ATnT’s regional switching center in San Francisco.

But the biggest reversal came in March, when a federal judge ruled that domestic surveillance is illegal without court approval.

The National Security Agency (NSA) was first empowered to wiretap on American soil without a warrant just three weeks after the attacks of September 11, thanks to an executive order from then-President Bush. The Obama administration had sought to retain the NSA’s surveillance privileges; the judge rejected the Justice Department’s claim that pursuing the lawsuit would reveal state secrets.

What does this all mean? James Bamford, who wrote The Shadow Factory and wrote and produced The Spy Factory with producer/director C. Scott Willis, says, “What it means is that the judge says what was done there — by both the NSA and ATnT — was illegal because it violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.”

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), enacted in 1978, requires court authorization for domestic wiretaps. But, Bamford points out, that doesn’t mean the telecoms which cooperated with the NSA will be on the hook.

“ATnT and the other telecoms were later given immunity by Congress,” he reminds us, a boneheaded move if there ever was one on the part of Congress, including many Democrats, some from Alabama. You know who you are!

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Locust Fork News-Journal editor and publisher Glynn Wilson was interviewed Thursday by the OpEd News on the first year of Barack Obama’s presidency and the subject of change.

Here’s the blurb and link.

It’s only been a year since we got rid of Bush. Y’all remember W, the worst president in history, right? So yeah, we got change. We got rid of the corporate Republican cabal running the country into the ground. Is Obama moving fast enough on all fronts to satisfy every liberal groups’ demands and all the promises of the campaign? No, of course not. Remember, it took 8 years for Clinton-Gore to balance the budget and get our economy back on track. Remember the “peace dividend?”

OpEdNews Interviews Glynn Wilson on Obama and Change

Finally, someone in the broadcast media willing to read the Fourth Amendment on the air…

I was practically laughed off the Finebaum show for raising this issue on the radio in Alabamaland a couple of years ago. Now it is finally on the front page of the New York Times, Washington Post, the AP A-wire and even on prime time cable TV news.

Bush White House Kept Justice in Dark on Wiretapping

Report: Bush Surveillance Program was Massive

U.S. Wiretaps Were of Limited Value, Officials Report

One of these days, someone will listen. The conservatives are all worried about their Second Amendment rights to bear arms, but said nothing when the Bush administration took their Fourth Amendment rights. We are calling on the Obama administration to cooperate in restoring those rights.

MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann continues looking into the breadth and depth of the Bush administration’s illegal domestic surveillance program with his guest, New York Times investigative reporter James Risen, author of State of War on the CIA.

My reaction? Risen says he could not confirm what Russell Tice said last night about journalists being illegally spied on by the Bush administration, but he said “it’s worth investigating.” Well, duh. I think we knew that.

He said the NSA has “far greater capability” than has “ever been made public,” and that there are parts of the program “we don’t know about,” he said, “including me.”

Coming from one of the top investigative reporters who was spied on and who we assume pushed to have his story published in the Times before his book came out, even though it was held for more than a year, this is a fairly shocking statement when you think about it. The fact is…

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We’ve been reporting on this scandal for three and a half years with multiple posts in our extensive archives, in too many posts to back link to them all right now,, although you can get a taste by clicking on the Tags and Categories links below. The Bush National Security Agency was collecting all phone calls, e-mail messages, Web browsing histories and other data on EVERYBODY, not just people on domestic soil contacting suspected terrorists overseas.

This includes environmental groups, journalists, bloggers and anyone who disagreed with Bush for ANY reason. Now that Bush has gone back to the ranch in Texas and Obama has taken the reins of the U.S. government, more sources may come out of the wood work to confirm this — like this former spy who engaged in the illegal surveillance and was fired when he objected to it on constitutional grounds.

We can’t wait to get even deeper in this list to find out what the Bush administration tried to find out about us, our sources on the Siegelman investigation, including Rainsville attorney Jill Simpson, and other non-profit groups we have promoted and linked to on this alternative independent Web Press.

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House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, the Michigan Democrat, has released a series of letters initiating the Judiciary Committee’s review into allegations that senior administration officials approved the creation of fabricated documents to deceive the American public about the nuclear threat posed by Iraq in 2003.

The Committee contacted a number of administration and intelligence officials seeking their cooperation with its review, including former CIA director George Tenet. You can read the letters here on the committee’s Website.

Questions center on an alleged scheme to create a bogus letter in late 2003, linking Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda, in a follow-up to Ron Suskind’s new book, The Way of the World: A Story of Truth and Hope in an Age of Extremism, which includes an account of how the mysterious letter originated, according to this account from the independent ConsortiumNews.com.

Interestingly, this controversy was the subject of the first AP story out of D.C. filed by former Birmingham News reporter Brett Blackledge, and let’s just say he takes something of a pro-Bush White House position in the story, not the stance of a skeptical, objective reporter.

CIA officials deny fake Iraq-al-Qaida link letter

We report. You decide.

Do you tend to believe Suskind? Or Blackledge?

Will the real Democrats please stand up … and filibuster?

Ad 2: The Senate just adjourned for the night and will take up the FISA legislation Thursday morning. Obviously, there are some important people who have some thinking to do.

But not before taking a test vote:

Senate Nears End of Surveillance Bill Debate

One of the most important votes in the history of the United States Congress will take place perhaps tonight. Since you will not see coverage of this on CNN, you better watch the blogs and C-SPAN 2.

As we reported last Friday, the cowardly Democrats who control the House of Representatives voted with the Republicans in favor the new domestic surveillance bill, granting a back door form of legal immunity for the telecom giants. They made it where a judge can grant the companies immunity – based solely on a piece of paper showing President George W. Bush authorized the illegal spying on Americans in the wake of 9/11 himself.

Scott Horton writes today at Harpers.org: Will the National Surveillance State Prevail Again?

His buddy Glen Greenwald at Salon.com, owned by the Washington Post, carried this detailed account: FISA A Significant Victory for the Democratic Party? Not…

One blog commenter says:

Victory is still possible in the fight against warrantless spying and immunity for the telecom companies that collaborated in previous illegal spying. There are signs of significant divisions in the Senate that we may yet be able to exploit to defeat the Senate version of HR 6304.

The divisions are deep enough that there still isn’t a Senate version of the House bill, or a bill number, and there are still multiple ways we could win this fight.

One strategy is to find a Senator willing to filibuster, and thereby block a vote. The aggressive progressives found one:

Senator Feingold Will Filibuster FISA

Then, the Washington Independent has now verified that House members may have been swayed by donations from the telephone companies such as ATandT and Verizon. Surprise! Surprise!

Telecom Donations Tied to FISA Vote

According to the Daily Kos, the Senate may vote tonight or there may be a filibuster.

Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., took to the Senate floor this afternoon to talk about the FISA bill and to detail, point by point, the failure of the Hoyer/Rockefeller capitulation. Here’s the statement he and Sen. Dodd released yesterday announcing their intent to filibuster:

“This is a deeply flawed bill, which does nothing more than offer retroactive immunity by another name. We strongly urge our colleagues to reject this so-called ‘compromise’ legislation and oppose any efforts to consider this bill in its current form. We will oppose efforts to end debate on this bill as long as it provides retroactive immunity for the telecommunications companies that may have participated in the President’s warrantless wiretapping program, and as long as it fails to protect the privacy of law-abiding Americans.

“If the Senate does proceed to this legislation, our immediate response will be to offer an amendment that strips the retroactive immunity provision out of the bill. We hope our colleagues will join us in supporting Americans’ civil liberties by opposing retroactive immunity and rejecting this so-called ‘compromise’ legislation.”

Another good place for good blog journalism on this issue is the TPM Mukraker.

In a related story, the Washington Post this morning carried a story about the ISP Charter Communications’ plan to spy on customers and sell the information to advertisers.

Charter Halts Plan to Track Surfing Data

Are newspaper editors just not paying attention to this battle? They are either AWOL or just on the wrong side of this fight. The telephone and cable companies are as much of a threat to newspapers as bloggers and craigslist.org. Why won’t they fight back?

But the big question for the day is:

Will Senator Barack Obama, who promised we are “not a country where wiretapping is done without warrants,” before we made him the Democratic Party’s nominee for president, stand up and join the filibuster? Will Senator Hillary Clinton stand with us?

If not, we may just have to crash the convention in Colorado in August and put someone else in there. Hey Al Gore? Hey John Edwards? Want to be president?