DOJ Inspector General Has No Answer to How Many in Government Can Spy on Americans Through ‘Backdoor’ Searches

Department of Justice (DOJ) Inspector General Michael Horowitz could not answer how many people in the federal government can use the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) on Americans through backdoor searches when Republican Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz asked him at a House Judiciary subcommittee hearing on Thursday.

FISA Section 702 enables intelligence agencies to carry out targeted surveillance of foreigners outside the U.S., but they have improperly used it on Americans. There were 3.4 million backdoor searches in 2021, according to an Office of the Director of National Intelligence 2022 Transparency report.

Read More

Commentary: Senator Marsha Blackburn is Doing What Other Lawmakers Aren’t

Initially, many of us welcomed the advent of companies like Facebook and Twitter. They helped us reach out to people we hadn’t spoken to in years and served as a way to get our news every day. But, as time went on, Big Tech has become a menace to the American people. For years, they have been stealing peoples’ data and selling users’ information online.

Read More

TikTok CEO Dodges on Whether Company Will Cease ‘Spying’ on Americans

TikTok CEO Shou Chew dodged questions Thursday about whether tactics by parent company ByteDance used to “spy” on American journalists could be used to target more Americans.

House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairwoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington questioned Chew on reporting by Forbes that staff at ByteDance used TikTok data last year to surveil journalists who were covering the company, gaining access to their IP addresses to track whether they had been in proximity to ByteDance employees.

Read More

Pro-Life Group Alleges the FBI Is Spying on Its Operations

Republican Texas Rep. Chip Roy and Republican Texas Sen. Ted Cruz sent a letter Wednesday to Attorney General Merrick Garland asking for answers about the FBI’s alleged spying on a pro-life group.

Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising (PAAU) alleges that an FBI informant infiltrated and recorded their meeting on Jan. 19 at the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C. The individual believed to be an informant, who goes by the name Eric Mike Santos, wasn’t personally known to other attendees, the group said in its Feb. 22 press release.

Read More

Michigan Supreme Court Could Decide Warrantless Government Drone Spying Lawsuit

An appeal filed with the Michigan Supreme Court says the government must get a warrant before it can surveil private property for evidence.

The Institute for Justice, a public interest law firm, says the government violated the Fourth Amendment when it used warrantless drone surveillance to snap pictures of Todd Maxon’s 5-acre property in Long Lake Township where he repairs cars, as proof of zoning violations.

Read More

Arizona AG Brnovich Discusses Settlement with Google over Deceptively Obtaining Users’ Location Data for Profit

Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich has sued numerous big players throughout his two terms, including the Biden administration, Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, Arizona State University, and the City of Tucson. Perhaps the biggest entity he sued was Google in 2020, for “deceiving consumers” by tracking their location on smartphones without their knowledge and then selling the information. After over two years of litigation, the tech giant capitulated, settling for $85 million, more than the country of Australia snagged in a similar settlement with Google, $60 million. 

The first attorney general in the country to sue Google over the practice, Brnovich told The Arizona Sun Times that what prompted him in part to file the complaint was the shocking extent of how much personal information was obtained. “Google knew more about where you were going and who you hung out with, more than your travel agent or spouse,” he said. He found out about the practice after a news article revealed that Google was tracking users through its app preloaded on Android smartphones even after they’d disabled their “Location History” setting. Google was told to stop and did not.

Read More

‘Coordinated Campaign on a Grand Scale’: US, UK Spymasters Issue Dire Warning on Chinese Espionage

by Micaela Burrow   Heads of intelligence agencies in the U.S. and UK warned against a widespread Chinese espionage campaign in a unique joint statement Wednesday. FBI Director Christopher Wray and MI5 Director General Ken McCallum addressed an audience of leaders in business and academia outside of the MI5 headquarters…

Read More

Lesko Joins Letter Demanding Info on CDC’s Location-Tracking of Americans During Lockdown

A U.S. congresswoman from Arizona has signed onto a letter with her House of Representatives colleagues demanding information from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) regarding the organization’s data collection during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

“I joined [Rep. Kelly Armstong (R-ND)]’s letter to CDC Director Walensky to demand answers about the CDC’s legal authority to obtain Americans’ location data. This violates the rights of Americans!” Rep. Debbie Lesko (R-AZ-08) said. 

Read More

U.S. Senator Bill Hagerty Weighs In on Durham Report and Russia-Ukraine Tensions

Wednesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report, host Leahy welcomed US SEnator Bill Hagerty to the newsmakers line to comment on the latest Durham report and his analysis of the Russia Ukraine conflict.

Read More

Grant’s Rants: ‘The Swamp Is Real and Its Creatures Are Terrifying’

Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton and John Durham

Tuesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report, host Leahy welcomed official guest host Grant Henry in studio for another edition of Grant’s Rants.

Read More

Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson: Trump ‘Endured Eternal Coup’ During Presidency

Ron Johnson

On the heels of massive news proving that former President Donald Trump was intentionally and falsely maligned as a Russian asset and that he was spied upon by intelligence agencies during his 2016 election campaign and his subsequent presidency, one senator took to Fox News in an attempt to set the record straight. 

“For many years now, as I’ve investigated this, I’ve always thought the Russian Hoax was just one intelligence community diversionary operation to basically cover up what they had done during the 2016 campaign,” Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) told host Jesse Watters on Fox News.

Read More

Tucker Carlson: A Whistleblower Warned Me That the NSA Has Been Spying on My Communications

Fox News host Tucker Carlson Monday night accused the Biden administration of spying on him in an attempt to find something scandalous to leak that could get him taken off the air.

Carlson told his audience that the “War on Terror” under the Biden Regime had pivoted, and was now “being waged against American citizens—opponents of the Regime.”

Read More

Police Officer Accused of Spying for Chinese Government to be Released on $2 Million Bond

A federal judge ruled on Friday that a former NYPD officer accused of spying for the Chinese will be released on bail immediately, according to the New York Post.

The officer in question, Baimadajie Angwang, was recently diagnosed with COVID-19 while awaiting trial in the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn according to the Post.

Read More

Commentary: TikTok is Just the First Chinese App the Trump Admin is Eyeing for Crackdown Over Spying

Two days after President Trump told reporters that he plans to ban TikTok from the United States, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo suggested in an interview with Fox News that executive action may soon be taken against many other apps owned by Chinese firms.

Trump remarked to journalists aboard Air Force One on Friday that he could ban TikTok “with an executive order,” suggesting that the president has made up his mind about the popular short video platform. TikTok, which is owned by Chinese tech conglomerate ByteDance, has been at the center of a months-long debate over whether the data that it collects from American users could be exploited by China’s government.

Read More

American Paul Whelan Convicted of Spying in Russia, Sentenced to 16 Years in Prison

A Russian court convicted an American corporate security executive Monday of espionage and sentenced him to 16 years in prison after a closed trial that the U.S. denounced as a “mockery of justice,” and it angrily said his treatment in jail was “appalling.”

Paul Whelan, a former Marine from Novi, Michigan (pictured above), has insisted he was innocent, saying he was set up when he was arrested in Moscow in December 2018 while he was visiting Russia to attend a friend’s wedding.

Read More

Commentary: The FBI’s Darkest Hour

by Adam Mill   One can imagine the unspoken question hanging in the darkness during the January 2017 ride back to the airport. A small gaggle1 of FBI agents had just concluded their long-overdue interview with Christopher Steele’s primary sub-source. The silence must have been deafening. Steele had tried to conceal2 his…

Read More

UCLA Professor Found Guilty of Conspiring to Steal US Missile Guidance Technology for China

by Ethan Cai   A jury found an electrical engineer and University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) professor guilty of exporting stolen U.S. military technology to China. UCLA adjunct professor Yi-Chi Shih was convicted June 26 on 18 federal charges, Newsweek reported, and could now lose hundreds of thousands of dollars, while also facing…

Read More

One America News Network’s Neil McCabe Joins The Tennessee Star Report to Talk About the Consequences of the Mueller Report

  On Tuesday’s Tennessee Star Report with Steve Gill and Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 am to 8:00 am – Gill and Leahy talked to One America News Network’s Neil McCabe about how the tide is about to turn on the Democrats as…

Read More

Commentary: The Real Reason Democrats Went Nuts Over AG Barr’s Testimony

by George Ralsey   Democrats and their allies in the Leftwing media went nuts after Attorney General William Barr testified that the government did indeed spy on the Trump campaign. “I think spying did occur,” Barr said during an explosive hearing before a Senate Appropriations subcommittee. “The question is whether…

Read More