Congress Scrambles on FISA as Pulte Pick Sparks Revolt
Source: RealClearPolitics - Homepage · Bias: Center Right
Summary
One week ago, Congress was sailing toward relatively easy passage of a bill to reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which authorizes intelligence agencies to spy on non-U.S. electronic communications without a warrant. Then President Donald Trump announced he would install director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency Bill Pulte as the part-time acting director of national intelligence.
Congress Scrambles on FISA as Pulte Pick Sparks Revolt
Center Right
One week ago, Congress was sailing toward relatively easy passage of a bill to reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which authorizes intelligence agencies to spy on non-U.S. electronic communications without a warrant. Then President Donald Trump announced he would install director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency Bill Pulte as the part-time acting director of national intelligence.
First lady Melania Trump gave Congress a private deadline to pass her signature foster care bill, and she is pursuing it largely outside the usual White House channels, according to a new report in Politico. At a bipartisan roundtable with the House Ways and Means Committee in April, the first lady publicly called foster care legislation a "moral imperative." Then, behind closed doors, she set a target, Rep. Jason Smith (R-MO) told the outlet: "I want this on Donald's desk by the August recess." The Fostering the Future Act, which expands housing, education and workforce help for young people aging out of foster care, passed the House unanimously.The Senate has not moved it out of committee, and lawmakers are set to leave Washington around Aug. 10. At a White House picnic the day the House passed the bill, both Trumps urged the Senate to hurry. "Hopefully, it will quickly pass in the Senate," the president said. He has not publicly pressed senators since.The deadline reflects a first lady who increasingly operates on her own track. Her office, not the State Department, has led her effort to reunite children displaced by the Russia-Ukraine war, negotiating directly with Moscow and Kyiv, the White House said. She has also shown a willingness to diverge from the administration's message. She broke with the White House on Epstein, calling for survivors to testify as the president's team tried to move past the scandal, and last week put her own spin on a Supreme Court ruling her husband celebrated, voicing support for the LGBTQIA+ community.A recent book recounted how she resisted Trump's overhaul of the White House grounds and lost.
The funniest part of the MSNBC report about the issue is their claim that Pulte has not been in office long enough to know who the Deep State embeds are. “I have a real question of how he would know this. This isn’t a guy who is familiar with intelligence,” said the former official, who […]
The post REPORT: Acting DNI Bill Pulte Fires Dozens of ODNI Staff for Politicizing Intelligence, Insubordination, Gross Misconduct appeared first on The Last Refuge.
Acting DNI Bill Pulte has fired more "Deep State" intel officials, according to MS NOW.
The post Happy Freedom 250! Acting DNI Bill Pulte Fires More “Deep State” Intel Officials appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
Resistance is mounting across the United States against the increasing use of surveillance tech company Flock Safety’s cameras, with a growing number of cities canceling contracts as the artificial intelligence-powered license plate readers are quietly being installed in thousands of locations nationwide.State and local police departments first used the Atlanta-based company’s automated license plate reader (ALPR) systems for standard law enforcement purposes, but they are now being employed for a much broader range of uses, including immigration-related searches and other actions supporting US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) during the Trump administration’s deadly anti-immigrant crackdown.“We have cameras that are used for everything from illegal dumping to drug houses to hotels that are just big problems,” Flock Safety engineer Kevin Cox told prospective customers during a demonstration of the company’s Condor Camera, according to a Thursday report in The Washington Times.“There are endless, endless uses for what we can do with these things,” Cox added.Those uses include spying on constitutionally protected protest activity and enforcing abortion bans by tracking pregnant people’s travel across states—even ones in which the medical procedure is legal.The ACLU—which recently launched a “Get the Flock Out” campaign to “fight creepy ALPR cameras”—says there are currently between 80,000 and 100,000 Flock devices installed nationwide that conduct more than 20 billion scans per month. More than 5,000 law enforcement agencies use the cameras, and some of them keep their locations a secret.“Flock’s ALPR cameras aren’t like your normal traffic cameras,” the ACLU explained. “This surveillance technology records and tracks every car that comes into view, and then an AI algorithm catalogs the make, model, color, license plate number, bumper stickers, and even scratches. This personal information is then uploaded into a nationwide database that any law enforcement agency with a Flock contract can search—with few regulations or oversight on how they use what they find.”The backlash against creeping state surveillance has even transcended the partisan divide.“I think our country is in a kind of uniquely anti-surveillance environment right now, which is to say that, in a time where it seems there is nothing that is not partisan, opposition to government surveillance is nonpartisan,” ACLU privacy and surveillance attorney Chad Marlow told The Washington Times on Thursday.There is growing action—both legal and otherwise—to end the use of ALPRs across the country.According to the public information project Ban Flock Cameras, 82 Flock contracts were terminated across 28 states between August 2021 and May 2026, with 39 of those cancellations occurring in the first five months of 2026 alone.Even Amazon-owned Ring announced earlier this year that it would stop doing business with Flock Safety.Susie O’Hara, a member of Santa Cruz, California’s nominally nonpartisan City Council, told WBUR earlier this year that she grew increasingly concerned about local use of eight Flock cameras last year after learning that police were sharing data gleaned from the cameras with the company’s national network without city officials’ knowledge, a violation of state laws banning the practice.O’Hara became increasingly convinced that Santa Cruz should cancel its Flock contract after an ICE agent fatally shot Renee Good, a US citizen, in Minneapolis in January.“I have goose bumps on my arms thinking about the absolute chaos that was happening in Minneapolis,” she said. “And just the absolute insanity of what we were seeing... It was totally clear to me that we should in no way consciously be in this system at all—just no way.”Less than a week after Good’s killing, the Santa Cruz City Council voted to terminate the city’s Flock contract, becoming the first municipality in California to do so.“For us, the threat to our civil liberties was greater than any benefit we could get from the flawed product,” Santa Cruz Mayor Fred Keeley told KQED at the time.Chad Kemp, who represents District 32 on the nonpartisan Dane County Board of Supervisors in Wisconsin—which in April voted to stop funding two dozen cameras leased from Flock—told The Washington Times that “there’s a public safety issue here, but there is also a privacy issue.”“There are serious concerns about individuals who can be monitored without their knowledge, or if it is even constitutional or ethical to track people without a warrant,” he added.At the national level, US Reps. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) and Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.) last year launched an investigation into the use of Flock cameras to track pregnant people across state lines for abortion care and to conduct unauthorized immigration enforcement operations.Krishnamoorthi and Sen.
A Florida family was completely devastated by the tragedy that unfolded on Monday after a father went to pick up a child at day care in Plantation.The man, who was not identified publicly, believed he had dropped off the child in the morning and went to work. At the end of the day, he went to the day care and let out a scream after finding his horrific mistake.'He opened the door, then slammed it shut. ... And he let out this scream.' The child was found dead in the back seat of the car.Leslie Novoa, the owner and director of A World of Discovery Academy, explained to the South Florida Sun Sentinel why the staff didn't react when the child wasn't dropped off that morning.Novoa said the man and his wife would alternate dropping off two kids at the day care. On that day, they called to inform them that they would not be dropping off the older child.When they didn't drop off any child, Novoa said no one found it suspect."This is a tragedy that happened to them and to all of us," said Novoa, who said the family had been very caring and very loving in their interactions.Novoa said the man had expected to pick up the child and only realized what happened when he opened the back door of the car."He opened the door, then slammed it shut," Novoa said. "And he let out this scream."Plantation Police said they were called to the day care on a report of "a deceased child in a vehicle."Firefighters responded to the emergency and confirmed the child had died.RELATED: Michigan parents charged with murder and torture after their 7-year-old boy dies with disturbing weight The National Safety Council said about 37 children under the age of 15 die each year on average after being left in a vehicle."Nearly every state has experienced at least one death since 1998," the group added. "In both 2018 and 2019, a record number of 53 children died after being left in a hot vehicle."About half of the hot-car deaths result in charges against a parent, and of those, about 80% result in convictions. Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!
