News Updates from Citizens For Legitimate Government | 17 Jun 2009

N.S.A.'s Pinwale Examines Large Volumes of US E-mail Messages Without Court Warrants --E-Mail Surveillance Renews Concerns in Congress 17 Jun 2009 The National Security Agency is facing renewed scrutiny over the extent of its domestic surveillance program, with critics in Congress saying its recent intercepts of the private telephone calls and e-mail messages of Americans are broader than previously acknowledged, current and former officials said. A former N.S.A. analyst who, in a series of interviews, described being trained in 2005 for a program [Pinwale] in which the agency routinely examined large volumes of Americans’ e-mail messages without court warrants. Two intelligence officials confirmed that the program was still in operation.

Audit Finds U.S. Overpaid Blackwater By $55 Million 17 Jun 2009 A government audit found that the State Department overpaid the contract-security firm once known as Blackwater Worldwide by tens of millions of dollars because the company failed to properly staff its teams in Iraq. The report said the State Department should have withheld at least $55 million in payments to the company because of the shortfalls.

New H1N1 strain found 17 Jun 2009 Brazilian scientists have identified a new strain of the H1N1 virus after examining samples from a patient in Sao Paulo, their institute said on Tuesday. The variant has been called A/Sao Paulo/1454/H1N1 by the Adolfo Lutz Bacteriological Institute, which compared it with samples of the A(H1N1) swine flu from California. The genetic sequence of the new sub-type of the H1N1 virus was isolated by a virology team lead by one of its researchers, Terezinha Maria de Paiva, the institute said in a statement.