[Instagram: notchlubber]

Kansas resident Matt Farmer took a road-trip and ended up in Edmond, Oklahoma, just northeast of Oklahoma City. He witnessed one of the powerful tornadoes in the Edmond area and snapped a picture (left) and this exclusive video below. On the radio, Farmer heard from Reed Timmer, a meteorologist and professional storm chaser who starred in the American documentary reality television series ‘Storm Chasers.’ Timmer said the tornado had the strongest winds of any he had ever intercepted.

Although Infinity doesn’t normally cover storms, we brought you live, on-the-ground coverage of Hurricane Sandy last October and (through the power of social media) just so happened to find a connection on the ground in Oklahoma today that was willing to share their footage exclusively with us.

Our prayers go out to all of the people who have been affected by this monstrous storm. We anticipate and look forward to the good stories that will emerge in the midst of the bad.

The post Tornadoes Tear Through Oklahoma appeared first on Infinity News Network.

[Mark Lennihan/The Associated Press]

Gary Pruitt, in his first television interviews since it was revealed the Justice Department subpoenaed phone records of AP reporters and editors, said the move already has had a chilling effect on journalism. Pruitt said the seizure has made sources less willing to talk to AP journalists and, in the long term, could limit Americans’ information from all news outlets.

Pruitt told CBS’ ”Face the Nation” that the government has no business monitoring the AP’s newsgathering activities.

“And if they restrict that apparatus … the people of the United States will only know what the government wants them to know and that’s not what the framers of the Constitution had in mind when they wrote the First Amendment,” he said.

In a separate interview with the AP, Pruitt said the news cooperative had not decided its next move but had not ruled out legal action against the government. He said the Justice Department’s investigation is out of control and President Barack Obama should rein it in.

“It’s too early to know if we’ll take legal action but I can tell you we are positively displeased and we do feel that our constitutional rights have been violated,” Pruitt said.

“They’ve been secretive, they’ve been overbroad and abusive — so much so that taken together, they are unconstitutional because they violate our First Amendment rights,” he added.

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said the government needs to stop leaks by whatever means necessary.

“This is an investigation that needs to happen because national security leaks, of course, can get our agents overseas killed,” he said.

Republican Sen. John Cornyn, a member of the Judiciary Committee, said the government should focus on those who leak sensitive national security matters and not on journalists who report on them. The Texas Republican said his committee should hold hearings on how the Justice Department obtained phone records from AP reporters and editors.

“What confuses me is the focus on the press, who have a constitutional right here and we depend on the press to get to the bottom of so many issues that we, as individuals, cannot,” Cornyn said.

Cornyn said the Justice Department’s actions were part of a pattern for Obama’s administration to quiet its critics.

“It’s a culture of cover-ups and intimidation that is giving the administration so much trouble,” Cornyn said.

He also renewed his call for Attorney General Eric Holder to resign, citing the contempt citation the House of Representatives voted against him last year for refusing to turn over documents in a failed government gun smuggling sting.

White House senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer said the president “has complete faith in Attorney General Holder.” He also insisted the White House was not involved in the decision to seek AP phone records.

“A cardinal rule is we don’t get involved in independent investigations. And this is one of those,” Pfeiffer said.

Although the Justice Department has not explained why it sought phone records from the AP, Pruitt pointed to a May 7, 2012, story that disclosed details of a successful CIA operation in Yemen to stop an airliner bomb plot around the one-year anniversary of the May 2, 2011, killing of Osama bin Laden.

The AP delayed publication of that story at the request of government officials who said it would jeopardize national security.

“We respected that, we acted responsibly, we held the story,” Pruitt said.

Pruitt said that only after officials from two government entities said the threat had passed did the AP publish the story. He said the administration still asked that the story be held until an official announcement the next day, a request the AP rejected.

The news service viewed the story as important because White House and Department of Homeland Security officials were saying publicly there was no credible evidence of a terrorist threat to the U.S. around the one-year anniversary of bin Laden’s death.

“So that was misleading to the American public. We felt the American public needed to know this story,” Pruitt said.

The AP has seen an effect on its newsgathering since the disclosure of the Justice Department’s subpoena, he said.

“Officials that would normally talk to us and people we talk to in the normal course of newsgathering are already saying to us that they’re a little reluctant to talk to us,” Pruitt said. “They fear that they will be monitored by the government.”

The Justice Department secretly obtained two months of personal and work telephone records for several reporters and editors, as well as general AP office numbers in New York, Washington and Hartford, Conn., and for the main number for the AP in the House of Representatives press gallery.

“It was sweeping and broad and beyond what they needed to do,” Pruitt said.

Read more at The Washington Post 

The post Government Intrusion Into Journalism ‘Unconstitutional’ appeared first on Infinity News Network.

[Doug Mills/The New York Times]

They used security badge access records to track the reporter’s comings and goings from the State Department, according to a newly obtained court affidavit. They traced the timing of his calls with a State Department security adviser suspected of sharing the classified report. They obtained a search warrant for the reporter’s personal e-mails.

The case of Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, the government adviser, and James Rosen, the chief Washington correspondent for Fox News, bears striking similarities to a sweeping leaks investigation disclosed last week in which federal investigators obtained records over two months of more than 20 telephone lines assigned to the Associated Press.

At a time when President Obama’s administration is under renewed scrutiny for an unprecedented number of leak investigations, the Kim case provides a rare glimpse into the inner workings of one such probe.

Court documents in the Kim case reveal how deeply investigators explored the private communications of a working journalist — and raise the question of how often journalists have been investigated as closely as Rosen was in 2010. The case also raises new concerns among critics of government secrecy about the possible stifling effect of these investigations on a critical element of press freedom: the exchange of information between reporters and their sources.

“Search warrants like these have a severe chilling effect on the free flow of important information to the public,” said First Amendment lawyer Charles Tobin, who has represented the Associated Press, but not in the current case. “That’s a very dangerous road to go down.”

Obama last week defended the Justice Department’s handling of the investigation involving the AP, which is focused on who leaked information to the news organization about a foiled plot involving the al-Qaeda affiliate in Yemen. AP executives and First Amendment watchdogs have criticized the Justice Department in part for the broad scope of the phone records it secretly subpoenaed from AP offices in Washington, Hartford, Conn., and New York.

“The latest events show an expansion of this law enforcement technique,” said attorney Abbe Lowell, who is defending Kim on federal charges filed in 2010 that he disclosed national defense information. A trial is possible as soon as 2014. “Individual reporters or small time periods have turned into 20 [telephone] lines and months of records with no obvious attempt to be targeted or narrow.”

The president said press freedoms must be balanced against the protection of U.S. personnel overseas. According to the office of Ronald Machen Jr., the U.S. attorney for the District, its prosecutors followed federal regulations by first seeking the information through other means before subpoenaing media phone records. Machen’s office is investigating both the Kim and AP cases. The Justice Department said in a statement that in both cases it had abided by “all applicable laws, regulations, and longstanding Department of Justice policies intended to safeguard the First Amendment interests of the press in reporting the news and the public in receiving it.”

The Obama administration has pursued more such cases than all previous administrations combined, including one against a former CIA official charged with leaking U.S. intelligence on Iran and another against a former FBI contract linguist who pleaded guilty to leaking to a blogger.

The Kim case began in June 2009, when Rosen reported that U.S. intelligence officials were warning that North Korea was likely to respond to United Nations sanctions with more nuclear tests. The CIA had learned the information, Rosen wrote, from sources inside North Korea.

The story was published online the same day that a top-secret report was made available to a small circle within the intelligence community — including Kim, who at the time was a State Department arms expert with security clearance.

FBI investigators used the security-badge data, phone records and e-mail exchanges to build a case that Kim shared the report with Rosen soon after receiving it, court records show.

In the documents, FBI agent Reginald Reyes described in detail how Kim and Rosen moved in and out of the State Department headquarters at 2201 C St. NW a few hours before the story was published on June 11, 2009.

“Mr. Kim departed DoS at or around 12:02 p.m. followed shortly thereafter by the reporter at or around 12:03 p.m.,” Reyes wrote. Next, the agent said, “Mr. Kim returned to DoS at or around 12:26 p.m. followed shortly thereafter by the reporter at or around 12:30 p.m.”

The activity, Reyes wrote in an affidavit, suggested a “face-to-face” meeting between the two men. “Within a few hours after those nearly simultaneous exits and entries at DoS, the June 2009 article was published on the Internet,” he wrote.

The court documents don’t name Rosen, but his identity was confirmed by several officials, and he is the author of the article at the center of the investigation. Rosen and a spokeswoman for Fox News did not return phone and e-mail messages seeking comment.

Reyes wrote that there was evidence Rosen had broken the law, “at the very least, either as an aider, abettor and/or co-conspirator.” That fact distinguishes his case from the probe of the AP, in which the news organization is not the likely target.

Using italics for emphasis, Reyes explained how Rosen allegedly used a “covert communications plan” and quoted from an e-mail exchange between Rosen and Kim that seems to describe a secret system for passing along information.

In the exchange, Rosen used the alias “Leo” to address Kim and called himself “Alex,” an apparent reference to Alexander Butterfield, the man best known for running the secret recording system in the Nixon White House, according to the affidavit.

Rosen instructed Kim to send him coded signals on his Google account, according to a quote from his e-mail in the affidavit: “One asterisk means to contact them, or that previously suggested plans for communication are to proceed as agreed; two asterisks means the opposite.”

Read more at The Washington Post 

The post Justice Department Spied on Journalist appeared first on Infinity News Network.

“What I can tell you is that this president believes strongly in the First Amendment and is a strong defender of the First Amendment,” Carney insisted to a packed house of angry reporters last Tuesday afternoon.

The White House had just been freshly stung by news that the Department of Justice had secretly raided the phone records of up to 100 Associated Press reporters, looking to identify the news organization’s private sources.

“He believes strongly in the need for the press to be unfettered in its pursuit of investigative journalism,” Carney continued, contorting his face between looks of concern and annoyance as question after question highlighted the press corps’ newly discovered skepticism.

“How can it be unfettered if you’re worried about having your phones –,” started one reporter.

Carney quickly dodged.

“I am very understanding of the questions on this issue and appreciate the nature of the questions,” he offered.

While this full-frontal assault on the media — and more importantly, news consumers — may suddenly have the press rubbing the sleep out of their eyes, it’s far from the first time Obama and his allies have used the power of the office to try to silence their critics.

It began gently enough.

Back in 2008, then-candidate Barack Obama traveled to Manhattan for a special mission: a personal sit-down with Fox News chief Roger Ailes. The goal of the meeting? Obama wanted Sean Hannity to ease up on the criticism.

Columnist and author Zev Chafets recently detailed the exchange for the first time in his book “Roger Ailes: Off Camera”:

“After some pleasantries, Obama got to the point. He was concerned about the way he was being portrayed on Fox, and his real issue wasn’t the news; it was Sean Hannity, who had been battering him every night at nine (and on his radio show, which Fox doesn’t own or control).”

Ailes, of course, wouldn’t change a thing about Hannity’s presentation, consoling the candidate with the reality that his supporters weren’t likely to be Hannity watchers. After a few more minutes, sensing a fruitless battle, Obama’s aide Robert Gibbs abruptly pulled the plug on the meeting.

Then, a single week into his presidency, Obama started what’s become a tradition for the president: blaming Rush Limbaugh.

“You can’t just listen to Rush Limbaugh and get things done,” he told a room full of Republican leaders at the White House while pushing his $787-billion stimulus plan.

Read more at The Daily Caller 

The post The Obama Administration’s History of Targeting The Press appeared first on Infinity News Network.

Just days after news broke that the IRS targeted conservative nonprofits, Speaker John Boehner’s House committees will morph into mock courtrooms where the White House will be the defendant in what amounts to a number of high-stakes political trials.

The most recent scandal to grip the Obama administration came Monday evening, when The Associated Press disclosed that the Justice Department sought its reporters’ phone records — including those of correspondents who sit in the Capitol. Within hours, House Republicans vowed to investigate. To make things worse for President Barack Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder is scheduled to be on Capitol Hill Wednesday for a House Judiciary Committee hearing.

That’s hardly the president’s only problem.

Two separate committees — Oversight and Government Reform, and Ways and Means — will probe whether the IRS was treating right-leaning groups unfairly. Republicans moved swiftly to secure the IRS acting director for a Friday hearing, just a week after the news broke. GOP aides hinted Monday afternoon that widespread calls for the director’s resignation could come shortly.

The panels will probe whether the targeting of right-leaning groups is systematic, or isolated. Ways and Means Republicans say they are interested in when top IRS officials, specifically former Commissioner Douglas Shulman was told about search terms used to single out conservative groups. Shulman told Ways and Means members in March 2012 that the IRS was not engaged in any manner of political targeting.

Top GOP sources acknowledge that it’s highly unlikely the White House was directly involved in the IRS mess, but the probe is sure to add to the Republican-spun narrative of Democratic, Big Government overreach.

The IRS probes might be new to the public, but they’re not to House Republicans, who have long worried about politicization at the agency. The hot-button topic has come up in several committee hearings since the GOP took the majority.

The inquest into the IRS is just the latest in a string of GOP-led investigations suddenly gaining steam on Capitol Hill. Instead of negotiating with the White House, GOP lawmakers are now investigating it.

There are currently five separate committee investigations into the attack on a U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, and a probe into Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius raising millions of dollars to promote Obamacare. Ways and Means is demanding answers to seven questions on this matter, as well.

All together, roughly one-third of House committees are engaged in investigating some aspect of the Obama administration.

“The speaker and other House leaders have been clear: Effective, responsible oversight is a key constitutional responsibility of Congress,” said Michael Steel, Boehner’s spokesman. “Whether the topic is the truth about Benghazi, thuggish political attacks from the IRS or the ‘train wreck’ of the president’s health care law, we will keeping fighting to make sure the American people know the truth.”

Read more at POLITICO 

The post Scandals Far Greater Than Watergate Grip The Capital appeared first on Infinity News Network.

Buried in the more than 800 pages of the bipartisan legislation (.pdf)  is language mandating the creation of the innocuously-named “photo tool,” a massive federal database administered by the Department of Homeland Security and containing names, ages, Social Security numbers and photographs of everyone in the country with a driver’s license or other state-issued photo ID.

Employers would be obliged to look up every new hire in the database to verify that they match their photo.

This piece of the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act is aimed at curbing employment of undocumented immigrants. But privacy advocates fear the inevitable mission creep, ending with the proof of self being required at polling places, to rent a house, buy a gun, open a bank account, acquire credit, board a plane or even attend a sporting event or log on the internet. Think of it as a government version of Foursquare, with Big Brother cataloging every check-in.

“It starts to change the relationship between the citizen and state, you do have to get permission to do things,” said Chris Calabrese, a congressional lobbyist with the American Civil Liberties Union. “More fundamentally, it could be the start of keeping a record of all things.”

For now, the legislation allows the database to be used solely for employment purposes. But historically such limitations don’t last. The Social Security card, for example, was created to track your government retirement benefits. Now you need it to purchase health insurance.

“The Social Security number itself, it’s pretty ubiquitous in your life,” Calabrese said.

David Bier, an analyst with the Competitive Enterprise Institute, agrees with the ACLU’s fears.

Read more at Wired 

The post Orwellian Database Hidden in Immigration Reform… appeared first on Infinity News Network.

According to new documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union, government officials may not always obtain warrants when they snoop through our emails, Facebook messages, and other electronic communications — and the FBI apparently doesn’t even believe it’s legally required to do so.

The documents, which were obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request and posted on the ACLU website, suggest that the U.S. Department of Justice is flouting a 2010 federal appeals court ruling that declared warrantless access to email a violation of the Fourth Amendment.

That ruling, a criminal appeal of U.S. v. Warshak, stated that the government must obtain a warrant before it can secretly seize and search emails stored by email service providers. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation noted at the time, “the court found that email users have the same reasonable expectation of privacy in their stored email as they do in their phone calls and postal mail.”

However, an FBI “Operations Guide” — made public for the first time by the ACLU — tells a more nuanced story. Revised in June of last year, the guide makes exemptions for email stored by a service provider for more than 180 days. That’s basically any message sitting in your Gmail or Facebook folder for longer than six months. Most email messages are stored on cloud servers, and with virtually unlimited storage space, many email users see no need to delete old messages.

According to the “Operations Guide,” here’s how the FBI views such contents:

“[I]f the contents of an unopened message are kept beyond six months or stored on behalf of the customer after the e-mail has been received or opened, it should he treated the same as a business record in the hands of a third party, such as an accountant or attorney. In that case, the government may subpoena the records from the third party without running afoul of either the Fourth or Fifth Amendment.”

Technically speaking, any commercial email service is a third party. Some email software programs, like Outlook, download messages to users’ hard drives. The government needs a warrant to access those messages, because they’re stored on private computers. But based on how the FBI has worded its policy, emails that are stored on servers like Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, Facebook messages or any other third party are potentially subject to warrantless access by the government.”

In a statement, the FBI insisted its methods are constitutional: “In all investigations, the FBI obtains evidence in accordance with the laws and Constitution of the United States, and consistent with Attorney General guidelines.”

However, that terse justification hasn’t quelled the concerns of privacy advocates.

“Our [Freedom of Information Act] request was the FBI’s chance to produce any policy documents, manuals, or other guidance stating that a warrant is always required, but they failed to do so,” wrote Nathan Freed Wessler, an ACLU staff attorney, in a blog poston Wednesday.

Read more at The International Business Times 

The post Search Warrants? Facebook, Emails Not Safe From FBI Surveillance appeared first on Infinity News Network.

So stated political consultant and media commentator Richard Grenell on Saturday’s Fox News Watch (video follows with transcript and commentary):

RICHARD GRENELL: I think the media’s becoming the story, let’s face it. CBS News President David Rhodes and ABC News President Ben Sherwood, both of them have siblings that not only work at the White House, that not only work for President Obama, but they work at the NSC on foreign policy issues directly related to Benghazi. Let’s call a spade a spade.

Let’s also show you why CNN did not go very far in covering these hearings because the CNN deputy bureau chief, Virginia Moseley, is married to Hillary Clinton’s deputy, Tom Nides. It is time for the media to start asking questions why are they not covering this. It’s a family matter for some of them.

JON SCOTT, HOST: So they don’t want to bring embarrassment upon folks who, who they’re close to?

GRENELL: Who directly are related to this story. Absolutely. They’re covering for them. There’s no question about it.

Read more at News Busters 

The post ABC, CBS Heads Have Siblings Working at White House With Ties to Benghazi appeared first on Infinity News Network.

AFP - 

The findings published in the US journal Science may offer new paths to treating psychiatric diseases, scientists said.

Researchers sought to pin down why identical twins are not perfect replicas of each other, even when they have been raised in the same environment, and studied the matter using 40 genetically identical mice.

The mice were kept in an elaborate, five-level cage connected by glass chutes and filled with toys, scaffolds, wooden flower pots, nesting places and more. The space available to explore spanned about five square meters (yards).

“This environment was so rich that each mouse gathered its own individual experiences in it,” said principal investigator Gerd Kempermann of the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases.

Even though the mice were genetically the same, and the environment they were kept in was also the same, they showed individually different levels of activity. Some explored a lot, some did not.

And by fitting them with a special micro-chip that emitted electromagnetic signals, scientists could track how much the mice moved around and quantify their exploratory behavior.

“Over time, the animals therefore increasingly differed in their realm of experience and behavior,” said Kempermann. Over the course of three months, they developed very different personalities.

Researchers found that the brains of the most explorative mice were building more new neurons — a process known as neurogenesis — in the hippocampus, the center for learning and memory, than the animals that were more passive.

Control mice kept in a less enriching environment showed less brain growth.

Kempermann and colleagues said they have shown for the first time how personal experiences and ensuing behavior contribute to individualization, and that neither genetics nor environment alone could cause this personal growth.

“Adult neurogenesis also occurs in the hippocampus of humans,” according to Kempermann. “Hence we assume that we have tracked down a neurobiological foundation for individuality that also applies to humans.”

Read more at France 24

The post Adventure Shapes The Individual appeared first on Infinity News Network.

In a letter received by the AP on Friday, the Justice Department acknowledged but offered no explanation for the seizure of two months’ worth of telephone records of reporters and editors. AP’s president, Gary Pruitt, called the ongoing monitoring a “massive and unprecedented intrusion.”

The AP believes that more than 100 journalists are involved in the DOJ’s phone surveillance, which would have involved a wide variety of stories regarding government and other topics. Pruitt has called for the return of obtained phone records, as well as the destruction of all copies.

“There can be no possible justification for such an overbroad collection of the telephone communications of The Associated Press and its reporters. These records potentially reveal communications with confidential sources across all of the newsgathering activities undertaken by the AP during a two-month period, provide a road map to AP’s newsgathering operations, and disclose information about AP’s activities and operations that the government has no conceivable right to know,” said Pruitt.

According to the AP’s own reporting of the alleged phone taps, Justice Department rules require that subpoenas of such records from news organizations must be approved by the attorney general. Notification to the AP was made by a letter sent by Ronald Machen, US attorney in Washington, but did not clarify if such rules had been followed.

It is believed that phone records were obtained as part of a criminal investigation into leaked information about a CIA operation in Yemen that unraveled an Al-Qaeda plot in the spring of 2012 to detonate an explosive on a US-bound jet airliner.

Speculation on a link to that particular story was made by the AP based on the fact that phone numbers were obtained by the DoJ for five reporters and an editor involved in the May 7, 2012 story.

According to the AP, CIA Director John Brennan was questioned by the FBI as to whether he had been the source of the leak. In testimony regarding the story in February, Brennan called the leak an “unauthorized and dangerous disclosure of classified information.”

Records obtained by the Justice Department detailed incoming and outgoing calls, as well as the duration of calls, for work and private numbers of AP reporters and offices in New York, Washington, and Hartford, Connecticut, as well as the main number for reporters in the House of Representatives press gallery.

Read more at RT

The post U.S. Government Spies on Journalists appeared first on Infinity News Network.