As of today, exactly half of the members of the US Senate support marriage rights for same-sex couples. Senator Tom Carper, Democrat of Delaware, and Senator Mark Kirk, Republican of Illinois, both announced their support of marriage equality. Delaware Sen. Tom Carper on Tuesday became the latest Senate Democrat to publicly endorse marriage rights for [...]

Hat tip to Boing Boing for passing along this juicy bit of Sunlight Foundation news concerning Mike Rogers (R-MI) and his love of that sweet, sweet CISPA lobby money.

Sourced to current and former legal and counterterrorism officials in the United States government, the New York Times published a story on Sunday on the killing of US-born Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who was targeted by a CIA drone without charge or trial on September 30, 2011.

Much of the material in the story from anonymous individuals could be considered sensitive or classified government information. These selective disclosures, which the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) condemned in a statement, functioned as propaganda.

The administration of President Barack Obama refuses to acknowledge to the court that the CIA actually has a drone program that exists. The act is repellent in one respect because the administration’s nominee for CIA chief, John Brennan, sat before senators and answered questions about the program during his confirmation hearing.

It is also detestable and fraudulent because President Obama continues to assert his administration is the most transparent and ethical administration in the history of the United States, even as it vigorously fights a major Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit in court that would further reveal the legal basis for the administration’s claimed authority to target and execute persons abroad without charge or trial.

A classified intelligence assessment shows the United States is “the target of a massive, sustained cyber-espionage campaign that is threatening the country’s economic competitiveness,” according to the Washington Post.

Well I thought yesterday that some of the GOP’s “bright lights” were getting pretty awful in defining the Almighty as a turned on voyeur of sexual assault, or that a daughter’s consensual sex was as bad as if their father was being raped.

But they had a sequel within hours and then one Republican leader took the whole thing international.

So far, supposed threats to national security have been the issue. The hysteria around what could happen to the United States if leakers were allowed to go unpunished has been central to the controversy around the Obama administration’s leaking. The threat to freedom of the press posed by an investigation has not mattered to politicians calling for an investigation. Instead, a lot of the discussion has been around how the leaks benefit the president.

Last week the President announced in a surprise visit to Afghanistan that the US signed a long-term agreement with the country that would more or less keep an American presence there for an indefinite period. And now we have an embarrassing admission, a bipartisan agreement from the heads of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, that the surge in Afghanistan, if its mission was to stop the advance of the Taliban in the country, completely failed its objectives.

A cybersecurity bill that many believe poses clear dangers to digital freedom is drawing the ire of digital freedom and civil liberties groups. The legislation, the Cybersecurity Intelligence Sharing Protection Act (CISPA), should be a major story all week.

In anticipation of headlines that might be made as members of Congress propose amendments to the bill and it continues to take shape before being voted on by the House on April 23, I recorded an interview on CISPA with Trevor Timm, who is a digital freedom activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

How nice that House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, a Republican Congressman from Alabama, and 206 of his House GOP colleagues live in a country where political opponents are not disappeared, tortured, or murdered in the dead of night, their children stolen to be brought up by the very intelligence officers that disappeared them.

So maybe Rogers didn’t appreciate the criminal absurdity of his comments to the Washington Post on Friday May 13, after a House vote defeated a proposed amendment by Democratic Rep. Maurice Hinchey (NY) on the declassification of U.S. intelligence files regarding the 1976 Argentine generals coup and the bloody seven year dictatorship that followed. According to the Post, Rogers “said declassifying them would distract U.S. spies from the fight against al-Qaida.”