Josh Gerstein

Officials at the Department of Veterans Affairs are privately sounding the alarm that California's new net neutrality law could cut off veterans nationwide from a key telehealth app. Two internet providers in California have told the VA that the new law could force them to end agreements offering free, subsidized data to veterans participating in the telehealth app called VA Video Connect. "VA is aware of California’s Net Neutrality law and is reviewing to determine whether it impacts the partnerships VA has developed with cellular carriers to assist Veterans with limited data plans connect

Attorney General William Barr has asserted the state secrets privilege for the first known time since he was sworn in in Feb, using the controversial legal tool in a lawsuit brought by the social media company Twitter over its bid to publish a more complete account of government surveillance requests.

The FBI never asked Hillary Clinton's top aides to turn over all the computers and smartphones they used while Clinton was secretary of state, an omission that is now triggering questions from Republican lawmakers. While the FBI made a concerted effort to obtain all the computers that were used as Clinton's private server and ultimately asked two of Clinton's lawyers for laptops used to review her e-mail messages, investigators never requested or demanded all equipment her top staffers used for work purposes during her four years at State, apparently.

"No one was asked for devices by the FBI," said an anonymous source. The decision left the FBI at least partially dependent on the aides' attorneys' decisions about which messages were work-related and therefore might have contained classified information the agents were looking for. Those messages were turned over to State in response to its request in 2015. GOP lawmakers say the decision not to demand the aides' electronics, or even to ask for them, raises doubts about how the FBI and prosecutors handled the probe.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-MI) tore into major US tech firms for their opposition to a House surveillance reform bill that many Internet industry leaders have denounced as too weak.

"We should be very mad at Google, Facebook and Microsoft, because they're doing a very dangerous thing," Rep Rogers said.

The House intelligence chairman charged that by opposing the House version of the USA Freedom Act and calling for more limits on surveillance the American firms are putting their profits ahead of their loyalty to the United States.

"They say, 'Well, we have to do this because we're trying to make sure we don’t lose our European business.' I don't know about the rest of you but that offends me form the words 'European business,'" Rep Rogers said. "Everyone on those boards should be embarrassed and their CEOs should be embarrassed and their stockholders should be embarrassed.....That one quarter [of European market profits] cannot be worth the national security of the United States for the next ten generations."

Amid a major public and press furor over National Security Agency surveillance, federal surveillance orders and demands for national-security related information declined slightly in 2013, according to statistics made public by the Justice Department.

The Obama Administration said it filed 1,655 applications with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in 2013, down from 1,856 the previous year. The court maintained its controversial record of virtually never rejecting a government surveillance request, doing so zero times in 2013. The last rejection of such an application was in 2009. The court did modify 34 applications for surveillance and/or physical searches, the Justice Department said in a letter sent to leaders of the House and Senate Intelligence and Judiciary committees.

The government made 178 applications last year for business records under Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act -- the mechanism used to authorize the NSA's now-famous telephone metadata program. That's down from 212 such applications in 2012.

All requests for 215 orders made in 2013 were granted, but judges made changes to the vast majority of those -- with 141 modifications reported by the Justice Department. The FBI's issuance of National Security Letters -- administrative subpoenas for certain types of information from telephone companies, Internet firms and other utilities -- also ratcheted back a bit in that year. There were 14,219 requests in 2013 covering 5,334 Americans or legal residents, DOJ said. That's down from 15,299 NSL's in 2012, covering 6,223 individuals.

A new directive issued by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper prohibits employees of certain government agencies from discussing any intelligence-related matter with the media, classified or not.

“[Intelligence Community] employees … must obtain authorization for contacts with the media” on intelligence-related matters, and “must also report… unplanned or unintentional contact with the media on covered matters,” the directive says.

DNI spokesperson Shawn Turner said that after the "damaging leaks in 2012," Clapper ordered a review to determine if there were a "consistent baseline requirement" for the intelligence community for engaging the media.

"The review demonstrated that baseline requirements were not consistent across the IC, but that there were best practices within the Community that could inform a consistent approach. That approach took shape as IC Directive 119," Turner wrote in an email. "This policy is being issued together with IC Directive 120 to ensure that members of the Intelligence Community are made aware of the protections provided them as whistleblowers who make protected disclosures. As with ICD 119, ICD 120 was initiated before Edward Snowden stole NSA property and leaked it to the media.”