U.S. Used Patriot Act to Gather Logs of Website Visitors
A disclosure sheds new light on a high-profile national security law as lawmakers prepare to revive a debate over it in the Biden administration.

The government has interpreted a high-profile provision of the Patriot Act as empowering F.B.I. national security investigators to collect logs showing who has visited particular web pages, documents show.

But the government stops short of using that law to collect the keywords people submit to internet search engines because it considers such terms to be content that requires a warrant to gather, according to letters produced by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

The disclosures come at a time when Congress is struggling with new proposals to limit the law, known as Section 215 of the Patriot Act. The debate ran aground in the spring amid erratic messages from President Trump, but is expected to resume after President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. takes the oath of office in January.

Enacted after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Section 215 of the Patriot Act permits the F.B.I. to obtain a secret court order to collect any business records deemed relevant to a national security inquiry — a very easy standard for investigators to meet. The legal authority for it and two other surveillance-related investigative tools lapsed for new inquiries earlier this year, although the F.B.I. can still use them for pre-existing cases.

Section 215 has been at the center of repeated fights over the balance between empowering national security investigators to detect potential threats and preserving Americans’ privacy and freedom to read what they want or call other people without fear of government observation. In the Bush years, civil liberties advocates raised alarms over the possibility that the F.B.I. might use it to monitor people’s library records. In 2013, an uproar erupted over the disclosure that the National Security Agency had been secretly using it to collect bulk logs of all Americans’ phone calls.

Govt accuses Facebook of discriminating against US workers

The Trump administration is accusing Facebook in a lawsuit of discriminating against U.S. workers in favor of foreigners with special visas to fill more than 2,600 high-paying jobs.

The Justice Department announced the suit Thursday, alleging that the social media giant refused to recruit, consider or hire qualified and available U.S. workers for the positions that Facebook reserved for temporary visa holders. Facebook sponsored the visa holders for “green cards” authorizing them to work permanently.

The so-called H-1B visas are a staple of Silicon Valley, widely used by software programmers and other employees of major U.S. technology companies.

The lawsuit followed a two-year investigation by the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.

“Facebook intentionally created a hiring system in which it denied qualified U.S. workers a fair opportunity to learn about and apply for jobs” that it instead sought to channel to temporary visa holders, the department said in a news release.

The positions at issue offered an average salary of around $156,000. The department is seeking unspecified civil penalties and back pay on behalf of U.S. workers deemed to have been denied employment.

“Facebook has been cooperating with the DOJ in its review of this issue and while we dispute the allegations in the complaint, we cannot comment further on pending litigation,” the company, which is based in Menlo Park, California, said in a statement.

President Donald Trump has long advocated restrictions on both legal and illegal immigration, and has raised concerns for years about foreigners competing with American citizens for jobs.

In June, his administration extended a ban on green cards issued outside the U.S. until the end of the year and added many temporary work visas to the freeze, including those used heavily by tech companies and multinational corporations for their employees. Officials cast the move as a way to free up jobs in an economy reeling from the coronavirus.

Trump also has been persistently critical of Big Tech companies, accusing them of bias against conservative viewpoints on their social media platforms and threatening to remove their legal protection for content posted by users.

White House vetting pardon requests as some push Trump to preemptively pardon family
Vetting has already commenced in some cases by White House lawyers, sources say.

As White House aides come to terms with the election results and turn their focus to the remaining weeks of President Trump's administration, multiple sources tell ABC News that various Trump allies and other lawyers have begun a campaign to petition the West Wing in hopes of securing pardons for those who might receive a sympathetic reception from the president.

Those in the mix for a potential pardon have ranged from family members and associates all the way to the Tiger King, according to sources.

The growing list is divided into two groups: those being pushed by Trump allies and friends, and requests from individuals serving sentences who aren't necessarily familiar to the president.

The process is not unique to the Trump administration, but some sources say that Trump is prone to subvert the normal procedures when it comes to pardoning, and could announce one-offs as he sees fit rather than waiting until the very end of his term as past presidents have done.

Release of PPP loan recipients' data reveals troubling patterns
The Trump Organization and Kushner Companies are major beneficiaries of PPP loans.

Sweeping data released by the Small Business Administration on who benefited from pandemic relief programs raises questions about the equitability and distribution of loans intended for small businesses, an initial analysis by NBC News shows.

The analysis found that properties owned by the Trump Organization as well as the Kushner Companies, owned by the family of Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump's son-in-law and senior adviser, profited from the program.

After months of litigation, the SBA released the dataset Tuesday night on every small business that received a Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) or Economic Injury Disaster (EIDL) loan.

The data reveals the most complete accounting to date of the more than $700 billion in forgivable loans Congress and the Trump administration introduced in the spring for allowable expenses, including payroll, rent, utilities and mortgage interest payments.

Facebook said on Tuesday it will ban anti-vaccination ads, following widespread pressure on the social network to curb harmful content.

Under the new global policy, the company will no longer accept ads discouraging people from getting vaccines; ads that portray vaccines as unsafe or ineffective; or ads claiming the diseases vaccines prevent are harmless.

"We don't want these ads on our platform," Facebook officials Kang-Xing Jin and Rob Leathern wrote in a blog post. "Our goal is to help messages about the safety and efficacy of vaccines reach a broad group of people, while prohibiting ads with misinformation that could harm public health efforts."

The new policy also applies to Instagram. Facebook said it will start enforcing it in the next few days.

The move is a reversal of Facebook's longstanding reluctance to police what people are allowed to say, saying it wants to encourage free speech. Public health groups and other critics have urged it to stamp out widespread misinformation on its platforms, which have more than 3 billion monthly active users.

This year the company has cracked down on hoaxes and falsehoods about the coronavirus. It had already banned vaccine misinformation and hoaxes identified by global health organizations like the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The new policy is not a total ban on opposition to vaccines. The company will still accept ads that advocate against government vaccination policies. But those ads cannot explicitly discourage vaccination or make false claims, Facebook spokesperson Devon Kearns told NPR.