The deep house duo will drop beats at Forest Hills Stadium on July 18.

"On behalf of a grateful Congress, this plaque honors the extraordinary individuals who bravely protected and defended this symbol of democracy on January 6, 2021." The post ‘A Grateful Congress’ Installs Highly Controversial Plaque Honoring Jan. 6 Capitol Defenders first appeared on Le·gal In·sur·rec·tion.

The SAFE act, introduced by Senators Mike Lee (R-UT) and Dick Durbin (D-IL), is the first of many likely proposals we will see to reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Amendments Act of 2008—and while imperfect, it does propose a litany of real and much-needed reforms of Big Brother’s favorite surveillance authority.  The irresponsible 2024 reauthorization of the secretive mass surveillance authority Section 702 not only gave the government two more years of unconstitutional surveillance powers, it also made the policy much worse. But, now people who value privacy and the rule of law get another bite at the apple. With expiration for Section 702 looming in April 2026, we are starting to see the emergence of proposals for how to reauthorize the surveillance authority—including calls from inside the White House for a clean reauthorization that would keep the policy unchanged. EFF has always had a consistent policy: Section 702 should not be reauthorized absent major reforms that will keep this tactic of foreign surveillance from being used as a tool of mass domestic espionage.  What is Section 702? Section 702 was intended to modernize foreign surveillance of the internet for national security purposes. It allows collection of foreign intelligence from non-Americans located outside the United States by requiring U.S.-based companies that handle online communications to hand over data to the government. As the law is written, the intelligence community (IC) cannot use Section 702 programs to target Americans, who are protected by the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures. But the law gives the intelligence community space to target foreign intelligence in ways that inherently and intentionally sweep in Americans’ communications. We live in an increasingly globalized world where people are constantly in communication with people overseas. That means, while targeting foreigners outside the U.S. for “foreign intelligence Information” the IC routinely acquires the American side of those communications without a probable cause warrant. The collection of all that data from U.S telecommunications and internet providers results in the “incidental” capture of conversations involving a huge number of people in the United States. But, this backdoor access to U.S. persons’ data isn’t “incidental.” Section 702 has become a routine part of the FBI’s law enforcement mission. In fact, the IC’s latest Annual Statistical Transparency Report documents the many ways the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) uses Section 702 to spy on Americans without a warrant. The IC lobbied for Section 702 as a tool for national security outside the borders of the U.S., but it is apparent that the FBI uses it to conduct domestic, warrantless surveillance on Americans. In 2021 alone, the FBI conducted 3.4 million warrantless searches of US person’s 702 data. The Good Let’s start with the good things that this bill does. These are reforms EFF has been seeking for a long time and their implementation would mean a big improvement in the status quo of national security law. First, the bill would partially close the loophole that allows the FBI and domestic law enforcement to dig through 702-collected data’s “incidental” collection of the U.S. side of communications. The FBI currently operates with a “finders keeper” mentality, meaning that because the data is pre-collected by another agency, the FBI believes it can operate with almost no constraints on using it for other purposes. The SAFE act would require a warrant before the FBI looked at the content of these collected communications. As we will get to later, this reform does not go nearly far enough because they can query to see what data on a person exists before getting a warrant, but it is certainly an improvement on the current system.  Second, the bill addresses the age-old problem of parallel construction. If you’re unfamiliar with this term, parallel construction is a method by which intelligence agencies or domestic law enforcement find out a piece of information about a subject through secret, even illegal or unconstitutional methods. Uninterested in revealing these methods, officers hide what actually happened by publicly offering an alternative route they could have used to find that information. So, for instance, if police want to hide the fact that they knew about a specific email because it was intercepted under the authority of Section 702, they might use another method, like a warranted request to a service provider, to create a more publicly-acceptable path to that information. To deal with this problem, the SAFE Act mandates that when the government seeks to use Section 702 evidence in court, it must disclosure the source of this evidence “without regard to any claim that the information or evidence…would inevitably have been discovered, or was subsequently reobtained through other means.”  Next, the bill proposes a policy that EFF and other groups have nonetheless been trying to get through Congress for over five years: ending the data broker loophole. As the system currently stands, data brokers who buy and sell your personal data collected from smartphone applications, among other sources, are able to sell that sensitive information, including a phone’s geolocation, to the law enforcement and intelligence agencies. That means that with a bit of money, police can buy the data (or buy access to services that purchase and map the data) that they would otherwise need a warrant to get. A bill that would close this loophole, the Fourth Amendment is Not For Sale Act passed through the House in 2024 but has yet to be voted on by the Senate. In the meantime, states have taken it upon themselves to close this loophole with Montana being the first state to pass similar legislation in May 2025. The SAFE Act proposes to partially fix the loophole at least as far as intelligence agencies are concerned. This fix could not come soon enough—especially since the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has signaled their willingness to create one big, streamlined, digital marketplace where the government can buy data from data brokers.  Another positive thing about the SAFE Act is that it creates an official statutory end to surveillance power that the government allowed to expire in 2020. In its heyday, the intelligence community used Section 215 of the Patriot Act to justify the mass collection of communication records like metadata from phone calls. Although this legal authority has lapsed, it has always been our fear that it will not sit dormant forever and could be reauthorized at any time. This new bill says that its dormant powers shall “cease to be in effect” within 180 of the SAFE Act being enacted.  What Needs to Change  The SAFE Act also attempts to clarify very important language that gauges the scope of the surveillance authority: who is obligated to turn over digital information to the U.S. government. Under Section 702, “electronic communication service providers” (ECSP) are on the hook for providing information, but the definition of that term has been in dispute and has changed over time—most recently when a FISA court opinion expanded the definition to include a category of “secret” ECSPs that have not been publicly disclosed.  Unfortunately, this bill still leaves ambiguity in interpretation and an audit system without a clear directive for enforcing limitations on who is an ECSP or guaranteeing transparency.  As mentioned earlier, the SAFE Act introduces a warrant requirement for the FBI to read the contents of Americans’ communications that have been warrantlessly collected under Section 702. However, the law does not in its current form require the FBI to get a warrant before running searches identifying whether Americans have communications present in the database in the first place. Knowing this information is itself very revealing and the government should not be able to profit from circumventing the Fourth Amendment.  When Congress reauthorized Section 702 in 2014, they did so through a piece of policy called the Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act (RISAA). This bill made 702 worse in several ways, one of the most severe being that it expanded the legal uses for the surveillance authority to include vetting immigrants. In an era when the United States government is rounding up immigrants, including people awaiting asylum hearings, and which U.S officials are continuously threatening to withhold admission to the United States from people whose politics does not align with the current administration, RISAA sets a dangerous precedent. Although RISAA is officially expiring in April, it would be helpful for any Section 702 reauthorization bill to explicitly prohibit the use of this authority for that reason.  Finally, in the same way that the SAFE Act statutorily ends the expired Section 215 of the Patriot Act, it should also impose an explicit end to “Abouts collection” a practice of collecting digital communications, not if their from suspected people, but if their are “about” specific topics. This practice has been discontinued, but still sits on the books, just waiting to be revamped. 

Vince Gill might not seem like the fighting type… but he was willing to throw hands back in the early 2000s. The “Go Rest High on That Mountain” singer evidently threatened to send legendary radio host Don Imus to that mountain himself during an on air interview back in the early 2000s. During a recent interview with television writer, producer, and Somebody Feed Phil host, Phil Rosenthal, on the Naked Lunch podcast, Gill explained that the radio personality had previously been a big fan of his. For some reason, when Gill married Amy Grant in 2000, Don Imus suddenly started bashing both him and Grant: “After Amy and I got married, he flipped on me. He kinda turned on me and started running me down, ragging me on his show every morning. He said, ‘I can’t believe my favorite singer, Vince Gill, lost to baby Jesus, married that Christian girl.’ He was just wearing my a** out.” Vince Gill heard all of that noise, and remembered it. When it came time to promote a new album that he had coming out, the country singer requested that his publicist get him booked for an interview on Don Imus’ show – Imus in the Morning. As he tells the story, the visit went according to plan until the radio host brought up his wife: “I went on there and got up and sang a song. We had a little small talk and then finally, Amy’s name came up. He said something about Amy and I said, ‘I’m glad you brought Amy up. I’ve been hearing you say some pretty ugly things about my wife, and I’m just kind of curious why. You used to be a great supporter of mine… If you ever met her, you’d never say an unkind word about her.” Then Vince Gill brought the hammer down. Once it was clear that he was on conversational offense in defense of his wife, Gill threatened to come over the desk that divided he and Imus in order to really drive his point home: “I said, ‘I’m gonna shoot you straight. I really only came on this show for one reason. We’re either gonna talk this out, straighten this out, or I’m gonna crawl across this desk and I’m gonna kick your a**.’ His eyes got big and he goes, ‘Well let’s figure this thing out. Let’s talk it out.’ I said, ‘Good choice, Don,’ you know, and so we had a great visit.” Who knew that Vince Gill was such an enforcer? That last line he added there – “we had a great visit” – is a hilarious touch to an already great story. Yeah… what is the radio host going to do once he knows that his guest is willing to crawl on to the table and kick some a**? That kind of tone setting from Gill completely changed the tone of the interview, and apparently led to Imus softening up his criticism of Gill and Grant from then on out. You can hear the country music legend talk more about the radio interview incident in the video below: The post Vince Gill Once Threatened To Fight Radio Host Don Imus While On Air… Here’s Why first appeared on Whiskey Riff.

Mama knows best… Back in June of 2023, Megan Moroney scored her first #1 hit was “Tennessee Orange,” which she released in 2022 and first went viral on TikTok, ultimately helping secure her first record deal and launched her onto the path to becoming the country superstar she is now. The song was co-written by Megan, Ben Williams, David Fanning and Paul Jenkins, she sings about falling for a guy who’s seemingly converted her into a Tennessee Volunteers fan, as she admits she’s now wearing “Tennessee Orange for him,” and even finds herself going to games at Neyland stadium. On top of that, seeing as she’s a diehard Georgia Bulldogs fan, he has her committing the most egregious of sins that her daddy would never approve of, like “learning the words to ol ‘Rocky Top,’” and even forgetting that she’s “always looked better in red.” Many speculated that the Volunteer fan she referenced and that inspired the song is Morgan Wallen, and coupled with that buzz, it became a massive hit, and Megan has obviously become one of the premiere mainstream country artists, playing sold out shows all over the country, and just last week, she scored her first ever #1 album on the Billboard Top 200 chart with her third studio album, Cloud 9. During an interview on Late Night with Seth Meyers last year, Megan talked about her inspiration for that song, saying she knew if her mom had seen her wearing that “gaudy orange” shirt she would have freaked, but it proved how much Megan really liked said “mystery man” the wrote it about: “Yeah, so, when I moved to Nashville, one day, I found myself wearing a Volunteers shirt. And I remember lookin gin the mirror going, ‘My mom would absolutely kill me right now if she saw me in this gaudy orange.’ And so then I thought, that would make a really good love song, like, I like this dude enough to not wear Georgia red.” She also revealed that she got “death threats” over that song from some angry college football fans: “And yeah, I got death threats over that song.” Honestly, I have no problem believing that, because rivalries run DEEP among SEC fans and football fans in the South in general, and Megan seemed to think it was funny, and seeing as she obviously knows what college football is like in the South, I’m sure she wasn’t all that surprised. Those fans are a different breed… And during an interview with Southern Living this week, Megan explained that she will often send her mom work tapes of stuff she’s working on from her phone so she can hear it, and her mom will always give her honest feedback. So you can imagine when her daughter, who was raised a Georgia Bulldog and is an alumni of UGA (as are both of her parents, I believe), sent her “Tennessee Orange,” mama was NOT happy and hoped it wasn’t true: “When I write songs, I send my mom a little work tape from my phone, and the first thing she says back is not ‘Oh, I like the song,’ or ‘I don’t really like it.’ She’s like, ‘Don’t tell me this is true… don’t tell me you’re wearing Tennessee orange.’ And I [said], ‘At least it’s not Florida orange!” Not sure that helps to be honest, Meg… that’s like the eighth deadly sin down here. I couldn’t even dream of it, really, but Megan also told the magazine how proud she is to be a Georgia Bulldog, and she has made it her “whole personality,” though we’ll just have to look past her aforementioned hit… “There’s a lot of pride there in being a Georgia Bulldog, so I kind of made it my whole personality. I loved going to school there. I met my best friends. It obviously changed the trajectory of my life going to school there so there’s a lot of pride.” To close it out, Megan talked about what she loves about being a Southerner, and she says the spirit of people in the South always being “willing to help someone” and “not expect anything in return,” is what makes it so special: “When I think of [being] Southern and how I was raised, I want to surround myself with people like that. Being kind is Southern to me, and always being willing to help someone and not expect anything in return, because you never know when you’re gonna need help.” Now that I can agree with and get behind… Megan just released her aforementioned album Cloud 9, and will hit the road on her subsequent tour in “Tennessee Orange” Cloud 9 Tour Dates: 29 | Columbus, OH – Schottenstein Center 30 | Indianapolis, IN – Gainbridge Fieldhouse 2 | Chicago, IL – United Center 3 | Chicago, IL – United Center – NEW 5 | Baltimore, MD – CFG Bank Arena 6 | Greensboro, NC – First Horizon Coliseum 8 | Atlanta, GA – State Farm Arena 9 | Atlanta, GA – State Farm Arena – NEW 12 | Louisville, KY – KFC Yum! Center 13 | St. Louis, MO – Enterprise Center 16 | Pittsburgh, PA – PPG Paints Arena 18 | Milwaukee, WI – Summerfest 19 | Grand Rapids, MI – Van Andel Arena 20 | Toronto, ON – Scotiabank Arena 6 | Boston, MA – TD Garden – NEW 7 | Boston, MA – TD Garden 9 | Brooklyn, NY – Barclays Center 10 | Newark, NJ – Prudential Center 11 | Philadelphia, PA – Xfinity Mobile Arena 14 | Charlotte, NC – Spectrum Center 16 | Orlando, FL – Kia Center 17 | Tampa, FL – Benchmark International Arena 18 | Sunrise, FL – Amerant Bank Arena 24 | Monticello, IA – Great Jones County Fair 25 | Minneapolis, MN – Target Center 26 | Lincoln, NE – Pinnacle Bank Arena 28 | Denver, CO – Ball Arena 1 | Portland, OR – Moda Center 2 | Seattle, WA – Climate Pledge Arena 5 | Sacramento, CA – Golden 1 Center 7 | Los Angeles, CA – Crypto.com Arena 8 | Los Angeles, CA – Crypto.com Arena – NEW 11 | Glendale, AZ – Desert Diamond Arena 14 | Dallas, TX – American Airlines Center 15 | Tulsa, OK – BOK Center 16 | Kansas City, MO – T-Mobile Center 18 | Detroit, MI – Little Caesars Arena 21 | Nashville, TN – Bridgestone Arena 22 | Nashville, TN – Bridgestone Arena – NEW 13 | Oslo, NO – Sentrum Scene 15 | Stockholm, SE – Annexet 18 | Cologne, DE – Carlswerk Victoria 19 | Tilburg, NL – 013 Poppodium 21 | Paris, FR – Le Trianon 23 | London, UK – Eventim Apollo 26 | Manchester, UK – O2 Apollo 27 | Glasgow, UK – O2 Academy 28 | Glasgow, UK – O2 Academy – NEW 1 | Belfast, UK – SSE ArenaThe post “Don’t Tell Me You’re Wearing Tennessee Orange”: Megan Moroney Says Her Mom Was Very Concerned After Hearing Her First Hit first appeared on Whiskey Riff.

Luke Combs detailing the blessing and the curse of being famous. It would be a blanket statement to say that there’s two types of people in this world: those that wish they were famous, and those who are and wish that they don’t. That’s obviously not entirely true, but there’s some truth to it. You hear celebrities talking all the time about how they miss the little things… like going out for a coffee, or being able to stroll through a grocery store. Luke Combs is one of the rare celebrities that is very much recognizable, yet continues to operate as if he’s anonymous. The country music superstar is currently on a press tour for his upcoming album The Way I Am, which is set to release March 20. The forthcoming project is expected to be a return to the old Luke Combs, musically, and will deliver 22 songs to a fanbase that’s been waiting for new music (outside of Fathers and Sons) for quite some time. In an interview with Apple Music’s Zane Lowe, Combs went into detail about the new project, why he chose to make it the length that it is, and how he hopes that fans and country music listeners in general love what he delivers. It’s undoubtedly a huge release for Combs in his already impressive career, and if it connects like Combs expects it to, it could be easy to get wrapped up in the success of it. But as Combs told Lowe, he doesn’t really tie his value to his music making that much anymore: “I really do try to stay grounded in family and friends. I try to not let the level of success be my identity and how I view myself as a person. I’m a person that’s trying to do the best I can as a dad, as a boss, as an artist, as a singer, as a performer. I try to be the best version of myself and try to give as much of myself as I can to everyone else, and not think of myself as better than everyone else or different than anyone else.” That lines up with everything we’ve heard about (and from) Luke Combs ever since he burst onto the scene in the mid 2010s. The “Beautiful Crazy” singer went on to say that he’s aware of his celebrity status, and explained that he doesn’t let it get to his head. Instead, he tries to keep things as normal as possible for himself and his family. And that’s a very intentional move by the country music star: “When I’m home, let’s just go to the grocery store with my kids and just get groceries. That’s what I do. People are like, ‘I can’t believe you do that.’ I’m like, ‘Why not? That’s what I’ve always done.’ If I want to go get something to eat, I’ll just go get something to eat. I try to just not operate in the vacuum of celebrity, because I’m kind of uncomfortable with the attention of it all.” One of the ways that he’s found to be very effective in the fight against feeling like a celebrity? That’d be the outdoors. Combs says that he didn’t grow up as an outdoorsman by any means, but that didn’t stop him from gripping onto the hobby and not letting go once he found it (around the same time he started to hit it big): “The outdoors is a huge part of how I’ve gotten to stay so grounded. For someone that didn’t grow up hunting or anything like that, it was something that I found 12 years ago… It was the complete opposite of my life at the time. When I started doing it, it was go-go-go, PR, radio, this-this all the time. I was gone all the time. Your life is changing at light speed. All the sudden, people recognize you everywhere you go, and you ask, ‘How do you figure that out? How do I deal with this?’ That was the place I would go that was the polar opposite of everything else in my life. It was complete quiet. Complete solitude and peace with one goal in mind.” Now, he says that there’s nothing more enjoyable for him than to take his kiddos out into the woods on his property. They’ll tell Combs that they want to throw rocks into the creek, and Luke encourages them to do so. It’s a simple act, but one that helps stay grounded, and something that he looks forward to as a father. And above all, it gets him away from his fame… even if it’s just for an hour or so. You can hear Luke Combs talk more about doing his best to live outside his own celebrity in the interview below: The post “Uncomfortable With The Attention”: Luke Combs Says He Does His Best To Operate Outside The World Of Celebrity first appeared on Whiskey Riff.