Wednesday, May 24, 2017

"Obama intel agency secretly conducted illegal searches on Americans for years"

Via Drudge:  The National Security Agency under former President Barack Obama routinely violated American privacy protections while scouring through overseas intercepts and failed to disclose the extent of the problems until the final days before Donald Trump was elected president last fall, according to once top-secret documents that chronicle some of the most serious constitutional abuses to date by the U.S. intelligence community.

More than 5 percent, or one out of every 20 searches seeking upstream Internet data on Americans inside the NSA’s so-called Section 702 database violated the safeguards Obama and his intelligence chiefs vowed to follow in 2011, according to one classified internal report reviewed by Circa.

The Obama administration self-disclosed the problems at a closed-door hearing Oct. 26 before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that set off alarm. Trump was elected less than two weeks later.

The normally supportive court censured administration officials, saying the failure to disclose the extent of the violations earlier amounted to an “institutional lack of candor” and that the improper searches constituted a “very serious Fourth Amendment issue,” according to a recently unsealed court document dated April 26, 2017.

The admitted violations undercut one of the primary defenses that the intelligence community and Obama officials have used in recent weeks to justify their snooping into incidental NSA intercepts about Americans.

(Link to more)

10 comments:

virgil xenophon said...

Why am I not surprised?

Methadras said...

And no one will ever see an indictment over it either. More illegality for those in power and the shaft for those that aren't.

virgil xenophon said...

As I have said here and many places before, there are not enough words in the English language to express the depths of my loathing for that man and his loyalist minions..

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

Looking the other way on this, is it the same as looking the other way on terror?

We have become comfortable with things we were never meant to become comfortable with.

Leland said...

McCain and Graham will be demanding a special counsel for this, never.

Amartel said...

If these tools were actually effective they would have been able to ferret out and end all that Russia collusion/tampering during the last election. Clearly, that didn't happen or we would have heard about it long before now. In the absence of any work-related application, we can't just hand over fun spy toys to politicians who will only abuse them for their own corrupt purposes.

edutcher said...

I thought we spent several years discussing this.

Oh, I know, the media wasn't going to admit it while Pissy was Preezy.

Trooper York said...

I think President Trump should set up a Presidential Commission to investigate this. Or demand a Senate Select committee. In any event I would put Senator Rand Paul in control of it and ask that he recommend prosecutions.

edutcher said...

Sounds good to me.

Michael Haz said...

Bret Baier led with this story on tonight's Fox Report. I doubt other networks will pick it up, but it's beginning to get legs. The original story was researched and reported by reporters on Circa News, an interesting website.