Illegal Spying Under Obama by Publius Tacitus

It is fascinating to observe the media contortions as they go to extreme lengths to ignore profound and important news. I am referring specifically to the revelations that the National Security Agency, under the stewardship of Barack Obama, was illegally spying on Americans. Here's the story:

A newly released court opinion from the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) shows that for years the NSA improperly and perhaps illegally surveilled Americans. The court order triggered the surprise announcement two weeks ago that the agency would be severely scaling back its domestic surveillance and destroying previously collected data on Americans.

Thursday, the Department of Justice released the 99-page court opinion from last month that ordered the National Security Agency to delete much of its surveillance on American people, which was collected improperly and in potential violation of the Fourth Amendment. The DOJ released the opinion as part of a 2015 plan to be more transparent.

The NSA collected data about Americans if they even mentioned a foreign target.

The opinion is a rebuke of many of the NSA's surveillance collection practices under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the powers of which were expanded under the US Patriot Act. According to the opinion—parts of which are redacted—the NSA improperly collected untold numbers of "multi-communications transactions" (MCTs) as they were in transit around the internet. The NSA is intentionally vague about what MCTs are, but they are believed to be groups of emails, metadata, screenshots of your inbox, and still-classified types of digital information (here's the best primer explaining MCTs).

Under Section 702, the NSA is allowed to collect domestic communication if Americans are communicating directly with a "foreign intelligence target" as approved by the FISC court. According to the opinion, the NSA had been collecting information if a foreign target was merely mentioned in the communication.

"Upstream collection could acquire an entire MCT for which the active user was a nontarget and that mostly pertained to non-targets, merely because a single discrete communication within the MCT was to, from or contained a reference to a tasked selector," Judge Rosemary Collyer wrote. "Such acquisitions could take place even if the non-target active user was a U.S. person in the United States and the MCT contained a large number of domestic communications that did not pertain to the foreign intelligence target."

 

Instead of focusing on this revelation--i.e., that the Obama Administration was illegally intercepting the communications of many Americans--most of the media is still busy ridiculing Trump for his claim that Obama had him "wire tapped" and obsessing over an anonymous report that Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, had talked with Russia's Ambassador last December and allegedly conspired to set up a private means of communication.

 

Hardly anyone has focused on the irony of Kushner being concerned about Obama and his cronies intercepting Trump campaign communications while we are getting news that is exactly what transpired under Obama. There is no genuine protection for private communications.

 

I am shocked by the intensity of the propaganda campaign against the Trumpers and against the Russians. Having worked on covert action programs during my time in the intelligence community, I do have an appreciation and understanding about how such campaigns are mounted and carried out. What is being done inside the United States by our foreign intelligence organizations signals we have crossed a dangerous threshold. Our traditional beliefs about privacy and the requirement for a warrant before authorities can poke around in your personal affairs are no longer valid. 

 

Normally we would expect the so-called liberal media to attack such abuses and lead the charge against the law breakers. But these are not normal times. The media, for the most part, are partisan hacks who are so opposed to Trump that they will gladly embrace authoritarian, fascist tactics as long as they are directed against the Trump Presidency.

 

One interesting twist in all of this--as long as Trump plays along with the deep state, for example, by vilifying Russia and carrying out illegal U.S. military operations in Syria, then Trump's abuses are ignored and even cheered. There is not legal basis for Trump to authorize bombing strikes in Syria but most in the U.S. establishment and media seem content to welcome those actions.

 

We are becoming immunized as a society to accept Presidential authority to break laws and numb to any evidence of wrong doing as long as it is embraced by the media establishment. A very dangerous time for our Republic.

 

 

Comments

[sid_finster]

The civil liberties ship has long since sailed.

[MRW]

A point of view from you I can agree with.

We’re almost married.

[MRW]

Thanks for that link, Sylvia 1. I didn’t see that. It’s a good report.

[MRW]

Jack, OT. We're too far down the rabbit hole for any kind of self-correction.

Few know that Jimmy Carter in an effort to curb rogue elements in the late 70s fired 4,000 agents.

[TonyL]

"By the way, TTG is developing the Silverman sindrome."

WTF. You gotta be kidding, or totally ignorant about who TTG is, or what he stands for.

[MRW]

Simplicius: Smart.

[MRW]

Started with Ronald Reagan.

[Freudenschade]

Anon,

Sergey's Morse code machine has Bluetooth, wifi, GPS jamming and a social media propaganda subsystem that will make your eyes bleed. :-) You need to get out more and see the world. Sergey's got some high tech shit.

[Fred]

Anonymous,

"It's not that America will become the usual third world country..."
You must not have politicians bringing in a replacement demographic of a more amenable citizenry.

[Lesly]

"Normally we would expect the so-called liberal media to attack such abuses and lead the charge against the law breakers. But these are not normal times."

It hasn't been normal since at least the 110th Congress passed the innocently titled Protect America Act of 2007, reauthorizing the legislation (PATRIOT Act) Democrats railed against and had to thank for retaking both chambers. That same year the Senste voted on granting retroactive immunity to telecoms who assisted federal agencies with illegally collecting private information. Except for some holdouts like Glenn Greenwald the media hasn't revisited the subject since both parties reached parity on this abuse of federal power. With no one in power to tell the media look here, they see nothing.

[Babak Makkinejad]

It was sometime in 1980s - I think - when it was revealed that the Marseilles Police had kept the Gestapo files collected during World War II; much of them covering Jews.

It caused some heated debate in France but, I think, they decided to keep the records instead of destroying them.

[Babak Makkinejad]

All:

You are not looking far enough into the future.

In less than one hundred years, the communication surveillance data, the medical records data, the criminal records, the public commercial records, the gnomic data (including enzymatic information regrading propensity to violence or docility) will be compiled and available to many governments in the world.

In turn, that data would also become available to shady business, criminals, and criminal syndicates, for such activities as cheating, blackmail, extortion and so on and so forth.

Sky would be the limit.

[Valissa]

Thanks for the link Sylvia!

More proof that Comey has lied to congress. We already know Clapper did. When the heads of intelligence agencies lie to congress as well as the public (though that's more expected) and it's documented and eventually makes the news, it seems to make no difference. No difference to their careers, no difference in the deference still shown them by media, and therefore ultimately no difference to most Americans.

[Laura]

I also appreciate SST. Not because I agree with every opinion but because there are a multitude of opinions, from many angles and viewpoints.

Thank you all.

[Jeannie Catherine]

Amen to that.

[Peter VE]

"if they even mentioned a foreign target" So, since everyone on this site has mentioned Putin in some context or another. Welcome to the Great Eye of the Borg...

[Fred]

Babak,

The Google search data; Facebook postso, likes and comment history as well as spending patterns by credit card to include political donations.

[dilbert dogbert]

Question: Is it possible that Publius Tacitus is Josh Trevino?

[Anonymous]

Fred, what I mean is exactly that, that America without its original demography is not a "Nation," but a mere resource for international parties. It surprises me that underlining the conversation in this thread there is the notion that someone would actually intervene against the advance of the police state for the sake of preserving essential american liberties. I think that is no longer the case.

Freudenschade, I know, and I am aware how sophisticated is TTG's insight on that.

TonyL, TTG has a long history of abstaining from discussing american internal ethnic tensions. When Tyler arrived I thought TTG had in him enough substance to at least impart on Tyler a more "Special Forces" approach to the conflict young americans have ahead (you know, having a herd of water buffaloes awaiting you in heaven with long faces and litigious claims of premature earthly departure, like Col. Lang has) otherwise why the hell would Tyler be directed by Providence to SST? I pressed TTG to tell his tale, but the "substance" ended up being mere romanticism of the "Royal Marines" kind. Worse still, TTG implied in typical liberal retconning for virtuousness imagery that he wished his A-Team had been less white. Now, while Tyler would long have abandoned SST were not for the absurd levels of impartiality in judgement regarding the problems of american society displayed by Col. Lang, we come to the full circle with TTG drinking the very kosher "the russians did it" cool-aid served by the child molesting predators of the democratic "no whites allowed to speak" party, because in the end, he is no less prone to ideological manipulation than Nancy K (who weeps for the children of illegal immigrants but is fast and furious in prescribing divorce, single motherhood and abortion, with benefits to biotech biz, to those who by all rights should be called "thy neighbours.")

TonyL, in few, I like to pester TTG from time to time. Don't be annoyed by it. He isn't.

[MRW]

Babak, a little OT.

I ran across a copy in my files the other day of an interview with the noted historian and researcher Yehuda Bauer. He’s a professor at Hebrew University, and a senior consultant to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.
Yehuda Bauer Interview
<http://www.remember.org/hist.per.bauer.html>

I found this interesting:

”...Two thirds of the Jews of France survived, so obviously it had something to do with the attitudes of a large number of French people. Sixty percent of the Jews of Belgium survived, eighty percent of the Jews of Italy survived. In the inner let's say region of Bulgaria, not the areas that were conquered by the Bulgarian army outside of Bulgaria, but within Bulgaria, all the Jews survived. Why? Why did it not happen elsewhere? Now that is not very difficult to explain. And it is very important if you are looking for the human element, then how do you explain that people behaved differently in the Ukraine than in Poland, then France? And how high do you value those few who did help in the Ukraine versus a general mood in France that made it much much easier for an ordinary Frenchman to say well my neighbor is doing this so that's okay, I'll do it too. And how come there are these differences and Bulgaria isn't in Western Europe, so it's not a question of region maybe it's not a question of democracy, Bulgaria was never democratic and so on, it was for a very short time, France was, yet the behavior seems to be similar in some ways."

[Lefty]

Here's a good analysis that is not flattering to the FISA court opinion or sanguine that it has materially reeled in NSA's violations that go back to at least 2003:

https://www.emptywheel.net/2017/05/30/the-problems-with-rosemary-collyers-shitty-upstream-702-opinion/