Tag Archives: FISA court

Russsia-Gate Implodes, by Justin Raimondo

Posted on January 22, 2018 | Leave a comment

The title says it all. From Justin Raimondo at antiwar.com:

The real “collusion” is the alliance of foreign actors and the Democrats

The finale is upon us: the Russia-gate fraud is about to be exploded, at long last. Although the vaunted memo – and the underlying intelligence – compiled by the leadership of the House Intelligence Committee under chairman Devin Nunes (R-CA) has yet to be released, there has been enough chatter by those House members who have read it to give us the basic elements of what it contains. Although prepare to be shocked by what I consider to be the most outrageous aspect of this affair.

To begin with, it’s clear that the “dossier” paid for by the neocons over at the Free Beacon and then taken up later by Hillary Clinton was submitted to the FISA court by the FBI as the factual basis for allowing secret surveillance of the Trump campaign, possibly including Donald Trump himself. The FISA judge was reportedly not told who paid for the dossier.

In an interview with the Daily Caller, veteran law enforcement professional Joseph DiGenova cites as evidence of a pattern of deception the details of a FISA court opinion (April 27, 2017) that charged the Obama administration with lying to the court and illegal use of material obtained through their spying campaign. The court said the government’s actions were “abusive” because the purloined material was handed out to “contractors.”  We aren’t told who these contractors are. My guess – and DiGenova’s: Fusion GPS, the firm hired to smear Trump, and CrowdStrike, the  cyber-security firm in charge of the DNC’s email system – which the FBI never was allowed to look at.

The anti-Trump coup plotters constructed an elaborate fiction for the benefit of the FISA court, presented it to the court as factual, and used it as the basis for obtaining a warrant for the Obama administration – and, in effect, the Clinton campaign – to not only spy on the Trump campaign but to actively disrupt it.

To continue reading: Russsia-Gate Implodes

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The FISA Memo is All the Ammunition Trump Needs to Take on the CIA, by Tom Luongo

Posted on January 21, 2018 | Leave a comment

Tom Luongo exults that Trump appears to be rolling up victory after victory against the shadow government, which he differentiates from the Deep State. From Luongo at tomluongo.me:

FISA is an abomination. Let’s get that out of the way. And since I don’t believe there are any coincidences in U.S. or geo-politics, the releasing of the explosive four-page FISA memo after Congress reauthorized FISA is suspicious.

Former NSA analyst (traitor? hero?) turned security state gadfly Edward Snowden came out in favor of President Trump vetoing the FISA reauthorization now that the full extent of what the statute is used for is known to members of the House Intelligence Committee, who are rightly aghast.

But, like I said, timing in these things is everything. And the timing on this leak is important.

Someone leaked this memo to the House Intelligence Committee with the sole intention of giving President Trump the opportunity to do exactly what Snowden is arguing for.

And well Trump should.  This is the essence of draining the swamp.  It is the essence of his war with the Shadow Government.  If one makes the distinction between the Deep State and the Shadow Government, like former CIA officer Kevin Shipp does, then this falls right in line with Trump’s goals in cleaning up the rot and corruption in the U.S. government.  In a recent interview with Greg Hunter at USAWatchdog.com,

Shipp explains, “I differentiate between the ‘Deep State’ and the shadow government. The shadow government are the secret intelligence agencies that have such power and secrecy that they act even without the knowledge of Congress. There are many things that they do with impunity. Then there is the ‘Deep State,’ which is the military industrial complex, all of the industrial corporations and their lobbyists, and they have all the money, power and greed that give all the money to the Senators and Congressmen. So, they are connected, but they are really two different entities. It is the shadow government . . . specifically, the CIA, that is going after Donald Trump. It is terrified that some of its dealings are going to be exposed. If they are, it could jeopardize the entire organization.” [emphasis mine]

To continue reading: The FISA Memo is All the Ammunition Trump Needs to Take on the CIA

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House Intelligence Committee Will Vote To Release FISA Corruption Memo… by sundance

Posted on January 21, 2018 | Leave a comment

This article takes exception with an assertion in an article yesterday by Glenn Greenwald that it’s a relatively easy matter to publicly disclose an allegedly explosive House Intelligence Committee report. The article has a fantastic list of links A hat to tip to SLL reader neilmdunn for this article, by sundance at theconservativetreehouse.com:

According to Representative Dave Joyce (R-OH14) the House Intelligence Committee will hold a vote on the release of the four-page Nunes memo that reveals systemic corruption within the DOJ and FBI; including the unlawful use of FISA-702(16)(17) data searches which were part of an elaborate DOJ-FBI surveillance program on the political campaign of Donald Trump.

Additionally, Chad Pergram reported that Chairman Devin Nunes met with Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte to discuss the best process to release the memo.   There are generally two ways it could be done, the HPSCI vote is the most likely.

As more people have become aware of the back-story to the campaign surveillance, FISA-702 issue, and the unlawful conduct of the FBI and DOJ, there is also a great deal of misinformation.  Few people have followed the entire story as it unfolded and that has led to large numbers of people mistakenly thinking the process for revealing the classified intelligence -at the heart of the issue- can be easily released.

There are also multiple media voices taking advantage of people with limited understanding of the year-long process.  Glenn Greenwald published an article today claiming there were “Four Easy Ways” the Nunes memo could be revealed.  That article by Greenwald is intentional disinformation targeted to cloud the larger issues and create chaos.  A deconstruction of Greenwald’s ridiculous arguments is HERE.

It is essential the process is followed that allows the larger story to come out without providing the use of political cover by those who are intent on hiding the corruption.

To continue reading: House Intelligence Committee Will Vote To Release FISA Corruption Memo…

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Republicans Have Four Easy Ways to #ReleaseTheMemo — and the Evidence for It. Not Doing So Will Prove Them to Be Shameless Frauds. by Glenn Greenwald and Jon Schwarz

Posted on January 20, 2018 | 2 comments

After all the ruckus the Republicans have  raised about their report on FISA court irregularities by the FBI and Department of Justice, they’d better make the report public. From Glenn Greenwald and Jon Schwarz at theintercept.com:

ONE OF THE gravest and most damaging abuses of state power is to misuse surveillance authorities for political purposes. For that reason, The Intercept, from its inception, has focused extensively on these issues.

We therefore regard as inherently serious strident warnings from public officials alleging that the FBI and Department of Justice have abused their spying power for political purposes. Social media last night and today have been flooded with inflammatory and quite dramatic claims now being made by congressional Republicans about a four-page memo alleging abuses of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act spying processes during the 2016 election. This memo, which remains secret, was reportedly written under the direction of the chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, GOP Rep. Devin Nunes, and has been read by dozens of members of Congress after the committee voted to make the memo available to all members of the House of Representatives to examine in a room specially designated for reviewing classified material.

The rhetoric issuing from GOP members who read the memo is notably extreme. North Carolina Republican Rep. Mark Meadows, chair of the House Freedom Caucus, called the memo “troubling” and “shocking” and said, “Part of me wishes that I didn’t read it because I don’t want to believe that those kinds of things could be happening in this country that I call home and love so much.” GOP Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania stated: “You think about, ‘Is this happening in America or is this the KGB?’ That’s how alarming it is.”

This has led to a ferocious outcry on the right to “release the memo” – and presumably thereby prove that the Obama administration conducted unlawful surveillance on the Trump campaign and transition. On Thursday night, Fox News host and stalwart Trump ally Sean Hannity claimed that the memo described “the systematic abuse of power, the weaponizing of those powerful tools of intelligence and the shredding of our Fourth Amendment constitutional rights.”

Given the significance of this issue, it is absolutely true that the memo should be declassified and released to the public — and not just the memo itself. The House Intelligence Committee generally and Nunes specifically have a history of making unreliable and untrue claims (its report about Edward Snowden was full of falsehoods, as Bart Gellman amply documented, and prior claims from Nunes about “unmasking” have been discredited). Thus, mere assertions from Nunes — or anyone else — are largely worthless; Republicans should provide American citizens not merely with the memo they claim reveals pervasive criminality and abuse of power, but also with all of the evidence underlying its conclusions.

To continue reading: Republicans Have Four Easy Ways to #ReleaseTheMemo — and the Evidence for It. Not Doing So Will Prove Them to Be Shameless Frauds

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A Bombshell House Intelligence report exposing extensive FISA abuse could lead to the removal of senior government officials, by Sara Carter

Posted on January 19, 2018 | 4 comments

It remains to be seen if the intelligence report matches the billing in the headline, because it’s only been released to House members. So take it with a grain of salt until it’s released to the public, if it is released to the public. From Sara Carter at saracarter.com:

A review of a classified document outlining what is described as extensive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act abuse was made available to all House members Thursday and the revelations could lead to the removal of senior officials in the FBI and Department of Justice, several sources with knowledge of the document stated. These sources say the report is “explosive,” stating they would not be surprised if it leads to the end of Robert Mueller’s Special Counsel investigation into President Trump and his associates.

The House Intelligence Committee passed the motion along party lines Thursday to make the classified report alleging extensive ‘FISA Abuse’ related to the controversial dossier available to all House members. The report contains information regarding the dossier that alleges President Trump and members of his team colluded with the Russians in the 2016 presidential election. Some members of the House viewed the document in a secure room Thursday.

Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., offered the motion on Thursday to make the Republican majority-authored report available to the members.

“The document shows a troubling course of conduct and we need to make the document available, so the public can see it,” said a senior government official, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the document. “Once the public sees it, we can hold the people involved accountable in a number of ways.”

The government official said that after reading the document “some of these people should no longer be in the government.”

The document also apparently outlines “several problematic” issues with how FISA warrants were “packaged, and used” state several sources with knowledge of the report.

Over the past year, whistleblowers in the law enforcement and intelligence community have revealed to Congress what they believe to be extensive abuse with regard to FISA surveillance, as previously reported. 

To continue reading: A Bombshell House Intelligence report exposing extensive FISA abuse could lead to the removal of senior government officials

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Did Donald Trump Change His Mind on Domestic Spying? by Andrew P. Napolitano

Posted on January 18, 2018 | Leave a comment

President Trump and Attorney General Sessions have been abysmal on civil liberties. From Andrew P. Napolitano at lewrockwell.com:

Late last week, Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, repeated his public observations that members of the intelligence community — particularly the CIA, the NSA and the intelligence division of the FBI — are not trustworthy with the nation’s intelligence secrets. Because he has a security clearance at the “top secret” level and knows how others who have access to secrets have used and abused them, his allegations are extraordinary.

He pointed to the high-ranking members of the Obama administration who engaged in unmasking the names of some people whose communications had been captured by the country’s domestic spies and the revelation of those names for political purposes. The most notable victim of this lawlessness is retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, President Donald Trump’s former national security adviser, a transcript of whose surveilled conversation with then-Russian Ambassador to the United States Sergey Kislyak found its way into print in The Washington Post.

During the George W. Bush and Barack Obama years, captured communications — digital recordings of telephone conversations and copies of emails and text messages — did not bear the names of those who sent or received them. Those names were stored in a secret file. The revelation of those names is called unmasking.

Nunes also condemned the overt pro-Hillary Clinton bias and anti-Trump prejudice manifested by former CIA Director John Brennan, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former FBI Director James Comey and their agents in the field, some of whose texts and emails we have seen. The secrets that he argued were used for political purposes had been obtained by the National Security Agency pursuant to warrants issued by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

Yet Nunes voted to enhance federal bulk surveillance powers.

Bulk surveillance — which is prohibited by the Constitution — is the acquisition of digital versions of telephone, email and text communications based not on suspicion or probable cause but rather on geography or customer status. As I have written before, one publicly available bulk surveillance warrant was for all Verizon customers in the United States; that’s 115 million people, many of whom have more than one phone and at least one computer. And it is surveillance of Americans, not foreigners as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act contemplates.

To continue reading: Did Donald Trump Change His Mind on Domestic Spying?

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Spying on You, Spying on Me, Spying on the President, by Andrew P. Napolitano

Posted on June 1, 2017 | Leave a comment

The Fourth Amendment is virtually a dead letter. From Andrew P. Napolitano at lewrockwell.com:

“The makers of our Constitution … conferred, as against the Government, the right to be let alone — the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men.” — Justice Louis D. Brandeis, 1928

After the Watergate era had ended and Jimmy Carter was in the White House and the Senate’s Church Committee had attempted to grasp the full extent of lawless government surveillance in America during the LBJ and Nixon years, Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. FISA declared that it provided the sole source for federal surveillance in America for intelligence purposes.

FISA required that all domestic intelligence surveillance be authorized by a newly created court, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Since 1978, FISC has met in secret. Its records are unavailable to the public unless it determines otherwise, and it hears only from Department of Justice lawyers and National Security Agency personnel. There are no lawyers or witnesses to challenge the DOJ or the NSA.

Notwithstanding this handy constitutional novelty, the NSA quickly grew impatient with its monitors and began crafting novel arguments that were met with no resistance. Those arguments did away with the kind of particularized probable cause about targets of surveillance that the Constitution requires in favor of warrants based on the probability that someone somewhere in a given group could provide intelligence data helpful to national security, and because the FISC bought these arguments, the entire group could be spied upon. The FISC unleashed the NSA to spy on tens of millions of Americans.

That was still not enough for the nation’s spies. So beginning in 2005, then-President George W. Bush permitted the NSA to interpret President Ronald Reagan’s executive order 12333 so as to allow all spying on everyone in the U.S., all the time. The NSA and Bush took the position that because the president is constitutionally the commander in chief of the military and because the NSA is in the military, both the president and the NSA are lawfully independent of FISA.

The NSA does not acknowledge any of this, but we know from the Edward Snowden revelations and from the testimony of a former high-ranking NSA official who devised many of the NSA programs that this is so.

To continue reading: Spying on You, Spying on Me, Spying on the President

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Deep Six the Deep State, by Justin Raimondo

Posted on May 26, 2017 | Leave a comment

The mainstream media is not interested in the depredations of the intelligence agencies because the agencies are the sources of some of the media’s best stories. From Justin Raimondo at antiwar.com (“Deep Six the Deep State” was a tag line SLL used to advertise Prime Deceit. Raimondo inexplicably gives SLL no credit for the title.):

Rogue “intelligence community” must be slapped down

You won’t read about this in what passes for the “mainstream” media, but newly declassified documents reveal that the Obama administration was violating its own rules and spying on Americans with such frequency that even the normally compliant FISA court scolded them:
“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.”

Was this covered by the New York Times, the “newspaper of record,” or the Washington Post, which has adopted the slogan “democracy dies in the dark”? Of course not. They’re too busy reporting on leaks of classified information from their Deep State sources, some of which is no doubt the product of this illegal spying.

I count less than half a dozen stories about this, all of them in conservative outlets like Fox News and Breitbart, The “liberal” media isn’t interested for the simple reason that they don’t want to interfere with the very process that provides them with so many “scoops.”

In 2011, the Obama administration loosened the rules whereby intelligence agencies could share information on US citizens – which we now know was illegally obtained and shared with other agencies by the National Security Agency. That same year, the FISA court enjoined the administration to put into practice minimization procedures that would protect the Fourth Amendment rights of Americans – but that didn’t happen. Former National Security Advisor Susan Rice, in defending her unmasking of Mike Flynn’s conversations with Russian officials, said it was all perfectly legal — except it wasn’t. We’re now learning that, two weeks before election day, the FISA court rebuked the administration, saying:

“Since 2011, NSA’s minimization procedures have prohibited use of U.S.-person identifiers to query the results of upstream Internet collections under Section 702. The Oct. 26, 2016 notice informed the court that NSA analysts had been conducting such queries in violation of that prohibition, with much greater frequency than had been previously disclosed to the Court.”

To continue reading: Deep Six the Deep State

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Declassified memos show FBI illegally shared spy data on Americans with private parties, by John Solomon and Sara Carter

Posted on May 26, 2017 | Leave a comment

More disclosures about illegal disclosures of data gleaned by the intelligence agencies and the FBI. From John Solomon and Sara Carter at circa.com:

The FBI has illegally shared raw intelligence about Americans with unauthorized third parties and violated other constitutional privacy protections, according to newly declassified government documents that undercut the bureau’s public assurances about how carefully it handles warrantless spy data to avoid abuses or leaks.

In his final congressional testimony before he was fired by President Trump this month, then-FBI Director James Comey unequivocally told lawmakers his agency used sensitive espionage data gathered about Americans without a warrant only when it was “lawfully collected, carefully overseen and checked.”

Once-top secret U.S. intelligence community memos reviewed by Circa tell a different story, citing instances of “disregard” for rules, inadequate training and “deficient” oversight and even one case of deliberately sharing spy data with a forbidden party.

 

For instance, a ruling declassified this month by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) chronicles nearly 10 pages listing hundreds of violations of the FBI’s privacy-protecting minimization rules that occurred on Comey’s watch.

The behavior the FBI admitted to a FISA judge just last month ranged from illegally sharing raw intelligence with unauthorized third parties to accessing intercepted attorney-client privileged communications without proper oversight the bureau promised was in place years ago.

The court also opined aloud that it fears the violations are more extensive than already disclosed.

“The Court is nonetheless concerned about the FBI’s apparent disregard of minimization rules and whether the FBI is engaging in similar disclosures of raw Section 702 information that have not been reported,” the April 2017 ruling declared.

 

The court isn’t the only oversight body to disclose recent concerns that the FBI’s voluntary system for policing its behavior and self-disclosing mistakes hasn’t been working.

The Justice Department inspector general’s office declassified a report in 2015 that reveals the internal watchdog had concerns as early as 2012 that the FBI was submitting ‘deficient” reports indicating it had a clean record complying with spy data gathered on Americans without a warrant.

 
To continue reading: Declassified memos show FBI illegally shared spy data on Americans with private parties

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Obama intel agency secretly conducted illegal searches on Americans for years, by John Solomon and Sara Carter

Posted on May 24, 2017 | Leave a comment

Big Brother Obama, supposed constitutional scholar, went above and beyond the call of duty in shredding Americans’ civil liberties. From John Solomon and Sara Carter at circa.com:

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.

Related:Court clears way for suit against NSA surveillance
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.

Circa has reported that there was a three-fold increase in NSA data searches about Americans and a rise in the unmasking of U.S. person’s identities in intelligence reports after Obama loosened the privacy rules in 2011.

Officials like former National Security Adviser Susan Rice have argued their activities were legal under the so-called minimization rule changes Obama made, and that the intelligence agencies were strictly monitored to avoid abuses.

To continue reading (and to read the FISA court opinion): Obama intel agency secretly conducted illegal searches on Americans for years

 

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