Public Enemy No. 1: Walls Closing In On Peter Strzok As Questions Arise Over His Involvement In FISA Application

Over the past 10 days we"ve learned a lot about FBI agent Peter Strzok, a man who very likely would have lived the remainder of his life in relative obscurity as an FBI counterintelligence agent but for his sudden dismissal from Special Counsel Mueller"s "Russian Collusion" investigation.

As we noted on December 2nd (see: Mueller"s Top FBI Agent Probing Clinton Emails, Russian-Collusion "Removed" After Anti-Trump Texts Found), Strzok"s life became far more complicated when it was revealed that his dismissal from Mueller"s team was linked to the discovery of multiple "anti-Trump text messages" shared with a colleague...a colleague with whom he happened to be having an extramarital affair. 

Of course, like most twisted Washington D.C. scandals, his overt political bias and anti-Trump text messages were only the tip of the iceberg as it was subsequently discovered that Strzok not only held a leading role in the Hillary email investigation but potentially single-handedly saved her from prosecution by making the now-infamous change in Comey"s final statement to describe her email abuses as "extremely careless" rather than the original language of "grossly negligent."

Of course, as we noted a month ago (see: First Comey Memo Concluded Hillary Was "Grossly Negligent," Punishable By Jail), the change in language was significant since federal law states that "gross negligence" in handling the nation’s intelligence can be punished criminally with prison time or fines whereas "extreme carelessness" has no such legal definition and/or ramifications.

All that said, while ill-advised, sending anti-Trump texts to your mistress is certainly not illegal and probably doesn"t violate any FBI statutes that would require dismissal from an ongoing investigation...if we"re wrong on that then we would highly encourage Mueller to look at the text messages of the remainder of his team because we"re almost certain he would have to replace everyone.

So, that brings us back to the key question surrounding Peter Strzok...why exactly was he fired from the Trump investigation?

As it turns out, Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH) has an interesting theory on that question which he shared during his questioning of FBI Director Chris Wray last week.  To summarize, Jordan"s theory is that Strzok received the controversial "Trump Dossier" from the Clinton campaign then went to the FISA courts where he passed it off as a legitimate piece of intelligence in an effort to obtain the warrants necessary to effectively spy on the Trump campaign.

"Here"s what I think Director Wray.  I think Peter Strzok, head of counter intelligence at the FBI, Peter Strzok the guy who ran the Clinton investigation and did all the interviews, Peter Strzok, the guy who was running the Russia investigation at the FBI, Peter Strzok, Mr. "Super Agent" at the FBI, I think he"s the guy who took the application to the FISA court...and if that happened...if you have the FBI working with the Democrats" campaign, taking opposition research, dressing it all up and turning it into an intelligence document and taking it to the FISA court so they can spy on the other campaign...if that happened...that"s as wrong as it gets."

Rep. Jim Jordan questions FBI Director Chris Wray about agent Peter Strzok being removed from Mueller"s special counsel for pro-Clinton bias. https://t.co/w8cOMfew9n … pic.twitter.com/QpDBoFd3i5

— Constitutional Republic News (@CRepublicNews) December 8, 2017

Of course, Director Wray could clear up any confusion on this topic by simply releasing the FISA application but that would just be too simple now wouldn"t it?

9/11 Gave Us the Police State With the ‘Patriot’ Act, After Vegas Get Ready for ‘USA Liberty’ Act

After 9/11, the United States government preyed on the fear felt by many Americans to justify the passage of the USA Patriot Act—a law that was supposed to prevent future terrorist attacks. Now, after the Las Vegas shooting, the government has another proposed law ready to go, and just as with the Patriot Act, it also infringes on Americans’ liberties, and does very little for their security.

The USA Liberty Act is the latest trendy name for a law that would reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which is set to expire on Dec. 31, 2017. According to the House Judiciary Committee, the act would preserve “the core purpose of Section 702: the collection of electronic communications by non-U.S. persons for use in our nation’s defense.”

However, it should be noted that while the purpose of FISA was reportedly only to allow surveillance on the communications of foreign targets who were suspected terrorists, it has been used to spy on the communications of innocent Americans—despite the practice being ruled illegal—and any reauthorization of the law will only allow the practice to continue under the guise of “preventing terrorism.”

The USA Liberty Act claims that it will “better protect Americans’ privacy” by requiring the government to have “a legitimate national security purpose” before searching an individual’s database. Then when they do have that purpose established, they will be required to “obtain a court order based on probable cause to look at the content of communications, except when lives or safety are threatened, or a previous probable cause-based court order or warrant has been granted.”

But what the USA Liberty Act does not advertise is the fact that it does not actually address the legitimate problems that exist with Section 702. The FBI’s “legitimate national security purpose” could be justified by just about any reason the agency chooses to give, and agents will only need supervisory authority in order to search Americans’ metadata.

READ MORE:  9/11 Scam: More than 100 NYC Police and Firefighters Indicted in Despicable Fraud

One of the most important things to remember about Section 702 is that, as the Constitution Project noted, it gives domestic law enforcement agencies access to the data seized by the NSA, while allowing the NSA to “retain and disseminate Americans’ communications that may contain any evidence of any crime.”

In a press release on the new act, the House Judiciary Committee bragged about the “bipartisan success” of the USA Freedom Act in June 2015, claiming that it “ended the bulk collection of data, protected civil liberties and national security, and provided robust oversight and transparency of our vital national security tools.”

However, as The Free Thought Project reported in May 2015, the USA Freedom Act “doesn’t actually end or suspend the phone records program, but simply requires phone companies to hold onto these records rather than the NSA.” It also authorized, for the first time, “the NSA, FBI, and other government agencies to unconstitutionally collect data in bulk on potentially millions of law-abiding Americans,” and it let the NSA collect “cell phone records in addition to the landline call records.”

In the same way that the USA Patriot Act was the opposite of patriotic in 2001, the USA Freedom Act only took away freedom in 2015. Do not be fooled by the title—the USA Liberty Act in 2017 has nothing to do with expanding “liberty.”

Louise “Hard Drugs” Mensch Fires Lawyer Over Twitter For Criticizing Evan McMullin

Content originally published at iBankCoin.com

Louise Mensch, the anti-Trump neocon provocateur and former Conservative MP from England, who admitted her mind is ‘messed up after taking hard drugs,’ has fired attorney Mark S. Zaid after he got in a twitter battle with CIA lackey and former Presidential candidate Evan McMullin.

McMullin, commenting on a recent story that Facebook sold $100,000 worth of political advertising to a “Russian bot farm,” said “This is direct evidence that our adversaries try to turn us against each other. They know we’re weak when divided.”

This is direct evidence that our adversaries try to turn us against each other. They know we"re weak when divided. Will we let them succeed? pic.twitter.com/SRwlpZkZ9S

— Evan McMullin (@Evan_McMullin) September 6, 2017

To which Mensch’s now-former attorney Mark Zaid replied:

“Of course, USGOVT undertakes similar actions overseas. At least #Russians financially contributed to our economy!”

Of course, USGOVT undertakes similar actions overseas. At least #Russians financially contributed to our economy! https://t.co/eRPv6HZIG0

— Mark S. Zaid (@MarkSZaidEsq) September 6, 2017

McMullin played the Red Dawn card in response – accusing Zaid of using a “Kremlin talking point.” After a brief back-and-forth, Louise Mensch fired Zaid over Twitter. Zaid, in response, seemed relieved – responding “Thank you Louise! Notice of withdrawal will be filed with court tonight. You’re on your own.”

See the exchange here:

Last night, Louise Mensch fired her pro bono lawyer on Twitter for telling Evan McMullin that the US also (gasp) interferes in democracies pic.twitter.com/hCww9xx4RP

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) September 7, 2017

Recently, Mensch falsely alleged that president Trump’s inactive fashion model agency is under investigation by New York authorities for sex trafficking – a claim which Mensch’s co-author Claude Taylor retracted and apologized for after it was revealed their source was a hoaxer.

Mensch, on the other hand, continued pushing the story over Twitter – using the hashtag #PIMPOTUS.

Other tall tales include that a FISA court issued “sealed indictments” against Trump in advance of an impeachment, Orrin Hatch secretly replaced Trump as president in May, Vladimir Putin murdered Andrew Breitbart so that Trump and Bannon would end up in the White House, Putin funded the Ferguson riots, and hundreds of Americans are under Russian control.

Don’t do hard drugs kids.

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Eric Holder Sends Ominous Late Night Tweet To "Career DOJ/FBI" Employees

Eric Holder, Obama"s former Attorney General and a man who recently hinted at an interest in pursuing a 2020 bid for the White House, issued a rather ominous warning to the "career men & women" of the DOJ/FBI last night saying that their "actions and integrity will be unfairly questioned" before calling upon them to "be prepared, be strong."

"To the career men & women at DOJ/FBI: your actions and integrity will be unfairly questioned. Be prepared, be strong. Duty. Honor. Country."

To the career men & women at DOJ/FBI: your actions and integrity will be unfairly questioned. Be prepared, be strong. Duty. Honor. Country.

— Eric Holder (@EricHolder) June 30, 2017

Of course, with the many scandals that plagued Obama"s Justice Department, it"s impossible to know exactly which one sparked Holder"s warning. 

Could it be the outrageous unmasking of Trump officials in the waning days of Obama"s administration, an obvious attempt to exploit the collection of foreign intelligence and use it as a political weapon of mass destruction, and subsequent illegal leaking of that information to the media?  Certainly, this would seem to be a concern for Susan Rice who has been asked to testify before the House Intelligence Committee.

Or, is it a simple message directed at FBI Director McCabe who we recently pointed out is coming under increasing scrutiny for not recusing himself from the investigation of Michael Flynn, a man against whom he very clearly harbored a personal vendetta.

Or, perhaps its that whole James Comey revelation that Eric Holder"s replacement, Loretta Lynch, colluded with the Hillary Clinton campaign and the FBI to quash the investigation of Hillary"s email scandal.

Or, perhaps it"s just a general warning after the FISA court recently revealed the the Obama administration conducted illegal queries targeting American citizens "with much greater frequency than had previously been disclosed to the Court"...an issue which it described as a "very serious Fourth Amendment issue."

"Since 2011, NSA"s minimization procedures have prohibited use of U.S.-person identifiers to query the results of upstream Internet collection under Section 702.  The October 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 previously been disclosed to the Court."

"At the October 26, 2016 hearing, the Court ascribed the government"s failure to disclose those IG and OCO reviews at the October 4, 2016 hearing to an institutional "lack of candor" on NSA"s part and emphasized that "this is a very serious Fourth Amendment issue.""

Or, perhaps its something else entirely.  Just imagine the possibilities...

NYPost Claims Trump Administration Spying On Press To Find Leakers

In what is bound to create mass hysteria among the mainstream media, NYPost"s bombastic columnist John Crudele reports that the Trump administration is spying on a number of journalists in an effort to flush out The White House leakers.

Crudele notes that there was a big ruckus four years ago when the Associated Press announced that telephone records for 20 of its reporters had been subpoenaed by the Justice Department.

The government was apparently looking for CIA leaks about an operation in Yemen that time. Crudele reports it is happening again...

The Justice Department has gotten a warrant from the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court — also known as the FISA court — to conduct electronic surveillance on a group of journalists who’ve been the recipient of leaked information, the source said.

The journalists are not the target, according to my source - and I say, thank goodness for that. Instead, the Trump administration is looking for the leaker.

Of course, just as with practically every media story nowadays, the source is anonymous and there is no confirming evidence or secondary source, but as we reported previously, three White House leakers (who were holdovers from the Obama administration) have either already been fired or will soon be, the source claims.

Last week, the Trump campaign released an email to supporters entitled "SABOTAGE," in which the campaign said, "There are people within our own unelected bureaucracy that want to sabotage President Trump and our entire America First movement."

Sperry: How Team Obama Tried To Hack The Election

Authored by Paul Sperry, op-ed via NYPost.com,

New revelations have surfaced that the Obama administration abused intelligence during the election by launching a massive domestic spy campaign that included snooping on Trump officials.

The irony is mind-boggling: Targeting political opposition is long a technique of police states like Russia, which Team Obama has loudly condemned for allegedly using its own intelligence agencies to hack into our election.

The revelations, as well as testimony this week from former Obama intel officials, show the extent to which the Obama administration politicized and weaponized intelligence against Americans.

Thanks to Circa News, we now know the National Security Agency under President Barack Obama routinely violated privacy protections while snooping through foreign intercepts involving US citizens — and failed to disclose the breaches, prompting the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court a month before the election to rebuke administration officials.

The story concerns what’s known as “upstream” data collection under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, under which the NSA looks at the content of electronic communication. Upstream refers to intel scooped up about third parties: Person A sends Person B an email mentioning Person C. Though Person C isn’t a party to the email, his information will be scooped up and potentially used by the NSA.

Further, the number of NSA data searches about Americans mushroomed after Obama loosened rules for protecting such identities from government officials and thus the reporters they talk to.

The FISA court called it a “very serious Fourth Amendment issue” that NSA analysts — in violation of a 2011 rule change prohibiting officials from searching Americans’ information without a warrant — “had been conducting such queries in violation of that prohibition, with much greater frequency than had been previously disclosed to the Court.”

A number of those searches were made from the White House, and included private citizens working for the Trump campaign, some of whose identities were leaked to the media. The revelations earned a stern rebuke from the ACLU and from civil liberties champion Sen. Rand Paul.

We also learned this week that Obama intelligence officials really had no good reason attaching a summary of a dossier on Trump to a highly classified Russia briefing they gave to Obama just weeks before Trump took office.

Under congressional questioning Tuesday, Obama’s CIA chief John Brennan said the dossier did not “in any way” factor into the agency’s assessment that Russia interfered in the election. Why not? Because as Obama intel czar James Clapper earlier testified, “We could not corroborate the sourcing.”

But that didn’t stop Brennan in January from attaching its contents to the official report for the president. He also included the unverified allegations in the briefing he gave Hill Democrats.

In so doing, Brennan virtually guaranteed that it would be leaked, which it promptly was.

In short, Brennan politicized raw intelligence. In fact, he politicized the entire CIA.

Langley vets say Brennan was the most politicized director in the agency’s history. Former CIA field operations officer Gene Coyle said Brennan was “known as the greatest sycophant in the history of the CIA, and a supporter of Hillary Clinton before the election. I find it hard to put any real credence in anything that the man says.”

Coyle noted that Brennan broke with his predecessors who stayed out of elections. Several weeks before the vote, he made it very clear he was pulling for Hillary. His deputy Mike Morell even came out and publicly endorsed her in the New York Times, claiming Trump was an “unwitting agent” of Moscow.

Brennan isn’t just a Democrat. He’s a radical leftist who in 1980 — during the height of the Cold War — voted for a Communist Party candidate for president.

When Brennan rants about the dangers of strongman Vladimir Putin targeting our elections and subverting our democratic process, does he not catch at least a glimpse of his own reflection?

What he and the rest of the Obama gang did has inflicted more damage on the integrity of our electoral process than anything the Russians have done.

FISA Court Blasted "FBI's Apparent Disregard For Rules"; Illegally Shared Spy Data With "Private Contractors"

Earlier this week we highlighted sections of a recently unclassified FISA Court order which found that the Obama administration routinely conducted "widespread" illegal searches of American citizens, an issue which the court described as a "serious fourth amendment issue" (see "FISA Court Finds "Serious Fourth Amendment Issue" In Obama"s "Widespread" Illegal Searches Of American Citizens"). 

Today, as highlighted by Circa, we find the that FBI, led by James Comey, was one of the biggest offenders when it came to improper usage of foreign-sourced intelligence on American citizens.  Per the FISA court order (which can be found here), the DOJ conducted a review of the FBI"s handling of so-called "Section 702-acquired information" beginning on March 9, 2016 and what that review found was fairly disturbing. 

Among other things, the DOJ found that the FBI routinely shared "raw FISA information" on American citizens with "private contractors"...to paraphrase, the FBI took illegally sourced intelligence on American citizens (no warrants required) and shared it with random private citizens working at non-government firms.

"On March 9, 2016, DOJ oversight personnel conducting a minimization review at the FBI"s [redacted] learned that the FBI had disclosed raw FISA information, includined but not limited to Section 702-acquired information, to [redacted]...largely staffed by private contractors."

But it wasn"t just that one time...

"For these reasons, the government concluded that the FBI had given the information to the private entity [redcated], not to an assisting federal agency."

All of which resulted in the following punchline from the FISA Court:

"The Court is nonetheless concerned about the FBI"s apparent disregard of minimization rules and whether the FBI may be engaging in similar disclosures of raw Section 702 information that have not been reported."

But sure, our intelligence agencies should be blindly trusted to spy on American citizens without the hassle of warrants...they would never abuse those powers, right?  Plus, it"s for our own good...

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." - Ben Franklin

Unclassified Documents Show Obama Intel Agency Secretly Spied On Americans For Years

Authored by John Solomon and Sara Carter via 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.

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.

The intelligence court and the NSA’s own internal watchdog found that not to be true.

“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 unsealed court ruling declared. “The Oct. 26, 2016 notice informed the court that NSA analysts had been conducting such queries inviolation of that prohibition, with much greater frequency than had been previously disclosed to the Court.”

Speaking Wednesday on Fox News, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) said there was an apparent effort under the Obama Administration to increase the number of unmaskings of Americans.

“If we determine this to be true, this is an enormous abuse of power,” Paul said. “This will dwarf all other stories.”

“There are hundreds and hundreds of people,” Paul added.

The American Civil Liberties Union said the newly disclosed violations are some of the most serious to ever be documented and strongly call into question the U.S. intelligence community’s ability to police itself and safeguard American’s privacy as guaranteed by the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment protections against unlawful search and seizure.

“I think what this emphasizes is the shocking lack of oversight of these programs,” said Neema Singh Guliani, the ACLU’s legislative counsel in Washington.

“You have these problems going on for years that only come to the attention of the court late in the game and then it takes additional years to change its practices.

“I think it does call into question all those defenses that we kept hearing, that we always have a robust oversight structure and we have culture of adherence to privacy standards,” she added. “And the headline now is they actually haven’t been in compliacne for years and the FISA court itself says in its opinion is that the NSA suffers from a culture of a lack of candor.”

The NSA acknowledged it self-disclosed the mass violations to the court last fall and that in April it took the extraordinary step of suspending the type of searches that were violating the rules, even deleting prior collected data on Americans to avoid any further violations.

“NSA will no longer collect certain internet communications that merely mention a foreign intelligence target,” the agency said in the statement that was dated April 28 and placed on its Web site without capturing much media or congressional attention.

In question is the collection of what is known as upstream “about data”about an American that is collected even though they were not directly in contact with a foreigner that the NSA was legally allowed to intercept.

The NSA said it doesn’t have the ability to stop collecting ‘about’ information on Americans, “without losing some other important data. ” It, however, said it would stop the practice to “reduce the chance that it would acquire communication of U.S. persons or others who are not in direct contact with a foreign intelligence target.”

The NSA said it also plans to “delete the vast majority of its upstream internet data to further protect the privacy of U.S. person communications.”

Agency officials called the violations “inadvertent compliance lapses.” But the court and IG documents suggest the NSA had not developed a technological way to comply with the rules they had submitted to the court in 2011.

Officials “explained that NSA query compliance is largely maintained through a series of manual checks” and had not “included the proper limiters” to prevent unlawful searches, the NSA internal watchdog reported in a top secret report in January that was just declassified. A new system is being developed now, officials said.

The NSA conducts thousand of searches a year on data involving Americans and the actual numbers of violations were redacted from the documents Circa reviewed.

But a chart in the report showed there three types of violations, the most frequent being 5.2 percent of the time when NSA Section 702 upstream data on U.S. persons was searched.

The inspector general also found  noncompliance between 0.7 percent and 1.4 percent of the time involving NSA activities in which there was a court order to target an American for spying  but the rules were still not followed. Those activities are known as Section 704 and Section 705 spying.

Review | The NSA inspector general’s highly redacted chart showing privacy violations.

The IG report spared few words for the NSA’s efforts before the disclosure to ensure it was complying with practices, some that date to rules issued in 2008 in the final days of the Bush administration and others that Obama put into effect in 2011.

“We found that the Agency controls for monitoring query compliance have not been completely developed,” the inspector general reported, citing problems ranging from missing requirements for documentation to the failure to complete controls that would ensure “query compliance.”

The NSA’s Signal Intelligence Directorate, the nation’s main foreign surveillance arm, wrote a letter back to the IG saying it agreed with the findings and that “corrective action plans” are in the works.

FISA Court Finds “Serious Fourth Amendment Issue”…

…In Obama’s “Widespread” Illegal Searches Of American Citizens

A newly released court order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) found that the National Security Agency, under former President 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.  In describing the violations, the FISA court said the illegal searches conducted by the NSA under Obama were “widespread” and created a “very serious Fourth Amendment issue.”

These new discoveries come from a recently unsealed FISA court document dated April 26, 2017 and center around a hearing dated October 26, 2017, just days before the 2016 election, in which the FISA court apparently learned for the first time of “widespread” and illegal spying on American citizens by the NSA under the Obama administration.

“The October 26, 2016 Notice disclosed that an NSA Inspector General (IG) review…indicated that, with greater frequency than previously disclosed to the Court, NSA analysts had used U.S.-person identifiers to query the result of Internet “upstream” collection, even though NSA’s section 702 minimization procedures prohibited such queries…this disclosure gave the Court substantial concern.”

The court order goes on to reveal that NSA analysts had been conducting illegal queries targeting American citizens “with much greater frequency than had previously been disclosed to the Court”…an issue which the court described as a “very serious Fourth Amendment issue.”

“Since 2011, NSA’s minimization procedures have prohibited use of U.S.-person identifiers to query the results of upstream Internet collection under Section 702.  The October 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 previously been disclosed to the Court.”

“At the October 26, 2016 hearing, the Court ascribed the government’s failure to disclose those IG and OCO reviews at the October 4, 2016 hearing to an institutional ‘lack of candor’ on NSA’s part and emphasized that ‘this is a very serious Fourth Amendment issue."”

Matt Taibbi: How Did Russiagate Start?

Authored by Matt Taibbi via RollingStone.com,

Amid the chaos of James Comey"s firing, new questions about the timeline of his fateful investigation

Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper appeared on This Week Sunday, and said some head-scratching things.

Clapper back in March told Meet the Press that when he issued a January 6th multiagency intelligence community assessment about Russian interference in the election, the report didn"t include evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, essentially saying he hadn"t been aware of any such evidence up through January 20th, his last day in office.

On Sunday, he said that didn"t necessarily mean there was no such evidence, because sometimes he left it up to agency chiefs like former FBI Director James Comey to inform him about certain things.

"I left it to the judgment [of] Director Comey," Clapper said, "to decide whether, when and what to tell me about counterintelligence investigations."

Clapper said something similar when he testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee last Monday. In prepared remarks, he essentially said that there was nothing odd about his not being informed about the existence of an FBI counterintelligence investigation involving Donald Trump"s campaign.

Speaking generally, Clapper seemed to imply that the Trump-Russia-collusion scandal, the thing colloquially known as #Russiagate all over the world now, may have originated in information gleaned by the intelligence community, who in turn may have tipped off the FBI.

"When the intelligence community obtains information suggesting that a U.S. person is acting on behalf of a foreign power," he said, "the standard procedure is to share that information with the lead investigatory body, which of course is the FBI."

He went on, explaining that in such a situation, it wouldn"t be unusual for the DNI to not be informed about an FBI counterintelligence investigation.

"Given its sensitivity," he said, "even the existence of a counterintelligence investigation"s closely held, including at the highest levels."

In his Senate testimony, Clapper went out of his way to say this didn"t contradict his earlier statements. But if he"s not contradicting himself, he"s certainly added a layer of confusion to what is already the most confusing political scandal ever.

Back on March 5th, when Clapper gave that interview to Chuck Todd on Meet the Press, he sounded definitive on a number of counts.

Todd for instance asked Clapper if he would know if the FBI had a FISA court order for surveillance. Clapper answered unequivocally: "Yes."

Clapper made it clear that he would have known if there were any kind of surveillance authority against "the president elect at the time, or as a candidate, or against his campaign."

Todd realized this was an important question and re-asked it, to make sure Clapper heard it right.

"You would be told this?" he asked.

"I would know that," Clapper answered.

Todd asked again: Are you sure? Can you confirm or deny that a FISA warrant exists?

"I can deny it," Clapper said flatly.

It wasn"t until the fourth time Todd asked the question that Clapper finally added the caveat, "Not to my knowledge."

Even so, there was no way to listen to the March 5th interview and not come away feeling like Clapper believed he would have known of the existence of a FISA warrant, or of any indications of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, had they existed up until the time he left office on January 20th of this year.

Todd went out of his way to hammer at the question of whether or not he knew of any evidence of collusion. Clapper again said, "Not to my knowledge." Here Todd appropriately pressed him: If it did exist, would you know?

To this, Clapper merely answered, "This could have unfolded or become available in the time since I left the government."

That"s not an unequivocal "yes," but it"s close. There"s no way to compare Clapper"s statements on March 5th to his interviews last week and not feel that something significant changed between then and now.

Clapper"s statements seem even stranger in light of James Comey"s own testimony in the House on March 20th.

In that appearance, Comey – who by then had dropped his bombshell about the existence of an investigation into Trump campaign figures – was asked by New York Republican Elise Stefanik when he notified the DNI about his inquiry.

"Good question," Comey said. "Obviously, the Department of Justice has been aware of it all along. The DNI, I don"t know what the DNI"s knowledge of it was, because we didn"t have a DNI – until Mr. Coats took office and I briefed him his first morning."

Comey was saying that he hadn"t briefed the DNI because between January 20th, when Clapper left office, and March 16th, when former Indiana senator and now Trump appointee Dan Coats took office, the DNI position was unfilled.

But Comey had said the counterintelligence investigation dated back to July, when he was FBI director under a Democratic president. So what happened between July and January?

If Comey felt the existence of his investigation was so important that he he had to disclose it to DNI Coats on Coats" first day in office, why didn"t he feel the same need to disclose the existence of an investigation to Clapper at any time between July and January?

Furthermore, how could the FBI participate in a joint assessment about Russian efforts to meddle in American elections and not tell Clapper and the other intelligence chiefs about what would seemingly be a highly germane counterintelligence investigation in that direction?

Again, prior to last week, Clapper had said he would know if there was a FISA warrant issued on this matter. But then on April 11th, law enforcement and government officials leaked – anonymously, as has been the case throughout most of this story – that the FBI had obtained a FISA warrant for surveillance of Trump associate Carter Page.

So what"s going on here? In talking to people on the Hill last week, I heard a number of theories.

One interpretation is that the FBI, concerned about operational security, conducted a secret investigation during the last months of Barack Obama"s presidency without informing the likes of Clapper and other agency chiefs.

But why hide your investigation in Obama"s administration, only to tell superiors about it under Trump? Why keep a secret from Clapper and not Coats? Moreover, why hide it from the voting public before the election, but announce it on live TV on March 20th?

Another interpretation is that Clapper was simply not telling the whole truth, either on March 20th or last week. In this version of events, he knew of the FBI investigation all along. More than one person I spoke with found it implausible that Clapper could have been ignorant of any investigation, especially following the issuance of the reported FISA warrant against Page.

But the context of these interviews still makes Clapper dissembling in his March interview a strange and unlikely possibility. Clapper has not been in the habit of doing Trump political favors this season. And if indeed it"s standard practice for a DNI to not know what counterintelligence operations the FBI might be up to, it would have made a lot more sense for Clapper to say that on Meet the Press on March 5th.

Instead, he did Trump a solid by stating unequivocally that there were no FISA warrants out, and that he would have known if there were, adding he had seen no evidence of collusion. Why?

When James Comey was fired last week, I didn"t know what to think, because so much of this story is still hidden from view.

Certainly firing an FBI director who has announced the existence of an investigation targeting your campaign is going to be improper in almost every case. And in his post-firing rants about tapes and loyalty, President Trump validated every criticism of him as an impetuous, unstable, unfit executive who additionally is ignorant of the law and lunges for authoritarian solutions in a crisis.

But it"s our job in the media to be bothered by little details, and the strange timeline of the Trump-Russia investigation qualifies as a conspicuous loose end.

What exactly is the FBI investigating? Why was it kept secret from other intelligence chiefs, if that"s what happened? That matters, if we"re trying to gauge what happened last week.

Is it a FARA (Foreign Agent Registration Act) case involving former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn or a lower-level knucklehead like Carter Page?

Since FARA is violated more or less daily in Washington and largely ignored by authorities unless it involves someone without political connections (an awful lot of important people in Washington who appear to be making fortunes lobbying for foreign countries are merely engaged in "litigation support," if you ask them), it would be somewhat anticlimactic to find out that this was the alleged crime underlying our current white-hot constitutional crisis.

Is it something more serious than a FARA case, like money-laundering for instance, involving someone higher up in the Trump campaign? That would indeed be disturbing, and it would surely be improper – possibly even impeachable, depending upon what exactly happened behind the scenes – for Trump to get in the way of such a case playing itself out.

But even a case like that would be very different from espionage and treason. Gutting a money-laundering case involving a campaign staffer would be more like garden-variety corruption than the cloak-and-dagger nightmares currently consuming the popular imagination.

However, let"s say the FBI is actually investigating collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian state. That"s the most serious possibility, and the one exciting so much public dread.

If it"s that, what"s at the heart of that case? Why can"t we be told what"s going on? Operational secrecy would be a believable excuse, were it not for the fact that so much else has been leaked. Intelligence sources even appeared to give up their ability to capture Russian officials celebrating Trump"s election win. If something like that can be leaked, and if even foreign governments can be told about "leverages of pressure" Russia allegedly has on Trump, it stands to reason that the American public should have heard what"s behind the Trump-Russia investigation by now.

Trump easily could have committed some disqualifying act in response to this scandal. The worry about that is why we"ve always needed an independent investigation.

Such an investigation into Trump"s campaign might very well uncover a range of improprieties and shady dealings by some of the campaign "associates" who"ve figured into news reports. This wouldn"t be surprising, I don"t think, even to some of the people in the White House.

But when it comes to the collusion investigation, there are serious questions. A lot of our civil liberties protections and rules of press ethics are designed to prevent exactly this situation, in which a person lingers for extended periods of time under public suspicion without being aware of the exact nature, or origin, of the accusations.

It"s why liberal thinkers have traditionally abhorred secret courts, secret surveillance and secret evidence, and in the past would have reflexively discouraged the news media from printing the unverified or unverifiable charges emanating from such secret sources. But because it"s Donald Trump, no one seems to care.

We should care. The uncertainty has led to widespread public terror, mass media hysteria and excess, and possibly even panic in the White House itself, where, who knows, Trump may even have risked military confrontation with Russia in an effort to shake the collusion accusations. All of this is exacerbated by the constant stream of leaks and hints at mother lodes of evidence that are just around the corner. It"s quite literally driving the country crazy.

The public deserves to know what"s going on. It deserved to know before the election, it deserved to know before the inauguration, and it deserves to know now.

President Obama Sought NSA Intel On 1000s Of Americans During The 2016 Election

Authored by John Solomon via Circa.com,

During his final year in office, President Obama"s team significantly expanded efforts to search National Security Agency intercepts for information about Americans, distributing thousands of intelligence reports across government with the unredacted names of U.S. residents in the midst of a divisive 2016 presidential election.

The data, made available this week by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, provides the clearest evidence to date of how information accidentally collected by the NSA overseas about Americans was subsequently searched and disseminated after President Obama loosened privacy protections to make such sharing easier in 2011 in the name of national security. A court affirmed his order.

The revelations are particularly sensitive since the NSA is legally forbidden from directly spying on Americans and its authority to conduct warrantless searches on foreigners is up for renewal in Congress later this year. And it comes as lawmakers investigate President Trump"s own claims that his privacy was violated by his predecessor during the 2016 election.

In all, government officials conducted 30,355 searches in 2016 seeking information about Americans in NSA intercept metadata, which include telephone numbers and email addresses. The activity amounted to a 27.5 percent increase over the prior year and more than triple the 9,500 such searches that occurred in 2013, the first year such data was kept.

The government in 2016 also scoured the actual contents of NSA intercepted calls and emails for 5,288 Americans, an increase of 13 percent over the prior year and a massive spike from the 198 names searched in 2013.

The searches ultimately resulted in 3,134 NSA intelligence reports with unredacted U.S. names being distributed across government in 2016, and another 3,354 reports in 2015. About half the time, U.S. identities were unredacted in the original reports while the other half were unmasked after the fact by special request of Obama administration officials.

Among those whose names were unmasked in 2016 or early 2017 were campaign or transition associates of President Trump as well as members of Congress and their staffers, according to sources with direct knowledge.

The data kept by ODNI is missing some information from one of the largest consumers of NSA intelligence, the FBI, and officials acknowledge the numbers are likely much higher when the FBI’s activity is added.

"There is no doubt that there was a spike in the requests to search for Americans in the NSA database,” a U.S. official familiar with the intelligence told Circa, speaking only on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the data.

“It’s simply easier for people to make requests. And while we have safeguards, there is always concern and vigilance about possible political or prurient motives that go beyond national security concerns.”

A top lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, which has long raised concerns about the NSA’s ability to spy on Americans, said the rise in searches is a troubling pattern that should concern members of both political parties because it has occurred with little oversight from the courts or Congress.

“I think it is alarming. There seems to be a universal trend toward more surveillance and more surveillance that impacts Americans’ privacy without obtaining a warrant,” said Neema Singh Guliani, the ACLU’s legislative counsel.

“This data confirms that there is a lack of acknowledgment that information is being specifically and increasingly mined about Americans for investigations that have little or nothing to do with international terrorism,” she added.

The ACLU’s concerns were heightened by the release last month of apreviously classified Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court document that revealed that then NSA has a “potentially very large and broad" collection of data on U.S persons that was never intended under the law.

U.S. intelligence officials confirmed the growth in queries about Americans’ data held by the NSA but declined to explain the reasons, except to say the requests for access grew after intelligence agency officials became more comfortable with Obama"s 2011 order.

They stressed the NSA has strict rules in place to govern when searches for Americans are being conducted and when a U.S. person’s identity can be unmasked. They also hailed the release of the new data as a step toward greater transparency."

As a community, we look for new ways to enhance transparency,” said Alex Joel, who leads ODNI’s Office of Civil Liberties, Privacy, and Transparency. “Our goal is to provide relevant information, distilled into an accessible format. This year"s report leans forward in that direction, providing significant information beyond what"s statutorily required, and reflecting our concerted effort to enhance clarity."

The data emerges just weeks after Circa first reported that Obama substantially eased the rules starting in 2011 allowing for government officials, including political appointees, to unmask and obtain information about Americans in NSA intercepts.

The easing allowed appointees like former National Security Adviser Susan Rice to request and review the unmasked names of Trump campaign or transition officials intercepted in foreign conversations late last year. And it also resulted in the frequent unmasking of members of Congress and their staff, as often as once a month, Circa reported.

The NSA is allowed to spy on foreign powers without a court warrant under Section 702 of the Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Act but is forbidden from targeting Americans.

For years, the NSA was required to follow strict rules to protect the accidental intercepts of Americans from being consumed by other government agencies. The rules required a process known as minimization, where the identity of an intercepted American is redacted or masked with generic references like “American No. 1.”

But the intelligence community fought hard over the last decade starting under President George W. Bush and continuing under Obama to gain greater access to NSA intercepts of Americans overseas, citing the growing challenges of stopping lone wolf terrorists, state-sponsored hackers, and foreign threats. Obama obliged with a series of orders that began in 2011, moves that were approved by the FISC.

Today, the power to unmask an American’s name -- once considered a rare event in the intelligence and civil liberty communities -- now resides with about 20 NSA officials.

The FBI also has the ability to unmask Americans’ names collected under FISA to other intelligence professionals and policymakers, though it hasn"t provided data on its frequency.

And the justification for requesting such unmasking can be as simple as claiming “the identity of the United States person is necessary to understand foreign intelligence information or assess its importance,” according to a once-classified document that the Obama administration submitted in October 2011 for approval by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

That memo laid out specifically how and when the NSA could unmask an American’s identity.

Intelligence officials try to assauge concerns by saying that FISA Section 702 activities are really focused only on foreign powers and stopping national security threats, an argument FBI Director James Comey struck anew Wednesday during testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

“702 is a critical tool to protect this country and the way it works is we are allowed to conduct surveillance again, under the supervision of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on non-U.S. persons who are outside the United States if they"re using American infrastructure; an email system in the United States, a phone system in the United States. So it doesn"t involve U.S. persons and doesn"t involve activity in the United States,” Comey testified.

But numerous civil liberty experts, including the ACLU’s Guliani, say such representations aren’t accurate because the NSA accidentally collects so much information on Americans and then shares it after the fact. The FBI, for instance, regularly queries the NSA database and the declassified court document in March said “there is no requirement that the matter be a serious one nor that it have any relation to national security.”

“I think it shows that the facade that government gives that these programs are just targeted at foreigners is just that, a façade,” Guliani told Circa. “The reality is we have an invasive surveillance program and the data we have shows the impact on Americans is quite substantial.”

A federal judge in Washington has ruled in 2013 and again in 2015 that the NSA collection of data on Americans violates the 4th Amendment of the Constitution, but that ruling is winding its way through appeals. The FISA court, meanwhile, continues to support the intelligence community’s continued use of the data, as recently as in 2015.

Circa is in the process of filing what"s called a "Mandatory Declassification Review," the legal process that asks the government to declassify certain information.

James Clapper Denies Obama Wiretapped Trump

The former Director of National Intelligence under the Obama administration, James Clapper, denied there was a secret court order for surveillance at Trump Tower. Speaking on NBC"s Meet The Press, Clapper said that in the national intelligence activity he oversaw, "there was no such wiretap activity mounted against the president, the president-elect at the time, as a candidate or against his campaign."

James Clapper: "There was no such wire tap activity amounted against" Donald Trump. #MTP pic.twitter.com/eNGFKe0vxY

— Meet the Press (@MeetThePress) March 5, 2017

Clapper was asked if he would be aware if something like that had happened. "I would certainly hope so ... Obviously I can"t speak officially anymore," "But I will say that for the part of the national security apparatus that I oversaw as DNI, there was no such wiretap activity." Clapper said that as intelligence director he would have known about a "FISA court order on something like this. Absolutely, I can deny it."

Clapper also said he would know if a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court order existed for "something like this."

"And at this point you can"t confirm or deny whether that exists?" host Chuck Todd asked.

"I can deny it," Clapper said in response. "There is no FISA court order," Todd asked. "Not to my knowledge," Clapper responded.

Clapper left the White House on January 20 when Trump took office.

Clapper"s comments come after President Trump accused former President Barack Obama of wiretapping Trump Tower in the last stages of the 2016 presidential campaign, and at the same time as the White House announced it would request a Congressional probe into whether Obama abused "executive branch investigative powers."

Some have pointed out the irony of relying on Clapper"s word to deny Trump"s - so far unsourced - allegations.

In addition to his political role in firing Michael Flynn from the directorship of the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2014, Flynn is perhaps best known for his March 2013 appearance in Seante, months before Snowden provided extensive NSA data documenting sweeping domestic and international communications dragnets, in which Clapper engaged in a back and forth with Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat on the intelligence committee.

Wyden asked Clapper: “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions, or hundreds of millions, of Americans?”

Clapper replied, untruthfully: “No sir,” rubbing his head. “Not wittingly.”

After Snowden"s documents confirmed Clapper lied, the former intelligence director offered a shifting series of explanations for his publicly uttered falsehood. He first said it was the “least untruthful” answer he could provide in an unclassified hearing. Later he said he misunderstood which particular communications collection program Wyden was asking about – despite Wyden’s staff alerting Clapper’s before the hearing as to the question – and apologized to the committee.

Later, Clapper"s lawyer, Robert Litt, would deny that Clapper lied and said the director simply forgot. Litt would also say that Clapper finds open intelligence-committee hearings, a requirement of congressional oversight, as annoying as folding fitted sheets, citing a distinctive turn of phrase used by his boss.

In November 2016, some lawmakers renewed their calls for perjury charges to face perjury charges. As USNews reported last year, "to his critics, Clapper lied under oath, a crime that threatens effective oversight of the executive branch. In an apology letter to lawmakers, however, Clapper said he gave the “clearly erroneous” answer because he “simply didn’t think of” the call-record collection. Clapper later told MSNBC he considered the question akin to asking, “When did you stop beating your wife?” and so gave the “least untruthful” answer."

No charges were filed against Clapper, but his critics say the incoming administration of President-elect Donald Trump could change that. Trump frequently railed against a “rigged system” on the campaign trail, alleging powerful people such as Hillary Clinton, his Democratic rival, avoid criminal charges thanks to a corrupt legal system.

"No one is above the law. Officials who commit perjury or lie to Congress should be held accountable,” Texas Republican Rep. Blake Farenthold tells U.S. News by email.

"Given the implications, a cursory examination of the facts to date under a less biased DOJ is in order,” says Arizona Republican Rep. Trent Franks. "I will withhold my judgment contingent on those findings."

Then-outgoing Rep. Alan Grayson, a Florida Democrat, said that Clapper could have sidestepped Wyden’s question but chose not to do so and further faults him for not issuing a prompt correction.  “This lie was particularly egregious because the answer actually affected the lives of every American,” Grayson says. “Clapper’s subsequent attempts at rationalization are no different from what Richard Nixon said: ‘When the President does it, that means that it is not illegal.’ If we want to call ourselves a nation of laws, then it is important that Clapper be prosecuted, and convicted.”

* * *

For the time being, it"s Clapper words versus that of Trump. Should Trump persist with his demand for a Congressional probe into Obama"s alleged wiretapping, it is almost certain that Clapper will once again be called in to testify. It is unknown if he will again commit perjury and lie to Congress.

NYTimes Reports Trump Aides' "Repeated Contact" With Russian Intel Officials, Admits No Collusion Discovered

As The White House tries to put the Flynn disappointment behind them, The New York Times appears to be resurrecting an old story with a new angle to keep the "blame the Russians" narrative alive. Following FISA court approval (to spy on Trump"s campaign), intercepted calls reportedly show "repeated contact" between Trump advisor Paul Manafort and senior Russian intelligence officials... but reveal no collusion.

Intercepted phone calls and phone records show that several aides and allies to President Trump"s campaign were in repeated contact with senior Russian intelligence officials, according to the New York Times. As The Hill explains,

Current and former officials that spoke with the Times would not give many details, and it"s not clear exactly who, both from the U.S. and Russia, were part of the conversations or what they talked about, including if discussions centered on Trump himself.

Officials told the publication that they have seen no evidence of collusion in regards to hacking or the election.

Three of the four current and former officials who spoke with the Times said the contacts were discovered during the same time that U.S. intelligence agencies were investigating Russia"s extensive hacking campaign, later determined to be aimed at helping Trump win the White House.

The Times" sources said Paul Manafort, Trump"s former campaign chairman, was picked up on the calls. Manafort left the campaign after several months as reports swirled about his business ties in Russia and the Ukraine.

The officials would not name any other Trump aides or supporters captured in the conversations.

As a reminder, it was not just Paul Manafort that was involved in FBI probes, but Tony Podesta - the brother of Hillary Clinton"s campaign director John Podesta - who had set up secret meetinsg woth Ukraine officials.

Manafort, who has not been charged with any crimes, exclaims To Britain"s Telegraph that "this is absurb,"

“I have no idea what this is referring to. I have never knowingly spoken to Russian intelligence officers, and I have never been involved with anything to do with the Russian government or the Putin administration or any other issues under investigation today.”

Mr. Manafort added, “It’s not like these people wear badges that say, ‘I’m a Russian intelligence officer.’"

Several of Mr. Trump’s associates, like Mr. Manafort, have done business in Russia, and it is not unusual for American businessmen to come in contact with foreign intelligence officials, sometimes unwittingly, in countries like Russia and Ukraine, where the spy services are deeply embedded in society. Law enforcement officials did not say to what extent the contacts may have been about business.

Finally, buried deep in The New York Times" story - which is sure to run the narrative during tomorrow"s media cycle (and already is a hot topic of conjecture on CNN) - the author admits, rather sheepishly that...

The intelligence agencies then sought to learn whether the Trump campaign was colluding with the Russians on the hacking or other efforts to influence the election.

The officials interviewed in recent weeks said that, so far, they had seen no evidence of such cooperation.

Which confirms what The FBI said back in November.

*  *  *

The bottom line here is that the only incremental news is that Manafort knowingly or unknowingly came into contact with Russian intelligence officials during his business dealings but no election-collusion was discovered. We leave it to Ari Fleischer to sum it all up perfectly...

Why isn"t the headline: "Officials Say No Evidence of Cooperation Betw Trump campaign and Russia"- as story states. https://t.co/8WleU06Tig

— Ari Fleischer (@AriFleischer) February 15, 2017

Facebook due for a Face-lift after Fake-News exposes Fakebook

Facebook (FB) is no doubt one of the most popular tech stocks out there. The market cap of Facebook as of this writing is 368 B - it"s nearly the size of Amazon.

But what does Facebook really do? This question has been asked of tech stocks since the .com bubble. But many tech stocks, for example Amazon (AMZN) perform a number of useful, tech services. In the case of Amazon they have hundreds of niche services many haven"t even heard of, such as Amazon Web Services (which is cloud computing, hosting, and related services), publication services for authors including a full life cycle publishing solution through Kindle, Shipping storing fulfillment and logistics services for small businesses; the list goes on and on and on.

This opinion about Facebook isn"t rare - there"s actually a huge movement of users who have deleted their profiles and refuse to ever use the service again. Here"s one power user, a Forbes contributor, who dumped Facebook, and explains reasons why:

It"s official. I"m off the Facebook FB -0.02% grid. Nobody offended me. I didn"t have a bad experience. While I"m not thrilled about the idea of Big Brother watching my every move, I"m not particularly paranoid about social media sharing. Therefore, I"m sharing why I"m dumping Facebook and committing to Twitter and Instagram. 1) Facebook sucks time from my life, and unlike money, time is a zero sum game 2) Most of my Facebook friends aren"t (actually friends).3) There are other (better) options for photo sharing.4) Facebook brings out the worst in people.5) I learn more on Twitter. 6) The presence of ads on Facebook is getting ridiculous. 7) Less is more. Goodbye, Facebook. Follow me on Twitter: @TimMaurer.

This is just one example. There"s actually a flood of people fleeing the platform, they"ve even created names for Facebook to describe their feelings, like "Fake Book" and others.

What is the straw that broke the camel"s back? It was the recent election news cycle. "Fake News" was blamed as having a part in shaping an online discussion about political issues. Sites that broadcast this alleged "Fake News" like Facebook (FB) are being investigated, and users are questioning their use of the sites:

For weeks, Facebook has been questioned about its role in spreading fake news. Now the company has mounted its most concerted effort to combat the problem.

Since the election drama, there"s all sorts of accusations both internally and from users as well:

Facebook has been in the eye of a postelection storm for the last few days, embroiled in accusations that it helped spread misinformation and fake news stories that influenced how the American electorate voted. The online conversation among Facebook"s executives on Tuesday, which was one of several private message threads that began among the company"s top ranks, showed that the social network was internally questioning what its responsibilities might be.

Even as Facebook has outwardly defended itself as a nonpartisan information source - Mark. Zuckerberg, chairman and chief executive, said at a conference on Thursday that Facebook affecting the election was "a pretty crazy idea" - many company executives and employees have been asking one another if, or how, they shaped the minds, opinions and votes of Americans.

We need to take a step back and understand the origins of Facebook as have been revealed in the last years. Facebook isn"t just a startup, it has some interesting backers and partners. It was revealed recently that Facebook was part of a broad program to collect user information they publicly volunteered on social media platforms on behalf of the intelligence community. PRISM is just one program but the most bright example of how social media was used to collect intelligence - you can read more about PRISM here. Not only was the NSA and CIA seed stage investors in Facebook under NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement) they were active customers. This data they extracted didn"t come free - they would pay for it, both with cash and favors. Favors that helped Facebook become the 368 B market cap behemoth that it has become.

All of this however, can potentially crumble. Not only is Facebook under investigation about manipulating public opinion with their "news algorithm" - it"s under scrutiny from potentially one of the most powerful people in the world, president-elect Trump.

Trump hasn"t put forth a plan to restructure the intelligence community explicitly; it"s been hinted at:

How Trump"s reported plans to restructure the intelligence agencies figure into this plan remains to be seen. This week, he selected former senator Dan Coats as his Director of National Intelligence, a position he reportedly considered abolishing earlier.

But case in point; Trump is in a quagmire due to his extensive international business units that can all pose a potential conflict of interest when he"s in office. As a President first and business owner second, he"s dealing with it. But from that perspective, would he perceive that it"s a conflict of interest for the intelligence community to directly invest, control, and partner with US tech companies on US soil - especially those such as the CIA that according to their mandate, only operate internationally? According to the CIA"s own website:

By law, the CIA is specifically prohibited from collecting foreign intelligence concerning the domestic activities of US citizens. Its mission is to collect information related to foreign intelligence and foreign counterintelligence. By direction of the president in Executive Order 12333 of 1981 and in accordance with procedures approved by the Attorney General, the CIA is restricted in the collection of intelligence information directed against US citizens. Collection is allowed only for an authorized intelligence purpose; for example, if there is a reason to believe that an individual is involved in espionage or international terrorist activities. The CIA"s procedures require senior approval for any such collection that is allowed, and, depending on the collection technique employed, the sanction of the Director of National Intelligence and Attorney General may be required. These restrictions on the CIA have been in effect since the 1970s.

That"s probably why InQTel makes their host clients sign NDAs! If Facebook can"t disclose them as an investor, it can never be proven they are involved in domestic intelligence even if indirectly, as the evidence could be thrown out of court due legal technicalities of how it entered the process of discovery (against the NDA). The author is not a lawyer to elaborate on how the NSA and CIA protect themselves from classified disclosures and lawsuits or worse, but they do have the best lawyers in America and even their own special court, called the FISA court, which is like a secret, classified court.

So if the NSA/CIA is "restructured" - would they look at InQTel and their affiliates? Is it a potential conflict of interest that the NSA/CIA has a vested interest in a company like Facebook that has been accused of shaping the election domestically? It"s unusual for the NSA/CIA to get involved in domestic politics. They have a history for fixing foreign elections, there are more than 100 countries where the NSA/CIA has either fixed the elections, or tried to, or tried to manipulate the local politics. But they"ve never done it domestically, at least to this extent. If they are investigated and restructured, and "de-politicized" - it can also lead to an investigation or restructuring in the least, of their public tech assets, companies like Facebook . This may sound like a big roundabout way to make a case; but consider that the NSA/CIA"s connection to Facebook is 1) not often talked about and 2) widely misinterpreted. In fact, they are a large part of the success of Facebook because well, they have really good connections!

Readers should note that, the CIA takes direction from the NSC, which is led by the President.

Facebook itself doesn"t develop technology or offer a "product" as does a company like IBM (IBM) or even Apple (AAPL). Facebook "s entire model is based on advertising, and now they have been buying companies that actually build and develop technology. But the core of Facebook is essentially, a house of cards built on the egos of its users and the illusionary world they allow people to create for themselves. This is not a stable business!

None of this is going to be reflected in the numbers, it"s hard to quantify. Even with a huge collapse Facebook is going to be around probably forever, but shareholders should take note of these major demographic trends that can cause a severe decline in the stock price as well as en-masse abandonment of the platform, at least from it"s US users. In foreign markets, it"s not clear if Facebook can be the dominating platform, as countries have their own platforms specific to their own culture, the best example being Russia"s VK which penetrates 99% of the market. Other countries have their own respective VK"s - so it"s not clear if Facebook could make up for the US issue with non-US business.

Finally, Facebook is littered with spam and fake accounts. Facebook claims to be aware of this issue, but it continues to be an ongoing problem. Local Police are even creating fake accounts for the purpose of monitoring local activity:

Police departments around the nation have taken predictive crime prevention to a new level by building fake user accounts, as well as posing as genuine people to gather information about local events, Tech.Mic reports.

Local agents put on a "digital mask" and pose as "members of the community," allowing them to gather personal information about suspects they consider a high risk of being involved in a future crime or have existing charges.

In a social media guide for law enforcement officialspublished by the Justice Department, the document details, officers create fraudulent profiles even though Facebook officially bans the practice.

That"s right - the Police have a guide on the creation of fake accounts in order to participate in the growing field of "pre-crime" published by the Department of Justice. You can download and read this manual by clicking here. From the introduction:

Police departments also have begun to explore the use of social media to obtain information, especially for tactical purposes, such as gathering information about threats of mob violence, riots, or isolated criminal activity during otherwiselawful mass demonstrations.

There"s even guides on how to create a fake account on sites like lifehacker.com - that"s not considering the companies that have made a business out of facebook-spam including but not limited to the US Military, via their Ntrepid software:

The U.S. Military is about to get into the business of lurking on forums and hanging around social media sites in a big way. Central Command (Centcom) is teaming up with a company called Ntrepid on software that will allow military users to create and manage multiple fake-but-convincing social media accounts, "replete with background, history, supporting details, and cyber presences that are technically, culturally and geographically consistent."

The military says these sockpuppet accounts will support "classified blogging activities on foreign-language websites to enable Centcom to counter violent extremist and enemy propaganda outside the US."

So here we have several cases of PUBLIC NOTIFICATIONS where organizations have stated PUBLICLY that they are creating fake accounts EN MASSE. That doesn"t consider the thousands or perhaps millions of companies that do this privately, as a business. Here"s just one example of a site that simply sells Facebook (FB) accounts, buyaccs.com and why not, they have a "bulk" discount for lazy spammers that don"t want to go through the trouble of creating their own army of fake accounts like the US military says they will do. Here"s an image of the site in case it gets taken down - you can see price per account, and how many accounts available per provider. If these are all "real" accounts - who would "sell" their Facebook account? And how would they possibly have so many in such large quantities?

Facebook and supporters of Facebook is in denial about how spammy Facebook has become. They are further blinded by the fact that ad-dollars have continued to roll into Facebook"s ad platform, which has put the issue of fake accounts on the back burner.

As an aside, Google (GOOG) has always had a problem with click fraud, but they developed highly sophisticated algorithms to detect click fraud, it"s not 100% accurate but works really well, according to advertisers and publishers. Legitimate publishers and advertisers both don"t want fraudulent clicks even if it"s as simple as a publisher clicking on his own ad (this is filtered by a simple IP algorithm). Google protects advertisers by finding invalid clicks (not genuine) and refunding the fees generated and in extreme cases, banning the publisher involved. It"s unknown how much Google invested in the development of this system, but it works.

Not only has Facebook not attempted to do something like this, they don"t even go after companies who have made a business out of hacking and spamming Facebook - they encourage it! They have changed their "real name policies" but that"s superficial, robots that create fake accounts have always used real names or names that sound real, i.e. Archimbaldo Ultsright, James Terefin, Haggo de Blazio, Horatio de Pulpa, if you aren"t creative here"s a fake name generator, similar to what all the robots use.

All of this information is of course, from the technical perspective of Facebook it says nothing about the earnings, the actual revenue Facebook has received and so on. Detractors of this Fakebook theory will claim this is all being dealt with. What they are failing to realize is how fragile the Facebook model is. Take a look at another example - many think Apple is overpriced. But Apple can"t be replicated in one weekend with a few million dollars - Facebook can, and has. There are thousands of competition social network sites that many have started using instead of Facebook . As isn"t sitting on a really unique technology / patent portfolio, the only thing keeping them at the top are their really high end connections, including but not limited to Silicon Valley and associated Billionaires, the NSA/CIA apparatus, and the marketing / advertising industry which has a vested interest to see Facebook be an "alternative" to the main stream media which is declining in relevance.

So, longs should be concerned about this and at the least, hedge your positions and in the most prudent, get out and find something with real value like Overstock.com (OSTK) as we have mentioned in a previous article. There"s hundreds of better tech plays out there that are real deep value plays. Facebook is due for a major face-lift, and the current management is not willing to face the facts: Facebook is Fake.

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