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.

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.

Government Spooks Can Use Mic, Camera On Trump's Phone (Even When He Thinks It's Turned Off)

Via Michael Snyder of The Economic Collapse blog,

After reading this article you might not ever view your electronic devices the same way again.  Last year, Hollywood released a biographical political thriller based on the life of Edward Snowden that had one particularly creepy scene.  In that scene, a government spook used a program to remotely activate the microphone and camera on a laptop, and by doing so he was able to watch a woman as she got undressed.  Sadly, as you will see below, this kind of thing is happening constantly.  Any digital device can potentially be accessed and used to spy on you even if it appears to be turned off.  And this is why Donald Trump needs to be so careful right now, because the intelligence community wants to take him down and they can literally use any digital device in his possession to try to gather dirt on him.  We have a “deep state” that is absolutely obsessed with watching, tracking and monitoring the American people, and something desperately needs to be done about this unconstitutional surveillance.  Now that Trump has become greatly upset about how the government was tapping into his phone calls, maybe something will finally get accomplished.

In an article that I just published on The Most Important News, I talked about the NSA’s brand new two billion dollar data storage facility in Utah that can store up to five zettabytes of data.  Secret “electronic monitoring rooms” embedded within the facilities of major communications companies across the United States send an endless flow of digital information to this facility, and most Americans have no idea that this is even happening.  The following comes from Wired…

Before yottabytes of data from the deep web and elsewhere can begin piling up inside the servers of the NSA’s new center, they must be collected. To better accomplish that, the agency has undergone the largest building boom in its history, including installing secret electronic monitoring rooms in major US telecom facilities. Controlled by the NSA, these highly secured spaces are where the agency taps into the US communications networks, a practice that came to light during the Bush years but was never acknowledged by the agency. The broad outlines of the so-called warrantless-wiretapping program have long been exposed—how the NSA secretly and illegally bypassed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which was supposed to oversee and authorize highly targeted domestic eavesdropping; how the program allowed wholesale monitoring of millions of American phone calls and email. In the wake of the program’s exposure, Congress passed the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which largely made the practices legal. Telecoms that had agreed to participate in the illegal activity were granted immunity from prosecution and lawsuits.

Whistleblowers have come forward again and again to warn us about what was happening, but they have largely been ignored.  One of the most prominent whistleblowers was former NSA employee William Binney…

Binney left the NSA in late 2001, shortly after the agency launched its warrantless-wiretapping program. “They violated the Constitution setting it up,” he says bluntly. “But they didn’t care. They were going to do it anyway, and they were going to crucify anyone who stood in the way. When they started violating the Constitution, I couldn’t stay.” Binney says Stellar Wind was far larger than has been publicly disclosed and included not just eavesdropping on domestic phone calls but the inspection of domestic email. At the outset the program recorded 320 million calls a day, he says, which represented about 73 to 80 percent of the total volume of the agency’s worldwide intercepts. The haul only grew from there.

Can you imagine recording 320 million phone calls a day?

And that was at the beginning of the program – I can’t even imagine what the number must be these days.

But even if you aren’t using your phone government spooks can still potentially be listening to you.  The following comes from a CNN article entitled “How the NSA can ‘turn on’ your phone remotely“…

Government spies can set up their own miniature cell network tower. Your phone automatically connects to it. Now, that tower’s radio waves send a command to your phone’s antennae: the baseband chip. That tells your phone to fake any shutdown and stay on.

A smart hack won’t keep your phone running at 100%, though. Spies could keep your phone on standby and just use the microphone — or send pings announcing your location.

John Pirc, who did cybersecurity research at the CIA, said these methods — and others, like physically bugging devices — let the U.S. hijack and reawaken terrorists’ phones.

Unfortunately, these tactics are not just used against “terrorists”.

The truth is that these tactics are employed against anyone that the NSA is interested in, and in fact they could be listening to you right now.

Thanks to Edward Snowden, we have learned quite a bit about how the NSA takes over digital devices…

The latest story from the Edward Snowden leaks yesterday drives home that the NSA and its spy partners possess specialized tools for doing exactly that. According to The Intercept, the NSA uses a plug-in called GUMFISH to take over cameras on infected machines and snap photos.

Another NSA plug-in called CAPTIVATEDAUDIENCE hijacks the microphone on targeted computers to record conversations.

Intelligence agencies have been turning computers into listening devices for at least a decade, as evidenced by the Flame spy tool uncovered by Kaspersky Lab in 2012, which had the ability to surreptitiously turn on webcams and microphones and perform a host of other espionage operations.

So what can you do to prevent this from happening?

If you have external webcams and microphones, you can unplug them when they are not in use.

If you have a built-in camera, some have suggested covering the camera with a sticker.

And of course pulling out the battery entirely will prevent someone from taking over your phone when you are not using it.

But at the end of the day, it is going to be really hard to keep government spooks out of your electronic devices completely.  They have become extremely sophisticated at using these devices to get what they want, and they will literally go after just about anyone.

For example, just consider what they did to former CBS reporter Sharyl Attkisson.  In her recent book, she details a campaign of digital harassment that sounds like something out of a spy novel.  The following comes from the Washington Post…

The breaches on Attkisson’s computer, says this source, are coming from a “sophisticated entity that used commercial, nonattributable spyware that’s proprietary to a government agency: either the CIA, FBI, the Defense Intelligence Agency, or the National Security Agency (NSA).” Attkisson learns from “Number One” that one intrusion was launched from the WiFi at a Ritz Carlton Hotel and the “intruders discovered my Skype account handle, stole the password, activated the audio, and made heavy use of it, presumably as a listening tool.”

To round out the revelations of “Number One,” he informs Attkisson that he’d found three classified documents deep inside her operating system, such that she’d never know they were even there. “Why? To frame me?” Attkisson asks in the book.

If they can do all of that to Sharyl Attkisson, they can do it to Donald Trump too.

Trump needs to understand that the deep state is trying to destroy him, and that everything that he says and does is being monitored.

So until Trump can completely clean house at all of our intelligence agencies, he is going to have to be extremely careful 24 hours a day.

And let us hope that Trump is ultimately victorious in his struggle against the deep state, because the future of this nation is literally hanging in the balance.

Trump Asks If It's Legal For Obama To Wiretap Him... Here's The Answer

Via Rachel Stockman of LawNewz.com,

If you woke up Saturday morning scratching your head as to what the heck President Donald Trump was talking about when he tweeted that Obama had his “wires tapped” in Trump Tower just before his victory, you are not alone.

Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my "wires tapped" in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 4, 2017

 So what happened? 

The best that we can tell, Trump is referring to a Breitbart article which was published Friday night that makes reference to attempts by U.S. intelligence agencies to obtain a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) to monitor communications involving Donald Trump and several advisers. The interesting thing is that this isn’t a new development. In fact, several outlets including Mother Jones, The Guardian, The National Review, and Heat Street have been reporting on this alleged activity over the last couple of months.

Here is the best summary we could find of the Obama administration’s efforts to wiretap Trump associates. From a January 11, 2017 Guardian article:

The Guardian has learned that the FBI applied for a warrant from the foreign intelligence surveillance (Fisa) court over the summer in order to monitor four members of the Trump team suspected of irregular contacts with Russian officials. The Fisa court turned down the application asking FBI counter-intelligence investigators to narrow its focus. According to one report, the FBI was finally granted a warrant in October, but that has not been confirmed, and it is not clear whether any warrant led to a full investigation

Trump then questions in a Tweet on Saturday morning if this is legal and even makes analogies to Nixon/Watergate.

Is it legal for a sitting President to be "wire tapping" a race for president prior to an election? Turned down by court earlier. A NEW LOW!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 4, 2017

How low has President Obama gone to tapp my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 4, 2017

So is it legal?

While the analogies to Watergate are totally misplaced (as that involved an illegal break-in), the underlying questions about the legality of these wiretaps are indeed important ones. So far, there is no indication that the Obama administration acted “illegally” if they did indeed intercept communications from Trump Tower.

“The problem with the President’s question is that the standards for FISA are so low and easily satisfied (with little judicial review) that it is difficult to establish any illegality under the law,” wrote George Washington Law Professor Jonathan Turley.

The FISA procedures were put in place in the aftermath of the Nixon-era scandals. To obtain a FISA warrant, the government needs to demonstrate probable cause that the “target of the surveillance is a foreign power or agent of a foreign power.” On top of that, the agents must prove that the main purpose of the surveillance is to obtain “foreign intelligence information.”

“It is true that, if the target is a ‘U.S. person’ there must be probable cause to believe that the U.S. person’s activities may involve espionage or other similar conduct in violation of the criminal statutes of the United States. However, citizens can be collateral to the primary target under FISA,” Turley explained.

So bottom line: if the Obama administration intelligence agents followed the proper protocols, had evidence, got approved by Main Justice, and presented their application to a FISA judge, and were approved, it is likely that any wiretapping was legal under U.S. law.

“Well, putting aside there is no indication Trump himself was the target of the FISA warrant (it appears to have been aimed at four of his associates), yes, it CAN be legally done,” Bradley Moss, an attorney and national security expert explained to LawNewz.com.

Would President Obama have to sign off on this FISA warrant as Trump implies?

No, not necessarily. Under the law, the warrant application needs to be signed off by the Attorney General. So based on the timing of these applications if the reports are true, it is likely that Loretta Lynch knew about them and approved them.

“The President can technically request the warrant but it still has to go through the process. Obama couldn’t authorize it on his own. The AG still has to sign off and the FISA judge still has to authorize the warrant,” Moss explained.

Trump is right that if the warrant involved four of his aides, some of his communications may have been intercepted too, and perhaps what happened warrants further investigation.

“If somehow several people in DOJ all got together and were asked to fabricate evidence to present to the FISA judge that would be illegal,” Moss explained. “But so far that is not what we are hearing happened.”

Turley further adds, “There is provisions stating that a U.S. person cannot be surveilled ‘solely upon the basis of activities protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.’ Thus, if Trump aides were targeted for political reasons, the surveillance would be unlawful even under the dubious protections of FISA.”

This matter is probably deserving of further investigation, but so far, there is no indication of anything illegal.