By Dr. Robert R. Owens ——Bio and Archives--October 27, 2017
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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 alarms. 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.
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.
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. ... 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.How does all this surveillance keep us safe? In Great Britain where there is more government surveillance than in any other western state it didn't help stop the recent Manchester bomber. According to press reports, he was known to the British intelligence services, he had traveled and possibly trained in bomb-making in Libya and Syria, his family members warned the authorities that he was dangerous, and he even flew terrorist flags over his house. What more did he need to do to signal that he may be a problem? Of course here in America our government's watchers are going to do it better ....... of course they will... 😉 My question is: As they are watching us who watches them besides secret courts that report only to the perpetually re-elected guardians of the dysfunctional democratic process in a well-functioning oligarchy? Never mind the facts. Don't pay any attention to who did what. Ignore an ex-president operating a deep state government in exile while orchestrating the Resist 45 Movement.
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Dr. Owens teaches History, Political Science, and Religion. He is the Historian of the Future @
drrobertowens.com
Follow Dr. Robert Owens on Facebook or Twitter @ Drrobertowens / Edited by Dr. Rosalie Owens