NSA was created by Congressional law and is overseen by the intelligence committee led by Republicans who have COMPLETE overview of EVERYTHING NSA does. So what is this bullshit again?
NOTE 8 of 18 Obama intel agency secretly conducted illegal searches on Americans for yearsby John Solomon and Sara Carter Politics May 24, 2017 The National Security Agency under former President Barack Obama routinely violated American privacy protections while scouring through overseas intercepts and failed to disclose the extent of the problems until the final days before Donald Trump was elected president last fall, according to once top-secret documents that chronicle some of the most serious constitutional abuses to date by the U.S. intelligence community. Related:Court clears way for suit against NSA surveillance 1 of 18 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. 2 of 18 WATCH | Circa's Sara Carter looks at a classified document from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. 3 of 18 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. 4 of 18 https://www.scribd.com/book/349261099/2016-Cert-FISC-Memo-Opin-Order-Apr-2017-4 The FISA court opinion 5 of 18 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. 6 of 18 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.” 7 of 18 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. 8 of 18 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. 9 of 18 “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.” 10 of 18 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. 11 of 18 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.” 12 of 18 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. 13 of 18 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. 14 of 18 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. 15 of 18 Review | The NSA inspector general's highly redacted chart showing privacy violations. 16 of 18 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.” 17 of 18 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.
Isn't the FBI also overseen by a similar congressional committee? If yes, have you ever seen any of the testimony of the FBI in front of Congress? Congress members spend a lot of time asking why they can't get what they have requested and the FBI just makes excuse after excuse of why they are not going to provide what has been requested. So, what makes you think that the NSA is providing information that has been requested by Congress? I watch a senior official from the FBI tell Trey Gowdy that he can get the information that he requested eventually through a FOIA request. In other words, the senior FBI official told Gowdy to fuck off.
All this is bullshit. The government cannot spy on you unless they have a warrant. Just ask Michael Flynn.
How Team Obama tried to hack the election By Paul Sperry May 26, 2017 | 7:44pm 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 e-mail mentioning Person C. Though Person C isn’t a party to the e-mail, 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. http://nypost.com/2017/05/26/how-team-obama-tried-to-hack-the-election/
All of this cries out for a special prosecutor who will take no prisoners. These are serious violations that would have the media and democrats in a frenzy if conducted by a republican administration. Instead we continue to get daily stories based on leaks by Obama appointees.