Obama’s NSA conducted illegal searches on Americans for years: Report

[Brian4Liberty]

Obama’s NSA conducted illegal searches on Americans for years: Report (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92qk1GH68NY)


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92qk1GH68NY


Judicial Watch Director of Investigations Chris Farrell on a report claiming former President Barack Obama’s NSA conducted illegal searches on Americans for years.

[morfeeis]

though the fox report is damn near unwatchable, the info is true and i thought it would get way more traffic here.

[Brian4Liberty]

Obama’s NSA rebuked for snooping on Americans; journo says it proves wide pattern (http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/05/25/obama-s-nsa-rebuked-for-snooping-on-americans-journo-says-it-proves-wide-pattern.html)
By Alex Diaz - May 25, 2017


The secret court that oversees government snooping took the Obama administration to task late last year, suggesting it created "a very serious Fourth Amendment issue" by violating rules the government itself had implemented regarding the surveillance of Americans.

According to top-secret documents made public by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court – often referred to as the FISA court – the government admitted that, just days before the 2016 election, NSA analysts were violating surveillance rules on a regular basis. This pattern of overreach, coupled with the timing of the government’s disclosure, resulted in an unusually harsh rebuke of the administration’s practices and principles.

A former CBS journalist suing the federal government for allegedly spying on her said the documents prove the illegal snooping was pervasive and widely abused.

POTENTIAL 'SMOKING GUN' SHOWING OBAMA ADMINISTRATION SPIED ON TRUMP TEAM, SOURCE SAYS

"Sources of mine have indicated that political players have increasingly devised premises to gather intel on political targets by wrapping them up in 'incidental' collection of foreigners, as if by accident," Sharyl Attkisson, who is pursuing a federal lawsuit the Department of Justice has tried to dismiss, told the Fox News Investigative Unit.

According to the FISA Court opinion, it was on September 26, 2016 that the government submitted an undisclosed number of "certifications" for the court to review. The review process was supposed to be completed within 30 days, or by October 26, 2016.

Just two days before that review was to be completed – and less than two weeks before the 2016 election – the government informed the court that NSA analysts had been violating rules, established in 2011, designed to protect the internet communications of Americans.
...
According to the NSA, Section 702 "allows the intelligence community to conduct surveillance on only specific foreign targets located outside the United States to collect foreign intelligence, including intelligence needed in the fight against international terrorism and cyber threats."

Upstream surveillance, according to the ACLU, was first disclosed by NSA leaker Edward Snowden, and “involves the NSA’s bulk interception and searching of Americans’ international internet communications — including emails, chats, and web-browsing traffic.”
...
According to the FISA Court documents just made public, the notifications sent to the NSA often led to the unmasking of American citizens caught up in monitoring. And as the court pointed out, many of the requests being made to unmask the Americans taking part in these communications were in direct violation of safeguards established by the Obama administration.
...
And, according to the government’s October 26, 2016 admission, “NSA analysts had been conducting such queries in violation of that prohibition, with much greater frequency than had been previously disclosed.”
...
Sen. Rand Paul, R-Kentucky, told Fox & Friends on Wednesday that the “terrible” program was basically “a back doorway to sort of get at Americans' privacy without using a warrant.”

When the NSA announced it was stopping certain Section 702 activities, Senate Intelligence Committee member Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, said he had raised concerns for years “that this amounted to an end run around the Fourth Amendment.”
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More: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/05/25/obama-s-nsa-rebuked-for-snooping-on-americans-journo-says-it-proves-wide-pattern.html

[Brian4Liberty]

though the fox report is damn near unwatchable, the info is true and i thought it would get way more traffic here.

A different written report posted above, easier than watching a video.

[AZJoe]

This is a huge story, yet the archaic "Mainstream" Media have a near total blackout on this.

[AZJoe]

Deep Six the Deep State: (http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2017/05/25/deep-six-the-deep-state/)

You won’t read about this (http://circa.com/politics/barack-obamas-team-secretly-disclosed-years-of-illegal-nsa-searches-spying-on-americans) in what passes for the “mainstream” media, but newly declassified documents reveal that the Obama administration was violating its own rules and spying on Americans with such frequency that even the normally compliant FISA court scolded them:

“The National Security Agency under former President Barack Obama routinely violated American privacy protections while scouring through overseas intercepts and failed to disclose the extent of the problems until the final days before Donald Trump was elected president last fall, according to once top-secret documents that chronicle some of the most serious constitutional abuses to date by the U.S. intelligence community.” ...

Was this covered by the New York Times, … or the Washington Post, … Of course not.

I count less than half a dozen (https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&gl=us&tbm=nws&authuser=0&q=FISA+court&oq=FISA+court&gs_l=news-cc.3..43j0l3j43i53.35580.38647.0.38808.10.6.0.4.4. 0.208.1047.0j5j1.6.0...0.0...1ac.1.NwIvbzfNUxQ#q=F ISA+court&hl=en&gl=us&authuser=0&tbm=) stories about this, all of them in conservative outlets like Fox News (https://twitter.com/MZHemingway/status/867557109499559937) and Breitbart (http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2017/05/25/report-obamas-nsa-conducted-illegal-searches-on-americans-for-years/), The [mainstream] media isn’t interested …

In 2011, the Obama administration loosened the rules (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/12/us/politics/nsa-gets-more-latitude-to-share-intercepted-communications.html?mcubz=2&_r=0) whereby intelligence agencies could share information on US citizens – which we now know was illegally obtained and shared with other agencies by the National Security Agency. …

Former National Security Advisor Susan Rice … said it was all perfectly legal — except it wasn’t. … two weeks before election day, the FISA court rebuked the administration, saying:

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

The FISA court is notoriously uncritical of government spying, but even they responded to this latest revelation by condemning the “institutional lack of candor” … Their actions, said the court, are a “very serious Fourth Amendment issue.” …

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) was one of the few politicians to take note … he accused the Obama administration of flouting the law in order to identify and spy on a record number of Americans: the unmasking involved “hundreds and hundreds of people,” he said. “If we determine this to be true, this is an enormous abuse of power. This will dwarf all other stories.” …

The American Civil Liberties Union characterized the new revelations as “some of the most serious to ever be documented,” and yet the “mainstream” media isn’t even reporting this, let alone underscoring its importance. …

For all intents and purposes, we are effectively living in a police state …

[Anti Federalist]

http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthread.php?510925-Intel-agency-secretly-conducted-illegal-searches-on-Americans-for-years