About Those NSA Databases
Larry Johnson has a great post today over at Sic Semper Tyrannis: We Were Warned About the Deep State, but Refused to Listen . Read it all--it's not that long. Here's a thumbnail of it, and the two videos that Johnson links (also not that long), which really give a great picture of Deep State capabilities. Be sure to watch both.
To start with, it's necessary to understand that there are no real good guys in this--except for the whistleblowers. Binney and Tice are real whistleblowers, not bureaucratic, political hitmen like Ciaramella and his ilk.
The expansive data collection that continues to this day began shortly after 9/11, under Dubya--and accelerated under Obama. For all the posturing by elected officials, it has been bipartisan pretty much from the start.
In one of the videos, Bill Binney--the same guy who says that the DNC "hack" was an inside job--maintains that this expansive program is 1) not necessary to protect against terrorists, and 2) increases the size of the haystack that needs to be searched. Binney and Tice communicate the true extent of the domestic spying--and it's mind blowing.
Here's what Johnson says with specific reference to what was done to Trump:
The real irony in all of this is that Barack Obama, as President, took credit for helping revise the laws in order to prevent the spying exposed by Edward Snowden. But under the Obama Administration, spying on political opponents--both real and perceived--escalated. ...
We know, thanks to a memo released by Judge Rosemary Collyer, that "FBI consultants" were making illegal searches of NSA material using the names of Donald Trump, his family and members of his campaign staff.
Some of this NSA material came courtesy of the Brits and their collection on U.S. targets. Some of this material came from the NSA's own collection and storage of all electronic communications and was obtained using a nifty NSA tool called XKEYSCORE. Listen to Ed Snowden's description. Also, take time to appreciate the irony that CNN and other journalists were actually trying to report real news. Now they are full blown apologists for the abuse of the intelligence collection tools.
Six years ago, former NSA Technical Director for Military and Geopolitical Issues, Bill Binney, and Russ Tice, a former NSA analyst, appeared on the PBS News Hour. Once again, they make very clear the enormous nature to the threat to our civil liberties.
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Given the robust, wide ranging ability of the NSA to probe all communications by any person in the United States, it is remarkable that no real dirt on Donald Trump was ever uncovered. Had such information existed, it would be in the NSA's storage vaults in Utah and crooked CIA analysts under Brennan's direction would have found it and used it. But that did not happen. The best the intel folks could fabricate were the salacious claims attributed to reports ostensibly created by former British spy, Christopher Steele.