It's Official: The NSA Unmasked Tucker Carlson

 

Three weeks after Fox News host Tucker Carlson accused the National Security Agency of reading his communications, the agency has confirmed he was unmasked. 

"The nation’s top electronic spy agency found that Carlson was mentioned in communications between third parties and his name was subsequently revealed through 'unmasking,' a process in which relevant government officials can request the identities of American citizens in intelligence reports to be divulged provided there is an official reason, such as helping them make sense of the intelligence documents they are reviewing," the Record reports. 

 

Another Lefty documents his fall from Grace.

I may have commented on this before, but if not it's worth a link.

But here's a good point:

Here's the money quote from this guy, its is an excellent observation:

Social justice is a surveillance culture, a snitch culture. The constant vigilance on the part of my colleagues and friends did me in. That's why I'm delivering sushi and pizza.

He means its the Stazi. And it totally is. Ask yourself, when the Stazi came knocking, would a grovelling apology have saved the one they came for? Nope. By then its too late.

When the Stazi comes, all there is left to choose is the manner of your death. You can die well, on your feet like a Man, or like a dog in a ditch. Metaphorically speaking of course. They can't -really- come for you.

Yet.

Oh: FaceBook is Collecting Data on People Who Never Even Signed Up for FaceBook

Fascistbook is the biggest spy agency in the world.

HIDDEN CAMERA: HUNDREDS of Twitter Employees Paid to View “Everything You Post Online” Including Private “Sex Messages”

San Francisco) Project Veritas has released undercover footage of Twitter Engineers and employees admitting that Twitter employees view all of your private messages on their servers and analyze it to create a “virtual profile” of you which they sell to advertisers.

The footage features four current Twitter software engineers–Conrado Miranda, Clay Haynes, Pranay Singh, and Mihai Alexandru Florea.

Haynes, who was featured in part one of the Twitter exposé, admitted in a January 6, 2018 meeting that Twitter has hired hundreds employees with the express purpose of looking at these “d*ck pics,” stating:

“There’s teams dedicated to it. I mean, we’re talking, we’re talking three or four… at least, three or four hundred people… Yes, they’re paid to look at d*ck pics.”

Read the whole thing.

Army Rips Out Chinese-Made Surveillance Cameras Overlooking U.S. Base

When electronics spy on you, do you want them to be made by China?

The U.S. Army said it removed surveillance cameras made by a Chinese state-backed manufacturer from a domestic military base, while a congressional committee plans to hold a hearing this month into whether small businesses face cybersecurity risks from using the equipment.

Fort Leonard Wood, an Army base in Missouri’s Ozarks, replaced five cameras on the base branded and made by Hangzhou Hikvision Digital Technology Co. , said Col. Christopher Beck, the base’s chief of staff. He said officials at the base acted after reading media reports about the company.

FBI gave heads-up to fraction of Russian hackers' US targets

It's what you get when you politicize policing.

Mark Steyn on Tucker Carlson and the Macedonian Content Farmers

If only the Republicans had control of Congress and a Republican President this would be investigated.

Newly declassified memos detail extent of improper Obama-era NSA spying

The Obama Administration learned from the mistakes of the Nixon White House how to spy on their political opponents and not get caught - until they left office.

The National Security Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation violated specific civil liberty protections during the Obama years by improperly searching and disseminating raw intelligence on Americans or failing to promptly delete unauthorized intercepts, according to newly declassified memos that provide some of the richest detail to date on the spy agencies’ ability to obey their own rules.

Watch: Interview with Neema Guliani, ACLU's Chief Legislative Counsel

Republicans worried about leaks consider cutting back surveillance authority

I think we should all be concerned about this.

NSA contractor accused of leaking top secret report on Russian hacking efforts

Finally.

Lindsey Graham: I Have Reason to Believe I Was Surveilled, and Maybe Unmasked, by the Obama Administration

This will not get CNN coverage.

Graham clarifies that while he has reason to believe he was surveilled, and allows that was probably incidental, he doesn't know if he was also unmasked -- which is what he's really asking about.

But do note that in his quote, he says he has reason to believe he was unmasked, too.

Not sure which is the claim he's actually making.

Stay tuned to a channel other than CNN for updates to this story.

How Team Obama tried to hack the election

From the NY Post

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.

Obama intel agency secretly conducted illegal searches on Americans for years

Obama's culture of corruption.  This is why Obama's intelligence leaders lied to loudly and so often that Trump was not wiretapped.  This is why the press keeps insisting that Obama did not spy on Trump.  This is what they wanted to hide.

THE RUSSIAN EMPEROR'S NEW CLOTHES

I'm going to steal this whole column from Ann Coulter (I met her once, so she'll forgive me).

The Susan Rice bombshell at least explains why the Democrats won't stop babbling about Russia. They need a false flag to justify using national intelligence agencies to snoop on the Trump team.

Every serious person who has tried to locate any evidence that Russia attempted to influence the 2016 election -- even Trump-haters at the New York Review of Books and Rolling Stone magazine -- has come away empty-handed and angry. We keep getting bald assertions, unadorned with anything resembling a fact.

But for now, let's just consider the raw plausibility of the story.

The fact-less claim is that (1) the Russians wanted Donald Trump to win; and (2) They thought they could help him win by releasing purloined emails from the Democratic National Committee showing that the Democrats were conspiring against Hillary Clinton's primary opponent, Bernie Sanders.

First, why on earth would Russia prefer a loose cannon, untested president like Trump to an utterly corrupt politician, who'd already shown she could be bought? The more corrupt you think Russia is, the more Putin ought to love Hillary as president.

The Russians knew Hillary was a joke from her ridiculous "reset" button as secretary of state. They proceeded to acquire 20 percent of America's uranium production, under Hillary's careful management -- in exchange for a half-million-dollar speaking engagement for her husband and millions of dollars in donations to the Clinton Foundation.

(Politifact rates this claim FALSE! -- LIAR, LIAR PANTS ON FIRE! -- because Trump referred to 20 percent of America's "uranium," not to 20 percent of America's "uranium capacity." This is the sort of serious reporting we get from our watchdog media.)

The last thing our enemies want is unpredictability in an American president, and Trump is nothing if not unpredictable. Actually, that's only the second-to-last thing Putin wants. Russia's only export is energy: The last thing Putin wants is a president who vows to drill and frack, driving down the world oil price.

But let's say the Russians were morally offended by a woman who could be bought (by them) for a $500,000 speaking fee, and what they really longed for was a bellicose American president promising to put our interests first.

Why would anyone, least of all trained spies, think that it would help Trump to release emails showing the DNC had its thumb on the scale against Bernie Sanders?

How was that supposed to work again? I forget.

Accepting everything else the most deranged Trump-hater believes, normal people lose the thread of the conspiracy at the moment when the Russians are supposed to have said to themselves, "HEY, I KNOW -- LET'S TRY THIS!”

Even experts in American politics haven't the first idea how to affect an election. The best minds of the GOP bet $140 million of their own money that Jeb! would be the nominee. (Maybe they should have hired Putin.)

Throughout the primaries, Democrats were openly praying that the GOP would nominate Trump. Democrats had the same hope in 1980 for Ronald Reagan. In 2008, Republicans hooted at the idea of Al Franken running for the U.S. Senate.

Days before the election, America's premier journal of liberal opinion, The New York Times, gave Hillary a 91 percent chance of winning. The Princeton Election Consortium calculated her chances at 99 percent. The Huffington Post's polling aggregator put Hillary's odds at 98 percent.

But we're supposed to believe that a country practiced in spycraft was confident that it not only knew what was likely to happen in a U.S. presidential election, but also knew how to swing it? And no one in Moscow thought to ask: "What will be the predictable, certain outcome of releasing the DNC's 'Get Bernie' emails?”

The DNC leaks might have ended up being the best thing that ever happened to the Democrats. What if they had pulled a Torricelli, and forced Hillary to drop out, so they could run Joe Biden instead? Biden is a lot more popular than Hillary!

Isn't the more logical leaker someone within the DNC who'd had enough with David Brock and Debbie Wasserman Schultz steering the party into a ditch? The actual leaker probably thought: I've got to save the party! She's going to destroy us!

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, as well as his associate, former British ambassador Craig Murray, both say that the DNC emails came from a whistleblower within the DNC. Murray has even identified the precise location where a DNC insider passed him the emails -- a park near American University.

Assange may be a misguided zealot, but neither his friends nor his enemies call him a liar. His image is very nearly the opposite: a self-righteousness fanatic -- not a slippery con man.

Hey, did anyone else notice that last week, very quietly, every single staffer at the DNC was fired?

The claim that Russia hacked the DNC's emails to help Trump is the sort of crackpot theory that can only be concocted after the fact.

They would prefer to say that North Korea or ISIS "hacked" our election and somehow installed Trump. But unfortunately, Trump has no business dealings with ISIS or the Pyongyang regime. He -- or people he knows -- have had some vague business dealings with Russia. So the left is stuck with its insane Russia conspiracy.

And now, just as the whole story is collapsing, their need is even more urgent, to distract from the Obama administration's use of national security intelligence-gathering agencies to spy on domestic enemies like Donald Trump.

Washington's spies

Before FISA, there really were no limits on what could be intercepted by intelligence agencies. This was abused over and over again, usually by the FBI, which used national security as a reason to intercept phone conversations of pretty much anyone who was thought to present some kind of a threat.

Even at the time FISA passed, though, civil libertarians were warning that there was little real protection against the Government using the information they collect maliciously. The problem goes back to the basics: you need to make sure that the people with access to the collected data were thoroughly checked and could be trusted.

In the United States, though, there’s a significant loophole, called “an election.”

Necessarily, when we elect a president, the president has complete access to any data — the president is the authority who decides what data is to be protected, and with what rigor. The president’s political appointees, just as necessarily, must have the same access. Our only real protection from illicit disclosure by these insiders is the degree to which they can be trusted. An unscrupulous political appointee on the president’s national security staff can obtain anything and leak anything.

In the Obama administration, scruples about information security were notably lacking. We saw it with the Clinton emails, where information security procedures were openly flouted, and where, frankly, multiple felonious violations of the espionage went unpunished.

And we’re seeing it now: Susan Rice, and probably a number of others, violated the provisions of FISA, and certainly, with no reasonable doubt violated the privacy of at least one U.S. Person.

FISA is coming up for renewal not too long from now, and FISA’s opponents have got a new and very strong argument that the government cannot be trusted with the power to intercept U.S. Persons communications.

If FISA were eliminated, the U.S. would lose a valuable tool — we really do need to be able to intercept communications within the U.S., for both state and non-state (read “terrorist”) actors. But for Americans to be able to trust their government with these surveillance powers, we have got to be able to trust that unscrupulous political appointees are deterred, and that illicit actions will be punished.

Yes, political abuse is always the threat, and when it’s not punished it becomes a much greater threat. And Charlie’s right that if there’s no accountability here, it’s going to be much harder to muster support for keeping FISA.

Glenn Reynolds on charlie Martin on Team Obama's spying on political opponents.

20 House Democrats request removal of Devin Nunes from Russia investigation

The idea that Democrats are trying to rescue the House from too much partisanship is, of course, absurd. There is still no proof behind the allegations the Trump campaign colluded with Russian hackers, an allegation which is once again trotted out in this letter. The allegation itself has become a means to an end: to keep the attack on the administration going and collect as many Republican scalps along the way as possible. “This is about country, not party,” would sound less like a laugh line if Democrats would stop using these accusations as a cudgel against Republicans in the media. Instead, we have House Democrats continually talking up collusion and even impeachment in advance of any proof.

When Democrats bleat that it's about country, not party, you can bet that it's about their party not the country. They're in bad trouble and they know it. Spying on your political opponents has been a crime since before Watergate.

Susan Rice somehow manages to make Benghazi cover-up seem minor

Well, that explains the deafening silence from President Obama.

All these months, it turns out, it was his right-hand hatchet gal and exposed serial prevaricator Susan Rice who was behind the scenes in his administration working all the levers of the most powerful espionage machine on planet Earth to spy on Mr. Obama’s political enemies.

This is jaw-dropping, bombshell information.

Not because it reveals Susan “Benghazi was about a video” Rice to be a liar. We already knew that.

Not because it exposed the Obama administration as the most nakedly partisan presidency in modern history, willing to use even the most sacred powers of the federal government for political purposes. We already knew that too.

What is so astonishing about the revelation that Ms. Rice was the one unmasking Donald Trump and his campaign before, during and after he won the presidency is that it doesn’t get any closer to Barack Obama himself.

Ms. Rice was Mr. Obama’s national security adviser, one of his closest aides. They spoke all the time. She worked directly for him. Here she was spying on Mr. Obama’s political enemies while in daily contact with him at the very height of the most contentious presidential election in memory. You don’t think she and the president discussed this?

The revelation that Ms. Rice was the operator behind the spying answers just one question. But it raises a thousand more.

When, exactly, did Ms. Rice start using the U.S. government’s spy operation as a weapon against Mr. Obama’s political opponents?

What conversations did she have with the president about the intel gleaned about Mr. Trump and other political enemies of Mr. Obama?

As was asked of an earlier president amid far smaller crimes: What did the president know, and when did he know it?

What other opponents running for the Republican nomination was the Obama administration spying on? Were any of those political enemies “unmasked” and disseminated across government agencies? Was any of that intelligence leaked to the press?

Did the Obama administration spy on Sen. Bernie Sanders during the long, messy Democratic primary, when the Vermont socialist refused to get out of the way for Hillary Clinton? Remember, we now know the lengths the entire Democratic National Committee went to rig that primary for Mrs. Clinton.

If there was nothing wrong with “unmasking” the identities of Mr. Obama’s political opponents and disseminating the intel, Ms. Rice, why did you flat out lie about it on national television last month?

“I know nothing about this” is not exactly a robust defense of one’s actions.

Most of the media, of course, is so desperate to destroy Mr. Trump and cover up anything that might reflect poorly on Mr. Obama that they would rather talk about phantom “Russia” connections instead.

Fine. Investigate Russia all you want. Even if that inquiry bears fruit, it will be about as scandalous as Richard Nixon going to China. But an administration actively spying on political opponents during a presidential election, unmasking U.S. citizens and then punishing them with selective leaks to the press? That is a real scandal.

And a constitution crisis that raises dire questions about whether any American citizen is safe from the espionage thuggery of the politically powerful.

Obama Admin “will become target of congressional investigation after this revelation”

The Sovietization of American Politics

The Sovietization of Washington politics is nearly complete.

 

Strong arm rule, political surveillance and the show trial threatens to replace the orderly alternation at power which characterized elective government. Watching the Beltway is now disturbingly like watching an unfolding power struggle at the Kremlin. Richard Arenberg writing in the Hill asks: "is there any hope of pulling out of the "nuclear option" death spiral before the Senate inflicts permanent damage upon itself and the Supreme Court?" There's growing concern the acrimony will permanently poison the atmosphere by locking both parties into a cycle of retaliation.

Senate Democrats set the stage for a confrontation this week that likely will change how Washington works, as they assembled more than enough votes to block President Donald Trump’s first Supreme Court nominee under the current rules. ...

Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has made clear Gorsuch will be confirmed one way or the other -- even if that means further eroding decades of Senate traditions that have forced the majority to compromise. To deliver on his promise, McConnell is likely to invoke what’s known as the “nuclear option” -- changing Senate rules to eliminate the 60-vote threshold and end filibusters on high court nominees. McCain said he will vote for the rule change.

“I guarantee you, just as the Democrats regretted what Harry Reid did, we will regret doing this,” McCain of Arizona told reporters. He was referring to then-Democratic leader Harry Reid’s decision in 2013 to end the filibuster for lower-court and executive-branch nominees.

Hope looks like it just left town. To boot there are now allegations that Susan Rice actively requested the "unmasking" of Trump campaign and transition official's names from intelligence reports. That makes a "dual track investigation" inevitable according to law professor William Jacobson. "I don’t see how the Obama administration does not now become a target of congressional investigation after this revelation." Both sides are in a race to see who can jail or politically cripple the other side first. Although the pawns will fall first the game won't end until checkmate traps one of the two rival kings.

Read the whole thing.

12 Pieces Of Proof: The MSM Knew Obama Spied On Trump and LIED To Cover It Up

What I am about to present to you is what really happened. All the proof is linked below, but what I'm about to do is what I call "Revealing the Matrix," showing you the truth backed by incontrovertible fact and the media's own words. Not my words. Not President Trump's words. The media's words.

We're gunna cut through all the code, all the spin, all the fog, all the lies, and all the Coordinated Narratives used by our media to obscure Truth.

Our national media has known for months that the Obama administration spied on Team Trump. This was not only common knowledge within the media community, it was no secret. In fact, as you'll see below, for two big reasons, the media was overjoyed that this spying had occurred: (1) they got scoops damaging to Trump, and (2) in their provincial and cultish minds, the very fact that the oh-so pure Obama administration felt the need to spy, could only mean Trump was in bed with Putin.

In fact, the media was actually having a big public party using Obama's spying. Hoo-hah here's a scoop! Whee-hee Flynn said this! Woo-woo palace intrigue! Ha-haaah here's what so-and-so said! Tra-la-la here's what so-and-so did!

And then on March 4, in a series of tweets that had the exact same effect as political nukes, Trump himself confirmed what the media had already told us, that the Obama administration had spied on him and his team. Trump's brilliance was focusing on the sleazy and illegal act of the actual spying. And this is when the media realized that all their ha-has and tra-la-las were about to backfire. Their Precious Barry was now at risk, and so the shameless cover up and lying began …

Suddenly, right around 8 a.m. on Saturday, March 4, the conventional wisdom and public knowledge that the Obama administration had spied on Trump, was surrounded by the media's semantic wagons which were manned by lying journalists armed with hair-splitting. I don't want to go through all that again, so you can read why Trump told the 100% truth in the first section of this piece. The bottom line, though, is this …

Trump accused Obama of spying on him.

Obama did spy on Trump.

The media knew Obama spied on Trump.

The media lied and covered up the fact that Obama spied on Trump.

We know this with absolute certainty because the media itself told us so. And here is all the proof you will ever need to make that case … [emphasis mine throughout]

1. Heat Street - November 7, 2016

EXCLUSIVE: FBI ‘Granted FISA Warrant’ Covering Trump Camp’s Ties To Russia

Two separate sources with links to the counter-intelligence community have confirmed to Heat Street that the FBI sought, and was granted, a FISA court warrant in October, giving counter-intelligence permission to examine the activities of ‘U.S. persons’ in Donald Trump’s campaign with ties to Russia.

So let's stop for a moment to make a couple of things clear. The FBI reports to the Department of Justice, which at the time was run by Obama's highly politicized Attorney General, Loretta Lynch. The author of this piece, Louise Mensch, despises Trump, and if you'll look at the publication date, she dropped this supposed bombshell the night before the election, and did so for reasons I should not have to explain.

You are now asking yourselves: Who the hell is Heat Street and how does this prove anything? That's a fair question, let me answer it this way: As you'll see below, this report of the Obama administration asking for and receiving a surveillance warrant to monitor Team Trump is confirmed by a number of other MSM sources.

Moreover, no less than The New York Times re-published this information as recently as last weekend.

Read the whole thing.