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Several individuals connected to a 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign plot to cast Donald Trump as a covert Kremlin collaborator are working in high-level jobs within the Biden administration—including at least two senior Biden appointees cited by Special Counsel John Durham in his “active (and) ongoing” criminal investigation of the scheme, according to recently filed court documents. Jake Sullivan, who now serves as Biden’s national security adviser, and Caroline Krass, a top lawyer at the Pentagon, were involved in efforts in 2016 and 2017 to advance the Clinton campaign’s false claims about Trump through the media and the federal government, documents...

The request is not automatically granted. The person asking has to have a good reason. Typically, the reason is that not knowing the name makes it impossible to fully understand the intelligence provided. The name is released only if the official requesting it has a need to know and the "identity is necessary to understand foreign intelligence information or assess its importance," according to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence's latest report, which includes statistics on unmasking. "Additional approval by a designated NSA official is also required." Former NSA Director Mike Rogers has said that only 20 of...

As his presidency drew to a close, Barack Obama’s top aides routinely reviewed intelligence reports gleaned from the National Security Agency’s incidental intercepts of Americans abroad, taking advantage of rules their boss relaxed starting in 2011 to help the government better fight terrorism, espionage by foreign enemies and hacking threats, Circa has learned. Dozens of times in 2016, those intelligence reports identified Americans who were directly intercepted talking to foreign sources or were the subject of conversations between two or more monitored foreign figures. Sometimes the Americans’ names were officially unmasked; other times they were so specifically described in the...

The NSA will have to satisfy itself with being the most powerful intelligence agency in the world. President Obama, rushing through some last-minute presidential business before handing over the title to an aspiring plutocrat, has split up the nation's cyberware command. This siloing prevents Cybercom from being run by the same military officer who oversees the NSA. “While the dual-hat arrangement was once appropriate in order to enable a fledgling Cybercom to leverage NSA’s advanced capabilities and expertise, Cybercom has since matured” to the point where it needs its own leader, Obama said in a statement accompanying his signing of...

On Thursday, the Obama administration finalized new rules that allow the National Security Agency to share information it gleans from its vast international surveillance apparatus with the 16 other agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence community. With the new changes, which were long in the works, those agencies can apply for access to various feeds of raw, undoctored NSA intelligence. Analysts will then be able to sift through the contents of those feeds as they see fit, before implementing required privacy protections. Previously, the NSA applied those privacy protections itself, before forwarding select pieces of information to agencies that...

The chief of counterintelligence at the Department of Justice (DOJ) has been accused of leaking information to the press in a new report, causing a firestorm on Twitter, but the DOJ insists the claims are inaccurate.Twitter personality and political commentator Mike Cernovich released a report Tuesday, stating that sources confirmed to him that “Obama holdover David Laufman is the source of the national security leaks.”“The leaks have wrongly been blamed on the FBI, sources tell me, leading to a morale issue with the agency,” a source reportedly told Cernovich.The report further stated that Laufman has the authority to end investigations into...

Obama AG makes secret deal to let NSA distribute illegally obtained private information to any government agency YouTube Video clip: Judge Napolitano on AG Lynch's secret NSA deal (4:11)Here is a rough transcript of 4:11 length video Stuart Varney: Now this just coming to us. It's news to me but the judge has got it for us. Coming up, Attorney General Loretta Lynch has just signed a secret deal days before leaving office ordering the NSA to give spying data to other federal agencies. Judge Napolitano joins us for this story. What's going on? Judge Napolitano: Well, we don't...

Just days before leaving office Loretta Lynch secretly signed an order to allow any branch of government, including local law enforcement, access to the NSA’s data mine on the American people. She created a mechanism by which the Fourth Amendment can be circumvented by law enforcement agencies of any type and description, foreign and domestic, in the area of digital information.

More U.S. intelligence agencies are getting access to the raw signals intelligence the National Security Agency collects abroad. That's got some privacy advocates worried. The NSA might not intentionally target U.S. citizens, but its bulk collection of foreign communications does sweep up some Americans' phone calls, emails and other online communications as they bounce across networks overseas.

Before Obama left office, he expanded the power of the National Security Agency (NSA) to share globally intercepted personal communications, including those of Americans, with 16 other intelligence agencies before applying privacy protections. The NSA is the collection agency of Signals Intelligence (SIGINT). SIGINT is intelligence-gathering by interception of signals, whether communications between people (communications intelligence—abbreviated to COMINT) or from electronic signals not directly used in communication. This includes cell phones. The new rules greatly relax longstanding security limits which dictated what the NSA may do with the information gathered by its surveillance operations. For instance, rules had been written...

This story, from the Jan. 12, 2017, edition of the New York Times , was little-remarked upon at the time, but suddenly has taken on far greater significance in light of current events: In its final days, the Obama administration has expanded the power of the National Security Agency to share globally intercepted personal communications with the government’s 16 other intelligence agencies before applying privacy protections. The new rules significantly relax longstanding limits on what the N.S.A. may do with the information gathered by its most powerful surveillance operations, which are largely unregulated by American wiretapping laws. These include collecting...

This story, from the Jan. 12, 2017, edition of the New York Times, was little-remarked upon at the time, but suddenly has taken on far greater significance in light of current events: In its final days, the Obama administration has expanded the power of the National Security Agency to share globally intercepted personal communications with the government’s 16 other intelligence agencies before applying privacy protections. The new rules significantly relax longstanding limits on what the N.S.A. may do with the information gathered by its most powerful surveillance operations, which are largely unregulated by American wiretapping laws. These include collecting satellite...

With only days until Donald Trump takes office, the Obama administration on Thursday announced new rules that will let the NSA share vast amounts of private data gathered without warrant, court orders or congressional authorization with 16 other agencies, including the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Agency, and the Department of Homeland Security. The new rules allow employees doing intelligence work for those agencies to sift through raw data collected under a broad, Reagan-era executive order that gives the NSA virtually unlimited authority to intercept communications abroad. Previously, NSA analysts would filter out information they deemed irrelevant and mask the names...