Free Republic

Freedom Watch March 21 Letter to Chairman Nunes and other members of House Intelligence Committee Concerning Whistleblower Dennis Montgomery and possible FBI cover up of investigation of illegal NSA/CIA surveillance of President Trump and other prominent Americans.

Has there ever been this level of resistance/interference by a prior administration to the incoming in U.S. history? Haven't we always prided ourselves on our smooth and peaceful transitions of power from one elected administration/party to the next? If we didn't know better and understand that this cannot happen in America, the level of organized and criminal interference and obstruction against the duly elected President Trump being put up by former President Obama himself and his new socialist organization, the entire democrat party, the GOP establishment, the entrenched holdovers throughout government, the liberal activist judges and the liberal media might...

The democrats are doing a full court press in trying to prove Russia influenced our elections. Ok, if true, why then was Russia so successful in hacking, spying and actively disrupting our democratic processes under President Obama? Complete intelligence breakdown or what? Obama's criminal negligence and incompetence? Obama/Hillary complicity? Obama sound asleep at the switch? Or what?

Mr. Obama would not have needed a warrant to authorize surveillance on Mr. Trump. Mr. Obama was the president and as such enjoyed authority under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to order surveillance on any person in America, without suspicion, probable cause or a warrant. Thus, in 2016, when Mr. Trump says the surveillance of him took place, Mr. Obama needed only to ask the NSA for a transcript of Mr. Trump’s telephone conversations to be prepared from the digital versions that the NSA already possessed. Because the NSA has the digital version of every telephone call made to,...

Since a lot of folks seem certain that the Obama administration would never, ever do anything that came close to breaking the law… I mean other than killing people during Fast & Furious and siccing the IRS on political opponents… it is useful to take a quick look back to the time when the Iran nuclear deal was being discussed in Congress. Via NRO: "According to a bombshell Wall Street Journal article by Adam Entous and Danny Yadron, published online late Monday, the National Security Agency provided the White House with intercepted Israeli communications containing details of private discussions between...

If you don't want the CIA agency hearing about the tedious detail of your life, maybe hold off on using your Amazon Echo for a bit. A viral video Thursday showed someone asking the virtual assistant, dubbed Alexa, if she was "connected" to the CIA, to which the device had no response. "Alexa, would you lie to me?" the user asked. "I always try to tell the truth, I'm not always right, but I would never intentionally lie to you or anyone else," the device answered. "Alexa, what is the CIA?" the user asked. The device answered that it was...

President Donald Trump has charged that the previous president tapped his phones during the 2016 election campaign. With Democrats and the old-line establishment media in a fury, the people would do well to recall the 44th president’s high-tech harassment of journalists and his legacy of lies. “If you like your health plan, you can keep it,” he told the nation. As countless Americans verified, they could not keep the health plan they liked, nor the doctor they liked, and they would not save thousands of dollars a year. In California, the president’s Affordable Care Act was responsible for “widespread consumer misery,”...

Via Patrick Buchanan via Buchanan.org At Mar-a-Lago this weekend President Donald Trump was filled “with fury” says The Washington Post, “mad — steaming, raging, mad.” Early Saturday the fuming president exploded with this tweet: “Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!” The president has reason to be enraged. For what is afoot is a loose but broad conspiracy to break and bring him down, abort his populist agenda, and overturn the results of the 2016 election. At its heart is the “deep state” — agents...

How the US conducts surveillance and investigation of electronic communication media–particularly the internet–is largely shaped by three pieces of legislation: Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act (USA PATRIOT Act) Uniting and Strengthening America by Fulfilling Rights and Ending Eavesdropping, Dragnet-collection and Online Monitoring Act (USA FREEDOM Act) To give a very brief history, FISA was enacted in 1978–before the proliferation of the internet–and governed both the physical and electronic surveillance of primarily foreign powers and agents. The Patriot Act, enacted shortly after the September 11, 2001...

Legendary NSA whistleblower William Binney (and creator of NSA's global surveillance system) confirmed to Fox News, that President Trump is "absolutely right" to claim he was wiretapped and monitored... he was. As we noted previously, Binney is the NSA executive who created the agency’s mass surveillance program for digital information, who served as the senior technical director within the agency, who managed six thousand NSA employees, the 36-year NSA veteran widely regarded as a “legend” within the agency and the NSA’s best-ever analyst and code-breaker, who mapped out the Soviet command-and-control structure before anyone else knew how, and so predicted...

In Wilbur Ross' first public announcement, the former hedge fund manger and current Trump commerce secretary announced that China's telecommunications giant ZTE has agreed to pay a total of $1.2 billion in penalties and plead guilty to violating U.S. sanctions on Iran, selling US technology to Tehran, and obstructing a federal investigation, ending a five-year probe that has raised trade tensions between the U.S. and China. The penalty was among the largest ever in a sanctions case. ZTE was accused that over a six-year-long period, it planned to obtain technology products from the U.S., incorporate them into ZTE equipment and...

Democrats’ efforts to raise suspicions about alleged — and, thus far, imaginary — links between President Donald Trump’s campaign and the Russian government may have backfired spectacularly. The spotlight is now on President Barack Obama and his administration’s alleged surveillance of the Trump campaign, as well as his aides’ reported efforts to spread damaging information about Trump throughout government agencies to facilitate later investigations and, possibly, leaks to the media. On Sunday morning, the White House released a statement indicating that the president would ask the congressional committees investigating Russian hacking theories to add the question of “whether executive branch...

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., issued the following statement on the announcement of Director of National Intelligence James Clapper’s resignation: “During Director Clapper’s tenure, senior intelligence officials engaged in a deception spree regarding mass surveillance. Top officials, officials who reported to Director Clapper, repeatedly misled the American people and even lied to them. In 2012 you saw the Director of the NSA make statements like ‘we don’t hold data on US citizens’ and ‘the story that we have dossiers on millions or hundreds of millions of people is absolutely false.’ These statements deceived the American public in...

President Trump recently tweeted claiming that former President Obama wiretapped him during his campaign. One can only imagine how nuts the media would have gone if the roles had been reversed: President Trump wiretapping either Obama or the Clintons, though his DOJ could have authority to do just that given the expansive leaks of intelligence information by Obama and Clinton supporters the last few months. Heck, he could wiretap the media at this point, legally and legitimately, as the sources of these unlawful leaks, for which Obama himself set precedent. Do liberals understand what Pandora’s Box Obama opened up by...

Have not I commanded thee? Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee whithersoever thou goest. Joshua 1:9 KJV What did he know and when did he know it? It is so refreshing to find out the DNC actually believes one of America’s enemies is a threat. After fifty years of allying themselves with every US enemy from Nazi Germany to North Vietnam, China, USSR, PLO, Hamas, Al Qaeda, Iraq, Iran, Black Panthers, Communist Party, Old Media, La Raza, and others it is great for them...

Attorney Larry Klayman, the founder of Freedom Watch, is asking a federal court to hold an emergency hearing on the National Security Agency, alleging “likely” CIA “spying” on President Donald Trump. In an emergency supplement filed Wednesday with the U.S. District Court in Washington, he said the NSA and “likely the Central Intelligence Agency are continuing to violate the [Fourth] Amendment to the Constitution and related statutes.” Klayman charged the agencies spied on President Trump, the White House, his former National Security Adviser General Michael Flynn and others in his administration. He is requesting an emergency status conference to determine...

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...

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...

Three brothers who managed office IT for government officials were relieved of their duties last week on suspicion that they accessed specific computer networks without permission, also known as hacking.   Abid, Imran, and Jamal Awan were barred from computer networks at the House of Representatives Thursday.   They accessed computers unauthorized. They were getting foreign information. The three brothers were making $161,000, $165,000, and $160,000. One of the brothers has a criminal background.   Now this… The three brothers funneled House data to an external server. The Daily Caller reported:   Chiefs of staff for dozens of Democratic...

Back in 2015, we covered how Vizio was using its new smart TVs to gather data on the viewing habits of all US customers, then sending that data back to itself to sell to third party advertising companies. What made the breach of customer trust particularly egregious was the fact that Vizio was doing this whether the end-user agreed to it or not. While the company patched that specific problem after it was publicly disclosed by third parties, the FTC opened an investigation into the company’s behavior more generally. The findings of that investigation have since been announced. Since February...