Napolitano: Three sources tell Fox News that Obama used the British NSA to secretly surveil Trump

Via the Daily Wire, that’s quite a claim. The president of the United States using a foreign intelligence agency to spy on the other party’s presidential candidate, for the obviously illicit purpose of erasing any domestic paper trail of his actions? “Scandal of the decade” material. And yet it falls not to the Fox News investigative team to break the story but to legal commentator Andrew Napolitano — and not on one of Fox’s marquee shows like O’Reilly or Tucker but on Fox & Friends and Martha MacCallum’s program. You’d think a scoop like this would be in 50-point font on the Fox website, but as I write this at around 4:45 ET, they’re leading with a story about a probe of IT staffers who work for House Democrats. How come?

Sean Davis thinks this is a game of telephone gone bad inspired by the “Trump dossier,” which was compiled by a British ex-spy. Could be. It gains some plausibility from the fact that the U.S. and UK are part of the “Five Eyes” intelligence-sharing arrangement, which of course includes the NSA and GCHQ (Britain’s NSA). It’ll also seem a bit more credible than it might have in light of the surprise resignation in January of Robert Hannigan as head of the GCHQ. Hannigan stepped down three days after Trump’s inauguration, ostensibly for personal reasons, having served just two years on the job. With news swirling at the time about the Trump dossier, some Brits speculated that the real reason he resigned might have been “related to British concerns over shared intelligence with the US in the wake of Donald Trump becoming president.” On top of all that, the Times reported just two weeks ago that two foreign intelligence agencies, the British and the Dutch, had provided intelligence on meetings allegedly held last year between Trump “associates” and Russian officials in European cities. It wouldn’t be surprising if the Brits had offered some information related to the probe into Trump staffers’ relationships with Russia. It would be surprising, and big, big, biggggg news, if it turned out Obama had secretly sought access to Trump communications intercepted by the NSA by asking the Brits to access the system and then hand them over to the White House.

The more attention this gets, the more incentive Fox will have to follow up on it, so give it some attention. Exit question: Doesn’t Trump watch Fox & Friends religiously? How has he not tweeted about this yet?

Update: Brits are chastising me on Twitter for my brain fart in describing GCHQ as “Britain’s CIA,” which is MI6, instead of what it really is, Britain’s NSA. I’ve fixed the error.

First a little history of how many decades this has been going on re Britain spying on our citizens and us spying on the UK Citizens.

The long history of the UK’s spying on our people and us spying on their people.

UKUSA Agreement
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The UKUSA Community: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States

The United Kingdom – United States of America Agreement (UKUSA, /;/ew-koo-sah)[1][2] is a multilateral agreement for cooperation in signals intelligence between Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The alliance of intelligence operations is also known as the Five Eyes.[3][4][5][6][7]

In classification markings this is abbreviated as FVEY, with the individual countries being abbreviated as AUS, CAN, NZL, GBR, and USA, respectively.[8]

Emerging from an informal agreement related to the 1941 Atlantic Charter, the secret treaty was renewed with the passage of the 1943 BRUSA Agreement, before being officially enacted on 5 March 1946 by the United Kingdom and the United States. In the following years, it was extended to encompass Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Other countries, known as “third parties”, such as West Germany, the Philippines, and several Nordic countries also joined the UKUSA community.[9][10]

Much of the sharing of information is performed via the ultra-sensitive STONEGHOST network, which has been claimed to contain “some of the Western world’s most closely guarded secrets”.[11]

Besides laying down rules for intelligence sharing, the agreement formalized and cemented the “Special Relationship” between the UK and the USA.[12][13]

Due to its status as a secret treaty, its existence was not known to the Prime Minister of Australia until 1973,[14] and it was not disclosed to the public until 2005.

[13] On 25 June 2010, for the first time in history, the full text of the agreement was publicly released by the United Kingdom and the United States, and can now be viewed online.[9][15] Shortly after its release, the seven-page UKUSA Agreement was recognized by Time magazine as one of the Cold War’s most important documents, with immense historical significance.[13]

The global surveillance disclosure by Edward Snowden has shown that the intelligence-sharing activities between the First World allies of the Cold War are rapidly shifting into the digital realm of the Internet.[16][17][18]

Due to its status as a secret treaty, its existence was not known to the Prime Minister of Australia until 1973,[14] and it was not disclosed to the public until 2005.

“It couldn’t possibly be true, because that is not how our system works,” Pelosi said during a Christian Science Monitor breakfast in Washington.

“We do not investigate, through a FISA court, Americans — here or abroad.”

Well, Nancy how about this:

MUSCULAR (surveillance program)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
MUSCULAR (DS-200B), located in the United Kingdom,[1] is the name of a surveillance programme jointly operated by Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) and the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) that was revealed by documents which were released by Edward Snowden and interviews with knowledgeable officials.[2] GCHQ is the primary operator of the program.[1]GCHQ and the National Security Agency have secretly broken into the main communications links that connect the data centers of Yahoo! and Google.[3]Substantive information about the program was made public at the end of October 2013.
Contents

1 Overview
2 Operational details
3 Reactions and countermeasures
4 Gallery
5 See also
6 References
7 External links
Overview[edit]

The programme is jointly run by:
– Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) (United Kingdom)

– U.S. National Security Agency (NSA)

MUSCULAR is one of at least four other similar programs that rely on a trusted 2nd party, programs which together are known as WINDSTOP. In a 30-day period from December 2012 to January 2013, MUSCULAR was responsible for collecting 181 million records. It was however dwarfed by another WINDSTOP program known (insofar) only by its code DS-300 and codename INCENSER, which collected over 14 billion records in the same period.[4]

Operational details[edit]
According to the leaked document the NSA’s acquisitions directorate sends millions of records every day from internal Yahoo! and Google networks to data warehouses at the agency’s headquarters at Fort Meade, Maryland. The programme operates via an access point known as DS-200B, which is outside the United States, and it relies on an unnamed telecommunications operator to provide secret access for the NSA and the GCHQ.[3]

According to the Washington Post, the MUSCULAR program collects more than twice as many data points (“selectors” in NSA jargon) compared to the better known PRISM.[2] Unlike PRISM, the MUSCULAR program requires no (FISA or other type of) warrants.

Because of the huge amount of data involved, MUSCULAR has presented a special challenge to NSA’s Special Source Operations. For example, when Yahoo! decided to migrate a large amount of mailboxes between its data centers, the NSA’s PINWALE database (their primary analytical database for the Internet) was quickly overwhelmed with the data coming from MUSCULAR.[5]

Closely related programmes are called INCENSER and TURMOIL. TURMOIL, belonging to the NSA, is a system for processing the data collected from MUSCULAR.[1]
According to a post-it style note from the presentation, the exploitation relied on the fact that (at the time at least) data was transmitted unencrypted inside Google’s private cloud, with “Google Front End Servers” stripping and respectively adding back SSL from/to external connections.

According to the Washington Post: “Two engineers with close ties to Google exploded in profanity when they saw the drawing.” After the information about MUSCULAR was published by the press, Google announced that it was working on deploying encrypted communication between its datacenters.[2]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUSCULAR_(surveillance_program)

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