Posted on 03/17/2017 6:43:22 AM PDT by Pinkbell
Washington (CNN)The White House has apologized to the British government after alleging that a UK intelligence agency spied on President Donald Trump at the behest of former President Barack Obama.
National security adviser H.R. McMaster spoke with his British counterpart on Thursday about press secretary Sean Spicer's comment from the White House podium about a Fox News report that said British intelligence helped wiretap Trump Tower during the 2016 campaign, a White House official said Friday.
The official described the conversation as "cordial" where McMaster described Spicer's comment as "unintentional."
McMaster also told his counterpart that "their concerns were understood and heard and it would be relayed to the White House."
The official said there was "at least two calls" from British officials on Thursday and that the British ambassador to the United States called Spicer to discuss the comment.
"Sean was pointing to the breadth of reporting, not endorsing any specific story," the official said.
A senior administration official told CNN that Spicer and McMaster offered what amounted to an apology to the British government.
Earlier Friday, a spokesman for British Prime Minister Theresa May said senior UK officials had protested to the Trump administration after the claims were repeated by Spicer.
"We've made clear to the US administration that these claims are ridiculous and should be ignored. We've received assurances that these allegations won't be repeated," May's spokesman said.
At a Thursday press briefing, Spicer read out allegations originally made on Tuesday on Fox News by legal analyst Andrew Napolitano, that the UK intelligence agency GCHQ -- the equivalent of the US National Security Agency -- had spied on Trump.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
Almost sounds like a threat.
Has anyone gotten comment from Judge Napolitano on this? He's a credible guy that wouldn't just make this stuff up.
My point is while I have no idea if they did it or not, do we honestly expect them to admit to it publicly? They wouldn't. If this is being done, it could be something done outside the purview of the President, although it also could be done where the President knows (I would presume the President would which would mean Obama would have known.) Now sticking with the theory where Obama knew, that doesn't necessarily mean Trump did/does because we know the CIA doesn't like Trump. It could be that Trump found out through Napolitano if this is happening. That said, if Trump knew for sure that this was happening, I would find it hard to see him apologize unless national security dictated as such.
So who is working at Echelon and Carnivore?
They aren’t going to speak of it nor make the claim anymore. I don’t see how that is an admission the mention was wrong. The guy that compile that dossier wasn’t an American, that’s for sure.
I don’t know why we bother with GB. Ungrateful, anti-Trump brats. Of course, they spy on us. We spy on them. As a Brit over at the Daily Telegraph said: “If they aren’t spying, they’re not doing their job.”
It was actually Judge Napolitano who said they were spying.
I can’t stand May.
So who is working at Echelon and Carnivore? Those are as old and out of date as I am. Now for a two part update:
First of two parts and maybe more on the 7+ decades 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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UKUSA_Agreement#Origins_.281940s.E2.80.931950s.29
Five Eyes. It coulda been Canaduh.
“So who is working at Echelon and Carnivore?” They have been replaced by several programs, including Muscular:
Part two of ??? parts history of our agreement where the Brits spied on our people and we spied on their people for 7+ decades. Unlike PRISM, the MUSCULAR program requires no (FISA or other type of) warrants.
“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.”
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:
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:
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)
June 2016: FISA request. The Obama administration files a request with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) to monitor communications involving Donald Trump and several advisers. The request, uncharacteristically, is denied.
October 2016: FISA request. The Obama administration submits a new, narrow request to the FISA court, now focused on a computer server in Trump Tower suspected of links to Russian banks. No evidence is found — but the wiretaps continue, ostensibly for national security reasons.
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The Obama wire-tapping gang WILL have to face the music.
(JIM0216 hat tip)......the issue isn't whether Trump was wiretapped (Obama admitted such and apparently, there was a FISA warrant issued for the wiretapping). The issue is whether there was probable cause to issue a warrant. Probable cause is defined as the reasonable likelihood that a crime is or has been committed by the person or at the place designated........
===============================================
(REAGANGENERATION2 HAT TIP)---Trump should be able to review all 2 or 3 FISA requests (if he hasn’t already), and then let Congress determine if the requesters lied about the probable cause justifying them......then (1) you’d prove perjury, and, even worse, (2) the intent was to abuse executive power.
===========================================
A good beginning....and then it gets downright lethal for the Obama gang:
Via Breitbart, JOHN HAYWARD observed that the FISA court may have approved a warrant submitted without Trump’s name but “which Obama then misused to spy on Trump and many connected to Trump.”
Ergo the most serious legal jeopardy that might be faced would be (a) perjury for lying to the FISA court, and, (b) the dissemination of collected intelligence that should have been kept tightly classified.
===========================================
It is also entirely possible that Obama and his legal team may have perjured themselves before the FISA court by willfully withholding material information in order to manipulate the FISA court’s willingness to permit the government surveillance.
FALSIFYING GOVT DOCUMENTS would fall under the Crimes Act of 1958. Moreover, falsifying official documents is the criminal MO to hide larger crimes.
EXCERPT A person falsifying documents can be held criminally liable if they are deliberately acting with the intention of deceiving or defrauding another party.
Falsifying documents is a very serious offense and is generally classified as a felony. This means that a person charged with falsifying documents may be subject to the following legal penalties:
◾Having to pay a monetary fine
◾Incarceration in a prison facility
Depending on the gravity of the offense, as well as individual state laws, falsifying documents can result in a prison sentence of 5-10 years.
And if official government documents or govt authorities were involved, the legal penalties may be more severe. Legal penalties may increase with repeat offenses.
Many different types of acts can be considered as falsifying a document, including:
◾Altering or misrepresenting fact-based information
◾Stating false information when requested to provide truthful statements
◾Forging a signature
◾Using official letterheads without authorization
◾Knowingly using or distributing a fake document
The penalty for falsifying government documents is outlined in the Crimes Act of 1958. (excerpt)
Yep, the man hired by McCain and McMuffin and Company was semi retired British spook. Waiting for the Downing street apology.
If you get your inside information from Judge Nap you are going to end up with egg on your face. This guy is always making stuff up
Do you not somehow understand that DJT knew his every breath would be monitored once he became a threat to DavosMan, and he didn’t plant non-stop dis-info and very particular pieces of data so he could flush out the surveillance/leak channels when he won?
I don’t at all agree with your statement about the judge.
Like a lot of Wiki stuff, I think there is some imprecision in this but all we can have is speculation.
The thing that really has changed is twenty years ago it was “wire-tap”, “bug” or listening device. Tools were placed with precision to gather specific things out of the soup of data, sound and transmissions.
Now, ALL of the soup is collected wholesale. It is just a matter of who sorts, filters and looks.
Sure Trump Tower was “wire tapped.” We all are and it is only important is someone is charged to filter through and get our communications.
“I don’t at all agree with your statement about the judge.”
He was the one that said there would be mass resignations at the FBI, totally made up
Remember the Trump dossier McCain’s aide flew to London to pick up? Call Johnny boy on the carpet.
I’m trying to get through the new book on Snowden.
How America Lost Its Secrets
Edward Snowden,
The Man and the Theft.
By Edward Epstein
This is where most of the Wiki info came from.
So three “reporters” and a CNN editor claim, “Where’s the apology?”
There’s none.
All this apologizing nonsense is Kabuki for the general public. The Brits are just pissed because it’s come out in the open.
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