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Privacy advocates and journalists want to know what Sen. Ron Wyden is up to -- and whether the Oregon Democrat elicited another lie about surveillance from a director of national intelligence during Wednesday's Senate intelligence committee hearing. Wyden asked one of the final questions at the hearing that dealt with the investigation into Russia's role in the 2016 election and with Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which expires later this year if Congress does not act. Wyden, a forceful privacy advocate, asked Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, with whom he had sparred earlier, a simple standalone...

CANBERRA, Australia (AP) - A former U.S. intelligence official said Wednesday the Watergate scandal that brought down a president "pales" in comparison with allegations that President Donald Trump's election campaign colluded with Russians. James Clapper, director of national intelligence until Trump took office in January, told Australia's National Press Club the cover-up of a 1972 burglary at the Democratic Party national headquarters in the Watergate complex in Washington that ended Richard Nixon's presidency "was a scary time." But the allegations under multiple investigations of Russian meddling in last year's presidential election were more concerning, he said. "I think (if) you...

Montgomery left the NSA and CIA with 47 hard drives and over 600 million pages of information, much of which is classified, and sought to come forward legally as a whistleblower to appropriate government entities, including congressional intelligence committees, to expose that the spy agencies were engaged for years in systematic illegal surveillance on prominent Americans, including the chief justice of the Supreme Court, other justices, 156 judges, prominent businessmen such as Donald Trump, and even yours truly. Working side by side with Obama's former Director of National Intelligence (DIA), James Clapper, and Obama's former Director of the CIA, John...

Every time I see an interview discussing 2016 surveillance of the Trump Campaign and candidate Donald Trump I keep going back to that November 17th, 2016, Trump Tower visit by NSA Director Admiral Mike Rogers. No-one in the Obama chain-of-command knew Director Rogers was going to meet with President-Elect Trump; Rogers did it entirely on his own impetus, and James Clapper was furious in the aftermath.Additionally, Admiral Mike Rogers is still running the NSA. President Trump has made no effort to replace him. “Three intelligence sources have informed Fox News that President Obama went outside the chain of command. He...

All three networks on Monday excitedly promoted the anti-Donald Trump potential of the testimony of a woman the President fired. CBS This Morning predicted that former acting Attorney General Sally Yates would deliver “explosive” “bombshells” about possible connections to Russia. Reporters on NBC’s Today reassured viewers that the Democrat was totally reliable. ABC's Good Morning America included a clip of liberal Senator Dianne Feinstein to make that point. A network graphic on CBS screamed, “Bombshell Testimony? Fmr. Acting AG Yates to Testify on Flynn & Russia.” Co-host Charlie Rose opened the show by trumpeting, “Testimony on Capitol Hill today could...

Holy cats. This post is somewhat rushed because everyone needs to watch Sally Yates testify before Congress

Representative Elise M. Stefanik is a young, freshman republican congresswoman from the Albany New York area. And using a probative questioning timeline, she single-handily pulled the mask from FBI Director James Comey, yet no-one seemed to notice. Obviously Ms. Stefanik has not been in the swamp long enough to lose her common sense. In the segment of the questioning below Rep. Stefanik begins by asking director Comey what are the typical protocols, broad standards and procedures for notifying the Director of National Intelligence, the White House and senior congressional leadership (aka the intelligence Gang of Eight), when the FBI has...

Bird Dog - verb: gerund or present participle: bird-dogging search out or pursue with dogged determination. What, exactly, is going on with the Trump-Russian connection? Answer: we don’t know because the media is obfuscating the truth and promoting the lies. But that won’t stop them from asserting, slyly, that it’s the worst scandal since Watergate. Just don’t ask them to produce any facts to substantiate this allegation. Someone has to flush them out. Bird Dog, Flushing Out the Grouse Trump’s been itching to unleash his own inner bird dog ever since the Clinton operatives were caught “bird-dogging” his campaign events...

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...

Former Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper on Sunday denied President Trump's allegations that former President Barack Obama wiretapped Trump Tower before the election. During an interview on NBC's "Meet The Press," Clapper was asked if he would be aware if something like that had happened. "I would certainly hope so ... Obviously I can't speak officially anymore," Clapper said on NBC's "Meet The Press." "But I will say that for the part of the national security apparatus that I oversaw as DNI, there was no such wiretap activity mounted against the president-elect at the time, as a candidate,...

Let us concede that short-lived National Security adviser  and former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency Gen. Michael Flynn did a dumb thing when he misled Vice-President Pence on whether he discussed sanctions on Russia in a conversation with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak fefore President Trump was sworn in January 20. Flynn may even had said some dumb things in a conversation he should have known was being recorded. But an incoming National Security adviser talking with a Russian counterpart a violation of the Logan Act which forbids private citizens from conducting what is essentially foreign policy with foreign governments....

I get the first part of this story, not so much the second. The bit about Obama alumni targeting Flynn? Highly plausible if not likely. Flynn was a harsh Obama critic ever since O fired him from his position as DIA, and Flynn more than anyone else in the administration seemed prepared to guide Trump towards detente with the same Putin regime that had tried to sink Democrats’ chances during the campaign with the DNC and Podesta hackings. Flynn is also famously an Iran hawk, something which the Obama administration was, er, not. Did Team O have the means...

America is in the beginning stages of a new Cold War with Russia. And China. This time around, though, most of the Cold War will be fought along digital, technological lines, with each nation hacking the other for the purposes of espionage and sabotage. In the situation in which the American people and the incoming president find themselves, trusting the intelligence community has never mattered more. Unfortunately, trust must not only be needed; it must be earned. In that area, the intelligence community comes up short.As The New American has recently reported, the intelligence community’s inclusion of a spurious “dossier”...

In his first tweet of the day, Donald Trump said at 7:23am on Thursday that Director of National Intelligence James Clapper had called him to effectively apologize and "denounce" the "false and fictitious" report containing numerous unverified allegations about the president-elect and Russia. "Made up, phony facts.Too bad!" Trump tweeted.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper appeared on Public Television shortly before the presidential election for an extended interview with Charlie Rose. Mister Rose, like many of his peers these days, swings between hard news at dusk and bimbo chat at dawn. Indeed, Charlie is the very model of a Beltway double-dipper, a celebrity groupie who feeds at public and commercial troughs, PBS and CBS. On any given day, Rose might be seen giggling with celebrities in the morning and then lofting softballs to political touts in the evening. The Council on Foreign Relations was the venue for the recent...

National Security Agency whistleblower William Binney explains how the secretive agency runs its pervasive domestic spying apparatus in a new piece by Laura Poitras in The New York Times. Binney—one of the best mathematicians and code breakers in NSA history—worked for the Defense Department's foreign signals intelligence agency for 32 years before resigning in late 2001 because he "could not stay after the NSA began purposefully violating the Constitution." In a short video called "The Program," Binney explains how the agency took part of one of the programs he built and started using it to spy on virtually every U.S....

The GOP chairman of a top committee in Congress on Saturday asked the nation's intelligence chief and defense secretary to appear and answer questions about reports that they recommended the ouster of the director of the National Security Agency.

CNN)Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told the House Select Committee on Intelligence Thursday he had submitted his letter of resignation on Wednesday night. "(I) submitted my letter of resignation last night, which felt pretty good," he said before the panel of lawmakers, in response to the top Democrat on the panel joking he hoped he would stick around for another four years. "I have 64 days left and I'd have a pretty hard time with my wife going past that," Clapper told California Rep. Adam Schiff, who also paid his respects to Clapper's service as the hearing opened.

"(I) submitted my letter of resignation last night, which felt pretty good," he said.

James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, told reporters Monday that ISIS has terror cells operating in the UK, Germany and Italy. He also indicated ISIS was taking advantage of the migrant crisis in Europe.Clapper made the comments at a reporter’s breakfast hosted by the Christian Science Monitor. A reporter from the NY Times asked Clapper, “Do you believe that they operate, they have clandestine cells like they had in Brussels in places like Germany, England and Italy?” Clapper replied, “Yes they do. And that is a concern of, obviously, ours and our European allies.”“I assure you we are...