Free Republic

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...

Is the intelligence community responsible for leaking the spurious “dossier” about Trump? To shed light on this question, Trump said he had a “meeting with intelligence” that he told no one about — “and immediately the word got out that I had a meeting.”President-elect Donald Trump has implicitly accused the intelligence community of leaking the unauthenticated “dossier” appended to intel’s report on the alleged Russian scheme to influence the election in his favor. While leaders in the intelligence community deny this and the liberal mainstream media pooh-poohs the idea, Trump took time in his press conference Wednesday to offer his...

In his press conference Wednesday, President-elect Donald Trump responded to recent attacks against him by the intelligence community by saying that leaking “information that turned out to be so false and fake” was “something that Nazi Germany would have done.” His remarks were in reference to an unsubstantiated “dossier” added to the intelligence community’s report of alleged Russian interference in recent U.S. elections.But how culpable is the intelligence community in its handling of this dossier? Do intel's actions rise to the level of “something that Nazi Germany would have done,” as Trump charges? And do those actions include not only fake...

The National Security Agency is making an ironic excuse for why it can’t stop deleting data evidence that could be used against it, despite receiving multiple court orders to stop – it doesn’t know how. Technology focused privacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation, which currently has a case pending against NSA alleging the agency illegally intercepted client data, discovered through a Justice Department email slip-up last week that the agency was deleting evidence it had already been ordered to keep by multiple courts. After failing to comply with an order to retain data collected under both executive authority and Foreign Intelligence...

The National Security Agency has admitted that analysts have abused their authority to spy on love interests on several occasions. In response to a letter from Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), the NSA identified 12 incidents since 2003 in which analysts intentionally misused their intelligence gathering powers. In one case, an analyst spied on a foreign phone number she discovered in her husband's cellphone, suspecting that he had cheated on her. She intercepted phone calls involving her husband, investigators discovered. The analyst resigned before any disciplinary action could be taken. On one analyst's first day of access to the NSA system,...

The National Security Agency is winning its long-running secret war on encryption, using supercomputers, technical trickery, court orders and behind-the-scenes persuasion to undermine the major tools protecting the privacy of everyday communications in the Internet age, according to newly disclosed documents. The agency has circumvented or cracked much of the encryption, or digital scrambling, that guards global commerce and banking systems, protects sensitive data like trade secrets and medical records, and automatically secures the e-mails, Web searches, Internet chats and phone calls of Americans and others around the world, the documents show. Many users assume — or have been assured...

Full title: NSA, DEA, IRS Lie About Fact That Americans Are Routinely Spied On By Our Government: Time For A Special Prosecutor It seems that every day brings a new revelation about the scope of the NSA’s heretofore secret warrantless mass surveillance programs. And as we learn more, the picture becomes increasingly alarming. Last week we discovered that the NSA shares information with a division of the Drug Enforcement Agency called the Special Operations Division (SOD). The DEA uses the information in drug investigations. But it also gives NSA data out to other agencies – in particular, the Internal Revenue...

<p>While speaking at an annual conference of hacker and cybersecurity experts on Wednesday morning, National Security Agency head Gen. Keith Alexander was heckled by members of the audience for his agency’s surveillance operations and for his controversial testimony before Congress.</p>

In the summer of 2010, with Republicans poised to take over the House and Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) in line to lead the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, the White House started urging reporters to write negative stories about the congressman’s past, a new book says. (article continues at link)

There seems to be a lot of confusion about what the NSA is actually doing. Are they reading our emails? Are they listening to our telephone calls? Do they target American citizens or is it only foreigners that they are targeting? Unfortunately, the truth is that we aren’t going to get straight answers from our leaders about this. The folks running the NSA have already shown that they are willing to flat out lie to Congress, and Barack Obama doesn’t exactly have the greatest track record when it comes to telling the truth. These are men that play word games...

Well, golly, this might be just a tad inconvenient for the establishment spin on PRISM, if true. After the Washington Post and then the Guardian exposed the NSA’s Internet snooping program, a few of the named Internet companies denied giving the NSA any access to their servers. Instead, they told the New York Times that they provided blocks of information pursuant to FISA court orders and placed them in virtual dropboxes for the agency to access. That would, as Red Alert Politics notes, make the program legal and narrower than originally thought, although still a worrisome development for privacy. However,...