Free Republic

The former director of the US National Security Agency has indicated that surveillance programs have "expanded" under Barack Obama's time in office and said the spy agency has more powers now than when he was in command. ... Hayden's comments came as the debate around the extent of government surveillance in the US and the UK intensified on Sunday. In Washington, some US senators demanded more transparency from the Obama administration. Libertarian Republican Rand Paul said he wanted to mount a supreme court challenge. ... Mark Udall, one of the prominent Senate critics of US government surveillance, called for amendments...

Former President Jimmy Carter on Sunday criticized the Obama administration’s surveillance efforts, saying the country’s use of drones has been “abused” and that he communicates by mail with foreign leaders for fear his electronic correspondences are being watched. “I have felt that my own communications are probably monitored,” the former Democratic president told NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “And when I want to communicate with a foreign leader privately, I type or write the letter myself, put it in the post office and mail it, because I believe if I send an email, it will be monitored.”

Farkas, President Obama’s former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense and now an NBC News National Security Analyst, whined to anchor Kate Snow: “And on the dark campaign of fake news, you know, that's still ongoing. We see even someone like myself get swept up in all of this. You know, when people like me are speaking on behalf of process, people spin to it suit their needs. And I think it may be that the Russians are behind even such fake news today.”

<p>Federal prosecutors secretly obtained records of telephone calls from more than 20 telephone lines belonging to The Associated Press and its journalists over a two-month period, in an apparent investigation of a leak of sensitive information about a terrorist plot in Yemen.</p>

President Barack Obama was dragged into the trans-Atlantic spying row after it was claimed he personally authorised the monitoring of Angela Merkel’s phone three years ago. The president allegedly allowed US intelligence to listen to calls from the German Chancellor’s mobile phone after he was briefed on the operation by Keith Alexander, director of the National Security Agency (NSA), in 2010.

President Donald Trump caused a media firestorm by claiming over the weekend that then-President Obama wire-tapped telephones at Trump Tower in Manhattan during the final leg of last year's election campaign. Seeing the writing on the wall, tainted FBI Director James Comey promptly and publicly urged the Department of Justice to reject Trump’s claims. Although it is an attempt at a cover-up, it is an admirably transparent one. Now the outlines of a Watergate-like conspiracy are emerging in which a sitting Democrat president apparently used the apparatus of the state to spy on a Republican presidential candidate. Watergate differed in...