Top Biden Intel Nominee Calls Warrantless Surveillance Tool Used to Spy on Americans ‘Irreplaceable’

President Joe Biden’s nominee to lead top intelligence agencies described a tool used to surveil Americans without a warrant as vital at his confirmation hearing Wednesday.

U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen. Timothy Haugh characterized Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), a tool that has been abused to spy on Americans, as “extensively used” and “irreplaceable” in his testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee. Biden nominated Haugh to head both Cyber Command and the National Security Agency (NSA) in May, according to Politico.

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Commentary: What We Know about the FBI’s Mar-a-Lago Raid (So Far)

“There’s so much we don’t know!” says any liberal losing an argument about the dramatic FBI raid last week on Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump’s Palm Beach residence and private club.

There are, indeed, some things that we do not know, but what we do know is already quite revealing. We know that the raid – which involved 30 FBI agents and three Justice Department lawyers – lasted over nine hours and was by day’s end reclassified as a “search” by all government agencies and the entire legacy media. We know that this supposed “search” was personally ordered not by FBI Director Christopher Wray, but by Attorney General Merrick Garland, a highly partisan Biden Administration appointee who has implied that parents objecting to critical race theory in public schools are domestic terrorists, and who refused to provide home security protection to Supreme Court justices in the majority of the recent ruling to overturn Roe v. Wade. 

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Vanderbilt Announces Research Partnership with NSA

After hosting a summit on modern conflict and emerging threats with the National Security Agency (NSA) in May, Vanderbilt University has announced a five-year “education partnership agreement” with the government agency. 

“This partnership will bring together the sharpest and most innovative minds across military intelligence and higher education to address these urgent and complex issues,” said Vanderbilt University Chancellor Daniel Diermeier. “Drawing on our strong track record with military-academic collaborations, Vanderbilt provides the intellectual forum to explore these challenges from new and cross-disciplinary perspectives.” 

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Prosecutors Plan to Argue Defendants Used Encrypted Chat in Whitmer Case

Gretchen Whitmer

In the high profile case against alleged plotters of a kidnapping of Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D), the state plans to introduce evidence that defendants use encrypted chat applications in the planning stages of their scheme. 

“The government disagrees, saying the defendants did more than talk, but took actions to carry out their plan: they cased Whitmer’s house twice; drew maps; bought night vision goggles; secretly communicated in encrypted chat rooms so as not to get caught; and held training exercises,” according to The Detroit Free Press.

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Commentary: The National Security Agency and Tucker Carlson Controversy

Tucker Carlson vs. NSA

Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s charge that the National Security Agency illegally spied on him and leaked his emails is enraging prominent liberals. Carlson sought “to sow distrust [of the NSA], which is so anti-American,” declared MSNBC analyst Andrew Weissman, formerly the chief prosecutor for Special Counsel Robert Mueller. CNN senior correspondent Oliver Darcy ridiculed Carlson for effectively claiming that “I’m not a crazy person overstating a case!”

When did the NSA become as pure as Snow White? Do pundits presume that there is a 24-hour statute of limitation for recalling any previously-disclosed NSA crimes and abuses?

The Carlson controversy cannot be understood outside the context of perennial NSA abuses. The NSA possesses a “repository capable of taking in 20 billion ‘record events’ daily and making them available to NSA analysts within 60 minutes,” the New York Times reported. The NSA is able to snare and stockpile many orders of magnitude times more information than did East Germany’s Stasi secret police, one of the most odious agencies of the post-war era.

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Tucker Carlson: A Whistleblower Warned Me That the NSA Has Been Spying on My Communications

Fox News host Tucker Carlson Monday night accused the Biden administration of spying on him in an attempt to find something scandalous to leak that could get him taken off the air.

Carlson told his audience that the “War on Terror” under the Biden Regime had pivoted, and was now “being waged against American citizens—opponents of the Regime.”

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Commentary: The Military-Intelligence Complex

Much has been written about the so-called Resistance of disgruntled Clinton, Obama, and progressive activists who have pledged to stop Donald Trump’s agenda. The choice of the noun “Resistance,” of course, conjures up not mere “opposition,” but is meant to evoke the French “resistance” of World War II – in the melodramatic sense of current loyal progressive patriots doing their best to thwart by almost any means necessary the Nazi-like Trump.

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National Security Agency ‘Unmaskings’ Skyrocketed Last Year

by Chuck Ross   The National Security Agency (NSA) disclosed the identities of nearly 17,000 U.S. residents and businesses to American intelligence officials last year through a legal — but controversial — practice known as “unmasking,” according to a report released Tuesday. The number of unmaskings — 16,721 to be exact — marks a 75 percent increase from 2017, which saw the NSA make 9,529 disclosures to intelligence agencies. Between September 2015 and August 2016, the first 12-month period in which NSA statistics were gathered, only 9,215 unmaskings occurred. The unmasking process has become controversial over the past two years. Republicans have alleged that Obama administration officials abused foreign surveillance laws by making unnecessary unmasking requests of Trump associates during the 2016 presidential campaign, as well as during the presidential transition period. Susan Rice, who served as President Obama’s national security adviser, told Congress in 2017 that she unmasked the identities of Trump associates who took part in a meeting with officials from the United Arab Emirates in December 2016. Samantha Power, who served as ambassador to the United Nations, said that an associate submitted 260 unmasking requests under her name in 2016. Some Republicans have accused Obama officials of…

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Prosecutors: Reality Winner Faces ‘Longest’ Sentence Ever Imposed For Media Leak

Reality Winner, NSA

by Chuck Ross   Former National Security Agency contractor Reality Winner’s 63-month prison sentence will be the “longest” ever served by a federal employee in a case involving leaks to the media, prosecutors said Tuesday. Winner, who worked for an NSA contractor based in Augusta, Georgia, pleaded guilty in June to transmitting secret government documents to the media in 2017. She faces sentencing August 23. Prosecutors said in a court filing Tuesday that Winner’s sentence is the “longest” imposed in a media leak case. “The government advises the Court that despite the agreed-upon sentence being below the applicable guidelines range, it would be the longest sentence served by a federal defendant for an unauthorized disclosure to the media,” prosecutors said in the filing, according to The Associated Press. Winner, 26, acknowledged stealing and leaking NSA documents to The Intercept, a news website, about Russian cyber attacks against election officials throughout the U.S. Winner was arrested June 3, 2017. The Intercept published the stolen documents two days later. Winner was caught after a reporter at The Intercept contacted the NSA to verify the documents, which were visibly creased because Winner snuck them out of her office in her pantyhose. Winner, whose social media…

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Trump Revokes Security Clearance of Former CIA Director John Brennan

Brennan, Rice, Comey, Clapper

The security clearance of a former Central Intelligence Agency director has been revoked by U.S. President Donald Trump, who said in a statement that John Brennan has been sowing “division and chaos” about his administration. The clearances of other former officials also are under review, including those of former National Intelligence Director James Clapper, former FBI Director James Comey, former Obama administration National Security Adviser Susan Rice, former National Security Agency Director Michael Hayden and former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates. “Security clearances for those who still have them may be revoked, and those who have already their lost their security clearance may not be able to have it reinstated,” White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said to reporters on Wednesday, reading out the statement in the president’s name. Sarah Sanders Reads Trump Statement Revoking Clearances Sanders, responding to reporters’ questions, denied that Brennan and others are being singled out because they are critics of Trump. The president’s statement accuses Brennan of “erratic conduct and behavior” that “has tested and far exceeded the limits of any professional courtesy that may have been due to him.” It also accuses Brennan of “a history that calls into question his objectivity and credibility.”…

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Senate Intelligence Committee Releases Report On Russian Meddling In 2016 Election

Senate Intelligence Committee (2017)

by Chuck Ross   The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence is endorsing a January 2017 report from three intelligence community agencies that found the Russian government, with the approval of Vladimir Putin, attempted to influence the 2016 election. The Senate panel released a summary report on Tuesday, two weeks before President Trump is poised to meet with Putin in Finland. “The Committee finds that the overall judgments issued in the [Intelligence Community Assessment] were well-supported and the tradecraft was strong,” reads the Senate Intel’s unclassified summary report. “The course of the Committee’s investigation has shown that the Russian cyber operations were more extensive than the hack of the Democratic National Committee and continued well through the 2016 election.” On Jan. 6, 2017, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a report known as the Intelligence Community Assessment [ICA] that reviewed Russia’s efforts to meddle in the 2016 election. In the ICA, the FBI, CIA and National Security Agency (NSA), all determined with a high degree of confidence that the Russian government was behind email hacks aimed at Democrats during the campaign. Putin also approved of the influence campaign, the ICA said. [ RELATED: Senate Intel Still Wants To Interview…

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NSA Deletion of Call Records Raising Questions

The National Security Agency is deleting more than 685 million call records the government obtained since 2015 from telecommunication companies in connection with investigations, raising questions about the viability of the program. The NSA’s bulk collection of call records was initially curtailed by Congress after former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked documents revealing extensive government surveillance. The law, enacted in June 2015, said that going forward, the data would be retained by telecommunications companies, not the NSA, but that the intelligence agency could query the massive database. Now the NSA is deleting all the information it collected from the queries. The agency released a statement late Thursday saying it started deleting the records in May after NSA analysts noted “technical irregularities in some data received from telecommunication service providers.” It also said the irregularities resulted in the NSA obtaining some call details it was not authorized to receive. That points to a failure of the program, according to David Kris, a former top national security official at the Justice Department. “They said they have to purge three years’ worth of data going back to 2015, and that the data they did collect during that time — which they are now…

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NSA Contractor ‘Reality Winner’ Pleads Guilty In Leak Case

Reality Winner, NSA

by Will Racke   Former National Security Agency contractor Reality L. Winner pleaded guilty Tuesday to sending a media outlet a classified document pertaining to Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election. A former Air Force linguist, Winner is the first person to be prosecuted by the Trump administration for leaking sensitive government information. Her plea agreement in federal court in Augusta, Georgia, calls for a 63-month prison term, though she will be sentenced at a later date, reported The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Winner was arrested in June 2017 after she stole classified materials from her former employer, Pluribus International, a defense contractor that works for the NSA at its offices in Augusta. After being arrested by the FBI, she admitted to printing and mailing the classified documents to investigative news website The Intercept, which went on to publish a story based on the document. The FBI announced that it had arrested Winner just hours after The Intercept published its story. In an affidavit, federal investigators said they were tipped to a leak of secret documents when an Intercept reporter seeking to authenticate the documents contacted the NSA, which then reached out to the FBI about the possible security breach. A scan of the document given…

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Commentary: The Left Attacks Fred Fleitz, The New Chief Of Staff At President Trump’s NSC

Fred Fleitz

by George Rasley   By a quick count of search returns it appears we’ve quoted our old friend Fred Fleitz, former CIA analyst, State Department aide, staffer for the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, FOX News regular and author of the must-read book Obamabomb: A Dangerous and Growing National Security Fraud, more than a dozen times in articles on subjects as diverse as Obama’s disastrous nuclear weapons deal with Iran, the war Islam has declared on the West and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Fleitz was a natural choice to serve as Chief of Staff at the National Security Council when his old Chief, Ambassador John Bolton, was selected by President Trump to head the NSC staff and serve as his National Security Advisor. In Washington it is often said you are known by your enemies, and if having the Far-Left Southern Poverty Law Center and terrorism front group the Council on American – Islamic Relations after his scalp is any indication, Fleitz has all of the right enemies. Except in this fight, and with these enemies, the first axis of attack was not Fred Fleitz’s scholarship or policy positions, which are well-known and well respected on both sides of…

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The Crisis of Confidence in the United States’ Intelligence Community Reaches New Heights

Kremlin Capitol

by Printus LeBlanc   The FBI is in serious trouble, not just the people in the bureau that lied to the Office of Inspector General, fixed the Clinton investigation, and spied on a political campaign. The American people are losing confidence in the bureau. FBI Deputy Director David Bowdich stated in January, “When I look through the prism of risk for our organization, I find the No. 1 risk for our organization is losing the faith and confidence of the American people.” The FBI has reason to be fearful because public trust in the institution is headed in the wrong direction. A recent poll by Axios showed that less than half of America had confidence in the FBI, with only 38 percent of Republicans having faith in the bureau. This should be extremely worrying to any prosecutor using the FBI’s evidence or agents as a witness at a trial — and a dream for any defense attorney. Half the jury pool has an unfavorable opinion of the feds, and recent revelations about the once revered law enforcement agency are sure to increase the unfavourability. The FBI’s treatment of Carter Page was reprehensible. The propaganda outlets never mention it, but Carter Page was a witness…

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NSA Tripled The Amount Of Surveillance It Conducted In 2017

by Eric Lieberman   The National Security Agency (NSA) tripled its collection of Americans’ phone call and text message records in 2017, according to U.S. intelligence agency report published Friday. The federal surveillance agency gathered 534 million records in 2017, a 151 million increase from 2016. The government “has not altered the manner in which it uses its authority to obtain call detail records,” Timothy Barrett, a spokesman at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, told Reuters. “We expect this number to fluctuate from year to year.” Americans weren’t the only ones looked upon on by U.S. authorities. Under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which was renewed earlier in the year, investigators spied on 129,080 non-U.S. citizens living abroad, an uptick of 22,611. Over a five-year span, the surveillance of foreigners rose roughly 45 percent. [ RELATED: The Battle Over The Government’s Massive Surveillance Powers Has Arrived ] Section 702 of FISA is a huge point of contention politically and societally, as civil liberties advocates and more privacy-focused lawmakers say it’s often used beyond the legal bounds with authorities scooping up the communications of law-abiding Americans. Those in the larger intelligence and law enforcement community, however, argue that it’s critical for protecting…

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Special Counsel Mueller’s Use of ‘Parallel Construction’ May Run Afoul of Constitutional Protections

by Printus LeBlanc   It seems like every day there is a chorus of officials celebrating Special Counsel Robert Mueller. If you dare question his integrity, you are to be banished to the gulags. However, with a little bit of research you will find out his career as a law enforcement officer is filled with mistakes, mishaps, and questionable policies. Once such policy is the subject of a Human Rights Watch report titled Dark Side: Secret Origins of Evidence in US Criminal Cases. The report details the practice of “parallel construction” in criminal investigations. What is parallel construction, why should every civil libertarian fear it, and what does this have to do with Robert Mueller? Parallel construction is a law enforcement technique used to build a criminal case against a suspect when law enforcement does not want to reveal the evidentiary basis for the investigation. The data comes from the NSA, which transmits it to a special unit in the DEA called the Special Operations Division (SOD). Within the SOD are representatives of several other agencies including the FBI, CIA, and IRS who are given “tips” to carry out their investigations. Let’s say local law enforcement receives a call from federal…

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Commentary: Is Today’s American Intelligence Community Trustworthy?

by Printus LeBlanc   Since President Trump took office, there have been multiple reports of friction between the President and the Intelligence Community (IC). This is disconcerting because the President needs the community especially in the tough times we are currently facing, North Korea, Iran, and terrorism. If the people of the IC would take a minute and put themselves in the shoes of the President, they might see why there is friction and that the friction can be fixed. Most Presidents have either served in the military or were elected officials before becoming the President, therefore they had contact with the intelligence community. President Trump was not in the military nor a politician before deciding to run for the office, therefore he did not have prior interaction with the intelligence community. All the President knew about the IC was what was reported by the media. What were some of the main media stories being pushed by the media about the IC prior to Donald Trump’s election? Before the election: The mainstream media lambasted the IC for the Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) debacle. The coalition never found the WMD stockpiles or the mobile labs that were the motive…

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Why Is Congress Not Investigating Obama’s Unprecedented Political Espionage?

An award-winning national security correspondent for CIRCA News believes Congress needs to launch an investigation into Obama-era unmasking and warrantless surveillance of Americans, according to an exclusive interview with The Daily Caller News Foundation. Sara A. Carter, of the Sinclair Broadcasting Group, has been an overseas war correspondent for the bulk of her professional life and…

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House Intelligence: “Reports Clearly Show That the President-Elect Was Monitored”

Tennessee Star

  Once again, statements by President Trump once characterized as “a lie” or “wrong” is proved to be, in fact, accurate. Moments ago House Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes had to awkwardly walk back previous statements flatly denying any “wiretapping” of Donald Trump or Trump Tower prior to the inauguration. At about 2:15 (minutes:seconds) into to video clip above, Representative Nunes (CA-22) states, “I have seen intelligence reports that clearly show that the President-elect and his team were, I guess, at least monitored…” The House Intelligence Chair said more information is forthcoming Friday. The full C-SPAN video report is here: http://cs.pn/2mtozcM    

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How Radical Islam Penetrated The U.S. House of Representatives

Tennessee Star

George Rasley, CHQ Editor Our friend Luke Rosiak, Investigative Reporter for the Daily Caller News Foundation, should receive a Pulitzer Prize for his investigative reporting of the vast national security breach of the House of Representatives perpetrated by five Pakistani Muslims who were employed as information technology staff by dozens of House Democrats. In his latest report on a story that, we might add, has been completely ignored by the establishment media Rosiak documents how the five Pakistanis have been connected to the Iranian-backed terror organization Hezbollah, that has killed hundreds of Americans and Israelis. Brothers Imran, Abid and Jamal Awan, as well as their wives Natalia Sova and Hina Alvi, were all on the congressional payroll serving as IT administrators for House Democrats. Rosiak has reported that while working for Congress, the Pakistani brothers controlled a limited liability corporation called Cars International A (CIA), a car dealership with odd finances, which took–and did not repay–a $100,000 loan from Dr. Ali Al-Attar. Laundering money through used car dealerships is a known Hezbollah tactic. In 2011 the government filed a civil asset forfeiture action in New York against 30 car dealerships from Michigan to Florida. To launder the terrorist money, vehicles were moved from the US to West Africa and resold, and…

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