Congress, Constitutional Law, Courts, Criminal law, Lawyering, Media, Politics, Uncategorized

Report: Obama Administration Carried Out Massive and Unconstitutional Surveillance Programs

President_Barack_ObamaWith the steady stream of controversies swirling around the White House, there has been little attention given a highly disturbing report that the Obama Administration engaged in previously undisclosed and violations of the Fourth Amendment.  Just a few days from the 2016 election, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) reportedly raised a highly unusual alarm over the creation of “a very serious Fourth Amendment issue” by possibly unconstitutional surveillance conducted under President Barack Obama.  If true, this should be given equal attention to the other stories crowding our front pages and cable coverage.  The Obama Administration has a well-documented history of abuse of surveillance and stands as one of the most antagonistic administrations toward privacy in our history.  Indeed, if true, many of the former Obama officials currently testifying against the Trump Administration were responsible for a far broader scope of abusive surveillance programs.

Recently disclosed top-secret documents from the FISA court suggest that the government admitted that the NSA was regularly violating surveillance rules. Not that these violations were occurring after the unconstitutional surveillance programs revealed by Wikileaks and Snowdon were curtailed.  It also would have occurred after the disclosure that the Obama Administration put journalists under surveillance.

The FISA indicate that the government informed the court that NSA analysts had been violating rules, established in 2011, that protect the privacy of citizens on the Internet.  Once again, the NSA claimed new “inadvertent compliance lapses.”  The Court noted in its dealings with the NSA a certain “lack of candor” in its disclosures to the FISA court.

It is very rare for the FISA court to make such statements.  (For full disclosure, I had occasion to go to the FISA court when I was an intern with the NSA and later became a critic of the court).  The standards for FISA are so low and easily satisfied (with little judicial review) that it is difficult to establish any illegality under the law.

Passed in 1978 as a compromise with the Nixon Administration, FISA allows for “foreign intelligence” surveillance and was designed to evade the fourth amendment protections governing the use of warrants.  FISA surveillance is permitted based on a finding of probable cause that the surveillance target is a foreign power or an agent of a foreign power. That is manifestly different from probable cause to believe someone has committed a crime.   It is true that, if the target is a “U.S. person,” there must be probable cause to believe that the U.S. person’s activities may involve espionage or other similar conduct in violation of the criminal statutes of the United States.  However, citizens can be collateral to the primary target under FISA. In 1994 Congress extended FISA further to allow for covert physical entries in connection with “security” investigations, and then in 1998, it was amended to permit pen/trap orders. It has been used to gather business records.

By any measure, this story deserves the attention of the national media and Congress.  However, it is being buried in the crush of controversies related to the Russian investigation, embarrassing leaks, and other items. The media is correct in pursuing these legitimate stories but it should also give attention to this chilling report. There was equally limited coverage of the expansion of surveillance authority in the final days of the Obama Administration.  Privacy advocates have serious concerns about these privacy stories being pushed from public review.

 

98 thoughts on “Report: Obama Administration Carried Out Massive and Unconstitutional Surveillance Programs”

  2. People Who Called Snowden a Traitor Shocked to Learn About All This Domestic Surveillance

    http://reason.com/blog/2017/05/26/some-who-called-snowden-a-traitor-now-sh

    “I selected Schlichter because he’s pretty prominent (and isn’t going to be bothered by me pointing this out), but I’ve seen several tweets of the “Why isn’t the MSM covering this?” variety from other conservative tweeters, acting as though the press is giving former President Barack Obama cover for setting up a surveillance system that they now think is being used to attack President Donald Trump. The reality is that these surveillance problems do get reported to an American public that has largely, unfortunately, stopped paying much attention. (As a guy who has been covering surveillance for Reason for years, I can easily map out the decline in readership of these pieces, and I suspect other sites can as well.)

    “If you think the intelligence community and the deep state is abusing its powers to go after Trump and his allies for political reasons, guess what: This is exactly the consequence that Snowden himself warned of! A major criticism of the expansive surveillance state has always, always, been its potential for abusive snooping on citizens, whether it’s Black Lives Matter or a militia. The problem cuts across the political spectrum. Perhaps people shouldn’t have been so quick to call Snowden a traitor. Perhaps they could have spent more time thinking about the actual consequences of the powerful surveillance state, and maybe all those previously reported FISA Court disclosures that helped inform the very story they’re passing around now.

    “But regardless of how folks like Schlichter got here, welcome to the surveillance skeptic club! Now that you’re here, you should know that there’s a very important congressional vote coming up. Section 702 of the FISA authorizations sunsets this year, and Congress has to act. Right now, tech companies are lobbying for changes that would provide more oversight on the National Security Agency and limit the feds’ ability to collect information without warrants within in the U.S.

    “One problem: The White House has said that it doesn’t want any reforms to Section 702. They want to leave government’s surveillance powers as they are. If you’re a Trump supporter who believes that he’s being targeted by the intelligence community for political reasons, well, here’s a way to reduce the possibility that future Democratic administrations will behave the same way. Civil rights and privacy advocates want to see Section 702 either reformed or eliminated in order to protect Americans’ privacy. Consider joining the cause now that you’re more familiar with how this surveillance actually plays out domestically.”

  4. So the constitutional law “professor” violates the law and thus criminal activity is no different than trump telling Germans their bad trade habits ? It seems that way with the same blog space for the two stories !

  5. Hi Jill, I’ve been reading BAR for over a decade albeit not on a regular basis. Ford is a fierce truth teller for sure and that article is spot on.

    I find though that younger people respond more to videos so Tim Black, LTMB, Robert Brown, Niko House, Jimmy Dore are what I share via email. And now there is a new guy Jamarl Thomas:

  7. A growing number of people – non MSM – want to know what happened with Seth Rich.

  8. This was interesting:

    “…If you think the intelligence community and the deep state is abusing its powers to go after Trump and his allies for political reasons, guess what: This is exactly the consequence that Snowden himself warned of! A major criticism of the expansive surveillance state has always, always, been its potential for abusive snooping on citizens, whether it’s Black Lives Matter or a militia. The problem cuts across the political spectrum. Perhaps people shouldn’t have been so quick to call Snowden a traitor. Perhaps they could have spent more time thinking about the actual consequences of the powerful surveillance state, and maybe all those previously reported FISA Court disclosures that helped inform the very story they’re passing around now.

    But regardless of how folks like Schlichter got here, welcome to the surveillance skeptic club! Now that you’re here, you should know that there’s a very important congressional vote coming up. Section 702 of the FISA authorizations sunsets this year, and Congress has to act. Right now, tech companies are lobbying for changes that would provide more oversight on the National Security Agency and limit the feds’ ability to collect information without warrants within in the U.S.

    One problem: The White House has said that it doesn’t want any reforms to Section 702. They want to leave government’s surveillance powers as they are. If you’re a Trump supporter who believes that he’s being targeted by the intelligence community for political reasons, well, here’s a way to reduce the possibility that future Democratic administrations will behave the same way. Civil rights and privacy advocates want to see Section 702 either reformed or eliminated in order to protect Americans’ privacy. Consider joining the cause now that you’re more familiar with how this surveillance actually plays out domestically…”

    http://reason.com/blog/2017/05/26/some-who-called-snowden-a-traitor-now-sh

  9. “If true, this should be given equal attention to the other stories crowding our front pages and cable coverage,” Professor Turley.
    _____

    Equal attention should also be given to the murder of Seth Rich after leaks regarding the DNC’s activities adverse to the Bernie Sanders candidacy and the resignations of its top cadre. The murder and resignations are too much of a coincidence.

    The abuse of power by Obama during elections and the murder of an alleged DNC leaker are as egregious as Hillary Clinton’s high crimes of “gross mishandling” of classified material which Comey proved.

    1. Hannity pulled the falsified story. He is losing advertisers by the droves after the harm he did to the Rich family.

      1. “Fake News”

        The murder of Seth Rich needs thorough investigation.

        The murder of Seth Rich was coincidental with leaks and revelations about a possible DNC conspiracy against Bernie Sanders and the actual, factual abrupt resignation of the entire DNC cadre. What’s that tell you?

        1. Sure it does but not through Sean Hannity cutting the heart out of his parents by making shit up. He is a vile man.

            1. I like this guy. Good attitude. Dispassionate apartisan analysis.Good natured recovering satanist.

          2. Have the police “…cut the heart out of his parents…” by speculating (i.e. “making —- up”) about all the possibilities during a thorough investigation? It’s typical for the police to suspect the friends and family first. I wonder if the police asked the parents if they knew of any individual, group or organization which may have had a motive to assassinate (he was shot twice and robbed of nothing) their son. Would compelling answers to those questions “cut the heart out” of Seth Rich’s parents? How dare those evil police investigators.

  10. Obama is the greatest constitutional criminal in American history.

    Obama abused the power of government against the People by “wiretapping,” “surveilling” and “unmasking” political opponents during elections.

    The evidence supporting President Trump’s “wiretapping” charge has been preponderant since before Congressman Dennis Kucinich revealed that Obama “surveilled” Congressman Kucinich without his knowledge during Kucinich’s interview with Muammar Gaddafi.

    This abuse of power by Obama is exponentially more egregious than Watergate.

    Obama should have been “perp-walked” a long time ago.

    1. The powers were given to Bush by Congress under the Patriot Act.

  14. This is the very tip of the iceberg on his know and provable crimes……
    How about stealing billions from Fannie Mae in order to keep Obama care afloat?
    Or the justice department slush fund where corps could give money to organizations such as BLM
    in order to avoid some trumped up charge?

    Lock him the hell up and throw away the key.

  15. anon,

    You Dems better hope Clinton doesn’t order an Arkencide on Putin because I don’t know what you’re going to do if you don’t have the Putin excuse any longer!

    For people who are actually concerned about this topic and it’s significance to our nation:

    Here’s the FBI in on the unlawfully surveillance act as well:

    http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-05-26/fisa-court-warned-fbis-apparent-disregard-rules-illegally-shared-spy-data-private-co

    As I don’t see this as a partisan issue, I can easily state this is terribly wrong and I’m certain it all continues to this very day. It’s been going on before Obama Jesus as well as after him. Somehow we need to cut through the extensive BS about the govt. “keeping us safe”. Tyranny may make the trains run on time but it does not make us “safe”. It puts everyone in danger. Come to think of it, the oligarchy in the US is so crappy that they don’t even bother to provide a good train system, let alone one that runs on time!

    They are great at stealing public funds. Very gifted in fact! They have successfully created many methods for silencing dissent. They are good at terror, arming terrorists, creating more terrorists, terrorizing our own people–it’s been the gift that keeps on giving. Somehow, we need to break through the “I’ll give up all my rights to have the govt. keep me safe by putting me in a state of complete tyranny” as a working paradigm for the police state. It’s way out of control.

      1. Yes, anon, Putin is totally in charge of this govt.

        Now, are you able to comment on Obama’s illegal spying on our citizens? Or is that just a non-issue to you?

          1. Anon,

            What do you think of Obama allowing illegal spying on our citizens?

              1. Someone needs to restore the rule of law and it won’t be the crooked Trump Kushner family. Maybe Pence is capable.

              2. The reports are available for anyone to read. It’s from the FISA court. After you read them, please let us know what you think of the fact that Obama allowed illegal surveillance of our citizens. I must say it’s strange that you’ve been commenting on this story without having read any of the reports.

                1. Turley’s link is to Fox News. Sean Hannity is a liar and so were O’Reilly and Ailes.

                  1. anon,

                    Are you really unable to find and read these reports? Then why are you commenting on this story? It makes no sense. From looking at your posts it does appear that FFS is correctly describing what you are doing.

                    1. Do I care what you or FFS think? NO For all I know you could be paid by the Gateway Pundit.

                    2. NO For all I know you could be paid by the Gateway Pundit.

                      For all you know? The whole point of the question is to find out what you know and what your opinion is on what you know. It’s becoming embarrassingly obvious the only thing you know is how to copy/paste from your Twitter feed.

                2. anon is not paid to read reports. anon is paid to paste anti-trump tweets into the threads, regardless if they’re on topic or not. Please do not expect anything more than that from anon, and you won’t be disappointed.

                  1. anon,

                    No one was asking you to care what FFS or I think. I was asking you if you were actually not able to find and read the reports? That’s a yes or no answer. Then I asked YOU what you thought of the fact that Obama was allowing our citizens to be illegally spied on. That should be a question you can answer once you have bothered to read the actual material from the FISA court.

                    The fact that you cannot answer direct questions, nor read the FISA court documents yet still comment on this story is strange.

                  2. Come on anon, discriminate on your news sources all you want, but look for the truth. The only reason anyone would not want to scour the internet for information on this topic is if they 1. Don’t want to see bad news about their ideological brethren and/or 2. They have no problem if the story is true.

                    Which is it?

                    1. I looked.The sources were your typical far right sources….the kinds of places where you Trump bots get your propaganda. 🙂

                  3. You have zero game. Circa, Zerohege, Consortium. Read the released Fisa court docs an stop interfering with this boars crowdsourcing of real stories based on real documents. You know like Dennis Montgomerys Project Dragnet files the he formally submitted to the FBI with full immunity from the US Attorneys Office in D.C. two years ago. Plenty of backup copies no doubt.

                    More than 5 percent, or one out of every 20 searches seeking upstream Internet data on Americans inside the NSA’s so-called Section 702 database violated the safeguards Obama and his intelligence chiefs vowed to follow in 2011. For seven years

                    http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-05-25/unclassified-documents-show-obama-intel-agency-secretly-spied-americans-years

                    Circa has reported that there was a three-fold increase in NSA data searches about Americans and a rise in the unmasking of U.S. person’s identities in intelligence reports after Obama loosened the privacy rules in 2011.

                    Officials like former National Security Adviser Susan Rice have argued their activities were legal under the so-called minimization rule changes Obama made, and that the intelligence agencies were strictly monitored to avoid abuses.

                    The intelligence court and the NSA’s own internal watchdog found that not to be true.

                    “Since 2011, NSA’s minimization procedures have prohibited use of U.S.-person identifiers to query the results of upstream Internet collections under Section 702,” the unsealed court ruling declared. “The Oct. 26, 2016 notice informed the court that NSA analysts had been conducting such queries inviolation of that prohibition, with much greater frequency than had been previously disclosed to the Court.”
                    Speaking Wednesday on Fox News, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) said there was an apparent effort under the Obama Administration to increase the number of unmaskings of Americans.

                    “If we determine this to be true, this is an enormous abuse of power,” Paul said. “This will dwarf all other stories.”

                    “There are hundreds and hundreds of people,” Paul added.
                    The American Civil Liberties Union said the newly disclosed violations are some of the most serious to ever be documented and strongly call into question the U.S. intelligence community’s ability to police itself and safeguard American’s privacy as guaranteed by the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment protections against unlawful search and seizure.

  16. Olly, thank you for your comments, I too think that…and I hate to use the term “BOTH SIDES DO IT” but the far side of any political view has gotten so embedded with the help of both media types that Americans have lost the balanced center. Newt made deals with Bubba, St. Ronnie made deals with Tip, and things got done for better or worse. Now its man the barricades and shoot lies and come out of your corners and fight. This has to stop somewhere, but at this rate I don’t like the so-called light at the end of the tunnel.

  17. This is the dog chasing it’s tail in the Oval Office; the only novel feature is watching one dog pass the chase off to the next dog before slinking off to collect it’s reward (250 million in speaking fees over the first decade after running in circles in the oval office seems to be the going rate).

    Every criminal believes he or she warrants all the protections of the law but none of it’s constraints on themselves. In the caase of the President of the United States, they also believe they merit all of the unconstitutional powers established by the previous top dog but with none of the responsibility for corrupting the system that occured by their creation. Since 9/11, we have had three criminal presidents using “terrorism” as a justification for trashing the US Constitution.

    As per the Fox link Professor Turley quoted at the start of the post.

    […]Until the NSA stopped it, the “upstream” snooping program notified them [intel agencies] directly if someone inside the U.S. composed an email that contained the email address of a foreign intelligence agent who was being monitored. According to an NSA declaration reportedly made during the Bush administration, these communications did not have to be to or from the foreign agent, they simply had to mention the email address.

    According to the FISA Court documents just made public, the notifications sent to the NSA often led to the unmasking of American citizens caught up in monitoring. And as the court pointed out, many of the requests being made to unmask the Americans taking part in these communications were in direct violation of safeguards established by the Obama administration.

    Bush Jr.single handedly invented the war on terror based on criminal actions originating and/or funded in large part in and by Saudi Arabia, the country we just made a massive arms sale to. Never one to miss an opportunity to exploit a tragedy, Bush used 9/11 as an excuse to deeply curtail the civil rights of his own countrymen and women by terrifying them with bogus propaganda grotesquely exaggerating the danger the US population faced. The MSM was delighted to help him out in this without so much as a thought in the world that doing so would someday come back to bite them in the form of press restrictions in the name of national security.

    Obama couldn’t have been happier and under his time in the White House, the intelligence agencies, if anything, increased thier bulk data collection of American citizens by exploiting loopholes in the FISA legislation even after the Obama administration established safeguards to prevent the practice.

    Of course the jury is still out on Trump. Will he be the first to insist to congress that the practice of spying on American citizens has to stop and that they make explicit laws to demolish FISA? So far, he seems instead to be insisting that the real problem are the leakers, the ones telling us about this spying on citizens, not the spying itself except, of course, in his own case. High ranking members of his administration are calling for the jailing (and worse) of those people responsible for telling us the truth.

    National security requires we have no idea of just how corrupt our government is. In fact, that seems to have become the most important feature of National Security.

    Of course I fully expect Trump to make a speech on this soon and to relinquish the corrupt power that his predecessors established for him to now take advantage of and to chastise those high up in his administration such as Jeff Sessions who just like Obama want to make sure it’s illegal for us to ever hear about the fact we are being spied upon.

    Well, I’m not exactly holding my breath, but I’ve got my fingers crossed.

    1. BB,

      I don’t think the jury is out on Trump. He’s appt. GS as his cabinet. He’s cracked down on whistleblowers. He has already got a very high civilian body count. He’s put the US into new wars and maintained the old wars. He’s pro the police state. Clinton got elected as far as I can tell!

      1. Yes, my comment requites a heavy duty snark-0-meter (the average one will blow up). 🙂

        Trump is chasing Obama’s tail which is Bush’s tail which is Clinton’s tail and so on. In the meantime, he is establishing for future oval office inhabitants the practice of using the office of President for personal gain.

        It’s the irony that gets me. The sole purpose of National Security now-a-days is to not to protect the citizens from international and domestic criminals, but rather to protect international and domestic criminals (the big ones that is) – including the president – from the people. It’s like making it illegal to notice, and totally criminal to report, that the bank is being robbed.

    2. You actually have a clue. I would like to point out it was the sexoffeder who was used as the scapegoat for domestic Esurvielance. With Smith v Alaska in hand feds were permitted to use databases for domestic monitoring. Most everyone applauded. Now you will suffer!

  18. The media should be all over this abuse of power under Obama. You would think they were a biased Democratic mouthpiece…

    2. Yes, but it started long before “Obama”… This is not a party issue.

    3. Fox News is MSM and certainly not a biased left wing organization. Instead of the crap on their evening shows, why not let their investigative reporters go after this story and hire decent people for the shows to report it. If there’s something there, they could break it. Instead, Tucker Carlson is reduced to yelling about bathrooms in Penn Station, Hannity is completely nuts, predator O’Reilly is gone. Remember, right wing, when you yell about MSM, you’re also talking about Fox.

  19. “The media is correct in pursuing these legitimate stories but it should also give attention to this chilling report.”

    And if you think “this report” is chilling, just wait… It’s the tip of the iceberg

  20. Olly, sometimes you just don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. Civil rights groups and the far left yelled and screamed about the Patriot Act from the start. It was Republicans and most of the corporate Democrats that said it was needed because of 9-11. Yes, and some on the right did not like it either. As for unwinding government servicing of the people and selling it to the lowest bidder, that my friend is a Republican idea. Just like Trump’s buddy in Moscow. How do you think Russia got all these billionaires? I just don’t think most Americans want to go to a National Park like Yellowstone or the Grand Canyon and pay fees to some billionaire that bought it on the cheap.

    1. Sometimes? I would say oftentimes. That’s why I follow this blog and that is why I specifically read every post. If I’m not learning something new everyday, then I would no longer follow the blog.

      There are a handful of contributors here that are able to post reasonable and rational arguments about any number of topics. They have what I consider a constitutional worldview. They aren’t blinded by any particular ideology other than the law and rights. They are what I consider the middle 40%, with the extremes holding the other 60%.

      As for unwinding government servicing of the people and selling it to the lowest bidder, that my friend is a Republican idea.

      Those are your words and not mine. Mine reflect a view that government should be limited to its constitutional purposes and not the utilitarian causes that have grown this massive bureaucracy. This progressive ideology has infected both major political parties and the security of the rights of ALL are worse for it.

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