Abuser-in-chief: Obama’s politicization of intel agencies led to illegal spying on Americans for YEARS
05/25/2017 / By JD Heyes
During the Bush presidency, then-Sen. Barack Obama regularly criticized the administration for its privacy abuses, utilizing the National Security Agency to scoop up terabytes of data on virtually every Americans’ electronic communications, in the name of combating terrorism.
In 2004, while running for the U.S. Senate, Obama lashed out at the USA Patriot Act, saying it violates “our fundamental notions of privacy.” The following year, he joined fellow Democrats in claiming the law “seriously jeopardizes the rights of all Americans and the ideals America stands for.”
As he geared up for his White House run in 2007, he said he would ensure that U.S. intelligence agencies had all the tools they needed to protect the country — while honoring the Constitution.
“That means no more illegal wiretapping of American citizens. No more national security letters to spy on citizens who are not suspected of a crime … No more ignoring the law when it is inconvenient.”
Then, of course, Obama won the presidency. And all of that sanctimonious preaching proved little more than political posturing.
As reported by Circa, it turns out that Obama committed more serial abuses of Americans’ constitutional rights to privacy and due process than any president before him, and even more so than Bush’s violations that he so blithely dismissed. (RELATED: Obama admin spied on THOUSANDS of Americans in months leading up to 2016 election)
The site noted that, according to top secret documents that have been declassified, the NSA, under Obama, “routinely violated American privacy protections” as the agency combed through intercepts of subjects overseas. The NSA then “failed to disclose the extent of the problems until the final days before Donald Trump was elected president last fall,” activity that amounts to “some of the most serious constitutional abuses to date by the U.S. intelligence community.”
What’s more, Obama’s abuses weren’t even committed with the noble intent of protecting the country; rather, they were the result of raw political intent.
The site noted further:
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, according to one classified internal report reviewed by Circa.
The Obama administration self-disclosed the problems at a closed-door hearing Oct. 26 before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that set off alarm. Trump was elected less than two weeks later.
In the vast majority of cases the FISA court is deferential to the government’s intelligence agencies, but in this particular case the judges — who are appointed to single seven-year terms and who do not have prior intelligence training or experience — censured administration officials for their failure to previously disclose the extent of violations. They characterized the failure as an “institutional lack of candor” adding that the abuses amounted to a “very serious Fourth Amendment issue,” according to the declassified document quoted by Circa.
And here’s the kicker: “The admitted violations undercut one of the primary defenses that the intelligence community and Obama officials have used in recent weeks to justify their snooping into incidental NSA intercepts about Americans [emphasis added]” — especially those who just happen to have been associated with the campaign of now-President Donald J. Trump.
Except, the FISA court along with the NSA’s internal watchdog found that to be BS.
“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,” said the unsealed court ruling. “The Oct. 26, 2016 notice informed the court that NSA analysts had been conducting such queries in violation of that prohibition, with much greater frequency than had been previously disclosed to the Court.”
Now, do you fully understand why Obama changed — as in loosened — privacy rules back in 2011, as he was gearing up for his reelection bid? The loosening of the rules was also used by Obama hacks like former National Security Advisor Susan Rice, a political functionary and not an actual intelligence community operative, to “unmask” Trump campaign officials like Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort and Carter Page.
If you ever needed more proof that Barack Obama lacks the hypocrisy gene — and that his was the most criminally corrupt administration in decades — this is it.
“If we determine this to be true, this is an enormous abuse of power,” Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., told Fox News, as noted by Circa.
Learn more at RealInvestigations.news and NewsTarget.com.
J.D. Heyes is a senior writer for NaturalNews.com and NewsTarget.com, as well as editor of The National Sentinel.
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Tagged Under: abuse, Constitution, Fourth Amendment, intelligence community, NSA, President Obama, privacy, Susan Rice
