An internal investigation by the C.I.A. has found that its officers penetrated a computer network used by the Senate Intelligence Committee in preparing its damning report on the C.I.A.’s detention and interrogation program.

  The report by the agency’s inspector general also found that C.I.A. officers read the emails of the Senate investigators and sent a criminal referral to the Justice Department based on false information, according to a summary of findings made public on Thursday.

Democrat, Liberal, Government, Obama, Bigbrother

The National Security Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation violated specific civil liberty protections during the Obama years by improperly searching and disseminating raw intelligence on Americans or failing to promptly delete unauthorized intercepts, according to newly declassified memos that provide some of the richest detail to date on the spy agencies’ ability to obey their own rules.

  They detail specific violations that the NSA or FBI disclosed to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court or the Justice Department's national security division during President Obama’s tenure between 2009 and 2016.

Democrat, Liberal, Government, Obama, Bigbrother, Constitution

The National Security Agency under former President Barack Obama routinely violated American privacy protections while scouring through overseas intercepts and failed to disclose the extent of the problems until the final days before Donald Trump was elected president last fall, according to once top-secret documents that chronicle some of the most serious constitutional abuses to date by the U.S. intelligence community.

Democrat, Liberal, Government, Obama, Bigbrother, Constitution

During the Obama years, the National Security Agency intentionally and routinely intercepted and reviewed communications of American citizens in violation of the Constitution and of court-ordered guidelines implemented pursuant to federal law.

  The unlawful surveillance appears to have been a massive abuse of the government’s foreign-intelligence-collection authority, carried out for the purpose of monitoring the communications of Americans in the United States. While aware that it was going on for an extensive period of time, the administration failed to disclose its unlawful surveillance of Americans until late October 2016...

  The administration’s stonewalling about the scope of the violation induced an exasperated Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to accuse the NSA of “an institutional lack of candor” in connection with what the court described as “a very serious Fourth Amendment issue.”

Democrat, Liberal, Government, Obama, Bigbrother, Corruption, Law

The Obama administration has asked a secret surveillance court to ignore a federal court that found bulk surveillance illegal and to once again grant the National Security Agency the power to collect the phone records of millions of Americans for six months. The legal request, filed nearly four hours after Barack Obama vowed to sign a new law banning precisely the bulk collection he asks the secret court to approve, also suggests that the administration may not necessarily comply with any potential court order demanding that the collection stop.

Democrat, Liberal, Obama, Bigbrother

The Central Intelligence Agency improperly and covertly hacked into computers used by Senate staffers to investigate the spy agency's Bush-era interrogation practices, according to an internal investigation. CIA Director John Brennan has determined that employees "acted in a manner inconsistent with the common understanding" brokered between the CIA and its Senate overseers, according to agency spokesman Dean Boyd.

Democrat, Liberal, Crime, Government, Obama, Oops, Bigbrother, Constitution

The audit, dated May 2012, counted 2,776 incidents in the preceding 12 months where the agency engaged in “unauthorized collection, storage, access to or distribution of legally protected communications.” The audit only covered issues at NSA facilities in the D.C. and Fort Meade areas.

Democrat, Liberal, Government, Obama, Character, Scandal, Oops, Bigbrother, Arrogance

The German news magazine Der Spiegel reported Sunday that classified leaks by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden detailed NSA bugging of European Union offices in Washington and New York, as well as an "electronic eavesdropping operation" that tapped into an EU building in Brussels. Mounting anger throughout Europe on Monday included a threat by French President Francois Hollande to halt talks with the United States on trade and other issues unless the bugging stopped.

Democrat, Liberal, Government, Incompetence, Obama, Character, Narrative, Oops, Bigbrother, Arrogance

The United States taps half a billion phone calls, emails and text messages in Germany in a typical month and has classed its biggest European ally as a target similar to China, according to secret U.S. documents quoted by a German newsmagazine... News of the U.S. cyber-espionage program Prism and the British equivalent Tempora have outraged Germans, who are highly sensitive to government monitoring having lived through the Stasi secret police in the former communist East Germany and with lingering memories of the Gestapo of Hitler's Nazi regime. A Spiegel report on Saturday that the NSA had spied on European Union offices caused outrage among EU policymakers, with some even calling for a suspension to talks for a free trade agreement between Washington and the EU.

Democrat, Hypocrisy, Liberal, Government, Obama, Bigbrother

The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents and connection logs that enable analysts to track a person’s movements and contacts over time. The highly classified program, code-named PRISM, has not been disclosed publicly before... But the PRISM program appears more nearly to resemble the most controversial of the warrantless surveillance orders issued by President George W. Bush after the al-Qaeda attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Its history, in which President Obama presided over "exponential growth" in a program that candidate Obama criticized, shows how fundamentally surveillance law and practice have shifted away from individual suspicion in favor of systematic, mass collection techniques.

Democrat, Hypocrisy, Liberal, Government, Obama, Character, Fascism, Bigbrother

Top secret court order requiring Verizon to hand over all call data shows scale of domestic surveillance under Obama... The National Security Agency is currently collecting the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon, one of America's largest telecoms providers, under a top secret court order issued in April. The order, a copy of which has been obtained by the Guardian, requires Verizon on an "ongoing, daily basis" to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the US and between the US and other countries. The document shows for the first time that under the Obama administration the communication records of millions of US citizens are being collected indiscriminately and in bulk – regardless of whether they are suspected of any wrongdoing.

Democrat, Hypocrisy, Liberal, Government, Obama, Bigbrother

The Obama administration, resolving years of internal debate, is on the verge of backing a Federal Bureau of Investigation plan for a sweeping overhaul of surveillance laws that would make it easier to wiretap people who communicate using the Internet rather than by traditional phone services, according to officials familiar with the deliberations... “We’ll look a lot more like China than America after this,” Mr. Gidari said.

Democrat, Liberal, Government, Obama, Bigbrother

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has claimed that agents do not need warrants to read people's emails, text messages and other private electronic communications, according to internal agency documents. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which obtained the documents through a Freedom of Information Act request, released the information on Wednesday. In a 2009 handbook, the IRS said the Fourth Amendment does not protect emails because Internet users "do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in such communications."

Democrat, Liberal, Government, Obama, Bigbrother

In a meeting with the American Bar Association last week, Slate reports the FBI General Counsel Andrew Weissmann saying it was a “top priority” of the agency to push for law reform that would allow it to access emails, chat and other information in real-time on the Web.

Democrat, Liberal, Government, Obama, Oops, Bigbrother

A US judge has ordered the FBI to stop its "pervasive" use of National Security letters to snoop on phone and email records, ruling that the widespread tactic was unconstitutional. The order issued by US District Court Judge Susan Illston in San Francisco came as a blow to a measure heavily used by the administration of President Barack Obama in the name of battling terrorism.

Democrat, Liberal, Obama, Bigbrother

Ms. Herman said citizens should be concerned by the increased secrecy of the government, and should be concerned about the chilling effect of the government’s surveillance capabilities. And continuing these programs appears not to be dependent upon who is president, she said. “A lot of people seem to think it ended with Obama, but on surveillance and material support laws, Barack Obama has not taken a different position,” she said.

Hypocrisy, Obama, Bigbrother, Constitution

The last time we visited President Barack Obama's Promise 180, civil liberties advocates and intelligence experts predicted big changes would be made to the Patriot Act to give Congress more oversight over warrantless wiretaps.

No go, apparently.

Government, Obama, Bigbrother

The federal government has repeatedly violated legal limits governing the surveillance of U.S. citizens, according to previously secret internal documents obtained through a court battle by the American Civil Liberties Union.

Democrat, Liberal, Government, Obama, Bigbrother

The Obama Administration is appealing a ruling in favor of privacy before the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit — seeking to allow it to track people by their cellphones and arguing that there is no privacy expectations to prevent tracking without probable cause.

Democrat, Government, Obama, Bigbrother

The use of GPS tracking devices is poised to become one of the most contentious privacy issues before the Supreme Court, if it agrees to hear an appeal filed by the Obama administration last month. The administration is seeking to overturn a ruling by a lower court that law enforcement officials must obtain a warrant before using a tracker.

Government, Obama, Bigbrother

Federal law enforcement agencies have been tracking Americans in real-time using credit cards, loyalty cards and travel reservations without getting a court order, a new document released under a government sunshine request shows.

Obama, Oops, Bigbrother

Gore, in a speech Monday, called for an independent investigation of the administration program that he says broke the law by listening in — without warrants — on Americans suspected of talking with terrorists abroad.

Gore called the program, authorized by President Bush, “a threat to the very structure of our government” and charged that the administration acted without congressional authority and made a “direct assault” on a federal court set up to authorize requests to eavesdrop on Americans.

Democrat, Hypocrisy, Liberal, Obama, Bigbrother

The number of wiretaps conducted by federal and state law enforcement in 2010 jumped 34 percent from the prior year, according to a new federal report. The 2010 Wiretap Report said federal and state courts approved 3,194 orders for intercepting wire, oral or electronic communications. That was up from the 2,376 intercepts approved in 2009.

Democrat, Hypocrisy, Liberal, Government, Obama, Oops, Bigbrother

...Between 2009 and 2011 the combined number of original orders for pen registers and trap and trace devices used to spy on phones increased by 60%, from 23,535 in 2009 to 37,616 in 2011. During that same time period, the number of people whose telephones were the subject of pen register and trap and trace surveillance more than tripled. In fact, more people were subjected to pen register and trap and trace surveillance in the past two years than in the entire previous decade.

Government, Obama, Bigbrother

The Obama administration is developing plans that would require all Internet-based communication services -- such as encrypted BlackBerry e-mail, Facebook, and Skype -- to be capable of complying with federal wiretap orders, according to a report published Monday.

Obama, Bigbrother

Under federal law, wiretaps may only be conducted in investigations of serious crimes, a list that was expanded by the 2001 Patriot Act to include offenses such as material support of terrorism and use of weapons of mass destruction. The administration is proposing to add copyright and trademark infringement, arguing that move "would assist U.S. law enforcement agencies to effectively investigate those offenses."