Rand Paul Is Right: NSA Routinely Monitors Americans' Communications Without Warrants

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: March 15, 2017 at 8:16:22 AM EDT
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Rand Paul Is Right: NSA Routinely Monitors Americans' Communications Without Warrants
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> [Note:  This item comes from friend David Rosenthal.  DLH]
>
> Rand Paul Is Right: NSA Routinely Monitors Americans’ Communications Without Warrants
> By Glenn Greenwald
> Mar 13 2017
> <https://theintercept.com/2017/03/13/rand-paul-is-right-nsa-routinely-monitors-americans-communications-without-warrants/>
>
> On Sunday’s Face the Nation, Sen. Rand Paul was asked about President Trump’s accusation that President Obama ordered 
> the NSA to wiretap his calls. The Kentucky senator expressed skepticism about the mechanics of Trump’s specific 
> charge, saying: “I doubt that Trump was a target directly of any kind of eavesdropping.” But he then made a broader 
> and more crucial point about how the U.S. government spies on Americans’ communications — a point that is 
> deliberately obscured and concealed by U.S. government defenders.
>
> Paul explained how the NSA routinely and deliberately spies on Americans’ communications — listens to their calls and 
> reads their emails — without a judicial warrant of any kind:
>
> The way it works is, the FISA court, through Section 702, wiretaps foreigners and then [NSA] listens to Americans. It 
> is a backdoor search of Americans. And because they have so much data, they can tap — type Donald Trump into their 
> vast resources of people they are tapping overseas, and they get all of his phone calls.
>
> And so they did this to President Obama. They — 1,227 times eavesdrops on President Obama’s phone calls. Then they 
> mask him. But here is the problem. And General Hayden said this the other day. He said even low-level employees can 
> unmask the caller. That is probably what happened to Flynn.
>
> They are not targeting Americans. They are targeting foreigners. But they are doing it purposefully to get to 
> Americans.
>
> Paul’s explanation is absolutely correct. That the NSA is empowered to spy on Americans’ communications without a 
> warrant — in direct contravention of the core Fourth Amendment guarantee that “the right of the people to be secure 
> in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and 
> no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause” — is the dirty little secret of the U.S. Surveillance State.
>
> As I documented at the height of the controversy over the Snowden reporting, top government officials — including 
> President Obama — constantly deceived (and still deceive) the public by falsely telling them that their 
> communications cannot be monitored without a warrant. Responding to the furor created over the first set of Snowden 
> reports about domestic spying, Obama sought to reassure Americans by telling Charlie Rose: “What I can say 
> unequivocally is that if you are a U.S. person, the NSA cannot listen to your telephone calls … by law and by rule, 
> and unless they … go to a court, and obtain a warrant, and seek probable cause.”
>
> The right-wing chairman of the House Intelligence Committee at the time, GOP Rep. Mike Rogers, echoed Obama, telling 
> CNN the NSA “is not listening to Americans’ phone calls. If it did, it is illegal. It is breaking the law.”
>
> Those statements are categorically false. A key purpose of the new 2008 FISA law — which then-Senator Obama voted for 
> during the 2008 general election after breaking his primary-race promise to filibuster it — was to legalize the 
> once-controversial Bush/Cheney warrantless eavesdropping program, which the New York Times won a Pulitzer Prize for 
> exposing in 2005. The crux of the Bush/Cheney controversy was that they ordered NSA to listen to Americans’ 
> international telephone calls without warrants — which was illegal at the time — and the 2008 law purported to make 
> that type of domestic warrantless spying legal.
>
> [snip]
>
> Dewayne-Net RSS Feed: <http://dewaynenet.wordpress.com/feed/>



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