Obama intel agency secretly conducted illegal searches on Americans for years
Barack Obama’s National Security Agency conducted illegal searches of hundreds of users’ Internet data after the former president relaxed the rules on government snooping.
The Obama administration also upped the number of Americans it had unmasked in intelligence reports, Circa reported, renewing concerns among civil liberty groups that Americans’ Fourth Amendment rights were routinely violated.
Sen. Rand Paul said Wednesday that it also raises questions about the motivations that Obama aides like Susan Rice had when they requested the names of Americans whose identities were obscured in surveillance reports.
If Rice and others did it for political purposes, to hurt Donald Trump for instance, that would be an ‘amazing abuse of power,’ he told Fox & Friends.
–Circa
“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.”
“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.” Continue reading >>>