Obama Admin Illegal Surveillance of Americans More Prolific Than Anyone Realized

During the Obama presidency, the National Security Agency was watching you. Really.

According to The National Review, the NSA “intentionally and routinely intercepted and reviewed communications of American citizens in violation of the Constitution.”

Why did the NSA do this? Well, because they wanted to monitor communications of Americans in the United States:

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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, when the administration was winding down and the NSA needed to meet a court deadline in order to renew various surveillance authorities under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

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.”

The illegal surveillance could comprise near 5% of all NSA searches.

Americans’ identities are concealed and “only the ‘masked’ version of the communication is provided to other U.S. intelligence agencies” but “this system relies on the good faith of government officials in respecting privacy” and “there are gaping loopholes that permit American identities to be unmasked.”

Long story short? The National Review reports that “American communications are being seized and subjected to an inspection–however cursory–in the absence of any warrant, probable cause, or foreign-intelligence relevance” even though “those Americans are not targets of foreign-intelligence collection.”

This is a major Fourth Amendment issue. We have the right to be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures, but our communications are being spied upon without any sort of protection for our privacy rights.

Last March, the Trump administration decided to do something about this.

They proposed new procedures, including “the elimination of searches about a target–henceforth, searches are limited to communications in which the target is presumptively a participant.”

The Trump administration wants to make sure the database only collects foreign communication, “at least one end of the communication is outside the U.S.”

This knowledge, in context of the Obama administration’s surveillance of Trump-campaign officials, raises eyebrows.

First and foremost, in the latter years of the Obama administration, “there was a significant uptick in unmasking incidents”, “more officials were given unmasking authority”, and Obama “loosened restrictions to allow wider access to raw intelligence collection and wider dissemination of intelligence reporters.”

This, then, increases the chances of information being leaked to the media (which has happened).

What is the Obama legacy then? He enabled “domestic spying”, had a “contemptuous disregard of court-ordered minimization procedures”, and unlawfully disclosed “classified intelligence to feed a media campaign against political adversaries.”

Talk about a Constitutional crisis…