Obama administration spies on Americans and now they are forced to admit they are spying on US Senators

Outrageously, the CIA engaged in surveillance of Senate emails.  When they were caught they "demonstrated a lack of candor about their activities."  Democratic Senators have "lost confidence" in Brennan, but is Obama talking about firing Brennan?  No. There is no criticism at all coming from the White House.  It makes it look as if President Obama has no problem with what the CIA did.  From Fox News:

The director of the CIA, offering a rare apology, has acknowledged an internal probe's findings that CIA employees in the Executive Branch improperly spied on the Legislative Branch by searching Senate computers and reading staffers' emails earlier this year.  

According to a declassified CIA inspector general's report, CIA officers improperly accessed Senate computers, read the emails of Senate staff, and exhibited a "lack of candor" when interviewed by agency investigators. The document, released Thursday by the CIA, is a summary of an internal CIA investigation -- which prompted CIA Director John Brennan to abandon his defiant posture in the matter and apologize to Senate Intelligence Committee leaders. 

Brennan also has convened an accountability board that will investigate the conduct of the CIA officers and discipline them, if need be. 

But the admission already has led to fierce recriminations from Senate lawmakers. 

Sen. Mark Udall, D-Colo., said he has "lost confidence" in Brennan, and urged the administration to appoint an independent counsel to investigate. . . .

Only 37 percent of Americans trust the federal government

These results are from a new Fox News poll.  One thing that should be explained is that Democrats trust in government goes up when there is a Democratic president and Republican trust is up when there is a Republican.  That explains the different results for Republicans and Democrats.  Interestingly, despite all the scandals with the IRS, NSA, EPA, AP, State Department, Benghazi, VA, and others, the level of trust in the federal government is actually higher now than last year or in 2010.

Comic: Obama: "If you like your privacy, you can keep your privacy"

More fallout from NSAgate, spying risks $35 billion in US Technology Sales, may help totalitarian countries

Business lost is just a part of the problem.  One of the fallouts from the NSA scandal is that China and Russia may get more support for their control of the internet.  The losers will be the citizens of those countries who will be less able to collect news from outside their countries.  From Bloomberg:

News about U.S. surveillance disclosed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden has “the great potential for doing serious damage to the competitiveness” of U.S. companies such as Cupertino, California-based Apple, Facebook Inc., and Microsoft Corp., Richard Salgado, Google’s director for law enforcement and information security, told a U.S. Senate panel Nov. 13. “The trust that’s threatened is essential to these businesses.” 

The spying revelations have led governments around the world to consider “proposals that would limit the free flow of information,” Salgado said. “This could have severe unintended consequences, such as a reduction in data security, increased cost, decreased competitiveness, and harm to consumers.”  

Countries such as China and Russia that are seeking to impose more national controls on the Internet are finding their views gaining ground. Rising economic powers, including India, Mexico and South Korea, are weighing further limits. Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff, a target of NSA surveillance, is calling for a new conversation about Internet governance with support from Germany, whose chancellor, Angela Merkel, also was an NSA target.. . .

NSA spys on internet porn viewing of a Muslim American who was never accused of unlawful activity

Great, we have a government that is tracking an American's internet porn habits.  No evidence that the person was engaged in any illegal activity.  From the New York Post:

. . . The top-secret papers  – leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden – show that the NSA monitored porn proclivities of six targets that the NSA claimed are “exemplars” of how “personal vulnerabilities” can be learned through electronic surveillance, and then exploited to undermine the target’s credibility and reputation, according to the Huffington Post, which obtained the documents. 

None of the six Muslims are accused of being involved in terror plots, and one is described as a “US person,” suggesting the target is a US citizen or legal resident. . . . 

It is not known if NSA went through with its plans to discredit the Muslims, either publicly or privately.

Americans lose German government cell phone business because NSA spying

Apple's iPhone has been the phone of choice for German government officials, but to avoid the US government's NSA, the iPhone has been dropped.  From The Local in Germany:

. . . Under the new government politicians will only make calls on encrypted phones, meaning mobiles which are not protected will become the exception instead of the norm. It means iPhones will no longer be allowed for official correspondence.

“Our conversations and communication structure have to be safer,” the government report said, following news at the end of October that Chancellor Angela Merkel's phone was being tapped by US intelligence agencies, and that both the UK and US embassies in Berlin allegedly had listing posts on the roof of their buildings.   

Finer details were drawn up by the Bonn federal office for information security (BSI). It has said that discussing official matters over the phone should only be done so on one that is BSI-approved.

The software is not iPhone-compatible, so Apple products will start disappearing from the German parliament. . . .

NSA sues t-shirt maker to stop his parody of government agency

Is the Obama administration's defense is people can't tell that this t-shirt is a parody?  If "Peeping while you're sleeping" and "The only part of the government that actually listens" strike people as serious descriptions of what the agency does, possibly the Obama administration has only itself to blame.

So let's do a test.  Here are the two emblems.  Can you guess which is the real one and which is the parody?  If the Obama administration lawsuit is justified, you should have a hard time figuring out which is which.  Click on pictures to make them larger.

Has the NSA been tracking the cellphone movements of millions of Americans?

Senator Wyden suggests that the NSA is either tracking or has been studying tracking millions of Americans.  Presumably Wyden isn't allowed to explicitly say what the NSA is doing, so his suggestions should probably be given more weight than suggestions by others.  From The Hill newspaper:

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) suggested on Thursday that the National Security Agency tracked or considered tracking the cellphone location data of millions of people in the United States.  

During a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, Wyden asked NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander whether "the NSA has ever collected — or made any plans to collect — Americans' cell site information in bulk." 

As a member of the Intelligence Committee, Wyden has access to classified information about the NSA's surveillance programs. . . .  

Analyzing which cell towers a phone has connected to can allow law enforcement or intelligence officials to track the location of the phone's owner.  

Wyden has been a long-time critic of NSA surveillance, but government secrecy has limited his ability to publicly discuss his concerns. . . . 

Obama administration secretly eliminated Bush limits on NSA's use of intercepted phone calls and e-mails

Several key points here.  1) The Obama administration greatly expanded the intrusiveness of these searches from what the Bush administration was willing to allow.  2) The Obama administration is searching through (in other words reading and listening to) the "vast majority" of the emails and telephone records of Americans.  3) That the Obama administration can do this without warrants.  Where does this leave Obama's claim that he is not doing any spying on Americans?  From the Washington Post:

The Obama administration secretly won permission from a surveillance court in 2011 to reverse restrictions on the National Security Agency’s use of intercepted phone calls and e-mails, permitting the agency to search deliberately for Americans’ communications in its massive databases, according to interviews with government officials and recently declassified material. . . . 

What had not been previously acknowledged is that the court in 2008 imposed an explicit ban — at the government’s request — on those kinds of searches, that officials in 2011 got the court to lift the bar and that the search authority has been used. 

Together the permission to search and to keep data longer expanded the NSA’s authority in significant ways without public debate or any specific authority from Congress. The administration’s assurances rely on legalistic definitions of the term “target” that can be at odds with ordinary English usage. The enlarged authority is part of a fundamental shift in the government’s approach to surveillance: collecting first, and protecting Americans’ privacy later. 

“The government says, ‘We’re not targeting U.S. persons,’ ” said Gregory T. Nojeim, senior counsel at the Center for Democracy and Technology. “But then they never say, ‘We turn around and deliberately search for Americans’ records in what we took from the wire.’ That, to me, is not so different from targeting Americans at the outset.” 

The court decision allowed the NSA “to query the vast majority” of its e-mail and phone call databases using the e-mail addresses and phone numbers of Americans and legal residents without a warrant . . . .

"NRA backs ACLU spying lawsuit over gun registry fears"

Remember when a bipartisan group of 26 senators worried that the NSA was collecting data on American gun ownership?  The main problem with letting the government collect massive information is that a large percentage of the population doesn't trust it.  From Fox News:

The National Rifle Association on Wednesday filed an amicus brief in federal court supporting an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit challenging a government phone-tracking program that collects the telephone records of millions of Americans.
The brief argues that the National Security Agency's phone records collection program could "allow identification of NRA members, supporters, potential members, and other persons with whom the NRA communicates, potentially chilling their willingness to communicate with the NRA."
The ACLU's lawsuit — which names as defendants the heads of national intelligence as well as the agencies they lead, including the National Security Agency, the FBI, the Department of Defense and the Department of Justice — argues the phone record collection program disclosed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden is unconstitutional.
The suit, filed in federal court in New York in June, asks the court to halt the datamining effort and purge phone records collected under the program, claiming the government action violates the First and Fourth Amendments of the Constitution.
The NRA argues in the brief that it would be "absurd" to think that Congress would take steps to prevent the creation of a national gun registry while simultaneously allowing the NSA to gather records that "could effectively create just such a registry." . . .

PEW has a series of different polls on trust in government, but unfortunately it ends in January of this year before all the White House scandals have come out.  After the 2012 election government had apparently enjoyed something of a boom in trust, though it was still historically low.  I can only presume that the many scandals have caused trust in government to plummet.

Here is an April poll from the AP, but it doesn't seem directly comparable.

Just 7 percent of Americans say they trust the government in Washington to do what is right "just about always," the AP-GfK poll found. Fourteen percent say they trust it "most" of the time. Two-thirds trust the federal government only some of the time; 11 percent say they never do. . . . .

Drug Enforcement Administration obtains massive about of telephone information on people, AT&T employees are embedded in DEA

It still appears to me that the worse case by far involves the DEA cases based upon NSA information that were reported in August.  While this information is extremely extensive, I am less bothered by subpoenas that cover a specific person or group of people.  I assume that the Obama administration can explain this by saying that they don't want drug lords to know what techniques are being used, but it is very hard to trust the government at this point.  From Fox News:

Federal and local drug officials reportedly have subpoena access to an AT&T database of phone calls whose size dwarfs any collection of data done by the National Security Agency. 

The New York Times reports Monday that a counternarcotics program known as The Hemisphere Project involves the government paying AT&T to place its employees in drug-fighting units made up of both Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents and local detectives. The AT&T employees then supply law enforcement officials with all the phone data going back to 1987. 

By contrast, the NSA stores data for nearly all calls in the United States, including the phone numbers involved, the time the call was made, and the duration of the call, for a period of five years. . . . 

A Justice Department spokesman told The Times "subpoenaing drug dealers’ phone records is a bread-and-butter tactic in the course of criminal investigations," . . . 

However, Jameel Jaffer, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said that the Hemisphere Project raised "profound privacy concerns," adding "I’d speculate that one reason for the secrecy of the program is that it would be very hard to justify it to the public or the courts." . . .

"NSA employees spied on their lovers using eavesdropping programme"

The fact that NSA employees spied on lovers enough times to give it a name tells us a lot.  If employees could spy on others for personal reasons, why would believe that they couldn't do so for undesirable political reasons.  From the UK Telegraph:

The employees even had a code name for the practice – "Love-int" – meaning the gathering of intelligence on their partners. 

Dianne Feinstein, a senator who chairs the Senate intelligence committee, said the NSA told her committee about a set of "isolated cases" that have occurred about once a year for the last 10 years. The spying was not within the US, and was carried out when one of the lovers was abroad. . . .

Now they refer to these violations as "mainly unintentional."  

John DeLong, NSA chief compliance officer, said that those errors were mainly unintentional, but that there have been "a couple" of wilful violations in the past decade. . . .

Just a week ago we were assured that none of the violations were intentional.

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) defended the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs Friday, saying that she has never come across an example of the NSA deliberately abusing its powers.
Feinstein released a statement in response to a Washington Post report detailing thousands of privacy violations committed by the NSA every year.
“As I have said previously, the committee has never identified an instance in which the NSA has intentionally abused its authority to conduct surveillance for inappropriate purposes,” Feinstein said. . . . 

See also this discussion from CBS News. 

Apparently there was intentional spying on Americans by the NSA

Apparently the claims made by President Obama concerning that there were no intentional violations by the NSA were wrong.  From Bloomberg:

There were “approximately a dozen” cases in the past 10 years that “involved improper behavior on the part of individual employees,” Phalen said. . . .  

“Over the past decade, very rare instances of willful violations of NSA’s authorities have been found,” the agency said in a statement to Bloomberg News. “NSA takes very seriously allegations of misconduct, and cooperates fully with any investigations -- responding as appropriate. NSA has zero tolerance for willful violations of the agency’s authorities.” 

The compilation of willful violations, while limited, contradicts repeated assertions that no deliberate abuses occurred. 

Army General Keith Alexander, director of the NSA, said during a conference in New York on Aug. 8 that “no one has willfully or knowingly disobeyed the law or tried to invade your civil liberties or privacy.” 

‘Misleading Statements’ 

President Barack Obama told CNN in an interview broadcast yesterday he is confident no one at the NSA is “trying to abuse this program or listen in on people’s e-mail.” 

“There’s a pattern of the administration making misleading statements about its surveillance activities,” Jameel Jaffer, a deputy legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union, said in a phone interview. “The government tells us one thing, and another thing is true.” . . .

But can the government even know how many abuses there have been?  From the Associated Press:

The disclosure undermines the Obama administration's assurances to Congress and the public that the NSA surveillance programs can't be abused because its spying systems are so aggressively monitored and audited for oversight purposes: If Snowden could defeat the NSA's own tripwires and internal burglar alarms, how many other employees or contractors could do the same? . . .

WSJ: 75% of US internet traffic intercepted by NSA, both Foreign and Domestic, and obtains "content of the communications themselves"

The president claims that there have currently been no abuses.  For the sake of argument, let's take his word for that, but with all this information on people why would believe that it won't be abused in the future?  From the WSJ:

. . . The system has the capacity to reach roughly 75% of all U.S. Internet traffic in the hunt for foreign intelligence, including a wide array of communications by foreigners and Americans. In some cases, it retains the written content of emails sent between citizens within the U.S. and also filters domestic phone calls made with Internet technology, these people say. . . . 

The NSA is focused on collecting foreign intelligence, but the streams of data it monitors include both foreign and domestic communications. Inevitably, officials say, some U.S. Internet communications are scanned and intercepted, including both "metadata" about communications, such as the "to" and "from" lines in an email, and the contents of the communications themselves. 

Much, but not all, of the data is discarded, meaning some communications between Americans are stored in the NSA's databases, officials say. Some lawmakers and civil libertarians say that, given the volumes of data NSA is examining, privacy protections are insufficient. . . .

The one positive benefit from all this is that it is turning young people against Obama.  From The Hill newspaper:

Some polls show a double-digit drop in Obama’s approval rating since Edward Snowden revealed NSA secrets, weakening the president ahead of fall fights with congressional Republicans over the budget and immigration. 

Polling taken by the Economist and YouGov finds a 14-point swing in Obama’s approval and disapproval rating among voters aged 18-29 in surveys taken immediately before the NSA revelations and last week. Overall, the swing in Obama’s approval rating moves just four points. . . . 

Fox News' Political Insiders make some great points on the Obama Scandals

Fox News' Political Insiders on Scandals

This is one of my favorite shows.  Pat Caddell is awesome, and I found 
myself agreeing more than usual with Doug Schoen. Two excellent 
points were made on the show (starting around 3:30 into the interview).

1) Why do we trust any agency, including the NSA, to investigate itself?

2) 2,700 hundred abuses just in the Washington, DC area and for every
violation there could be thousands of Americans who could be violated.

On another topic, Schoen argued that Nixon is a piker compared to Obama on 
the abuse of power.  One of the articles of impeachment against Nixon went 
after him for "musing" about using the IRS to attack his enemies.  Obama's 
administration did more than Nixon even mused about.

Contrast this discussion with a recent editorial in the Washington Post.  
The Post seems to want to argue that while he was clearly wrong in his 
frequently repeated statements that there had been no abuses of power, they 
are unwilling to say that Obama lied.  The implication is that he may have 
been frequently inaccurate, but the implication from the Post is that he 
didn’t necessarily deliberately lie because he may not have known he was 
not telling the truth.

The Fox News' Political Insiders are having none of this whitewashing.  
They clearly argue that the press is covering up for Obama and that 
Obama's lies are making it possible for him to completely undermine the 
rule of law in the US.

Even the New York Times says that the Obama administration is hiding what it is doing on surveilling Americans

Even the New York Times attacks the Obama administration for hiding information on what it is doing.

The public has a right to know the government’s policies on these matters. There is very good reason to be concerned about the government’s interpretation of its police powers, especially given the Obama administration’s insensitivity to privacy in its mass collection of phone data in the national security sphere. 

When the A.C.L.U. filed a request for the memos under the Freedom of Information Act, the Justice Department responded by handing over copies with the text nearly entirely blanked out, prompting the lawsuit. . . . 

It is distressing that the administration, which claims to welcome a debate over the government’s surveillance practices, time and again refuses to be transparent about those practices. Instead of awaiting a court order, the administration should release the tracking memos on its own.

Will Obama's legacy be to reintroduce slavery?: Obama threatens jail for man who wants to shut down business

When Federal government demands backdoor to his system, Lavabit Founder, Ladar Levison, wants to shut Down His Service and Feds respond by threatening his arrest.  Threatening someone with jail for shutting down their business sure sounds like Obama is demanding that they continue working at a particular job and do that job a particular way even when they don't want to do it.  Isn't that what slavery is?  From NBC News:

The owner of an encrypted email service used by ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden said he has been threatened with criminal charges for refusing to comply with a secret surveillance order to turn over information about his customers.

"I could be arrested for this action," Ladar Levison told NBC News about his decision to shut down his company, Lavabit LLC, in protest over a secret court order he had received from a federal court that is overseeing the investigation into Snowden. 

Lavabit said he was barred by federal law from elaborating on the order or any of his communications with federal prosecutors. But a source familiar with the matter told NBC News that James Trump, a senior litigation counsel in the U.S. attorney’s office in Alexandria, Va., sent an email to Levison's lawyer last Thursday – the day Lavabit was shuttered -- stating that Levison may have "violated the court order," a statement that was interpreted as a possible threat to charge Levison with contempt of court. . . . 

Levison, a 32-year-old entrepreneur who ran his company out of a Dallas apartment, said in a public statement last Thursday that he made "the difficult decision" to shut down Lavabit because he did not want "to become complicit in crimes against the American people." . . . 

Levison stressed that he has complied with "upwards of two dozen court orders" for information in the past that were targeted at "specific users" and that "I never had a problem with that." But without disclosing details, he suggested that the order he received more recently was markedly different, requiring him to cooperate in broadly based surveillance that would scoop up information about all the users of his service. . . .

Fortunately, President Obama assures us that there is no domestic spying.

With the NSA audit and the DEA cases, does anyone still believe that Obama is honest about no domestic spying?

When Obama said that there was no domestic spying was he ignorant of this NSA audit?  From Fox News:

. . . Despite repeated claims by officials that the NSA does not spy on Americans, the Post reports that the bulk of the infractions involved improper surveillance of Americans or foreign targets in the U.S. Some of the infractions were inadvertent, caused by typographical errors resulting in U.S. calls or emails being intercepted. Others were more serious.
The Post reported that the most significant violations included the unauthorized use of information on more than 3,000 Americans and green-card holders. In another incident, the Post reported that a “large number” of calls from Washington were intercepted in 2008 after the Washington area code 202 was confused with the code 20, which is the code for dialing to Egypt.
In total, an NSA audit from May 2012 reportedly found 2,776 incidents in the prior 12 months of improper collection and handling of communications.
In another case, the special court that oversees the NSA did not learn about a new collection method until it had been underway for months. The court ruled the method unconstitutional, according to the Post. . . .

All the collection of telephone numbers of Americans, who they called, how long they talked, and where they called from seems like domestic spying, but we were told that they weren't listening to the calls.  From the Washington Post:

The Drug Enforcement Administration has been the recipient of multiple tips from the NSA. DEA officials in a highly secret office called the Special Operations Division are assigned to handle these incoming tips, according to Reuters. Tips from the NSA are added to a DEA database that includes “intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records.” This is problematic because it appears to break down the barrier between foreign counterterrorism investigations and ordinary domestic criminal investigations. 

Because the SOD’s work is classified, DEA cases that began as NSA leads can’t be seen to have originated from a NSA source. 

So what does the DEA do? It makes up the story of how the agency really came to the case in a process known as “parallel construction.” Reuters explains:

Some defense lawyers and former prosecutors said that using “parallel construction” may be legal to establish probable cause for an arrest. But they said employing the practice as a means of disguising how an investigation began may violate pretrial discovery rules by burying evidence that could prove useful to criminal defendants.

. . .  There’s another reason the DEA would rather not admit the involvement of NSA data in its investigations: It might lead to a constitutional challenge to the very law that gave rise to the evidence. . . .

UPDATE: Senator Leahy expresses concerns over NSA problems and plans to hold another inquiry.

. . . Leahy's announcement about the additional hearing comes a day after an internal NSA audit published by The Washington Post revealed that the spy agency had repeatedly broken privacy rules or overstepped its authority. 

"The American people rely on the intelligence community to provide forthright and complete information so that Congress and the courts can properly conduct oversight. I remain concerned that we are still not getting straightforward answers from the NSA," Leahy said in a statement.  

"I plan to hold another hearing on these matters in the Judiciary Committee and will continue to demand honest and forthright answers from the intelligence community." . . . 

More on Democrats jumping ship at Fox News:

House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi called the latest reports "extremely disturbing."  

Rep. Mike Thompson, D-Calif., a member of the House Intelligence Committee, said: "Reports that the NSA repeatedly overstepped its legal boundaries, broke privacy regulations and attempted to shield required disclosure of violations are outrageous, inappropriate and must be addressed." . . .

Another article in The Hill has this:

Sens. Mark Udall (D-Colo.) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) warned Friday that recent revelations of privacy violations by the National Security Agency (NSA) were “just the tip of a larger iceberg.” . . .

But the problem is that they just can't tell us what the violations are.

Udall and Wyden, who both sit on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in a joint statement that the new leak vindicated past claims that “violations of [privacy] laws and rules were more serious than had been acknowledged.”  

They implied, however, that privacy violations when far further than was revealed Thursday. 

“While Senate rules prohibit us from confirming or denying some of the details in today’s press reports, the American people have a right to know more details about the scope and severity of these violations,” they said. . . .

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.), the chairman of the Europe, Eurasia and Emerging Threats Subcommittee, lauds Snowden, defends Putin

You have to respect Rohrabacher for having the guts to say this.  From The Hill newspaper:

“Snowden was just alerting us to our government getting out of hand. Russia accepting him for asylum I think was not as hostile an act as was being portrayed,” Rohrabacher said in an interview on C-SPAN’s “Newsmakers” program. . . .

Meanwhile, despite the revelations, no real changes are expected at the NSA.

Gen. Michael Hayden, former director of the National Security Agency (NSA) and Central Intelligence Agency, said on Sunday that he doesn’t expect significant operational changes at the NSA despite an uproar over its massive surveillance programs.  . . . 
“To me, the most telling thing he said was perhaps something he didn’t quite say. He didn’t suggest he was going to operationally change this program,” Hayden said.
“There’s no suggestion that what he was doing or what President Bush was doing before him with regard to these programs was anything other than lawful, effective and appropriate.” . . .

UPDATE:  Others don't think that anything would have changed without Snowden.

House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Mike McCaul said Sunday he doesn't believe President Barack Obama would have acted to reform National Security Agency programs were it not for the leaks from Edward Snowden.
"I see no evidence of that. I think Snowden came out, leaked this information, and the WhiteHouse has been backtracking ever since," the Texas Republican said Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press.".
Responding to the president's press conference on Friday announcing a suite of NSA reforms, McCaul dismissed the president's announcements as "window dressing."
"I think when the story initially broke, the president went under cover. He just finally came out last Friday trying to come up with ways to salvage the program by window dressing, forming a website, for instance, an outside group," McCaul said. . . . 

Rep. Tom McClintock has also thought that on net Snowden actions were beneficial.  From The Hill newspaper:

Rep. Tom McClintock (R-Calif.) said the Obama administration should give National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden amnesty to get him to return to the United States."I think it would be best if the American government granted him amnesty to get him back to America where he can answer questions without the threat of prosecution," McClintock told Sacramento station KCRA after a town hall last week, in an interview flagged by Buzzfeed on Monday.
"We have some very good laws against sharing secrets, and he broke those laws," McClintock said. "On the other hand, he broke them for a very good reason, because those laws were being used in direct contravention of our Fourth Amendment rights as Americans." . . . 

Is your Android phone listening to you?

Well, of course, just as politicians would never be tempted to use the IRS to harm their political opponents, they would never use this power to improperly gather political information.  From the WSJ:

Federal agencies have largely kept quiet about these capabilities, but court documents and interviews with people involved in the programs provide new details about the hacking tools, including spyware delivered to computers and phones through email or Web links—techniques more commonly associated with attacks by criminals.

People familiar with the Federal Bureau of Investigation's programs say that the use of hacking tools under court orders has grown as agents seek to keep up with suspects who use new communications technology, including some types of online chat and encryption tools. The use of such communications, which can't be wiretapped like a phone, is called "going dark" among law enforcement. . . .

The FBI develops some hacking tools internally and purchases others from the private sector. With such technology, the bureau can remotely activate the microphones in phones running Google Inc.'s Android software to record conversations, one former U.S. official said. It can do the same to microphones in laptops without the user knowing, the person said. Google declined to comment. . . .