The extent of the spying by the Obama administration is being revealed bit by bit. We know that the Trump campaign was spied on but who else was spied on in the years before?

It’s becoming clearer that the spying goes back as far as 2012.

Reports of UN Ambassador Samantha Power unmasking hundreds of people on behalf of the Obama administration adds to the question of who and why certain people were targeted.

The Conservative Treehouse is reporting extensively on this but the Columbia Review (see below) goes into the details of spying on opponents of the Iran Deal and pro-Israel organizations.

https://twitter.com/JackPosobiec/status/1131933485567029248

OBAMA ADMIN SPYING ON US OPPONENTS OF IRAN DEAL AND PRO-ISRAEL ORGANIZATIONS:

“Obama Admin also spied on US opponents of the Iran deal, both in Congress and in private pro-Israel organizations.Pro-Israel activists reported the Obama administration seemed to know exactly what they were saying and doing, and acted accordingly” –

FOX REPORTER JAMES ROSEN’S REPORT ON ILLEGAL SURVEILLANCE:

In May of 2017, James Rosen discussed his knowledge of Obama spying on him and even his parents. Note that Nancy Pelosi claimed ignorance about the spying:

JAMES ROSEN: Pelosi confessed ignorance of this week’s disclosure that the National Security Agency for at least five years under the Obama administration systematically violated Americans’ Fourth Amendment rights.

Civil liberties groups said the disclosures should factor into lawmakers’ decision at year’s end about whether to reauthorize the NSA collection program that witnessed the abuses…

The sheer scale of the 4th Amendment violations is staggering, as was the sternness of the rebuke of the Obama administration by the FISA court, which ordinarily approves 99.9% of the government’s request.

JAMES ROSEN WAS SPIED ON BY THE OBAMA WHITE HOUSE:

SHARYL ATTKISSON WAS ALSO SPIED ON BY THE GOVERNMENT AND CLAIMS BELOW THAT JOHN BRENNAN IS BEHIND THE SPYING:

Sharyl Attkisson tweeted out an intel firm’s email from 2012 that says everything we need to know about former CIA Director John Brennan:

The email below is from Wikileaks and is an email from Stratfor Firm’s Fred Burton:

On Monday February 27th, 2012, WikiLeaks began publishing The Global Intelligence Files, over five million e-mails from the Texas headquartered “global intelligence” company Stratfor. The e-mails date between July 2004 and late December 2011. They reveal the inner workings of a company that fronts as an intelligence publisher, but provides confidential intelligence services to large corporations, such as Bhopal’s Dow Chemical Co., Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and government agencies, including the US Department of Homeland Security, the US Marines and the US Defence Intelligence Agency. The emails show Stratfor’s web of informers, pay-off structure, payment laundering techniques and psychological methods.

John Brennan is a dirty cop who took orders from Obama…

https://twitter.com/SharylAttkisson/status/1022658564110864386

SHARYL ATTKISSON is now suing the government:

https://twitter.com/SharylAttkisson/status/1022539292143493120

WAS THE UNMASKING USED TO SPY ON AMERICAN CITIZENS LIKE ROSEN AND HIS PARENTS?

From The Hill: To understand, it helps to begin with the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, when U.S. intel agencies sought to expand their surveillance authority — for what seemed like all the right reasons. (For context, a week before 9/11, Robert Mueller had become FBI director; a month earlier, James Clapper had been named head of the agency that supplies image intel to the CIA, and John Brennan recently had become CIA deputy executive director.)

Wiretapping foreigners who could be terrorists isn’t as sensitive an issue since our law doesn’t give them the same protection as U.S. citizens. The problem comes when wiretaps include U.S. citizens in contact with foreign targets. That’s called “incidental” collection.

And it’s not just phone calls. Today’s wiretaps can include everything on the web — emails, bank accounts, photos, messaging, Facebook posts. And “incidental collection” can include anything picked up when a target is watched directly, through a bug, or by secretly activating his computer’s microphone and camera.

U.S. citizens who aren’t accused of crimes are entitled to strong constitutional privacy protections. So, to alleviate worries that citizens’ rights might be violated through “incidental” spying on foreign targets, the intel agencies adopted strict rules. At first, they promised to destroy any “incidental” intelligence they collected. Later, they decided to store it — for a short time — but promised that the names of the U.S. citizens would be “masked,” or hidden, even internally.

Then, they argued that they needed to store the information on U.S. citizens a little longer, and might occasionally need to “unmask” or reveal their names. Still, “unmasking” was supposed to be extraordinarily rare, requiring a high-ranking official’s approval accompanied by a strong legal argument that the citizen’s name is crucial to addressing some national-security threat.

But several years ago, intel insiders tell me, the process was corrupted. Here’s how:

An official who is a bad actor may want to monitor a U.S. citizen — say, a political enemy or a journalist — but knows he could never get wiretap approval from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC). So he develops a pretext to wiretap a foreigner or a target in contact with that citizen. He then “incidentally” captures the citizen’s information, too. Later, he builds a case for “unmasking” the U.S. citizen’s name, supposedly for national security or other crucial reasons.

Here’s the best part — for the bad actors. The U.S. citizens are usually none the wiser. The surveillance isn’t intended to build a criminal case; it’s to collect dirt or political intel or blackmail material. So the corrupt process is never scrutinized in a U.S. court.

Think of it as reverse engineering of intel.

In 2016, very real questions were raised about whether reverse engineering of intel was widely deployed in an unethical manner. A red flag waved when we got a sense of how many Americans are “incidentally” surveilled — so many, that near-daily unmasking requests were said to be made in 2016 under the name of a single official: United Nations Ambassador

Who else was involved? Then-acting Attorney General Sally Yates, national security adviser Susan Rice, and Director of National Intelligence Clapper. Clapper said he requested unmasking of American names “every couple of weeks.”

Apparently, it became so common that Clapper told Congress he probably made some requests on his way out the door before Trump’s inauguration, but couldn’t recall the specifics.

Watch James Clapper and Sally Yates discuss the unmasking of Trump officials or members of Congress with Judiciary Committee Chair, Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa).

Barack Obama’s former National Security Adviser Susan Rice refused an invitaation from the Senate Judiciary Committee to testify alongside James Clapper and Sally Yates.

Rice initially claimed she knew nothing about the unmasking of surveilled Trump associates. Later, she admitted on MSNBC that she had asked for names of U.S. citizens previously masked in intelligence reports.
Watch Susan Rice, Obama’s former National Security Advisor try to squirm out of the unmasking allegations: 

Add to all this the report that, during 2016, the Obama administration vastly expanded its searches for information about Americans in the National Security Agency (NSA) database. In 2013, there were 9,500 searches involving 198 Americans. In 2016, that escalated to 30,355 searches of 5,288 Americans.

One final note: Last October, Amb. Power reportedly told congressional investigators that many of the hundreds of “unmasking” requests in her name in 2016 were not made by her. If true, it implies something equally problematic, or worse: Someone else in the government used her name to unmask Americans.

The good news would seem to be that there’s documentary evidence of all this … if anyone wants to discover it. There are names of who requested what and when, information as to where unmasked intel was sent, names of those who searched the NSA database and under what auspices. Unlike a lot of facets of the Trump-Russia-intel controversy, this trail should be easily traceable.

But we just might be too busy chasing the pretty colors flashing before us every day. They might be keeping us from taking a good hard look at a very serious matter.

Officials involved in unmaskings insist they did nothing improper, that their motivations were to protect the nation. They say they did not act for political reasons, or to spy.

If they did, people could go to prison. Theoretically.

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