Tag: nsa

House Renews FISA Section 702, Rejects Warrant Requirement

The House voted 235 to 191 on Wednesday to keep Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act running for another three years, declining once more to require federal agents to get a warrant before searching Americans’ communications scooped up under the program.

Around twenty Republican privacy hawks broke with leadership and joined Democrats in opposition, but the bill cleared the chamber with hours to spare before the Thursday midnight expiration.

Section 702, first authorized in 2008, lets intelligence agencies intercept the electronic communications of foreign nationals outside the United States without a warrant.

The catch, and the part that has driven nearly two decades of reform fights, is that those intercepts routinely sweep up the texts, calls, and emails of Americans who happen to be in contact with the roughly 350,000 foreign targets surveilled each year. That data sits in a federal database, and the FBI can search it for Americans’ information without going to a judge first.

The reforms attached to the renewal do not change that. They tinker around the edges. Federal agents will need an attorney’s sign-off before targeted reviews of Americans’ data, each query will require written justification submitted to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and misuse can now carry up to five years in prison.

The FBI will also have to file monthly reports to oversight officials defending searches involving Americans.

None of this requires a judge or forces the government to articulate probable cause before reading what an American wrote or said.

A bipartisan bloc has pushed for almost twenty years to require specific court approval before agents can pull up an American’s communications from the 702 trove, arguing that anything less is a Fourth Amendment workaround.

The bill that passed Wednesday explicitly references the Fourth Amendment in its text. It just does not require a warrant to honor it.

We obtained a copy of the bill for you here.

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Mike Johnson’s Crusade to Renew Warrantless NSA Spying on Americans Culminates This Week

House Speaker Mike Johnson is on a crusade. He is determined to pass a three-year, reform-free renewal of the notorious FISA law that authorizes the NSA to spy on the communications of American citizens, on U.S. soil, without warrants of any kind.

Immediately prior to the last (unsuccessful) attempt by Johnson to pass a new reform-free renewal of this spying law — just two weeks ago — I wrote about the bizarre and deeply bipartisan history of FISA domestic spying and how the U.S. somehow became a country that authorizes its surveillance state to target American citizens, all without warrants.

I will not recount all of that here, except to note that — like the 2001 Patriot Act — the original law empowering the NSA to spy on Americans without warrants was such a self-evident departure from American tradition that passage was only possible by portraying it as a mere temporary emergency measure. Yet those spying powers have now become one of the many such “temporary” and “emergency” measures that have seamlessly become a quasi-permanent fixture of the U.S. government. This upcoming week in the House will determine whether it becomes genuinely permanent and, worse, forever immune to reforms.

The FISA bill that permits warrantless NSA spying on American citizens was first enacted by Nancy Pelosi’s House in 2008, then signed into law by President Bush. The law provided for those powers to expire four years later, unless Congress approved renewal.

The law was first renewed in 2012 with the support of the Obama White House, this time for five years, without any reforms. When that five-year renewal was set to expire in 2018, Congress, this time backed by the Trump White House, passed a six-year reform-free renewal, requiring a new vote in 2024.

For the 2018 renewal, there was a mountain of evidence demonstrating abuse, which in turn gave rise to steadfast opposition to such a renewal from dozens of members of both parties (who were demanding, among other reforms, the addition of a warrant requirement for spying on Americans). As a result, then-Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) was forced to rely on dozens of Democratic representatives to secure FISA renewal.

Ryan accomplished this by working in close tandem with three key California Democrats: then-Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, ranking Intelligence Committee member Adam Schiff, and Eric Swalwell (D-CA). That liberal trio led 65 House Democrats alongside 191 Republicans to vote to endow a President they were calling a Hitler-type fascist with virtually unlimited power to spy on Americans without warrants.

The last time the FISA bill was renewed was four years after that 2018 vote: in April, 2024, with the support of the Biden White House and the key support of newly elected House Speaker Mike Johnson. That time, Congress was only willing to extend it only for two years, meaning the bill was scheduled to lapse on April 17, 2026, unless it was renewed again.

That is why Mike Johnson is now tasked with securing a new multi-year renewal of FISA with no reforms. On April 17 — last week — Johnson’s first attempt to renew the spying law for 18 more months failed to secure the necessary votes in the House for renewal He was thus forced to desperately plead with the chamber for a short 10-day extension to give more time to pressure the 20 House GOP holdouts to change their minds, and to try to induce more Democratic defections.

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Trump Reverses Himself, Joins Obama and Biden in Demanding “Clean” Renewal of NSA Domestic Spying Powers

In August 2013 — in the wake of our Snowden reporting, which revealed the NSA’s mass warrantless domestic spying on Americans — an extraordinary bipartisan bill emerged. Jointly sponsored by one of the most liberal House members (Michigan Democrat John Conyers) and one of his most libertarian-conservative counterparts (Michigan Republican Justin Amash), the bill would have reined in the NSA’s domestic spying powers by imposing serious limits on how such powers can be exercised when aimed at American citizens.

When the Conyers-Amash bill was first introduced, “Official Washington” did not take it seriously. But the Snowden revelations were causing serious public anger about NSA spying, and many members of Congress shared that anger because they were not told that the NSA had implemented a system of mass warrantless surveillance aimed, in part, at Americans. As a result, support for the bill quickly picked up bipartisan steam, seemingly heading toward certain passage — until Barack Obama called Nancy Pelosi.

Despite running for President as a constitutional law professor who vowed to end the civil liberties abuses of the War on Terror, Obama had become an enthusiastic supporter — and user — of the NSA’s domestic spying system. He thus instructed then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi to whip enough Democratic House votes to kill the bill. She did as she was told, and the bill — which initially appeared on its way to approval — was defeated 205-217 (94 Republicans and 111 Democrats voted for the reform bill; 134 Republicans and 83 Democrats voted against it). Official Washington heralded Pelosi as the heroine who saved NSA warrantless spying on Americans.

It is hard to overstate how significant the passage of this bill would have been. It would have been the first time in two decades that the U.S. Congress limited rather than increased the domestic powers of the U.S. security state. The era of the Patriot Act would finally have been confronted, or at least diluted. But Obama and Pelosi joined hands with the likes of GOP pro-spying members such as Peter King, Michelle Bachmann, and Kristi Noem to block any limits on the NSA’s power to spy on Americans without warrants.

Now, Donald Trump is on the verge of doing what Obama and Pelosi did back then. Despite running in 2024 by vowing to “KILL FISA,” based on his (quite valid) claim that spying powers had been abused against him for political ends in the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump on Monday demanded that FISA be fully renewed: yet again, with no reforms, safeguards, or limits of any kind.

Congress this week, perhaps as early as Wednesday, will vote on a renewal of Section 702 of FISA, which grants the NSA the power to spy on certain communications of American citizens without a warrant. Although it appeared that there was bipartisan support for finally imposing some limits and safeguards in the wake of years of documented abuses, Trump’s demand on Tuesday — that all House Republicans unite to renew the spying powers with no limits — raises serious doubts about whether any reform is now possible.

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Rep. Lauren Boebert Demands Answers for ‘Deeply Troubling Abuse of Power’ by NSA Analysts

Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) on Monday wrote to National Security Agency (NSA) Director Joshua Rudd about multiple instances of “deeply troubling abuses of power” by NSA analysts who have misused Section 702 of FISA to search private communications, including a person met through a dating service and a potential tenant.

“I write to demand answers about a deeply troubling abuse of power by a National Security Agency analyst who exploited one of our nation’s most sensitive surveillance authorities to spy on Americans met through an online dating service,” Boebert wrote to the NSA.

She recounted an incident that was disclosed by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight (PCOAB)’s September 2023 report that “represents exactly the kind of government overreach that erodes the trust of the American people in their intelligence community.”

“As a Member of Congress who takes both national security and the constitutional rights of every American seriously, I find it unacceptable that nearly three years after this abuse was disclosed, the public has received no accounting of what consequences, if any, were imposed on the individuals responsible,” she added.

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Jeffrey Epstein Recruited NSA Codebreakers for Genome “Manhattan Project”

In the decade before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the U.S. and Russia were engaged in high-stakes exchanges of advanced technology involving the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Skolkovo Innovation Center—a Russian government-backed technology hub that aimed to jump-start a “venture” innovation ecosystem in Moscow.

Jeffrey Epstein sat at the crossroads of academia, philanthropy, and venture finance as these global capital flows were threatened by the brewing confrontation in Ukraine.

In 2013, during the early cryptocurrency boom, Epstein sought an audience with Vladimir Putin to encourage the Russian president to shift course from the MIT–Skolkovo model. Instead of playing “catch up” with the United States through venture-backed startups, Epstein proposed, Russia could help lead a new financial system based on a novel global currency.

Epstein funded the early development of cryptocurrency through the MIT Digital Currency Initiative, founded in 2015. MIT’s Bitcoin Core Development Fund helped pay bitcoin’s early developers to maintain the open-source software authored by Satoshi Nakamoto, bitcoin’s anonymous inventor. Epstein was an early investor in Coinbase, and he was friends with Brock Pierce, the co-founder of U.S. dollar stablecoin company Tether, which operates, in effect, the world’s largest crypto bank.

Epstein was also recruiting cryptographers to a more ambitious project: hacking the human genome. In an email to a redacted recipient in August 2012, Epstein wrote, “My biology gurus at harvard all agree that the signal intelligence used by the various agencies , could be put to work on breaking the dna code or protein signal problems. breaking foreign codes is the expertise of the us and nsa.” Epstein prompted the recipient to help him recruit “code breakers” from the various intelligence agencies: “it would be great to know which agency button to push.”

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China accuses US of major cyber-attack

China has accused the US National Security Agency (NSA) of waging a “major” multi-year cyberattack on the Chinese agency responsible for keeping national time.

In a statement posted on its official social media account on Sunday, the Ministry of State Security (MSS) said it had “obtained irrefutable evidence” that the NSA infiltrated the National Time Service Center. The covert operation allegedly began in March 2022, aiming to steal state secrets and conduct acts of cyber sabotage.

The center serves as China’s official time authority, issuing and broadcasting ‘Beijing Time’ to key sectors including finance, energy, transport, and defense. A disruption to this critical piece of infrastructure could have caused widespread instability in financial markets, logistics and power supply, according to the MSS.

According to the MSS, the NSA first exploited a vulnerability in the foreign-made mobile phones of several staff members at the center, gaining access to sensitive data.

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The New Normal Of US Domestic Spying

What if the federal government captures in real time the contents of every telephone call, email and text message and all the fiber-optic data generated by every person and entity in the United States 24/7? What if this mass surveillance was never authorized by any federal law and tramples the Fourth Amendment?

What if this mass surveillance has come about by the secret collusion of presidents and their spies in the National Security Agency and by the federal government forcing the major telephone and computer service providers to cooperate with it? What if the service providers were coerced into giving the feds continuous physical access to their computers and thus to all the data contained in and passing through those computers?

What if President George W. Bush told the NSA that since it is part of the Defense Department and he was the commander in chief of the military, NSA agents could spy on anyone, notwithstanding any court orders or statutes that prohibited it? What if Bush believed that his orders to the military were not constrained by the laws against computer hacking that Congress had written or the interpretations of those laws by federal courts or even by the Constitution?

What if Congress has written laws that all presidents have sworn to uphold and that require a warrant issued by a judge before the NSA can spy on anyone but Bush effectively told the NSA to go through the motions of getting a warrant while spying without warrants on everyone in the U.S. all the time? What if Presidents Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Donald Trump have taken the same position toward the NSA and ordered or permitted the same warrantless and lawless spying?

What if the Constitution requires warrants based on probable cause of criminal behavior before surveillance can be conducted but Congress has written laws reducing that standard to probable cause of communicating with a foreign national? What if a basic principle of constitutional law is that Congress is subject to the Constitution and therefore cannot change its terms or their meanings?

What if the Constitution requires that all warrants particularly describe the place to be searched or the person or thing to be seized? What if the warrants Congress permits the NSA to use violate that requirement by permitting a federal court — the FISA Court — to issue general warrants? What if general warrants do not particularly describe the place to be searched or the person or thing to be seized but rather authorize the bearer to search indiscriminately through service providers’ customer data?

What if the government has no moral, constitutional or legal right to personal information about and from all of us without a valid search warrant consistent with constitutional requirements?

What if raw intelligence data comes to the government without any proper names on it? What if in order to find those proper names, the government goes through a procedure called unmasking? What if lawful unmasking can only occur when the government knows that a national security problem is afoot and it needs to know the identity of the person whose communications it has in hand? What if the Constitution requires a search warrant to engage in unmasking?

What if the Obama administration made it easier for political appointees to unmask members of Congress and other government officials without demonstrating a national security need as a reason for doing so? What if unmasking for political purposes is a felony? What if it is common today?

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Shake Up At NSA And NSC

The Media is blaming Laura Loomer for the firings at the National Security Agency (NSA) and also the National Security Council (NSC).

From what I have seen, Laura has brought reasonable things to light that were rightly reviewed. House cleaning was in order.

Let’s address these one at a time.

On the NSC, there have been multiple firings. “Among the officials being fired, according to two people familiar with the matter, are Thomas Boodry, a senior NSC official overseeing legislative affairs who worked for Waltz when he was in Congress; David Feith, an official overseeing technology and national security; and Brian Walsh, an NSC official working on intelligence issues who previously worked for Secretary of State Marco Rubio during his time in the Senate.”

The concerning one is Alex Wong (not mentioned above).

We need to be careful about guilt by association, but these are sensitive positions. Alex’s wife had both feet in the Deep State.

If the President or Mike Waltz had any concerns, better to swap them out.

Sorry, but that is the game and life in the big leagues.

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NSA REPORT: The NUMEC Affair and Israel’s Nuclear Weapons Program

Nearly seventy years have gone by since Israel embarked on its nuclear program, and almost sixty years have passed since it achieved nuclear weapons capability. However, the narrative of Israel’s nuclear history remains largely unarticulated. The country has not produced an official and sanctioned account of its nuclear development, nor have any insiders been permitted to share their perspectives.

In 1966, the United States Department of Energy (DOE) performed a security inspection at the NUMEC uranium facility located in Apollo, Pennsylvania. During this inspection, the inspector suspected that some of the missing uranium had been transported to France before ultimately reaching Israel. Zalman Shapiro, one of NUMEC’s founders, had established a dubious new enterprise in collaboration with a French organization known as Société D’Applications de la Physique (SAIP). This new venture was named NUMEC Instruments and Controls Corporation (NUMINCO) and was located in Monroeville, Pennsylvania. In 1957, as France was advancing its nuclear program, it initiated a nuclear agreement with Israel, sending engineers to assist in the construction of the nuclear reactor at Dimona, Israel. However, to facilitate the development of nuclear weapons, the newly established state required a plutonium separation facility, which was secretly built by the French company “Saint Gobain.” Shimon Peres, who passed away on September 28, 2016, was a protégé of David Ben-Gurion and played a key role in shaping Israel’s clandestine nuclear program, a program that was developed with French assistance – but whose existence is still officially denied to this day.

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Tulsi Gabbard to Fire Transgender Extremists and Sexual Deviants Who Participated in NSA’s Secret Sex Kink Chatrooms

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard will fire the transgender extremists and sexual deviants who participated in the NSA’s secret sex chatrooms.

According to Christopher Rufo: Tulsi Gabbard is preparing a memo directing all intelligence agencies to identify the employees who participated in the NSA’s “obscene, pornographic, and sexually explicit” chatrooms and to terminate their employment and revoke their security clearances. Deadline: Friday.

On Tuesday afternoon Tulsi Gabbard said “action is underway.”

On Monday Christopher Rufo and a fellow reporter obtained logs from the NSA’s secret transgender sex chatrooms.

Hundreds of transgender DEI hires in the NSA were using secret chat rooms to discuss sexual fetishes on government time.

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