RUTHFULLY YOURS

During the Obama years, the National Security Agency intentionally and routinely intercepted and reviewed communications of American citizens in violation of the Constitution and of court-ordered guidelines implemented pursuant to federal law.

The unlawful surveillance appears to have been a massive abuse of the government’s foreign-intelligence-collection authority, carried out for the purpose of monitoring the communications of Americans in the United States. 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 court is the federal tribunal created in 1978 by FISA; it is often referred to as a “secret court” because proceedings before it are classified and ex parte — meaning only the Justice Department appears before the court.)

The FISA-court opinion is now public, available here. The unlawful surveillance was first exposed in a report at Circa by John Solomon and Sara Carter, who have also gotten access to internal, classified reports. The story was also covered extensively Wednesday evening by James Rosen and Bret Baier on Fox News’s Special Report.

According to the internal reports reviewed by Solomon and Carter, the illegal surveillance may involve more than 5 percent of NSA searches of databases derived from what is called “upstream” collection of Internet communications.

As the FISA court explains, upstream collection refers to the interception of communications “as they transit the facilities of an Internet backbone carrier.” These are the data routes between computer networks. The routes are hosted by government, academic, commercial, and similar high-capacity network centers, and they facilitate the global, international exchange of Internet traffic. Upstream collection from the Internet’s “backbone,” which accounts for about 9 percent of the NSA’s collection haul (a massive amount of communications), is distinguished from interception of communications from more familiar Internet service providers.

Upstream collection is a vital tool for gathering intelligence against foreign threats to the United States. It is, of course, on foreign intelligence targets — non-U.S. persons situated outside the U.S. — that the NSA and CIA are supposed to focus. Foreign agents operating inside the U.S. are mainly the purview of the FBI, which conducts surveillance of their communications through warrants from the FISA court — individualized warrants based on probable cause that a specific person is acting as an agent of a foreign power.

The NSA conducts vacuum intelligence-collection under a different section of FISA — section 702. It is inevitable that these section 702 surveillance authorities will incidentally intercept the communications of Americans inside the United States if those Americans are communicating with the foreign target. This does not raise serious Fourth Amendment concerns; after all, non-targeted Americans are intercepted all the time in traditional criminal wiretaps because they call, or are called by, the target. But FISA surveillance is more controversial than criminal surveillance because the government does not have to show probable cause of a crime — and when the targets are foreigners outside the U.S., the government does not have to make any showing; it may target if it has a legitimate foreign-intelligence purpose, which is really not much of a hurdle at all.

So, as noted in coverage of the Obama administration’s monitoring of Trump-campaign officials, FISA section 702 provides some privacy protection for Americans: The FISA court orders “minimization” procedures, which require any incidentally intercepted American’s identity to be “masked.” That is, the NSA must sanitize the raw data by concealing the identity of the American. Only the “masked” version of the communication is provided to other U.S. intelligence agencies for purposes of generating reports and analyses. As I have previously explained, however, this system relies on the good faith of government officials in respecting privacy: There are gaping loopholes that permit American identities to be unmasked if, for example, the NSA or some other intelligence official decides doing so is necessary to understand the intelligence value of the communication.

Only in Florida. A white supremacist man converted to Islam and confessed to killing two of his roommates, who were also white supremacists. A third roommate (and again, white supremacist), who was away during the killings, was also arrested for homemade explosives.

Tampa police arrested 18-year-old Devon Arthurs Friday night, after the young man brought them to the bodies of two men he confessed to killing that very evening, Fox 13 News reported. The Miami Herald reported that Arthurs told police he killed his roommates “because they disrespected his new-found Muslim faith.” As he was arrested, Arthurs made several references to “Allah Mohammed.”

Around 5:30 p.m., Arthurs came into the Green Planet Smoke Shop near his apartment, wielding a gun and announcing that he had killed two people. He reportedly said he was upset “due to America bombing his Muslim countries.” He also warned employees not to leave the store, but the shop’s manager was able to break away and call the police.

“He came in there with a gun, never faced it at [the employees],” manager Fadi Soufan told Fox 13 News. Arthurs started “telling them the world’s corrupt, crazy stuff like that, and that he just shot someone.”

Police officers came and took Arthurs into custody, but then he told them where to find the bodies. He also reportedly added, “I had to do it. This wouldn’t have to happen if your country didn’t bomb my country.” Officers identified the victims as 22-year-old Jeremy Himmelman and 18-year-old Andrew Oneschuk. Investigators reported that all three of the men lived in an apartment together.

In a press release, the Tampa Police Department announced that “due to concerns about possible explosives, the Tampa Police bomb squad and the Tampa Fire Rescue Hazmat team worked through the night to ensure that it was safe to enter the condominium.”

Arthurs was booked into the jail early Saturday, and faces first-degree murder and kidnapping charges.

But the story gets crazier. On Sunday afternoon, police arrested a fourth roommate, Brandon Russell, whom Arthurs also identified as a white supremacist. According to Arthurs, this man had participated in neo-Nazi chat rooms where he “threatened to kill people and bomb infrastructure,” according to the FBI report.

Inside Russell’s bedroom, police found a framed photograph of Timothy McVeigh, the convicted and executed bomber responsible for attacking the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 16, 1995. They also found Nazi and white supremacist propaganda, and radiation sources — thorium and americium. CONTINUE AT SITE

To a social justice warrior, there is nothing so awful as a white male. For one like Linda Sarsour, that is especially true, which she recently illustrated at Dartmouth College.

On May 12, during a question and answer period with Sarsour, someone in the audience asked a question about a tweet Sarsour made regarding genital mutilation survivor Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Arab Christian Brigitte Gabriel.

In that tweet, Sarsour said:

I wish I could take their vaginas away – they don’t deserve to be women.

The Daily Wire reported on the question, and Sarsour’s response:

The young man confronted Sarsour:

Hi. So, um, this question is really important because I believe that women’s rights are also human rights. So I really want to know: under what circumstances it’s acceptable to say that “I wish I could take their vaginas away. They don’t deserve to be women.” Just to give that context, that’s one of the tweets off your Twitter.

There was a long pause while Sarsour decided how to mitigate the effect of the truth being thrown at her. She finally responded by evading the question:

So, let’s give some context here, because, y’know, we have — Uh, this is an event organized by an Asian American, right? Let’s just get — let’s get some context to what is going on here. Celebrating a community, right? Talking about communities of color who are being directly impacted by this moment and I have a young white man in the back who is not directly impacted by any of the issues I mentioned.

That elicited applause from the supine audience, which apparently didn’t care about the massive hypocrisy of a woman posing as a fighter for women’s rights who had called for literally ripping away the vaginas of women that she hated.

Sarsour continued by astonishingly claiming she never issued the tweet: “A copy and paste that he got from a right-wing blog. He doesn’t even know if it actually came from my Twitter account because he has a screenshot of it. He never actually went to my Twitter to see if it’s actually there. Right? That never happened. ”

Never happened, huh? Then what’s this?
A screenshot of Linda Sarsour’s tweet.

Sarsour then tried to deflect the criticism by pretending it was simply a case of saying “stupid s***” when one is younger — yet she never disavowed the sentiment in that tweet.

She could have simply apologized. But she didn’t. Instead, she simply argued that people say things that may be “stupid” — but of course, she alone gets a pass on what she said and did in the past.

Meanwhile, the progressive movement she so proudly supports has ruined people for saying and doing much less. CONTINUE AT SITE

Talk to anyone who has tried to run a business and ask them how hard it is. I can speak from experience when I tell you that it isn’t easy. Long hours, sleepless nights, and concerns you never even thought about as an employee are the norm. Add in the fact that you get paid last, which can mean some very lean times, and the challenges of owning a business become rather obvious.

Now, you may also have to consider the idea that Social Justice Warriors think you have the wrong DNA for your line of work, because they’re horrible.

Reason.com reports that some have put together a spreadsheet of Portland, Oregon, restaurants that allegedly engage in “cultural appropriation”:

The list, a Google Docs spreadsheet, includes about 60 Portland-area restaurants, the names of their white owners, and the kind of cuisine they serve. (For example, the list informs us that Burmasphere “was founded by a white man who ate Burmese food in San Francisco.”) The spreadsheet also lists competing restaurants that are owned by people of color and urges customers to try them instead.

“This is NOT about cooking at home or historical influences on cuisines; it’s about profit, ownership, and wealth in a white supremacist culture,” wrote the spreadsheet’s authors. “These white-owned businesses hamper the ability for POC [people of color] to run successful businesses of their own (cooking their own cuisines) by either consuming market share with their attempt at authenticity or by modifying foods to market to white palates. Their success further perpetuates the problems stated above. It’s a cyclical pattern that will require intentional behavior change to break.”

The spreadsheet seems to be a response to the controversy over Kooks Burritos, a Portland-area pop-up food truck run by two white women. In an interview with Williamette Week, Kooks owners Kali Wilgus and Liz Connelly explained how they fell in love with authentic Mexican tortillas during a visit to Puerto Nuevo, Mexico.

It’s funny that these oh-so-caring and tolerant individuals fail to understand how outright insulting they are to everyone, whether white or minority.

Restaurants open and close all the time for a variety of reasons. To say that minorities can’t compete simply because white people are cooking the same type of food? That implies that minorities are incapable of succeeding without these benevolent white knights who compiled the listing.

They are literally saying that “people of color” can’t possibly make it without a group of SJWs to clear the road for them.

Sounds like this is about the SJWs own self-esteem more than anything else. CONTINUE AT SITE

Try to imagine the metaphysics of a deadly snake.

Existence exists. Youknow that. But does a snake?

On May 18th Tucker Carlson on Fox Insider News delivered what must be one of the most poignant and hard-hitting warnings voiced by a newscaster about today’s trend to settling political disputes with violence. It was a delivery that reflects a cogent, thinking mind, a virtue we don’t usually associate with TV newscasters:

“’We Are in Danger’: Tucker Says Progressives Must Condemn Political Violence.”

The modern left is no longer an ideological movement. Instead it’s an organized movement around identity politics,” Tucker said on tonight’s show.

He warned that dividing Americans into “sub-groups” and promoting “tribalism” is dangerous for our democracy.

He said that modern progressives don’t want to argue and have a reasonable discussion. They want their “team” to win, and some of them are willing to use violence to do so, as we’ve recently seen at protests across the country.

“Violence is what separates politics from war,” Tucker said. “It’s when hurt feelings become dead bodies, the point at which countries become ungovernable.”

He noted that he’s recently had progressives on his program, and when pressed, they refused to condemn political violence.

He concluded that “we are in danger” as long as that’s the case.

In truth, the Progressives and Antifa thugs have no “identity” to speak of. It could be an amalgam of disparate groups. I am “anti-Trump” and violence is what I do. As Greg Gutfield writes, also on Fox:

On its ever changing face, identity politics seemed pretty innocuous. It’s simply a way of unifying your demands among a similar group of people.

We’ve seen it take all shapes: There’s identity politics based on race, gender, disability and religion. There are loads of others — some so unusual they beggar belief (there are people who now identify as animals, for example. Sometimes, I feel that I am one of them).

But as identity politics expanded, infecting campus life, political agendas and self-absorbed acceptance speeches at award shows, we saw something strange and wonderful happen….

2017 may have been that year when identity politics hit a brick wall, and slumped limply on the pavement.

But what prompts Progressives and their “foot soldiers” – the ones who riot, destroy property, shout down speakers with impunity, and physically assault anyone who dissents – to close their minds to any rational, civil discourse on the issues that seem to excite them to foam-flecked madness?

I have taken to characterizing Progressive/University behavior to that of cobras or rattlesnakes. Snakes do not think; in terms of teleology, they are “programmed” to respond to stimuli such as heat or a moving body, at which they will strike, to kill and/or consume. To a predator snake, all moving bodies pose a threat or an opportunity for a meal. Snakes do not pause to think about the body; there is no appraisal of it at all. The consciousness of a snake is not volitional. A snake cannot, by its nature, have values. Progressives champion no fixed ideology but chaos. They are prime candidates for herpetological study.

If police believe bank robbers were hoping for inside help on a heist, they don’t hold a press conference to smear the bank manager with their suspicions about “collusion.” They go about the quiet police work of building a conspiracy case. Unless and until they find concrete evidence and are ready to file formal charges, they keep their big mouths shut.

Those rudimentary rules of the road are worth remembering when we consider the transparently political testimony of former Obama-administration CIA director John Brennan before the House intelligence committee on Tuesday.

Brennan’s story can be summed up as follows: The Russians are insidious, and they plot to manipulate Americans into helping them, wittingly or unwittingly. The Russians interfered with the American election by orchestrating the publication of unflattering information (mainly, Democrat e-mails), hoping either that Donald Trump would win, or that the likely winner, Hillary Clinton, would be badly damaged. While carrying out this plan, Russian operatives reached out to some people who were connected to the Trump campaign. Brennan supposes that the Russians must have attempted to “suborn” those people because . . . well . . . um . . . that’s “what the Russians try to do.” But he can’t say whether they actually did.

More to the point, Brennan has no idea whether these suspected but unproved Russian entreaties actually worked. When he left the government at the end of President Obama’s term, Brennan said, “I had unresolved questions in my mind as to whether or not the Russians had been successful in getting U.S. persons involved in the [Trump] campaign or not to work on their behalf.”

That’s a weasel’s way of saying he’s got nothing.

Brennan, the hardest charger in Obama’s patently politicized intelligence community, spent goo-gobs of energy on this, throughout the closing months of the 2016 campaign. And he’s got nothing.

The “Russian collusion” scandal is manufactured. Like all good subterfuge, it is premised on a kernel of truth: The Russian regime is always on the look-out for Americans willing to betray their country. Sometimes it works. So, when our security services detect such Russian outreach, of course they must investigate it.

But the fact that the Kremlin wants to flip an American does not mean the American in question will play along. The fact that an American ends up speaking to a Russian operative — just as Democratic lawmakers and administration officials regularly speak to Russian operatives — does not mean the American is a traitor. To establish that an America is doing Russia’s bidding, you need to prove that the American is doing Russia’s bidding.

Brennan apparently can’t even prove that Russia beseeched Trump associates to do anything related to influencing the election outcome, much less that any particular Trump associate agreed to do anything, and less still that anything was actually done.