The Front Page Cover
~ Featuring ~
Spying on You, Spying on Me,
Spying on the President
by Judge Andrew Napolitano
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France, India Leaders Love Hating
Trump – Empty Climate Vows Exchanged
by Rick Wells
{rickwells.us} ~ The pure hypocrisy and disingenuous theatrics of globalists and those they entertain is both offensive and laughable. The fact that they get away with is directly attributable to the apathy, naiveté and brainwashing of the citizens of every nation around the globe... Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited President Emmanuel “Rothschild” Macron in Paris on Saturday where the two engaged in some of the most phony, empty, dishonest political theater in recent memory. Modi arrived in Paris in the aftermath of President Trump’s announcement of the Climate hoax pullout and surprisingly vowed that his country will “continue” to go “above and beyond” in its fulfillment of the Paris climate accord. How hard is it to continue to do nothing, Modi? And to go above and beyond nothing wouldn’t take much either. He could turn the thermostat a degree or two for a day in the official mansion and that would more than meet the definition... http://rickwells.us/france-india-leaders-love-hating-trump-empty-climate-vows-exchanged/.
Putin praises Trump, says
U.S. spies may have faked hacking evidence
by Denis Pinchuk and Christian Lowe
{reuters.com} ~ President Vladimir Putin said on Friday that Donald Trump had run a better presidential campaign than liar-Hillary Clinton and that U.S. intelligence agencies could have easily faked what he said was false evidence that Russia had hacked the Democratic Party... U.S. intelligence officials have said Russia tried to interfere in the U.S. election by hacking Trump's opponents, a charge that has deepened a political scandal which has focused on whether Trump had improper ties with Moscow, something he flatly denies. Putin, addressing the St Petersburg International Economic Forum, said on Friday that the hacking accusations were nothing more than "harmful gossip" which he complained was damaging international relations and the global economy... https://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-economic-forum-putin-cyber-idUSKBN18T1Z7
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After Middle East, Will Islamists
Uproot Christians in Europe?
Cardinal Bechara Boutros Rai, the Maronite patriarch of Antioch
by Giulio Meotti
Cardinal Bechara Boutros Rai, the Maronite patriarch of Antioch
by Giulio Meotti
{gatestoneinstitute.org} ~ We do not yet know enough about the three terrorists who, saying "This is for Allah!", killed and wounded so many in London on June 4, but consider these two recent scenes:... Scene one: Manchester, United Kingdom, the "free world". A British-born Muslim terrorist prays in a former church. All around him, the Christian sites and congregations accepted being turned into Islamic sites. The day after, this terrorist goes on a rampage, murdering 22 concert-goers. Scene two: Minya, Egypt, the "unfree world". An Islamist terror group stops a bus full of Christian pilgrims. The terrorists demand that their victims recite the Islamic creed, the shahaada. The Christians refuse to abandon Christianity and become Muslims. The Islamists murder them, one by one. What do these scenes tell us? Christians resist Islam more in the Middle East than in Europe... https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/10455/islamists-uproot-christians
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Chicago Reportedly Creates New ID To
Help Illegals Receive Welfare Without Being Deported
by Harry Hibbs
{usatwentyfour.com} ~ Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel wants illegal aliens living in the city to have their own special IDs – to ensure they can receive welfare benefits without risk of deportation... Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel has moved forward with plans for a Chicago-only identification card specifically designed to ensure illegal aliens in the city can receive welfare benefits with minimal risk of repatriation. The new program was unveiled at a Chicago City Council meeting on Wednesday, and it protects illegal aliens from federal oversight by not collecting any copies of identification documents presented when illegals apply for the identification card...Defund Chicago now. http://www.usatwentyfour.com/chicago-reportedly-creates-new-id-help-illegals-receive-welfare-without-deported/.
Details Emerge on FBI “National
Security” Raid in Dearborn Michigan…
{theconservativetreehouse.com} ~ Two days ago the FBI, DHS and a joint anti-terrorism command force raided a home in Dearborn Michigan. At the request of the FBI the media was intentionally ambiguous as to the nature of the raid leading to some speculative reporting... In the aftermath of the raid some details have emerged. The house raided was occupied by Samer ElDebek, a Lebanese American truck driver with ties to New York. According to Arab-American News ElDebek lived in New York and left for Lebanon approximately 8 years ago. He returned to the U.S., and after a time back in New York he relocated to Dearborn about 10 months ago... https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2017/06/04/details-emerge-on-fbi-national-security-raid-in-dearborn-michigan/
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Spying on You, Spying on Me,
Spying on the President
by Judge Andrew Napolitano
{townhall.com} ~ "The makers of our Constitution ... conferred, as against the Government, the right to be let alone -- the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men." -- Justice Louis D. Brandeis, 1928
After the Watergate era had ended and Jimmy Carter was in the White House and the Senate's Church Committee had attempted to grasp the full extent of lawless government surveillance in America during the LBJ and Nixon years, Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. FISA declared that it provided the sole source for federal surveillance in America for intelligence purposes.
FISA required that all domestic intelligence surveillance be authorized by a newly created court, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Since 1978, FISC has met in secret. Its records are unavailable to the public unless it determines otherwise, and it hears only from Department of Justice lawyers and National Security Agency personnel. There are no lawyers or witnesses to challenge the DOJ or the NSA.
Notwithstanding this handy constitutional novelty, the NSA quickly grew impatient with its monitors and began crafting novel arguments that were met with no resistance. Those arguments did away with the kind of particularized probable cause about targets of surveillance that the Constitution requires in favor of warrants based on the probability that someone somewhere in a given group could provide intelligence data helpful to national security, and because the FISC bought these arguments, the entire group could be spied upon. The FISC unleashed the NSA to spy on tens of millions of Americans.
That was still not enough for the nation's spies. So beginning in 2005, then-President George W. Bush permitted the NSA to interpret President Ronald Reagan's executive order 12333 so as to allow all spying on everyone in the U.S., all the time. The NSA and Bush took the position that because the president is constitutionally the commander in chief of the military and because the NSA is in the military, both the president and the NSA are lawfully independent of FISA.
The NSA does not acknowledge any of this, but we know from the Edward Snowden revelations and from the testimony of a former high-ranking NSA official who devised many of the NSA programs that this is so.
The NSA's use of FISC-issued warrants is only one of a half-dozen tools that the NSA uses, but it is the only tool that the NSA publicly acknowledges. FISC-issued warrants do not name a person as a suspect; they name a category. For example, it could be customers of Verizon, which includes 115 million people. It could be telephones and computers located at 721-725 Fifth Ave. in New York; that's Trump Tower. It could be all electronic devices in the 10036 ZIP code; that's midtown Manhattan.
When the NSA obtains a FISA warrant and captures a communication, the participants often mention a third person. The federal "minimization" statute requires the NSA to get a warrant before surveilling that third person. Last week, we learned that last month, the FISC rebuked the NSA for failing to minimize by continuing to surveil third parties to the sixth degree without warrants.
Here is an example of warrantless surveillance to the sixth degree. The NSA surveils A and B pursuant to a FISC-issued warrant; A and B discuss C; the NSA, without a warrant, surveils C talking to D; C mentions E, and D mentions F; the NSA surveils E and F without warrants, etc. This continues going out to six stops from the A-and-B conversation, even though this is prohibited by federal law. The final stop, which involves huge numbers of people, has been proved to have no connection whatsoever to the warrant issued for A and B, yet the NSA continues to spy there.
But it doesn't stop there. The Bush interpretation of EO 12333 is still followed by the NSA. Its logic -- "I am the commander in chief, and I'll do what I need to do to keep us safe, and the NSA can do what I permit" -- permits universal surveillance in flagrant violation of FISA and the Constitution. It was used to justify the surveillance of Donald Trump before he was inaugurated. It no doubt still is.
The availability of the information acquired by this massive spying is a serious threat to democracy. We know from the Susan Rice admissions that folks in the government can acquire intelligence-generated data -- emails, text messages, recordings of telephone conversations -- and use that data for political purposes. Just ask former Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn. And we know from recent tragedies in San Bernardino and Orlando, even Manchester, that the NSA is suffering from information overload. It has too much data to sift through because it does not focus on the bad guys until after the tragedies. Before the tragedies, it has no focus.
The now public rebuke of the NSA by the FISC is extraordinary, but it is also a farce. The FISC is virtually owned by the NSA. That court has granted 99.9 percent of requests made by the NSA since the court was created. Despite all the public revelations, the FISC looks the other way at non-FISC-authorized NSA spying. The judges of the FISC have become virtual clerks for the NSA. And the FISC has become an unconstitutional joke.
Where does all this leave us? It leaves us with a public recognition that we are the most spied-upon people in world history and that the president himself has been a victim. This fall, the NSA will ask Congress to reauthorize certain spying authorities that are due to expire at the end of the year. Congress needs to know just how unconstitutional, intrusive and fruitless all this spying has become.
Perhaps then Congress will write laws that are faithful to the Constitution -- and if so, maybe the folks empowered by those laws will follow them.
After the Watergate era had ended and Jimmy Carter was in the White House and the Senate's Church Committee had attempted to grasp the full extent of lawless government surveillance in America during the LBJ and Nixon years, Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. FISA declared that it provided the sole source for federal surveillance in America for intelligence purposes.
FISA required that all domestic intelligence surveillance be authorized by a newly created court, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Since 1978, FISC has met in secret. Its records are unavailable to the public unless it determines otherwise, and it hears only from Department of Justice lawyers and National Security Agency personnel. There are no lawyers or witnesses to challenge the DOJ or the NSA.
Notwithstanding this handy constitutional novelty, the NSA quickly grew impatient with its monitors and began crafting novel arguments that were met with no resistance. Those arguments did away with the kind of particularized probable cause about targets of surveillance that the Constitution requires in favor of warrants based on the probability that someone somewhere in a given group could provide intelligence data helpful to national security, and because the FISC bought these arguments, the entire group could be spied upon. The FISC unleashed the NSA to spy on tens of millions of Americans.
That was still not enough for the nation's spies. So beginning in 2005, then-President George W. Bush permitted the NSA to interpret President Ronald Reagan's executive order 12333 so as to allow all spying on everyone in the U.S., all the time. The NSA and Bush took the position that because the president is constitutionally the commander in chief of the military and because the NSA is in the military, both the president and the NSA are lawfully independent of FISA.
The NSA does not acknowledge any of this, but we know from the Edward Snowden revelations and from the testimony of a former high-ranking NSA official who devised many of the NSA programs that this is so.
The NSA's use of FISC-issued warrants is only one of a half-dozen tools that the NSA uses, but it is the only tool that the NSA publicly acknowledges. FISC-issued warrants do not name a person as a suspect; they name a category. For example, it could be customers of Verizon, which includes 115 million people. It could be telephones and computers located at 721-725 Fifth Ave. in New York; that's Trump Tower. It could be all electronic devices in the 10036 ZIP code; that's midtown Manhattan.
When the NSA obtains a FISA warrant and captures a communication, the participants often mention a third person. The federal "minimization" statute requires the NSA to get a warrant before surveilling that third person. Last week, we learned that last month, the FISC rebuked the NSA for failing to minimize by continuing to surveil third parties to the sixth degree without warrants.
Here is an example of warrantless surveillance to the sixth degree. The NSA surveils A and B pursuant to a FISC-issued warrant; A and B discuss C; the NSA, without a warrant, surveils C talking to D; C mentions E, and D mentions F; the NSA surveils E and F without warrants, etc. This continues going out to six stops from the A-and-B conversation, even though this is prohibited by federal law. The final stop, which involves huge numbers of people, has been proved to have no connection whatsoever to the warrant issued for A and B, yet the NSA continues to spy there.
But it doesn't stop there. The Bush interpretation of EO 12333 is still followed by the NSA. Its logic -- "I am the commander in chief, and I'll do what I need to do to keep us safe, and the NSA can do what I permit" -- permits universal surveillance in flagrant violation of FISA and the Constitution. It was used to justify the surveillance of Donald Trump before he was inaugurated. It no doubt still is.
The availability of the information acquired by this massive spying is a serious threat to democracy. We know from the Susan Rice admissions that folks in the government can acquire intelligence-generated data -- emails, text messages, recordings of telephone conversations -- and use that data for political purposes. Just ask former Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn. And we know from recent tragedies in San Bernardino and Orlando, even Manchester, that the NSA is suffering from information overload. It has too much data to sift through because it does not focus on the bad guys until after the tragedies. Before the tragedies, it has no focus.
The now public rebuke of the NSA by the FISC is extraordinary, but it is also a farce. The FISC is virtually owned by the NSA. That court has granted 99.9 percent of requests made by the NSA since the court was created. Despite all the public revelations, the FISC looks the other way at non-FISC-authorized NSA spying. The judges of the FISC have become virtual clerks for the NSA. And the FISC has become an unconstitutional joke.
Where does all this leave us? It leaves us with a public recognition that we are the most spied-upon people in world history and that the president himself has been a victim. This fall, the NSA will ask Congress to reauthorize certain spying authorities that are due to expire at the end of the year. Congress needs to know just how unconstitutional, intrusive and fruitless all this spying has become.
Perhaps then Congress will write laws that are faithful to the Constitution -- and if so, maybe the folks empowered by those laws will follow them.
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