Sloan: FISA court critical of spying on Americans

I will be very surprised if you hear this story on any of the liberal networks or cable news outlets exposing the fact that American’s have been spied on far, far more than we knew about during President Obama’s administration. Under the guise of foreign intelligence gathering we have learned that the National Security Agency (NSA) was not only abusing our Fourth Amendment rights that protect us from unlawful search and seizure but had done so on a scale that brought a very sharp rebuke from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (the FISA Court) in top-secret documents recently made public. The FISA Court censured Obama administration officials for their failure to disclose the extent of their violations and lack of candor in very serious Fourth Amendment issues.

The Democrats who are in near convulsions about possible Russian hacking seem totally unconcerned that our own country was spying on American citizens. The recently released documents show how the Obama administration twisted section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act designed to monitor terrorist suspects overseas to spy on Americans. We can now more fully understand how Susan Rice used her position and access as National Security Adviser to the President to not only monitor communications but if Americans were inadvertently mentioned their names were to be masked to protect their identity. It was Susan Rice who chose to un-mask certain Americans if she felt there was a political advantage to her actions, especially if they had any association with the Trump campaign.


 The unmasking requests granted by NSA to the Obama administration tripled in 2016 – an election year. Coincidence, I’m sure! Susan Rice argues that what she did was legal but the intelligence court and the NSA’s own rules seem to contradict her opinion.

So how did these revelations finally become public? The information was declassified recently (May 11, 2017) by the director of National Intelligence detailing the abuses and the FISA Court’s censure in January of 2016 these violations were disclosed in a report generated from NSA’s inspector general. Later, on September 21, 2016 the Obama administration submitted an undisclosed number of certifications for the court to review. This review was to be finished by October 26, 2016. Two days before the review was to be completed and less than two weeks before the presidential election, the Obama administration informed the court in a closed meeting that NSA analysts had been violating rules established in 2011 to protect internet communications of Americans. Apparently even the FBI violated their own internal privacy-protecting rules. The FBI acknowledged to a FISA judge last month that they illegally shared raw intelligence with unauthorized third parties and also accessing intercepted attorney-client privileged communications minus the proper oversight the FBI promised was in place years ago.


This story will hopefully continue to unfold as Congress, armed with these revelations, will delve deeper into these illegal actions and then seek to build in more future protections for Americans. What adds to my concerns are what happened to the congressional oversight of NSA and the FISA Court’s critical critique of what NSA and the FBI was doing ? How can the FISA Court find such abuses of our Fourth Amendment rights and the Congress not know or not be extremely concerned about illegal spying on Americans ? It appears that Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky was rightly concerned about Americans, including himself, being spied upon. Attempted Russian, Chinese, Iranian spying on American persons and entities is to be expected by our intelligence agencies, but we should never have to worry about our own government doing the same to us.