I urge you to read this article entitled Obama’s Rule Changes Opened Door for NSA Intercepts of Americans to Reach Political Hands.

Here is a link to Executive Order 12333.  Pay particular attention to Section 2.3, Collection of Information.

Here is the document that Obama approved just before he left office.  It amends E.O. 12333, primarily Section 2.3.  This document expands the number of people who can be given permission to view raw signals intelligence (SIGINT) information.

The result of expanding that list is to make it more difficult to find and prosecute persons who unlawfully and without authorization disseminate SIGINT, some of the most sensitive information the US Intelligence Community handles.   Thus, it is highly probable that sensitive information about political candidates will find its way into the hands of those candidates’ opponents.

OpenCdA has two questions:

(1) Why did our elected representatives in Congress allow this to happen?  (Answer:  Complacency, cowardice, and incompetence)

(2) Why did our supposed news media not cover this subversion of the national security by President Obama as closely as it has covered President Trump’s trips to Mara Lago? (Answer:  Complicity and incompetence)

When OpenCdA reviewed our local legislators’ voting records on the Idaho Legislature’s House Bill 67 (that’s the ‘repeal the grocery tax’ bill that Governor Otter has indicated he might veto), the monochrome image of the stars of our favorite television program of the 1950’s popped into our small mind.

Striking similarities, aren’t they?

If the recent penetration of the White House grounds and the theft of a laptop computer with sensitive security and investigative information are an accurate indication of the present security awareness and readiness of the US Secret Service, then once again a major reevaluation of the organization is needed.

First, the protective mission of the Secret Service needs to be restated with renewed emphasis.  “Gunshot mentality” must be culturally replaced with “Secure environment mentality.”  It was supposed to happen after the Warren Commission report, but complacency dies hard.

Second, the present Secret Service Director must be replaced with someone from outside the Secret Service.  In addition to all of the administrative and management knowledge, skills, and abilities taxpayers would expect in a 21st century chief executive law enforcement officer, the new Director must also have a very strong and extensive experiential background in counterintelligence.  The new Director should come with extensive experience from a counterintelligence component inside the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Defense Department (DoD), or Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).   OpenCdA’s preference would be to select a new Director from the DoD.

The two recent incidents linked above and others that preceded them are clear indicators that some of the more sensitive findings of the September 24, 1964, President’s Commission to Report Upon the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy (Warren Commission) were not fully culturally embraced by the US Secret Service.  The various Congressional committees examining the recent performance of the US Secret Service needs to look back at all those findings including those still under the seal of secrecy. (more…)

Did someone in the Obama administration either with or contrary to statutory authority order some form of technical interception to acquire information being passed through or stored on telecommunications systems or equipment in the Trump Tower in New York during the time that now-President Trump was Candidate Trump or Nominee Trump?

That was a mouthful.  That may be why President Trump use some variation of the simpler but much broader term ‘wiretap’ in his March 4 Twitter messages.   Unfortunately, ‘wiretap’ means different things to different people.

‘Wiretap’ was romanticized in the radio dramas and movies of the 30’s and since.   It meant using a simple device such as a telephone lineman’s handset (buttset) or an audio amplifier and headphones attached to a telephone line to listen and maybe record the people talking to each other on the line.  Their conversations were analog, not digitized, and there was almost always only one conversation at a time on each line.

As telecommunications technology evolved to include more than analog communications and to pass data in addition to voice audio, the term ‘wiretap’ became less and less accurate, less precise, to describe an array of wire and non-wire audio and non-audio interceptions, usually nonconsensual.    We’d go so far as to say that in 2017, it has become too imprecise to have much meaning at all in either law or technical surveillance.

OpenCdA wishes that President Trump’s staff (especially Press Secretary Sean Spicer), the Capitol Hill Clowns , and the remarkably inept skews media had directly asked President Trump what he meant when he accused former President Obama of directing a  ‘wiretap’ on his phone lines at the Trump Tower in Manhattan.

Apparently, they didn’t ask or he chose not to explain what he meant.

Moments after the conclusion of today’s press conference with President Trump,  the official White House photographer snapped this photo of the White House press leaving the north grounds.

President Trump, like many other people including former President Obama, members of Congress, and the supposedly educated but woefully ignorant skews media, persist in referring to the unauthorized disclosure of national security information as “leaks” or “leaking.”  Using those terms carelessly trivialize a very serious criminal act.

The Memorial Wall at NSA Headquarters identify 176 of our fellow citizens who have died protecting the integrity of signals intelligence or the sources and methods used to gather it so that the rest of us may live our lives comfortably and safely.

OpenCdA urges our three or four readers to read the February 14, 2017, column by Bloomberg View writer Eli Lake.   Mr. Lake titled his column “The Political Assassination of Michael Flynn” .   Please pay particular attention to the last paragraphs beginning at paragraph 7 which reads:

Normally intercepts of U.S. officials and citizens are some of the most tightly held government secrets. This is for good reason. Selectively disclosing details of private conversations monitored by the FBI or NSA gives the permanent state the power to destroy reputations from the cloak of anonymity. This is what police states do.

General Michael Flynn was asked to resign as President Trump’s national security adviser because the partial transcript of an intercepted telephone conversation between General Flynn and the Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak was provided to persons not authorized to reveal its contents to anyone else.  General Flynn was not even permitted to see the transcript, so he could hardly affirm or refute its accuracy and completeness.

Yet some people who had lawful access to the transcript decided that using the information for political expediency was more important than national security.   Those people who unlawfully revealed partial details of the Flynn-Kislyak conversation for personal and political gain betrayed more than the public trust; they dishonored the memories of all those who have served honorably in service to the United States.

OpenCdA hopes that Attorney General Sessions and his Acting Assistant Attorney General for National Security have already convened a federal grand jury under the authority of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).   This unauthorized release of extremely sensitive national security signals intelligence must be investigated for the purpose of pursuing criminal prosecutions against all violators including elected and appointed officials as well as members of the skews media.

Given the limited distribution of signals intelligence (telecommunications) interceptions permitted by law and the stringent documentation associated with access to each interception (see my July 14, 2016, post “It’s a Bigot List“), we hope that every person who was given unauthorized access will be subpoenaed and compelled to give grand jury testimony under oath.     It will not be a complicated investigation.

Regardless, we hope that from the resignation of General Michael Flynn, arrogant politicians and ignorant skews media members as well as private citizens will better appreciate the importance of safeguarding national security information.

We are not a police state.  Yet.