Obama's NSA Illegally Surveilled Americans for Years

More information has come to light revealing the degree to which Barack Obama and his administration violated protocols designed to protect Americans from unlawful government surveillance. Conveniently, in October of last year, just two weeks before the election, in a closed-door hearing before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the Obama administration self-disclosed that since 2011 the National Security Agency had routinely violated Americans' privacy rights in failing to meet privacy protection standards.

This disclosure of protocol violations was significant enough that even the FISA court called it a "very serious Fourth Amendment issue." So how bad was the problem? Well, according a story from Circa, "More than 5 percent, or one out of every 20 searches seeking upstream Internet data on Americans inside the NSA's so-called Section 702 database violated the safeguards Obama and his intelligence chiefs vowed to follow in 2011." In 2011, Obama loosened privacy rules, which precipitated a three-fold increase in the number of NSA data searches as well as unmasking of Americans. In other words, Obama worked to make it easier to surveil and collect data on Americans, contrary to the claims of his former national security advisor, Susan Rice. (And she knows a thing or two about lying and unmasking.)

On Wednesday, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) warned, "If we determine this to be true, this is an enormous abuse of power. This will dwarf all other stories." Even the leftist American Civil Liberties Union blasted the report, with the ACLU's legislative counsel Neema Singh Guliani stating, "I think what this emphasizes is the shocking lack of oversight of these programs. You have these problems going on for years that only come to the attention of the court late in the game and then it takes additional years to change its practices." She continued, "I think it does call into question all those defenses that we kept hearing, that we always have a robust oversight structure and we have culture of adherence to privacy standards. And the headline now is they actually haven't been in compliance for years and the FISA court itself says in its opinion is that the NSA suffers from a culture of a lack of candor."