Obama's Team Secretly Conducted Illegal Searches for Years

More examples of Obama overreach coming to light. The argument against such overreach was not only that it was intrinsically bad, but that it set an awful precedent should someone like a Donald Trump get elected. Well, a Donald Trump got elected, and this kind of stuff is part of the toolkit Obama handed him.

http://circa.com/politics/barack-obamas-team-secretly-disclosed-years-of-illegal-nsa-searches-spying-on-americans

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So the administration claimed this was legal under the relaxed rules, and the NSA self reporting and the FISA court said it wasn’t. My bet is the attorney general will let this slide and not pursue an investigation. Neither party wants all this out in the open and they certainly don’t want to lose this new toy.

This information hits my confirmation bias so hard I’m inclined not to believe it. The government was granted extraordinary powers and the pols promised those powers would be used appropriately and not abused… Who’s surprised?

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I think we’re starting to see what the long term effect (fallout) will be from the passing of the Patriot Act…

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Almost every President has tried to extend the power of the Executive Branch, usually only a little but sometimes by quite a lot (FDR, GWB). Even Presidents who claimed to be running against a strong central government did this (Jefferson being the first of many). The only President I know of who actually tried to give power back to Congress was Ike, and Congress didn’t want it because more power would mean more responsibility and that would take time away from fund raising and their focus on what their own districts and states want.

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Not disagreeing. But this article is throwing the word illegal around quite a bit. There are two issues for me.

  1. Excess surveillance and government power. We need to cram the genie back in that bottle, even if it means tearing down and rebuilding the NSA/CIA/FBI.

  2. Did the administration break the law with this unmasking of thousands of citizens? If so do we prosecute people or just censure them and move on like nothing happened? This wasn’t clear from what I’ve read.

I’ve never read Circa before but I’m guessing since @thunderbolt23 linked it that it’s not a breitbart type site. This story should be front page evwrywhere, but people generally don’t seem to care all that much.

I agree. I wonder why it’s not?

Hmm…

Unfuckingbelievable.

Why did we have to have these two back-to-back? Why?

And the left wing media pretends that this is just not important as they keep chasing the illusive Trump/Russia connection.

If it were not so pathetic it would be funny.

Why would we blame a republican controlled POTUS, SCOTUS, and Congress for failing to investigate this when we can pretend like the media has more power amirite?!

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The entire government has a vested interest in keeping this capability. Politicians rarely relinquish a power once the have it.

The public just doesn’t seem to care. They didn’t care about the patriot act. They don’t care about social media sites and everything else collecting their data. Privacy is boring and passe.

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Agreed. But let’s not pretend the reason the public doesn’t care is because of the media. It’s because a worthless % of politicians on either side care about this issue, and have no intention of changing anything.

The people have decided they don’t care, and as a result the media doesn’t care, not the other way around.

True the public didn’t know because of the media. And if the media had run the thousands of stories on it as it has done for the Trump Russian nonsense…well…never mind.

Have a good day pfury.

How did you find out about it if not for the media?

Assuming you don’t have a CIA source and actually found this info from the media, the public DOES know because of the media, and borderline ONLY because of the media.

If you ponder on that question long enough, you’ll find the answer. Below you’ll find a wholly unconnected image, perhaps it will provide inspiration.

https://media.townhall.com/townhall/reu/ha/uploads/2015/8/25/21.jpg

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Point made. More than adequately. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.