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Obama Opens NSAs Vast Trove of Warrantless Data to Entire Intelligence Community, Just in Time for Trump
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of The Intercept
Posted: January 23rd, 2017
https://theintercept.com/2017/01/13/obama-opens-nsas-vast-tr...
The Obama administration on Thursday announced new rules that will let the NSA share vast amounts of private data gathered without warrant, court orders or congressional authorization with 16 other agencies, including the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Agency, and the Department of Homeland Security. The new rules allow ... those agencies to sift through raw data collected under a broad, Reagan-era executive order that gives the NSA virtually unlimited authority to intercept communications abroad. Previously, NSA analysts would filter out information they deemed irrelevant and mask the names of innocent Americans before passing it along. The last-minute adoption of the procedures is one of many examples of the Obama administration making new executive powers established by the Bush administration permanent, on the assumption that the executive branch could be trusted to police itself. Executive Order 12333 ... serves as authorization for the NSAs most massive surveillance programs. In 2014, a former state department official described NSA surveillance under 12333 as a universe of collection and storage beyond what Congress has authorized. This massive database inevitably includes vast amount of Americans communications swept up when they speak to people abroad, when they go abroad themselves, or even if their domestic communications are simply routed abroad. Thats why access was previously limited to data that had already been screened to remove unrelated information and information identifying U.S. persons.
Note: For an important viewpoint on the real complexities going on with recent reporting on Trump links to Russia, CIA involvement in Syria, and media manipulations, don't miss this provocative article by Glenn Greenwald and this interview he gave to Fox News. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles about intelligence agency corruption and the disappearance of privacy.