An interesting hypothesis:
Another, less well-understood surveillance authority comes from a Reagan-era executive order known as 12333, or “twelve triple-three.”
EO 12333 — much of which is redacted — governs U.S. intelligence-gathering overseas. It has come under fire from civil liberties advocates, who say it gives the intelligence community a blank check to regulate its own spying.
Under the order’s signals intelligence procedures, the attorney general can authorize searches of communications to or from an American for the purposes of targeting that American — again, as long as the attorney general determines that person is an agent of a foreign power.
And under some changes made to the executive order in the waning days of the Obama administration — which had been in the works for the better part of a year — the National Security Agency (NSA) now uploads the stream of intercepted intelligence directly to searchable repository that other intelligence agencies can sift through.
The NSA has always had the capability to share information gathered under 12333 with other agencies — like the FBI, for example — but now it does so automatically, without monitoring the content first.
From what I am seeing in the article, most of 12333 is redacted, so although they are assuming it relates to foreign captured intelligence, it is not impossible that some redacted portions allow it to be used on domestic intelligence captured by listening posts overseas. It also would not surprise me if intelligence assets and officers in communications companies could, with a click of a mouse, reroute desirable domestic phone traffic to an overseas subsidiary’s node, and back to the US, for the explicit purpose of placing the data on foreign soil and bypassing domestic collection rules. This may even be the justification allowing foreign allies to conduct surveillance on domestic US targets, and then share the intelligence with US authorities. Since it is technically gathered overseas, it allows domestic spying on US Citizens absent any warrant, and with just AG approval.
The whole idea that Donald Trump, of all people, was a Russian mole always seemed both ridiculous and a very poorly constructed attempt at manipulation. Nobody would actually believe he was going to be Putin’s puppet. And the very idea of liberals trying to pretend they care about national security always seemed kind of laughable as well. After Clinton’s sellout of all our tech to China for campaign contributions, Candidate Kerry’s betrayal over Vietnam, and Obama’s anti-American globalism as he stabbed our allies in the back, the whole idea that suddenly the left was concerned with national security and patriotism seemed a unique mixture of preposterousness and phoniness. Perhaps the motive was not manipulating the electorate however, but rather to create a plausible legal justification to label President Trump a potential agent of a foreign power, for purposes of legally covering surveillance operations targeting him.
The moment a single newspaper ran the accusation, the Attorney General, leftist partisan Loretta Lynch, immediately had the authority to move the entire world of counter-intelligence spook-dom and surveillance onto the entire Trump campaign, and they didn’t need any court approval or oversight by any other agency, or approval by anyone else. All she had to do was say she believed it possible Donald Trump was an agent of a foreign power based on media accounts (media accounts the Obama Administration had planted itself). Then GCHQ could have grabbed all of Donald Trump’s team’s communications, and turned them over to the Obama administration, who could have processed them legally as lawful surveillance. Everything about the operation would be top-secret, but whatever they wanted leaked would be spread so widely through the intelligence apparatus there would be no telling where it leaked, once it became public.
Again, Trump needs to put a high priority on rooting out the Obama plants in that intel apparatus, and replacing them with his own people, with an eye to taking control of the machine. Until that happens, he will have a lot of very smart people gathering intelligence and plotting on how to overthrow his administration.
Spread r/K Theory, because for every American spy monitoring you, a foreign spy will hear about it as well
