Six ways we were blind to screaming red flags about government surveillance

Election year red flags: Following sporadic reports of intelligence officials misleading Congress about surveilling U.S. citizens — even spying on journalists and political figures and their staffs — there was a series of red flags in 2016 and 2017 that should have drawn attention and action. Some of the same intelligence officials who we now know wanted to keep President Trump from winning the White House apparently modified rules to make it easier to share and leak intelligence involving innocent U.S. citizens (including people connected to the Trump campaign). Obama administration requests reached a crescendo to “unmask” the identities of Americans whose private information supposedly was collected “incidentally” during the monitoring of other targets. There was a long stream of leaks of intelligence information to the media that was harmful to Trump — some of it true, some not — by anonymous sources. Government insider searches of a key NSA database suspiciously peaked. Former top intelligence officials were hired as analysts, appearing on TV almost daily to make anti-Trump claims and accusations that sometimes proved wildly false.

FBI Director Christopher Wray: As I have written, FBI Director Christopher Wray falsely testified to Congress that there have been no 702 surveillance abuses. Surprisingly, nobody questioned him about this incorrect claim, even though many documented abuses are in the public record. If the head of this important agency either doesn’t know about surveillance abuses or knows of them and is being misleading, it doesn’t bode well for the notion that he can (or will) clean things up.

ConservativeChick