Back story: the alleged Trump phone tapping

You may have noticed that the Review has not written much about the alleged Trump phone tapping. The reason: following this sort of thing for over two decades, we have learned to be wary of such top level accounts. One reason: it's typically not a politician such as Obama who is involved, but an intelligence agency. The motivations for such invasions: everything from intelligence gathering to politics to blackmail. It's one of the grimmest stories of our time but one which the conventional media tenders to cover only superficially. Our best bet on the current story: Trump was tapped by NSA not Obama and it was going on long before Obama came into office. He's the kind of guy spooks like to follow. 

Global Research - Washington’s Blog asked the highest-level NSA whistleblower in history – Bill Binney – whether he thought Trump had been bugged. Binney is the NSA executive who created the agency’s mass surveillance program for digital information, who served as the senior technical director within the agency, who managed six thousand NSA employees.

He was a 36-year NSA veteran widely regarded as a “legend” within the agency and the NSA’s best-ever analyst and code-breaker.

Binney told Washington’s Blog:

NSA has all the data through the Upstream programs [background] and backed up by second and some third party country collection. Plus the FBI and CIA plus others, as of the last month of the Obama administration, have direct access to all the NSA collection (metadata and content on phones,email and banking/credit cards etc.) with no attempt at oversight by anybody [background]. This is all done under Executive Order 12333 [the order which allows unlimited spying no matter what intelligence officials claim] ….
FBI would only ask for a warrant if they wanted to be able to take it into court at some point given they have something meaningful as evidence. This is clearly true given the fact the President Trump’s phone conversations with other country leaders were leaked to the mainstream media.

In other words, Binney is saying that Trumps phones were bugged by the NSA without a warrant – remember, top NSA whistleblowers have previously explained that the NSA is spying on virtually all of the digital communications of Americans – and the NSA shared the raw data with the CIA, FBI and other agencies.

If the FBI obtained a warrant to tap Trump’s phone, it was a “parallel construction” to “launder” improperly-gained evidence through acceptable channels.

As we’ve previously explained:

The government is “laundering” information gained through mass surveillance through other agencies, with an agreement that the agencies will “recreate” the evidence in a “parallel construction” … so they don’t have to admit that the evidence came from unconstitutional spying. This data laundering is getting worse and worse.

So does it mean that the NSA spying on Trump Tower actually turned up some dirt?
Maybe … But history shows that mass surveillance has long been used to blackmail opponents … including high-level officials.  And see this.

And the former NSA director admitted that the mass surveillance is a power grab.
So we won’t know until the intelligence agencies actually show their cards … and reveal what evidence they’ve gathered.

Progressive Review, 1997 - An important story behind the story of Whitewater is the increasing role of intelligence agencies. It appears that the FBI, CIA and NSA are all involved with institutional agendas that greatly muddy an already complex saga. For example, some of the information concerning Chinese efforts to buy and exercise influence over American politics seems to have come from NSA intercepts of telephone calls carried out by listening posts such as those in England and New Zealand, which the agency uses to evade US wiretap laws.  

Progressive Review, 1998 - The NSA is tapping phones at an extraordinary rate on the pretext that violating constitutional rights is okay as long as you do it from a foreign monitoring station.

A story in the London Daily Telegraph confirms what TPR and a few other alternative news sources have been reporting for some time: that the National Security Agency routinely eavesdrops on telephone, e-mail and fax communications around the world. A recent report of the Civil Liberties Committee of the European Parliament notes that "within Europe all email telephone and fax communications are routinely intercepted by the United States National Security Agency transferring all target information from the European mainland by satellite to Fort Meade in Maryland via the crucial hub at Menwith Hill in the North York moors in the UK." The report continues:

"Unlike many of the electronic spy systems developed during the Cold War, ECHELON is designed primarily for non-military targets: governments, organizations and businesses in virtually every country. The ECHELON system works by indiscriminately intercepting very large quantities of communications and then siphoning out what is valuable using artificial intelligence aids like MEMEX to find key words."

The Daily Telegraph notes that:

"The NSA, the world's biggest and most powerful signals intelligence organization, received approval to set up a network of spy stations throughout Britain. Their role was to provide military, diplomatic and economic intelligence by intercepting communications from throughout the Northern Hemisphere. The NSA is one of the shadowiest of the US intelligence agencies."