Sharyl Attkisson

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Support for lawsuit to fight government computer intrusion

Thanks to Thomas Lifson and American Thinker for supporting Attkisson v. DOJ/FBI fighting against the government's computer intrusions.

"I am one of the signatories to a GoFundMe appeal to Americans for financial support of Sharyl Attkisson’s lawsuit against the Department of Justice over spying on her computer that took place following her honest reporting on activities of the Obama administration.  This is a clear violation of the Fourth Amendment's protections..."

Read more: https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/11/sharyl_attkisson_needs_your_support.html#ixzz5Ww89kBvI

Link to Attkisson Fourth Amendment Litigation Fund:

https://www.gofundme.com/sharyl-attkisson-4th-am-litigation[hr]

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Attkisson v. DOJ/FBI Fourth Amendment Litigation Fund

 

 

Give Back Acosta's White House Pass (along with Rules of Engagement)

There’s a long history of tensions between some members of the press and some U.S. presidents. And numerous examples of payback.

President Nixon nixed the Washington Post from the White House after the newspaper broke the Watergate story. The New York Times claimed it was denied a seat on Vice President Dick Cheney’s plane. President Obama declared war on Fox News, and booted from his campaign plane reporters from three newspapers that had endorsed his opponent, Republican John McCain.

When it comes to White House briefings, there are traditions and practices. President Reagan called on raised hands. President Obama was said to stick religiously to calling on a pre-prepared list of reporters’ names, in order. Some reporters have attended White House briefings for years without ever being called upon; some get called upon almost every time. UPI reporter Helen Thomas covered 10 presidential administrations, starting with John F. Kennedy, and nearly always got the first question, as a matter of tradition; often, her question was ornery or challenging. (She retired in 2010 after making comments viewed as anti-Semitic.)

Preferential front-row seats used to be reserved exclusively for network reporters. Little bronze tags were affixed to the chairs; “CBS,” “ABC” or “NBC,” they read. Nobody else dared sit there. The networks liked that; other reporters, not so much. (Continued)

Read the rest of my article in The Hill

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/416213-give-back-acostas-white-house-pass-along-with-rules-of-engagement

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The Surveillance State-- it's here.

Maybe you once thought the CIA wasn’t supposed to spy on Americans here in the United States.

That concept is so yesteryear.

Over time, the CIA upper echelon has secretly developed all kinds of policy statements and legal rationales to justify routine, widespread surveillance on U.S. soil of citizens who aren’t suspected of terrorism or being a spy.

The latest outrage is found in newly declassified documents from 2014. They reveal the CIA not only intercepted emails of U.S. citizens but they were emails of the most sensitive kind — written to Congress and involving whistleblowers reporting alleged wrongdoing within the Intelligence Community.

The disclosures, kept secret until now, are two letters of “congressional notification” from the Intelligence Community inspector general at the time, Charles McCullough. He stated that during “routine counterintelligence monitoring of government computer systems,” the CIA collected emails between congressional staff and the CIA’s head of whistleblowing and source protection.

McCullough added that he was concerned about the CIA’s “potential compromise to whistleblower confidentiality and the consequent ‘chilling effect’ that the present [counterintelligence] monitoring system might have on Intelligence Community whistleblowing.”... (continued)

Read the rest of the story in The Hill.

https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/414804-surveillance-state-is-alive-well-and-operating-against-us-all

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New cholesterol guidelines and questions about drug company influence

New cholesterol and heart disease guidelines are about to come out for the first time in several years. Sunday on Full Measure, we'll investigate the controversy over past national guidelines which, we learned after the fact, were written by a lot of doctors compensated by the makers of cholesterol-lowering statin drugs. As it happens, the guidelines basically say millions more Americans should take statins. Some researchers argue there’s a serious conflict of interest there-- and in the writing of other national health guidelines. We'll dig into the Statin Wars.

[hr]Brazilians have elected a new President-- some call him Brazil's version of Donald Trump. Jonathan Elias reports from Brazil on why a nation in crisis is taking a right political turn.

[hr]Lisa Fletcher looks at greyhound racing which may be on its last legs in Florida depending on a vote Tuesday. Critics say the sport is cruel to the animals, which can be injured or mistreated. Supporters say it provides a livelihood of thousands of Floridians.

[hr]Original reporting you won't see anywhere else! We won't waste your time rehashing news you've already seen all week.

[hr]Watch us on TV or replays online anytime, livestream Sundays at 9:30a ET www.fullmeasure.news

More original stories you won’t see anywhere else. Watch on TV or online at www.fullmeasure.news!

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CIA secretly intercepted Congressional communications about whistleblowers

  • CIA intercepted Congressional emails about whistleblowers in 2014
  • The Inspector General expressed concern about "potential compromise to whistleblower confidentiality" and "chilling effect"

Newly-declassified documents show the CIA intercepted sensitive Congressional communications about intelligence community whistleblowers.

The intercepts occurred under CIA Director John Brennan and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. The new disclosures are contained in two letters of “Congressional notification” originally written to key members of Congress in March 2014, but kept secret until now.

In the letters, then-Intelligence Community Inspector General Charles McCullough tells four key members of Congress that during “routine counterintelligence monitoring of Government computer systems,” the CIA collected emails between Congressional staff and the CIA’s head of whistleblowing and source protection. McCullough states that he’s concerned “about the potential compromise to whistleblower confidentiality and the consequent ‘chilling effect’ that the present [counterintelligence] monitoring system might have on Intelligence Community whistleblowing.”

The idea that the CIA would monitor communications of U.S. government officials, including those in the legislative branch, is itself controversial. But in this case, the CIA picked up some of the most sensitive emails between Congress and intelligence agency workers blowing the whistle on alleged wrongdoing.

John Brennan, former Obama CIA Director and Homeland Security Adviser

“Most of these emails concerned pending and developing whistleblower complaints,” McCullough states in his letters to lead Democrats and Republicans on the House and Senate Intelligence Committees at the time: Senators Dianne Feinstein (D-California) and Saxby Chambliss (R-Georgia); and Representatives Michael Rogers (R-Michigan) and Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Maryland). McCullough adds that the type of monitoring that occurred was “lawful and justified for [counterintelligence] purposes” but [quote]“I am not confident that Congressional staff fully understood that their whistleblower-related communications with my Executive Director of whistleblowing might be reviewed as a result of routine [CIA counterintelligence] monitoring.”--Intelligence Community Inspector General 2014[/quote]

The disclosures from 2014 were released late Thursday by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa). “The fact that the CIA under the Obama administration was reading Congressional staff’s emails about intelligence community whistleblowers raises serious policy concerns as well as potential Constitutional separation-of-powers issues that must be discussed publicly,” wrote Grassley in a statement.

According to Grassley, he originally began trying to have the letters declassified more than four years ago but was met with “bureaucratic foot-dragging, led by Brennan and Clapper.”

James Clapper, former Obama Director of National Intelligence

Grassley adds that he repeated his request to declassify the letters under the Trump administration, but that Trump intelligence officials failed to respond. The documents were finally declassified this week after Grassley appealed to the new Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson.

History of alleged surveillance abuses

Back in 2014, Senators Grassley and Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) had asked then-Director of National Intelligence Clapper about the possibility of the CIA monitoring Congressional communications. A Congressional staffer involved at the time says Clapper’s response seemed to imply that if Congressional communications were “incidentally” collected by the CIA, the material would not be saved or reported up to CIA management.

“In the event of a protected disclosure by a whistleblower somehow comes to the attention of personnel responsible for monitoring user activity,” Clapper wrote to Grassley and Wyden on July 25, 2014, “there is no intention for such disclosure to be reported to agency leadership under an insider threat program.”

However, the newly-declassified letters indicate the opposite happened in reality with the whistleblower-related emails: “CIA security compiled a report that include excerpts of… whistleblower-related communications and this reports was eventually shared with… the Director of the Office of Security and the Chief of the Counterintelligence Center” who “briefed the CIA Deputy Director, Deputy Executive Director, and the Chiefs of Staff for both the CIA Director and the Deputy Director.”

Clapper has previously come under fire for his 2013 testimony to Congress in which he denied that the national Security Agency (NSA) collects data on millions of Americans. Weeks later, Clapper’s statement was proven false by material leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

“During Director Clapper’s tenure, senior intelligence officials engaged in a deception spree regarding mass surveillance,” said Wyden upon Clapper’s retirement in 2016. “Top officials, officials who reported to Director Clapper, repeatedly misled the American people and even lied to them.”

Clapper has repeatedly denied lying, and said that any incorrect information he provided was due to misunderstandings or mistakes.

Clapper and Brennan have also acknowledged taking part in the controversial practice of “unmasking” the protected names of U.S. citizens— including people connected to then-presidential candidate Donald Trump— whose communications were “incidentally” captured in US counterintelligence operations. Unmaskings within the U.S intelligence community are supposed to be extremely rare and only allowed under carefully justified circumstances. This is to protect the privacy rights of American citizens. But it's been revealed that Obama officials requested unmaskings on a near daily basis during the election year of 2016.

Clapper and Brennan have said their activities were lawful and not politically motivated. Both men have become vocal critics of President Trump.[hr]

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What it really means to "Think outside the box."

If a man from Mars came to America and sampled information on the internet and on the news, he might reach some pretty firm conclusions about our society. We might appear universally violent, polarized, racist and more.

But if that same Martian instead were to travel the United States, minus that information flow, he might reach entirely different conclusions. He’d see some big problems, to be sure. But he’d observe the vast majority of Americans living, working, playing and going to school together in relative harmony, day in and day out...

The stark difference in impressions might be explained, in part, by the manipulatable nature of what I refer to as “The Box”— information we receive on the news, online, and through social media. In recent years, I’ve researched and reported on the industry that works on behalf of various paid interests to control information within The Box. They do so with assistance from PR groups, think tanks, social media, lobby groups, law firms, nonprofits, letters to the editor, blogs, LLCs, SuperPACs, politicians, Hollywood, news reporters and even comedians... (continued)

Read the rest of my column in The Hill:

https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/413589-this-is-what-it-really-means-to-think-outside-the-box [hr]

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