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Senator Accuses CIA of Snooping On Intelligence Committee Computers
An anonymous reader writes "Sen. Feinstein, head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, publicly accused the CIA of inappropriately searching computers used by her committee, violating presidential directives, federal laws and the Fourth Amendment. The computers in question were provided by the CIA at an undisclosed CIA location for use by the members of the intelligence committee. When the committee staff received internal documents the CIA had not officially provided, the agency examined the computers used by the committee and removed the unauthorized documents. The action has been referred to the Justice Department for possible prosecution."
There were rumors of such a few weeks ago, and now it's official. Read the transcript of her speech.
This is the same Senator who crys "terrorists!" whenever people suggest reining in NSA surveillance of regular citizens.
I have sympathy for her, and her arguments against being spied upon. Why does she not have sympathy for us, and for our arguments against being spied upon?
And she said that the CIA appears to have violated the Fourth Amendment, which bars unreasonable searches and seizures, as well as various federal laws and a presidential executive order that prevents the agency from conducting domestic searches and surveillance.
I don't think she even realizes how hypocritical she is. Surveillance and secrecy are all cool, unless they happen to apply to her. Then it is her -- "Fourth Amendment!"
That asshole's name is Dianne Feinstein, a staunchly pro-NSA, pro-BIG BROTHER senator.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
... Senator Feinstein has significantly less technological prowess than my cat, and has exhibited this on numerous occasions.
Excuse me for a moment while I savor this moment.
I have sympathy for her
I have absolutely no sympathy for that piece of shit.
She's a typical example of what is wrong with the government of the United States of America.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Feinstein is Chair on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence! That she doesn't know what the CIA, NSA, or anyone else is doing with regard to surveillance, or is kept out of the loop on purpose, or hasn't pulled any muscle to reign it in, speaks volumes to what exactly her position in the committee does.
Quick jab... but sure as hell, when it comes to copyright and the media cartels, her power seems endless.
As I read it, the CIA searched their own computers that were made available to the Senate Committee, looking for documents that were not supposed to be made available or publicly released. For whatever reason (probably a CIA screw-up) someone on the committee found those documents and blabbed about them.
Feinstein's complaint is that the CIA wasn't supposed to monitor what the committee was looking at on those computers. It sounds like she has a reasonable complaint, but given the amount of hysteria around leaks these days it doesn't surprise me that the CIA thought they had a bigger problem than just one of their own inadvertently releasing documents that should not have been.
I say it's time to double-down
You gotta understand that assholes like Dianne Feinstein doesn't think like us.
She thinks she's in the 0.1% elite, and for that, she ought to have the immunity from the same BIG BROTHER that she has thrown her support for.
As for us, asshole Feinstein look at us as if we are peons, slaves for the elites, that we do not have any right to enjoy the protection granted by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and that we ought to be stripped of everything, and kow-tow to her and her kinds.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
And here we are told that the CIA only spies on other nations and not within the US. I will say that her position is such that an enemy who turned her would have a serious advantage and therefore she does need deep investigation as a matter of national security as do all others involved in the intelligence community. The catch is that the CIA is not the org that is supposed to do this sort of thing. Just maybe this world is so dangerous that all of this spying needs to be going on. Maybe I am lucky in not knowing the evil going on around me.
Your rights are only important when they're also my rights.
I hope I never live in a world where you can't even trust the CIA to be honest with you.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
And so the NRA's smear campaign continues to influence idiots like you
I am a card carrying member of both the NRA and the ACLU.
I am an American who treasure the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and am willing to do anything and everything to protect my country from traitors such as that asshole Feinstein.
If doing so makes me an "idiot", so be it, and I hope that America has more "idiots" like me than "geniuses" such as your kind.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Let's see ... you're investigating potential war crimes perpetrated by the CIA, so you store all of the records of the investigation on an air-gapped computer system located at a CIA facility in Virginia. What could possibly go wrong?
I see now.
Well, the ironic thing is that the spying was on the committee who are supposed to oversee and authorize the spies. The committee can hardly effectively oversee the spying when they are turned into a target of spying themselves.
And we keep re-electing these scoundrels, why, exactly?
Well, the ironic thing is that the spying was on the populace who are supposed to oversee and authorize the government. The populace can hardly effectively oversee the government when they are turned into a target of spying themselves.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Feinstein is a liar and has mislead the American people on countless occasions about NSA spying and has been in lock step with the emerging police state. this is a distraction from the real constitutional violations that she has been complicit in covering up.
She deserves every insult, every invective and our complete contempt. And even more so for this latest charade and false indignation. If anything this just shows that not even the CIA respects her.
Any other questions?
Because she - being a very wealthy Senator - is more equaler than the rest of us.
Though one must convert all output to PETSCII
From what I read you're misreading it. The CIA agreed to put a bunch of its own stuff on its own computers for the Senate to look at, under the written agreement that they would let the Senate do its investigation without interference. Apparently, at one point they (the CIA and apparently 3rd party public contractors) started removing documents from the secure computers in violation of that agreement. That was what you were referring to, and that alone would be the CIA searching and hiding stuff from the Senate in violation of a written agreement (and several laws, mentioned at the end of the speech).
However, the issue went further after that first incident was "resolved". At one point, the CIA included a report it had made about the same topics that the Senate was investigating on those computers. Those papers were printed, removed from the CIA room and taken in a secure fashion to the committee offices, per exactly what they were allowed to do. The CIA then, allegedly, and if I read it right (I only read it once), decided to break into the committee computers and removed the documents. Again, there are a list of laws and constitutional provisions that this would have potentially violated mentioend at the end of the speech.
Again, I read this quickly and only once, so if I got a detail wrong someone else might correct me. Also, I should mention that given James Clapper's blatant lying to congress re: NSA spying, it doesn't seem like any consequences come with giving the legislature a big fuck off.
The ACLU isn't anti second amendment. They just don't actively support that particular civil liberty.
Both the NRA and the ACLU are pro-civil liberty organizations. Between them, they support (as much as realistically possible) the whole constitution. The NRA is the United States oldest civil liberty organization.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Regardless of the hypocrisy of Feinstein, this turn of events needed to be made public.
The CIA did something wrong. The Senate opened an investigation. The CIA accidentally sent them incriminating information, then deleted some after it had already been reviewed. The CIA agreed not to delete any more, then did it again. The Senate put some of this incriminating information into their official report and moved evidence to a secure location. The CIA didn't much care for that and started an investigation into how they got it, trumped up accusations of criminal conduct and have refused to accept the legitimate oversight role of the Senate. Hate Feinstein all you want, but don't dismiss this illegitimate action by the CIA because she's no angel herself.
Hot Damn! It's the Soggy Bottom Boys!
For those that didn't read the article, there are a few important points to clarify:
Feinstein's staff is being (falsely) accused of hacking/spying on CIA since they got their hands on some documents the CIA did not want them to have: namely the CIA's own internal investigation of the documents being released to the senate investigation. It seems like the "search tool" provided to the senate staff picked up more than the CIA thought it would. The staffers smartly made their own copy of these docs (as previous evidence had disappeared) and then the CIA did a search of the investigations computers without seemingly any authority to do so.
The final twist is that the CIA internal investigation supposedly agrees with the senate investigation, while publically the CIA disagrees. Feinstein basically has them over a barrel, plus they pushed their luck to try and escape the trap and got themselves in deeper with the potentially highly illegal search.
It also seems likely that the CIA lawyer who allowed all the CIA torture is heavily involved now in trying to save his own ass.
Complexity Happens
At the outset, let's look at the moral of the story: You can't trust spies or spy agencies. Especially not the way the Senator has consistently told us we should trust the NSA.
The "CIA computers" were part of a document production system provided by the CIA pursuant to a Senate Committee subpoena. It contained CIA documents responsive to the Senate subpoena in electronic form instead of paper copies. The document depository was run by private contractors. That's not really that unusual.
Apparently, when the CIA found out they had turned over to the Senate Committee a CIA draft report that was particularly harmful to the CIA's position, the draft report "disappeared" from the computerised document depository. The senior Senator from California believes the CIA caused it to disappear.
It's like erasing portions of White House tapes that had been subpoenaed a la Nixon. Just because it was done by the CIA doesn't mean it was spying, merely criminal tampering with a federal investigation. That's all.
Trust the CIA and the NSA. They will never over-reach or break the law.
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain with all your metadata.
Unfortunately. People are either stupid or easily influenced. Part of it is probably the propaganda bombardment they get during and leading up to elections. Hell politicians don't even bother with that anymore, they campaign 100% of the time now.
I have a friend who I would consider otherwise intelligent, however I could not believe his political leanings. Basically voting against his best interests. Political parties also seem to tend to create these fictional realities that people buy into. Ideologies that they proport, but never really live up to. I think the big problem is, anyone that closely follows politics would easily see through the lies, however most are so disinterested in politics, so apathetic about their vote being more less meaningless, that most don't vote, and those that do don't really pay enough attention to even make an informed decision. Also there are social status that comes into play, voting for Conservatives/Republicans means you must be part of the wealthy elite (even though your really not).
Anyway I mean the guy in question is in a Union, and when I said that voting for Conservatives in Canada was counter to his best interests because they are anti-union he didn't believe me. His impression was that the Conservatives loved Unions and they had never ever done anything to Unions in the past. Some of the first things they did once elected were to break several Unions and force settlements, all under the guise of "for the sake of the economy" etc...
Anyway I know a few that are informed, and swing Conservative because they believe in certain factual things, which I can respect, however most seem to just spit ideology and rhetoric, most of which is meaningless as fed to them, and seem more than happy to vomit it up over anyone else close enough to listen.
Also not to generalize, but Old People. They tend to pay about as much attention (which is none), however are much more dangerous because most of them do vote. Most of them vote very consistently, and will proudly say that they have been Conservative for 30 years. Never mind that the Conservative party they are used to voting for has little resemblance to the one that exists today. They are not voting for someone, or something, but an idea of what they think a party is. Which is why in a rather cynical move the Conservatives apparently amended a bill recently to attempt to reduce the number of younger voters (as they more often than not do not vote Conservative). Anyway haven't really looked up the details for that one yet, but I wouldn't doubt it given their past machinations.
You're right. And talk about the Fourth Amendment is entirely inappropriate in this context.
Correct. She got it wrong here: this is not a 4th Amendment fact set.
Just like she gets it wrong when she says it does NOT abridge one's 4th Amendment rights to have wholesale recording of citizen's phone data.
She calls it like she sees it; whichever is politically expedient at the time.
I do not like her, Sam-I-Am.
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain with all your metadata.
It should also probably be mentioned that part of why the ACLU doesn't (often) actively support the second amendment not because the members don't believe in it, but because the NRA serves the purpose well enough that it would be a waste of donations.
Not a sentence!