Slashdot Mirror
Senators Demand CIA Director Admit He Lied About Spying On Senate Computers
blottsie writes with a link to a story at The Daily Dot which begins: CIA Director John Brennan lied when he denied ordering agency employees to search Senate computers to trace a leak. Frustrated with his unwillingness to admit the obvious, three Senate Democrats on Friday called on Brennan to admit that his agency crossed the line. The Senate Intelligence Committee was preparing a report on the CIA's Bush-era torture programs when the spy agency discovered that the committee had somehow acquired an internal CIA report on the program. To determine how the report had leaked, Brennan ordered CIA officers to pry into the computers used by committee staffers. The heart of the story is in the letter in which the Senators call for Brennan to 'fess up, also linked from the story. Drawing from that letter: When you were asked publicly about the CIA's search in March 2014, you denied that any improper access had occurred, stating that "As fas the allegations of, you know, CIA hacking into, you know, Senate computers, nothing could be further from the truth. I mean, that's -- that's just beyond the -- you know, the scope of reason in terms of what we could do." The reports of both the Inspector General and your review board demonstrate that this denial was at odds with the facts.
In June 2014, senior officials from the FBI, NSA, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence all testified that it would be inappropriate for their agencies to secretly search Senate files without external authorization. To date, however, there has been no public acknowledgement from you or any other CIA official (outside the Office of Inspector General) that this search was improper, nor even a commitment that the CIA will not conduct such searches in the future. This is entirely unacceptable.
In June 2014, senior officials from the FBI, NSA, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence all testified that it would be inappropriate for their agencies to secretly search Senate files without external authorization. To date, however, there has been no public acknowledgement from you or any other CIA official (outside the Office of Inspector General) that this search was improper, nor even a commitment that the CIA will not conduct such searches in the future. This is entirely unacceptable.
Funny how the spying is only bad when it's done against politicians. Against the plebes, it's perfectly fine. I'm shedding so many crocodile tears for them.
If you have nothing to hide, dear Senators...why worry about it?
Yeah like how they are going to keep renewing the heinous Patriot Act.
Well mister vocal congressman, it would be a shame for this (fabricated or not) evidence of your (pick one.. drug use, homosexual activity, pedophilia, adultours wife, illegal contributions), to become public wouldn't it?
Wonder who wins....
Silence is a state of mime.
That sentence is straight from the letter from the Senators. Why is it inappropriate to include the Senators' words?
Great joke. This is going to change nothing.
He should fucking resign, as should most of the old retards who occupy the halls of congress. It was their blind eye that led to the situation of torture being used in the first place.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Yeah, he lied. Why not? Congress is a bunch of spineless whores, there to grub up the money and do what they're told by whichever puppetmaster has his hand shoved up their ass at the moment.
Besides, what are they going to do about it? Make another speech? So what?
They can defund the CIA or particular CIA programs if they want. If there's one thing the CIA hates about Congress, it's the fact that they have to get a new budget from them every year--they can't plan multi-year operations without having contingencies for different funding levels, etc...
Most of Congress may be spineless, and all of it pretends to be spineless, but it is not powerless.
If they had a set of balls between them they'd send the motherfucker to jail where he belongs. They don't and they won't.
If they continue to push this, then Brennan will resign and then they'll tell us that everything will be OK.
Then we'll get a new head of the CIA.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
After he gets a book deal. Then the confessions will fly. Standard procedure...
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
The world is always changing and always will be. It will always be a power struggle between various groups and if you quit, you loose. Look at German culture in current times. Parliament has many glass windows to represent 'if you want know what we are doing, come and look inside' (as it was described to me when I did a tour of the city). The vast majority praise Snowden for doing the right thing.
There is corruption in all systems and a lot in America. You need to fight it and get behind this call for the truth because things can and will get worse if you dont. You need to chip away at the system and continually try to make it better. The more people who take an interest and talk about issues the better. This one may be a war of words but the outcome will renew an important precedant.
The Senators are a bunch of morons and are the last group that should ever complain about someone lying. They are experts at prevarication and give unambiguous answers that always leave room for them to back track. Only a very select committee of Senators are privy to anything relating to classified US intelligence matters and that committee is responsible for determining what information can be safely released to the entire Senate. Any Senator claiming they did not know about certain intelligence programs or operations should first go after their fellow Senators on the foreign intelligence committee and ask them what they know and then go after the particular intelligence agency. This investigation was not being conducted by this intelligence committee. The vast majority of Senators and staffers do not even have the necessary security clearances needed for access to certain classified information about US intelligence programs. In this particular case the CIA discovered the Senate had possession of an internal CIA report that had not been legally obtained through the proper channels. The CIA could attempt to justify it's actions by claiming there had been a security leak (which there was) and they were investigating how the Senate got a hold of the document in question. The first logical step in the investigation would be obtaining proof the document was actually on the Senate computer system. The Senate constantly wastes time on these types of conflicts while doing nothing that would actually help the country and the people who put them in office. The Senate is more dangerous to the US public than the CIA and NSA combined. And the feckless Senators will do nothing of consequence in this cat fight because they are just barely smart enough not to get into a full blown conflict with agencies capable of destroying their political careers. After all the CIA has had a lot of practice changing governments around the world using subtle and not to subtle means. The Senate and the CIA deserve each other.
I don't see the relevance of your post to mine. The AC was trying to claim that including that sentence was some sort of inappropriate editorializing when it was simply part of a quote of the letter. I was simply informing them of the source of the sentence that got them butthurt.
OMG,
"Senators Demand CIA Director Admit He Lied About Spying On Senate Computers"
What if the senator is demanding the CIA director lie?
If he did lie make a case and charge him.
The senators should simply demand honesty.
However N.B. the senate and congress passed laws with little audit and oversight.
Some senators may in point of fact be legitimate targets of investigations one,
two, three, four degrees of Bacon connection.
OBTW the spying might have been to track back international criminals that had
illegally compromises Senate computers.
This proves that it is turtles all the way down.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
This is relevant. In today's news:
Get that? The goddamn Director of National Intelligence just "forgot" that they're collecting information about millions of Americans. It takes balls to get up in front of a congressional committee and say that shit. "We all make mistakes". Yes, we all make mistakes. I accidentally left my keys in the back door once. But forgetting about data collection efforts on millions of Americans? "We all make mistakes" doesn't quite cover it. But the senators? They're made because they're just figured out that the NSA treats them just like the rest of us. So they're gonna get all up in John Brennan's grill but let the NSA get off with a warning, billions of dollars in increased black budget and maybe a little tug job in the basement of the Capital for the effort.
http://thehill.com/policy/tech...
You are welcome on my lawn.
The precedent that's being renewed here is that it's all well and good to fuck with the common people, but doing the same to VIPs is unacceptable. It's funny that you mention Germany, as this exact same scenario played out there when Merkel was completely fine with German citizens being spied on, but threw a shit fit when it surfaced that she was being spied on as well.
The only outcome of this is the further solidification of our two-tier society where different rights exist for the ruling class and the hoi polloi.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
3 senators just stood up against the cia.
And demanded he admit he lied? That's quite toothless.
CIA: Hey, MI5.... Can you do me a favour? I'll owe you one.
MI5: Sure, what do you need?
CIA: Can you skim through these PCs and look for evidence of this thing I'd like to know about?
MI5: Sure, no problem.
3 Senators can do jack shit when at least 90 more will do nothing.
Just to be picky, that call would be to MI6, not MI5.
I believe they would describe it as "Serving our country."
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
If he lied under oath and there's proof that he did then charge the bastard with perjury and put him on trial and make an example of him to show that you can not lie under oath to congress and get away with it.
Fuck you, brownshirt.
Seems like an awfully close correspondence with"To serve Man"?
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
these same senators don't hesitate to trample all over it.
and then back up over the victim, just to make sure.
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
US Senate: Liar liar pants on fire! ... Even at that point, it would only be half the battle...
CIA: Pot/Kettle?
The people: You are fired!
So, he should goto prison.
The CIA would not have a foreign power search US Senate computers even for plausible deniability.
Well, a 'Oh, shucks, a bad thing happened, that sucks.' press release isn't precisely 'nothing', but it's about what I expect.
Oh joy - so they will have to turn back to their old ways of raising funds like selling weapons to terrorists (North and Hezbolla) or drug running.
Any solution is going to require extra funding for incarceration of those that choose to continue to act against the state - the sort of thing that used to be called treason before it got more narrowly defined.
As an example there is an astonishing amount of effort being put in by these spooks to support a regime (Saudi Arabia) that is both putting money into ISIS/daash and running a deliberate campaign to drive US based oil producers out of business by artificially lowering the oil price. That (the pro-Arab factions) and the the infighting (with pro-Israel factions) of the spooks are examples of spooks having their own policies that are opposed to national policies.
... John Brennan serves at the pleasure of one Barack Obama, and has in some capacity or other for the last six years.
Any chance we could hold him accountable too? Or did he read about this in the papers like everything else?
Thinking that the Saudis deliberately lowering oil prices to hurt US based production is a delusional fantasy. It's just that OPEC cannot currently dictate worldwide oil prices.
So Iran and Venezuela are hurting far more then US oil interests, and they are not exactly our friends.
There are plenty of reasons to question the relationship between Saudi Arabia and the West, but so far you have not cited even one of them.
Why is Snark Required?
Senators, if you believe he committed a crime, have him arrested and take him to court.
We have a legal system. This is what it's for.
If you don't think it will achieve the goal, accept that the system needs reform and start reforming it.
If congress defunds the CIA, and the CIA keeps going (due to drug money or something) what happens then?
Check this out. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... . The needle in the haystack is made up of people, when will we learn ?.
That would be one funny-looking fish.
The Third Reich took place in Germany, the Fourth Reich is not extant in Amerika!
Time to cut the crap --- CIA has never been formally audited (I suspect the same applies to the NSA, DIA and others) --- time to audit them and shut them down as they have nothing to do with national security and EVERYTHING to do with supporting the Fourth Reich.
Recommended reading: Expulsions, by Saskia Sassen (she's the daughter of a Nazi, so she should know)
Only the little people have to obey the law. Snowden, Manning, etc. Big wigs like James Clapper, John Brennan, and David Petraeus never get charged with crimes.
CIA: Hey, MI5.... Can you do me a favour? I'll owe you one.
MI5: Sure, what do you need?
CIA: Can you skim through these PCs and look for evidence of this thing I'd like to know about?
MI5: Sure, no problem.
Hate to ruin a joke, but the computers we're talking about were the CIA's. The data on them was provided by the CIA, in a facility run by the CIA.
Couple of things.. the Senate Committee made copies of sensitive documents and removed them from that CIA run facility.
CIA staff erased some documents that they felt they should not have made available to the Committee, and they searched the computers to determine how the information left the facility.
It's easy to argue both sides were doing their jobs, as expected. The dispute is all office politics.
I won't judge either side in this, but I will point out that if you morons are really upset about the CIA searching these computers, you are overlooking the bigger picture that money was wasted on this facility in the first place because they didn't use existing CIA or Senate resources, and it only housed information the CIA spent even more money on sanitizing.
That the committee ever saw any documents that the CIA didn't want them to says everything about this whole situation. This whole thing is just dumb on all sides, including the spectators.
Not going to happen as long as Snowden and his conspirators are fugitives from justice.
No amount of willful lack of understanding of security clearance work, which thrives in Snowden supporters, will change that fact.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
As for the second - I did not say OPEC, I was referring to the situation where the market is being flooded to drive down the price as Saudi policy and not OPEC policy. Iran and Venezuela were not a threat to them before - this is about trying to halt new production in the USA.
I've mentioned two recent developments that do damage to the USA, not the list of things that cause regional problems.
Can you cite a single case where it has helped? I really don't care whether it's "harmful" or not. My research is private & confidential to everyone without my specific permission. This does not imply guilt of any crime. I demand the right to keep my papers & personal effects, including my data, free from unreasonable search & seizure. Blanket surveillance is unreasonable. End of story.
Look, I'm all for civil liberties, but we can't even begin to have a conversation about those if one agency is refusing to even be accountable to its overseers. This is/was a bigger deal. This is "dad beat me, and when I told mom, he killed her." You don't say "boo hoo" to that, you say "holy shit."
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Cite?
This comment is my opinion and does not represent an official position of Donald Trump or others I do not work for
Comment removed based on user account deletion