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How Wiretaps Actually Work (washingtonpost.com)
David Kris, assistant attorney general for national security from 2009 to 2011, has responded to the recent accusations made by president Donald Trump. On Saturday, Trump accused former president Obama of orchestrating a "Nixon/Watergate" plot to tap the phones at his Trump Tower headquarters in the run-up to last fall's election. He writes in an opinion piece for The Washington Post: First, the U.S. government needs probable cause, signatures from government officials and advance approval from a federal court before engaging in wiretapping in the United States. There are some narrow exceptions, for things such as short-term emergencies, which are then reviewed by a judge promptly after the fact. This is not something that the president simply orders. Under the law governing foreign intelligence wiretaps, the government has to show probable cause that a "facility" is being used or about to be used by a "foreign power" -- e.g., a foreign government or an international terrorist group -- or by an "agent of a foreign power." A facility is something like a telephone number or an email address. Second, there is no requirement that the facility being wiretapped be owned, leased or listed in the name of the person who is committing the offense or is the agent of a foreign power. [...] Third, government officials, including the president, don't normally speak publicly about wiretaps. Indeed, it is in some cases a federal crime to disclose a wiretap without authorization, including not only the information obtained from the wiretap, but also the mere existence of a wiretap with an intent to obstruct it. With respect to intelligence wiretaps, there is an additional issue: They are always classified, and disclosure of classified information is also generally a crime. The president enjoys authority over classified information, of course, but at a minimum it would be highly irregular to disclose an intelligence wiretap via Twitter.
This. All this procedure is bullshit theatre to make the masses believe there is justice. They do whatever they want including murder and starting illegal wars over bullshit. #Vault7 is proof they want omnipotent control over all communication so dossiers can be formed to blackmail and intimidate all persons who may try to rock the boat.
WAPO is a deceitful rag, the Fox News of the left. If I see a WAPO article, I take it with a pillar of salt. No objectiveness and the comment section looks like it is WAPO employees posting, "Ya, what he said!" and "But Russia!".
WAPO is far worse then that. Fox is at least open with their bias, which is one of the reasons that it has such a large following, on top of the fact that their commentators who have such biases are open about it. WAPO weasel words their way through everything, and even if they get caught lying they'll go out of their way to try and claim it's "fake but accurate"(Hi there Dan Rather). What's funny is you can see the exact time frame that it happened too, just after Bezos bought it out.
Om, nomnomnom...
The best part about being a compulsive liar is that it only takes seconds to make an outrageous lie but minutes/hours/days for people to gather enough evidence to definitively prove it's a lie. By that point, the compulsive liar has made dozens more outrageous lies. I used to think that this behavior tends to catch up to liars but apparently the consequences amount to becoming president.