Except that Obama and the "Dems" didn't order any such wiretapping. The story is a conspiracy theory that would have been ignored, except Trump himself gave it a whole lot of oxygen.
Just as plausibly, Flynn, Sessions and heaven knows who else simply got caught up in the US government's already well known spying on the Russian ambassador and other Russian officials in the US. In other words, there was no need to directly target Trump and his proxies at all. They literally walked into the existing monitoring that was going on. And really, at that point, if you have some US citizens chatting up Putin's representatives, how is that not justification for seeking FISA warrants to take a closer look at those proxies?
This is the part that amazes me. Even if I'm willing to accept that Sessions, Flynn, Kushner and whomever else was getting cozy with the Russians weren't committing any crimes, how could these people have gone around imagining that their activities wouldn't be noted by US security agencies? Sessions and Flynn have been around a long goddamned time and certainly must be at least vaguely aware of what the FBI, NSA, CIA and Secret Service are capable of. This either betrays a kind of supreme arrogance, or a level of base stupidity, and in either case doesn't exactly recommend these men to any kind of high office or position of trust. That Flynn and Sessions felt compelled to lie about it makes it all the more curious.
Here's my opinion, for the little bit it's worth. I don't think even they thought Trump would win. I think both Congressional Republicans and Trump's own team had no real expectation up until the last week or so before the election that they would ever have to be in a position to explain themselves. When he won, and suddenly they had to answer to somebody about their activities (Flynn to Pence and Sessions to the Senate confirmation committee) they suddenly had to answer questions they never imagined would be posed to them. If Trump had lost, nobody would given a flying fuck about Trump's chief advisers and supporters. There might still have been a peak into Trump-Russia leaks, but it wouldn't have been the kind of microscope that's being employed now. And the funniest part is that Trump's propagating the whole wiretapping claim has literally invited both the House and Senate Intelligence Committees to probe even deeper.
Microsoft still has MS Office and the Backoffice software, and this is where its hegemony remains. It long ago showed its willing to bring the software to other platforms with the Mac versions, and it has put its toes in the Android waters, so I think pragmatism is winning the day. I think MS is fully aware that it has not been able to meaningfully challenge Android and iOS in the mobile and smart device markets, and it must surely know that Google certainly has eyes on bumping further into the traditional PC markets. While the idea of a merger of Chrome OS and Android seems to be dead, my hunch is that more likely Chrome OS will probably simply be abandoned in favor of the much maturer Android environment.
People keep pointing to this piece of an NY Times story and inserting claims that were not made. It's been known for fucking months that US security services were keeping a damned close eye on Russian communications. If the likes of Sessions and Flynn were so fucking stupid and incautious as to be just chatting up the Russian Ambassador on behalf of their boss, well they deserve what they get. The takeaway here is that Trump and his proxies are fucking morons, regardless of whether they were actually doing anything wrong or not. In politics, the perception of scandal can be as bad as an actual scandal.
Whatever Wikileaks was, what it is now is a combination of the Julian Assange Fan Club and mouthpiece for Russian security services. It doesn't do journalism, it does targeted leaks on behalf of the Russians.
Clapper isn't trustworthy, but then again, neither is Trump, who clearly just picked up on a bunch of garbage coming from Levin and Breitbarts, more conspiracy theory nonsense, and running with it. It's pretty clear that no one else in the White House even saw this coming, which is why they really had no way of countering it other than "The President has ways of knowing things!" Considering we can trace the wiretap claim right back to Levin, who was exaggerating the already well known fact that Russian communications were being monitored during and after the election (because concocting anti-Obama conspiracy theories is what right wing radio shock jocks have been doing for eight fucking long years), so we know Trump didn't likely get any of this information from the FBI or any other government intelligence services.
And now we see as Trump's mouthpieces basically dilute the entire wiretap claim to the point where it was "something", that they're trying to make the entire "wiretapping of Trump Tower" conspiracy theory go away, because what Trump really did was empower and invite Congressional oversight to begin looking even closer at the nonsense going on between Trump's proxies and the Russians during and after the election.
Mod me flamebait if you will, but that's how Trump got to "I was wiretapped!" Via a conspiracy theory from a right wing radio host that Breitbarts picked up and Fox ran with. We have a man at the top of the one of the most powerful espionage machines the world has ever known, and he gets "intel" from right wing commentators. Can't you see this for what it is, a massive vulnerability at the very top of the US Government? A foreign power could game the system by selectively feeding the likes of Levin and Breitbart stories of this kind, and because Trump clearly has no trust of his own departments, and spends far too much time watching television, he would be supremely vulnerable to such manipulation.
And that's where the two issues collide. Let's assume for the moment that Levin, Breitbart and Fox opinion crew who are spreading this conspiracy theory are right, that somehow Obama personally managed to get Trump Towers wiretapped. Let's assume that President Barack Obama is an evil man of Nixonesque subterfuge and willful vileness who overrode decades-old restrictions that basically shut the POTUS out from ordering wiretaps on domestic phone lines. How does that make the problems that Trump has with his proxies being so tight with the Russians during the campaign? It's not like some great revelation that Obama is a wiretapper (which I don't think anyone actually believes, not even Fox News) somehow makes the allegations against Sessions just disappear.
My hunch is that the leaks in the White House aren't meant to be attacks on Trump himself, but rather various factions in what appears to be a very competitive White House environment trying to take the piss out of each other.
In the past, when "White House sources" leaked something, that was shorthand for "the President wants the public to know this, but doesn't want anyone going on record", in other words, it was a targeted form information/mis-information dissemination.
But the Trump White House doesn't function like that. It appears that Trump, perhaps quite intentionally, has created a White House built out of various competing factions, all trying to curry his favor and show their the best and most loyal. That's why they all seem to have their knives out for Priebus, because, as Chief of Staff, he's nominally supposed to be in charge of access to the President and general administration of the White House staff itself. But in this kind of environment, the CoS's primary job as gatekeeper would inevitably mean he's viewed as an obstruction, and what's more, with a dizzying array of "chief advisers" with Jared Kushner and Ivanka on one side and Steve Bannon on the other, Priebus seems to be viewed in equal parts with contempt and jealousy, and likely has no real control at all. The long and the short of it is that Trump's White House is a badly malfunctioning one with no clear lines of authority and where people seem to be using the press as a means of plunging knives into each others' backs, and in the process they're damaging the credibility of the Administration.
And that's all before Trump picks up his cell phone and begins tweeting...
Meanwhile, I'm reading these articles about what a steadying hand Mike Pence is (which makes us wonder how chaotic the White House would be if he wasn't there), how he's formed his own effective team and seems to generally be maintaining an air of calm orderly competence. Which makes me wonder if Pence is positioning himself in such a way as to a Trump loyalist, while sending coding signals to Congress that amount to "I'll back the President all the way, but if you do decide that he's too fucking batshit insane to be President anymore, well, I'm ready to go..."
The problem boils down to the fact that Trump's proxies spent a good deal of last year cozying up to the Russians. They can spread conspiracy theories about President Obama ordering Trump be bugged (which is factually wrong, the President doesn't have that power, but whatever), but the real problem is that Trump's close advisers and appointees have created a veritable nest of Russian connection problems, and now the chickens are coming home to roost. Did the likes of Flynn and Sessions imagine that they weren't going to get caught.
That's the real bizarre part, that people like Flynn and Sessions clearly weren't being very covert at all, that they were lying about their contacts with Russia that have been trivially easy to find. Even if nothing they did ultimately was illegal, the fact that they lied about it makes what may very well be non-events, or at least fairly unremarkable contacts, into scandals. As with Sessions, as with Flynn, the probably may not be that they chatted with Putin's representatives, it's that they seemed to have such a guilty conscience about it that they felt the need to lie; Flynn to Pence, and Sessions, far worse, to US Senators in his confirmation hearing. If Flynn had to go, how much longer has Sessions got?
The real solution here is relatively frequent backups, multiple copies in different filesystem and physical formats (ie. flash, hard drive, optical). Over time you just keep moving your file store to the new mediums. I have files that are over twenty five years old now, some of them coming from DOS and Windows 3.1, others from my old original Slackware 3 installs. Along the way some of those files have been on CD-Rs, DVDs, early USB thumb drives, various hard drives running everything from FAT, FAT32, ReiserFS, HPFS, NTFS, ext2 and ext3. And I'll keep on doing that until I drop dead, and I'll leave it up to my family to decide whether they want to keep any of the documents, pictures, music files, videos and so on that I've been collecting.
At no point do I ever assume a mere file system sitting on one physical and/or logical volume is ever going to do the job of keeping my files available over the long haul. RAID and file systems in all their glory are not intended for that. Multiple physical copies at multiple locations on multiple types of media, that's the only real way to assure your files remain accessible and safe over time.
So well researched that not even he can actually provide any evidence that President Obama ordered Trump Tower wiretapped. There's nothing well-researched about this. It's just out and out conspiracy theory, and Trump has jumped on it because he is, in his awkward way trying to take control of the 24 hour news cycle from the ill attention Sessions was getting. That's certainly been successful, to an extent, except of course the claim of wiretapping is going to end up in the same hands as the claims of Russian and Trump campaign team communications. It's a bit of hyperbole that maybe, just maybe, buys him some time, but if all he has is Levin and Breitbart's fantastical tales of the evil Obama Administration, sooner or later, Sessions' problems are going to resurface.
The problem is that if he's in total meltdown now, just 45 days into his Presidency, what is Trump going to be like in 180 days or 365 days? No wonder Republicans are trying to get an Obamacare replacement out ASAP. How much longer can they keep up the facade of good will before they finally have to accept they're dealing with a fantasist?
In general, I don't accept someone simply saying "I was wiretapped" and the primary defense of that being his own staff saying "Oh fur shure, he's got like evidence you don't know..."
As it stands, it's pretty clear a whole lot of people in Congress are as mystified by this as everyone else. But it served its purpose. It got everyone to stop talking about yet another senior member of the Administration being outed lying about contact with the Russians.
As to the standards put forward by CNN, whenever it amounts to "inside sources", I don't usually give the story THAT much credibility. But as we saw with Flynn, it wasn't very long before "that's a total bullshit story that's all lies!" turned into Flynn quitting/being fired.
What I'm seeing here is the Trump Administration rather awkwardly trying to pivot some fairly well known information about the FBI looking into Russian interference into "Obama wiretapped Trump!" as a form of misdirection about the fact that his AG has been outed lying to the Senate confirmation hearing. And that for me is a puzzler. Why did Flynn lie to Pence and why did Sessions lie to Franken? After all, neither man, on the fact of it did anything wrong. But at any rate, the reasons may never be known, but that doesn't mean that they didn't get caught lying, nor is it justification for Trump loudly proclaiming, without providing any evidence, that the previous POTUS ordered his phone to be tapped (which would appear to be a pretty huge distortion of what happened largely based on some right wing conspiracy theory shock jock's bizarre claims).
To me that's the most trouble part of most of Trump's activities. He seems to react to things he sees on the fucking television. He has probably the most effective espionage apparatus the world has ever known at his fingertips, and CNN, Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Breitbarts and some right wing conspiracy poo flinger named Mark Levin. You can tell by the awkward interviews with Trump's own PR people that not even they know what the fuck he's talking about.
In other words you can provide no actual evidence to support his claims. As it is the whole thing appears to be a right wing shock jock's conspiracy theory.
Slashdot Mirror
Except that Obama and the "Dems" didn't order any such wiretapping. The story is a conspiracy theory that would have been ignored, except Trump himself gave it a whole lot of oxygen.
Just as plausibly, Flynn, Sessions and heaven knows who else simply got caught up in the US government's already well known spying on the Russian ambassador and other Russian officials in the US. In other words, there was no need to directly target Trump and his proxies at all. They literally walked into the existing monitoring that was going on. And really, at that point, if you have some US citizens chatting up Putin's representatives, how is that not justification for seeking FISA warrants to take a closer look at those proxies?
This is the part that amazes me. Even if I'm willing to accept that Sessions, Flynn, Kushner and whomever else was getting cozy with the Russians weren't committing any crimes, how could these people have gone around imagining that their activities wouldn't be noted by US security agencies? Sessions and Flynn have been around a long goddamned time and certainly must be at least vaguely aware of what the FBI, NSA, CIA and Secret Service are capable of. This either betrays a kind of supreme arrogance, or a level of base stupidity, and in either case doesn't exactly recommend these men to any kind of high office or position of trust. That Flynn and Sessions felt compelled to lie about it makes it all the more curious.
Here's my opinion, for the little bit it's worth. I don't think even they thought Trump would win. I think both Congressional Republicans and Trump's own team had no real expectation up until the last week or so before the election that they would ever have to be in a position to explain themselves. When he won, and suddenly they had to answer to somebody about their activities (Flynn to Pence and Sessions to the Senate confirmation committee) they suddenly had to answer questions they never imagined would be posed to them. If Trump had lost, nobody would given a flying fuck about Trump's chief advisers and supporters. There might still have been a peak into Trump-Russia leaks, but it wouldn't have been the kind of microscope that's being employed now. And the funniest part is that Trump's propagating the whole wiretapping claim has literally invited both the House and Senate Intelligence Committees to probe even deeper.
Microsoft still has MS Office and the Backoffice software, and this is where its hegemony remains. It long ago showed its willing to bring the software to other platforms with the Mac versions, and it has put its toes in the Android waters, so I think pragmatism is winning the day. I think MS is fully aware that it has not been able to meaningfully challenge Android and iOS in the mobile and smart device markets, and it must surely know that Google certainly has eyes on bumping further into the traditional PC markets. While the idea of a merger of Chrome OS and Android seems to be dead, my hunch is that more likely Chrome OS will probably simply be abandoned in favor of the much maturer Android environment.
Do you think Levin has any actual evidence for his claims?
People keep pointing to this piece of an NY Times story and inserting claims that were not made. It's been known for fucking months that US security services were keeping a damned close eye on Russian communications. If the likes of Sessions and Flynn were so fucking stupid and incautious as to be just chatting up the Russian Ambassador on behalf of their boss, well they deserve what they get. The takeaway here is that Trump and his proxies are fucking morons, regardless of whether they were actually doing anything wrong or not. In politics, the perception of scandal can be as bad as an actual scandal.
Whatever Wikileaks was, what it is now is a combination of the Julian Assange Fan Club and mouthpiece for Russian security services. It doesn't do journalism, it does targeted leaks on behalf of the Russians.
Clapper isn't trustworthy, but then again, neither is Trump, who clearly just picked up on a bunch of garbage coming from Levin and Breitbarts, more conspiracy theory nonsense, and running with it. It's pretty clear that no one else in the White House even saw this coming, which is why they really had no way of countering it other than "The President has ways of knowing things!" Considering we can trace the wiretap claim right back to Levin, who was exaggerating the already well known fact that Russian communications were being monitored during and after the election (because concocting anti-Obama conspiracy theories is what right wing radio shock jocks have been doing for eight fucking long years), so we know Trump didn't likely get any of this information from the FBI or any other government intelligence services.
And now we see as Trump's mouthpieces basically dilute the entire wiretap claim to the point where it was "something", that they're trying to make the entire "wiretapping of Trump Tower" conspiracy theory go away, because what Trump really did was empower and invite Congressional oversight to begin looking even closer at the nonsense going on between Trump's proxies and the Russians during and after the election.
Mod me flamebait if you will, but that's how Trump got to "I was wiretapped!" Via a conspiracy theory from a right wing radio host that Breitbarts picked up and Fox ran with. We have a man at the top of the one of the most powerful espionage machines the world has ever known, and he gets "intel" from right wing commentators. Can't you see this for what it is, a massive vulnerability at the very top of the US Government? A foreign power could game the system by selectively feeding the likes of Levin and Breitbart stories of this kind, and because Trump clearly has no trust of his own departments, and spends far too much time watching television, he would be supremely vulnerable to such manipulation.
The President doesn't need the spooks' technological spying techniques. That's what he's got Breitbart and Fox for!
Except it's not much of a team.
It hasn't been caught doing any such thing, and even Trump's mouthpieces know it which is why they're diluting the claims.
So now the Senate is going to be charged with investigating "somehow, sometime, somewhere the Obama Administration did something to Donald Trump"?
And that's where the two issues collide. Let's assume for the moment that Levin, Breitbart and Fox opinion crew who are spreading this conspiracy theory are right, that somehow Obama personally managed to get Trump Towers wiretapped. Let's assume that President Barack Obama is an evil man of Nixonesque subterfuge and willful vileness who overrode decades-old restrictions that basically shut the POTUS out from ordering wiretaps on domestic phone lines. How does that make the problems that Trump has with his proxies being so tight with the Russians during the campaign? It's not like some great revelation that Obama is a wiretapper (which I don't think anyone actually believes, not even Fox News) somehow makes the allegations against Sessions just disappear.
My hunch is that the leaks in the White House aren't meant to be attacks on Trump himself, but rather various factions in what appears to be a very competitive White House environment trying to take the piss out of each other.
In the past, when "White House sources" leaked something, that was shorthand for "the President wants the public to know this, but doesn't want anyone going on record", in other words, it was a targeted form information/mis-information dissemination.
But the Trump White House doesn't function like that. It appears that Trump, perhaps quite intentionally, has created a White House built out of various competing factions, all trying to curry his favor and show their the best and most loyal. That's why they all seem to have their knives out for Priebus, because, as Chief of Staff, he's nominally supposed to be in charge of access to the President and general administration of the White House staff itself. But in this kind of environment, the CoS's primary job as gatekeeper would inevitably mean he's viewed as an obstruction, and what's more, with a dizzying array of "chief advisers" with Jared Kushner and Ivanka on one side and Steve Bannon on the other, Priebus seems to be viewed in equal parts with contempt and jealousy, and likely has no real control at all. The long and the short of it is that Trump's White House is a badly malfunctioning one with no clear lines of authority and where people seem to be using the press as a means of plunging knives into each others' backs, and in the process they're damaging the credibility of the Administration.
And that's all before Trump picks up his cell phone and begins tweeting...
Meanwhile, I'm reading these articles about what a steadying hand Mike Pence is (which makes us wonder how chaotic the White House would be if he wasn't there), how he's formed his own effective team and seems to generally be maintaining an air of calm orderly competence. Which makes me wonder if Pence is positioning himself in such a way as to a Trump loyalist, while sending coding signals to Congress that amount to "I'll back the President all the way, but if you do decide that he's too fucking batshit insane to be President anymore, well, I'm ready to go..."
The problem boils down to the fact that Trump's proxies spent a good deal of last year cozying up to the Russians. They can spread conspiracy theories about President Obama ordering Trump be bugged (which is factually wrong, the President doesn't have that power, but whatever), but the real problem is that Trump's close advisers and appointees have created a veritable nest of Russian connection problems, and now the chickens are coming home to roost. Did the likes of Flynn and Sessions imagine that they weren't going to get caught.
That's the real bizarre part, that people like Flynn and Sessions clearly weren't being very covert at all, that they were lying about their contacts with Russia that have been trivially easy to find. Even if nothing they did ultimately was illegal, the fact that they lied about it makes what may very well be non-events, or at least fairly unremarkable contacts, into scandals. As with Sessions, as with Flynn, the probably may not be that they chatted with Putin's representatives, it's that they seemed to have such a guilty conscience about it that they felt the need to lie; Flynn to Pence, and Sessions, far worse, to US Senators in his confirmation hearing. If Flynn had to go, how much longer has Sessions got?
Wow, Obama directly acted a FISA court to bug Trump.
And you have evidence for this, right?
Well at least my stalker has an actual account.
Whose to say zfs will be around in a few decades?
The real solution here is relatively frequent backups, multiple copies in different filesystem and physical formats (ie. flash, hard drive, optical). Over time you just keep moving your file store to the new mediums. I have files that are over twenty five years old now, some of them coming from DOS and Windows 3.1, others from my old original Slackware 3 installs. Along the way some of those files have been on CD-Rs, DVDs, early USB thumb drives, various hard drives running everything from FAT, FAT32, ReiserFS, HPFS, NTFS, ext2 and ext3. And I'll keep on doing that until I drop dead, and I'll leave it up to my family to decide whether they want to keep any of the documents, pictures, music files, videos and so on that I've been collecting.
At no point do I ever assume a mere file system sitting on one physical and/or logical volume is ever going to do the job of keeping my files available over the long haul. RAID and file systems in all their glory are not intended for that. Multiple physical copies at multiple locations on multiple types of media, that's the only real way to assure your files remain accessible and safe over time.
So well researched that not even he can actually provide any evidence that President Obama ordered Trump Tower wiretapped. There's nothing well-researched about this. It's just out and out conspiracy theory, and Trump has jumped on it because he is, in his awkward way trying to take control of the 24 hour news cycle from the ill attention Sessions was getting. That's certainly been successful, to an extent, except of course the claim of wiretapping is going to end up in the same hands as the claims of Russian and Trump campaign team communications. It's a bit of hyperbole that maybe, just maybe, buys him some time, but if all he has is Levin and Breitbart's fantastical tales of the evil Obama Administration, sooner or later, Sessions' problems are going to resurface.
The problem is that if he's in total meltdown now, just 45 days into his Presidency, what is Trump going to be like in 180 days or 365 days? No wonder Republicans are trying to get an Obamacare replacement out ASAP. How much longer can they keep up the facade of good will before they finally have to accept they're dealing with a fantasist?
In general, I don't accept someone simply saying "I was wiretapped" and the primary defense of that being his own staff saying "Oh fur shure, he's got like evidence you don't know..."
As it stands, it's pretty clear a whole lot of people in Congress are as mystified by this as everyone else. But it served its purpose. It got everyone to stop talking about yet another senior member of the Administration being outed lying about contact with the Russians.
As to the standards put forward by CNN, whenever it amounts to "inside sources", I don't usually give the story THAT much credibility. But as we saw with Flynn, it wasn't very long before "that's a total bullshit story that's all lies!" turned into Flynn quitting/being fired.
What I'm seeing here is the Trump Administration rather awkwardly trying to pivot some fairly well known information about the FBI looking into Russian interference into "Obama wiretapped Trump!" as a form of misdirection about the fact that his AG has been outed lying to the Senate confirmation hearing. And that for me is a puzzler. Why did Flynn lie to Pence and why did Sessions lie to Franken? After all, neither man, on the fact of it did anything wrong. But at any rate, the reasons may never be known, but that doesn't mean that they didn't get caught lying, nor is it justification for Trump loudly proclaiming, without providing any evidence, that the previous POTUS ordered his phone to be tapped (which would appear to be a pretty huge distortion of what happened largely based on some right wing conspiracy theory shock jock's bizarre claims).
To me that's the most trouble part of most of Trump's activities. He seems to react to things he sees on the fucking television. He has probably the most effective espionage apparatus the world has ever known at his fingertips, and CNN, Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Breitbarts and some right wing conspiracy poo flinger named Mark Levin. You can tell by the awkward interviews with Trump's own PR people that not even they know what the fuck he's talking about.
Writing unevidenced claims in bold capitals doesn't make them true.
In other words you can provide no actual evidence to support his claims. As it is the whole thing appears to be a right wing shock jock's conspiracy theory.
They seem awfully proficient at getting mod points, mind you.
You can of course point to where that piece of an article says "Obama wiretapped Trump's phone."
There's a specific claim being made and it isn't the one you seem to think it is.