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You've got it backwards. He was lying about being wiretapped by Obama for political purposes, who doesn't have the power to direct law enforcement surveillance of citizens. (No President does.) If there was surveillance of someone on Trump's organization (Flynn, Manafort) it would be because the Justice Dept. and FBI directed it through a FISA court. Trump's lying about it to muddy the water about his many Russian connections. (And more we likely don't know about because he refuses to release his taxes.)
Not sure what the fixation with Trump's taxes are. They wouldn't show any "Russian connections" (or anything of that sort) since that information isn't required to be disclosed.

Anyway, the leaks in the early days were almost certainly from Obama-era holdovers, and politically motivated.

Regarding the Flynn leaks, it could well be that the DOJ has a wiretap order on the Russian ambassador, which means that they have records of conversations with leaders on both sides of the political aisle. I'm sure someone so politically motivated could find something damaging a Democrat said to the ambassador.
 
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I usually agree with most of your posts, but this one is an outlier. these sorts of tools need to be used under a framework of transparency and law. Given the direction the US has been going in I wouldn't trust them to be used appropriately at all. The right to privacy is an important one, not lightly brushed aside.

That sounds like a problem with trust in the US Government. As I said in a later post, I don't really see how these tools are significantly legally or practically different than the sort of wire-tapping technology that Governments around the world have been using for well over a hundred years.

We, in the United States, have considerable legal protections over our privacy. The FBI or other law enforcement agency is required to obtain a warrant before placing a listening or other surveillance device. The CIA is legally prohibited from conducting operations within the United States itself. If those laws are being avoided or broken, then that is a matter that needs to be addressed. But the mere existence of a hacking tool (in the hands of our intelligence agencies) is not - in my mind at least - any more of a danger than a machine gun or tank in the hands of our armed forces.

The CIA, NSA, and FBI are not staffed and run by people who are either fools or professional voyeurs. Before any surveillance or intelligence-gathering operation begins it undergoes a cost-benefit analysis. Deploying and maintaining such tools, and collecting and analyzing any form of data recovered requires resources of time, materials, and money. These expenditures have to be balanced against the value, in terms of increased national security, that they deem like to achieve. It simply isn't worth it for them to snoop on ordinary people's smartphones or televisions. In the case of the zero-day exploits detailed in the most recent Wikileaks revelation, intelligence agencies are going to deploy such tools extremely sparingly, and to only the most valuable targets, since widespread distribution is likely to shorten its life as a useful espionage tool.
 
Not sure what the fixation with Trump's taxes are. They wouldn't show any "Russian connections" (or anything of that sort) since that information isn't required to be disclosed.

Loans from Russian banks, deals with Russian businesses. Then there's the rumored Rosneft sale which was predicted by the Steele dossier and turned out to be true, with a mysterious company created in the Caymans. We know he lies about his Russia connections, since he says he has none despite hosting the Miss Universe pageant in Moscow.

Anyway, the leaks in the early days were almost certainly from Obama-era holdovers, and politically motivated.

Or just patriots who are nervous about how unhinged Trump gets- attacking Gold Star families, attacking the intelligence community, his twitter rants about SNL and Hamilton and Nordstroms. He's thin skinned and erratic, which are terrible for a world leader, especially in crisis situations like a North Korean missile crisis or a standoff in the Strait of Hormuz.
 
CIA lost control over the material and it was proliferated amongst unauthorised persons outside the agency, one of whom blew the whistle.

CIA should be shut down. It's run by special interest groups outside the US Government control, specifically extremist zionist interest groups. CIA is not acting in the interest of the U.S. of A.

Close it down and rebuild something good you have control over.

I am not sure where you get the zionist conspiracy notion from, but in any case the issue about whether the CIA needs to be better regulated is completely different from the issue of whether or not the person(s) leaking this information has effectively helped criminals and hostile nations.
 
Loans from Russian banks, deals with Russian businesses. Then there's the rumored Rosneft sale which was predicted by the Steele dossier and turned out to be true, with a mysterious company created in the Caymans. We know he lies about his Russia connections, since he says he has none despite hosting the Miss Universe pageant in Moscow.



Or just patriots who are nervous about how unhinged Trump gets- attacking Gold Star families, attacking the intelligence community, his twitter rants about SNL and Hamilton and Nordstroms. He's thin skinned and erratic, which are terrible for a world leader, especially in crisis situations like a North Korean missile crisis or a standoff in the Strait of Hormuz.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/24/...ssed-for-control-of-uranium-company.html?_r=0
Cash Flowed to Clinton Foundation Amid Russian Uranium Deal
As the Russians gradually assumed control of Uranium One in three separate transactions from 2009 to 2013, Canadian records show, a flow of cash made its way to the Clinton Foundation. Uranium One’s chairman used his family foundation to make four donations totaling $2.35 million. Those contributions were not publicly disclosed by the Clintons, despite an agreement Mrs. Clinton had struck with the Obama White House to publicly identify all donors. Other people with ties to the company made donations as well.
 
That sounds like a problem with trust in the US Government. As I said in a later post, I don't really see how these tools are significantly legally or practically different than the sort of wire-tapping technology that Governments around the world have been using for well over a hundred years.

We, in the United States, have considerable legal protections over our privacy. The FBI or other law enforcement agency is required to obtain a warrant before placing a listening or other surveillance device. The CIA is legally prohibited from conducting operations within the United States itself. If those laws are being avoided or broken, then that is a matter that needs to be addressed. But the mere existence of a hacking tool (in the hands of our intelligence agencies) is not - in my mind at least - any more of a danger than a machine gun or tank in the hands of our armed forces.

The CIA, NSA, and FBI are not staffed and run by people who are either fools or professional voyeurs. Before any surveillance or intelligence-gathering operation begins it undergoes a cost-benefit analysis. Deploying and maintaining such tools, and collecting and analyzing any form of data recovered requires resources of time, materials, and money. These expenditures have to be balanced against the value, in terms of increased national security, that they deem like to achieve. It simply isn't worth it for them to snoop on ordinary people's smartphones or televisions. In the case of the zero-day exploits detailed in the most recent Wikileaks revelation, intelligence agencies are going to deploy such tools extremely sparingly, and to only the most valuable targets, since widespread distribution is likely to shorten its life as a useful espionage tool.
Is there any amount of institutionalism you won't step in line for?

How many times do the legal-only-on-paper-but-not-adhered-to-in-reality tactics need to be used before you admit there might be illegal activity going on in these institutions.

As for the underlined, the NSA exists for a very specific reason, under what definition of cost-benefit analysis does the CIA setting up it's own duplicate systems instead of using the NSA ones fall? If we only wanted to look at this whole thing from a literal financial perspective, why are two agencies in intelligence doing the exact same thing? Why is the CIA having it's own "NSA within the CIA" acceptable?
 
This leak looks to be an even bigger deal than Snowden's leak. Whereas Snowden revealed secretive systems, nothing he leaked really revealed how such systems operated.

Basically, Snowden said there's secret doorknobs.

But this person, with these new leaks, said "here's the keys!" and also how to make them.
 
Not sure what the fixation with Trump's taxes are. They wouldn't show any "Russian connections" (or anything of that sort) since that information isn't required to be disclosed.


Seriously, really don't understand why people think Trump's tax returns would show and additional information outside of what Trump disclosed to the FEC.
 
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You realize that what you just wrote is libel (a crime) right?
Libel is a tort, not a crime, IIRC. Even so, since Trump is a public figure unless the OP knew his statement to be false or acted with reckless disregard for the truth then he didn't commit libel. I would contend neither condition, is met so there is no libel.
 

If you're upset about that $2.35 million going to charity, you might want to look into the Rosneft sale. The Steele dossier alleged that Trump camp was offered 19% of the privatization sale of state-owned oil company Rosneft in exchange for dropping the sanctions on Russia. The sale happened in December of 2016, 19.5%, just like the dossier predicted, transferred to a mysterious company in the Cayman Islands. If it turns out to be true, I guess the Clintons are chumps for getting $2.35 million for charity instead of ~$11 billion for their personal bank account!
 
If you're upset about that $2.35 million going to charity, you might want to look into the Rosneft sale. The Steele dossier alleged that Trump camp was offered 19% of the privatization sale of state-owned oil company Rosneft in exchange for dropping the sanctions on Russia. The sale happened in December of 2016, 19.5%, just like the dossier predicted, transferred to a mysterious company in the Cayman Islands. If it turns out to be true, I guess the Clintons are chumps for getting $2.35 million for charity instead of ~$11 billion for their personal bank account!
so glad she lost :D
 
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Seriously, really don't understand why people think Trump's tax returns would show and additional information outside of what Trump disclosed to the FEC.

In all honesty, they likely would show Trump wasn't as rich as he pretended at the start of the election, which aside him hurting his ego, would've hurt his "Vote for me because I'm a great businessman" campaign. We already know he was personally in debt at one point, poor enough that his dad had to buy $3.5 million in poker chips at his casino and not use them (which is fraud) so his casino could make a debt payment. But there might be loans from Russian banks, or deals with Russian businesses that wouldn't look good with the recent Russian allegations.

Also: if they don't show anything, why does Trump want to hide them? Why not release them and get it over with?
 
The number one lie people tell themselves is that "The Government can't/won't do that!"

The number two lie people tell themselves is "Well, I'm not doing anything wrong, so why does it matter?"

The truth is that an innocent person cannot be manipulated, as they have nothing to hold over them. Sooner, or later, something valuable will be found by those that want to manipulate you, and will, at their leisure, use that to bend your will.

I thought it was something like

"The government wouldn't really do that to us"

"If they did, they would tell us about it on the news"
 
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In all honesty, they likely would show Trump wasn't as rich as he pretended at the start of the election, which aside him hurting his ego, would've hurt his "Vote for me because I'm a great businessman" campaign. We already know he was personally in debt at one point, poor enough that his dad had to buy $3.5 million in poker chips at his casino and not use them (which is fraud) so his casino could make a debt payment. But there might be loans from Russian banks, or deals with Russian businesses that wouldn't look good with the recent Russian allegations.

Also: if they don't show anything, why does Trump want to hide them? Why not release them and get it over with?
He's leveraged to the moon and back. Theres a reason none of the US banks will loan to him and he started going to Asia to get it done. The guy is broke, swimming in debt, but operates under the (somewhat true) adage of "if you owe the bank $1000 you're in trouble, if you owe the bank $50 million the bank is in trouble".

He's a leverage con artist, always has been.
 
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17155340_10158395786405422_5946504431401083031_n.jpg
Or

C6G35ceWAAAw5fK.jpg


Neither picture can be real though, he's holding the binoculars correctly.
[doublepost=1488917931][/doublepost]
Didn't that Snowden guy basically say similar stuff? Like this is news? lol
This contains more.
 
I enjoy the tears.

I think deep down inside, you know Trump is a terrible President and you legitimately won't get anything out of it. He'll help himself and his family and his rich billionaire friends and that's about it. Your only joy comes from telling yourself you won something.

Reminds me of a psychological experiment where they offered people $50k per year and all their neighbors would make $25k per year, or they could have $100k/year and all their neighbors would make $250k/ year. Most people chose $50k just so they could feel better than their neighbors, even though that meant they were getting less money themselves. Humans are weird and they do nonsensical things that hurt themselves in the end.
 
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I think deep down inside, you know Trump is a terrible President and you legitimately won't get anything out of it. He'll help himself and his family and his rich billionaire friends and that's about it. Your only joy comes from telling yourself you won something.

Reminds me of a psychological experiment where they offered people $50k per year and all their neighbors would make $25k per year, or they could have $100k/year and all their neighbors would make $250k/ year. Most people chose $50k just so they could feel better than their neighbors, even though that meant they were getting less money themselves. Humans are weird and they do nonsensical things that hurt themselves in the end.
better example would be supporting Hillary over Bernie :D
 
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