American Consequences - July 2017

Sara Carter

A CONVERSATION WITH...

Sara Carter: : I feel grateful that that I could get these stories out there to the American public because I feel they are vitally important to our liberties, to our Fourth Amendment rights

Obama administration, journalists... There was a loophole that allowed the FBI, under certain conditions and with no warrant, to look at communications that journalists had with their sources. This was incredible to me because you have the FISC Court, which pretty much says yes to everything that comes across their desk for a warrant. But requesters have to fill out 80 pages worth of paperwork. This is a very intense thing when you’re trying to get a warrant to surveil someone. But what happened was the FISC Court couldn’t do everything. So they kind of gave oversight to the agencies themselves... What they came back with was complete disregard for the rules. They said there was inadequate training and there was deficient oversight, sharing spy data with forbidden parties. And remember, James Comey testified to lawmakers and told them that they only use sensitive espionage data that was gathered about Americans without a warrant when it was overseen and checked. And what the FISC Court found out was that that was not the case at all. We were also able to uncover that Obama relaxed the laws on the National Security Agency for searches... That they were searching much more than we ever thought. From 2011 until the time of the election, those searches increased by over 350%... That’s overseas searches on Americans talking to foreigners overseas. And so those “unmaskings” also increased, particularly from November through December. Not only did we see searches on upstream Internet data on

and to the foundation of our country. Once again, the stories are based on

documented fact. We obtained documents that were pretty much buried... nobody paid attention to them... from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), which openly chided the Obama administration for basically illegal surveillance. Going back to the FBI, it was illegally sharing our espionage data on Americans with unauthorized actors – third parties, forbidden parties, and contractors. What we've seen is that there was, in a sense, political espionage. There were hundreds of cases of warrantless surveillance where the FBI was basically able to glean information from people that you would’ve thought was protected under your Fourth Amendment rights. Let me give you a couple of examples... Private conversations between your attorney and you. There were cases where the FBI went in and they obtained and listened in to private privileged client-attorney relations, which you would’ve thought would’ve been completely secured. Priests; priests were also there. And another interesting factor that we saw under the

28 | July 2017

Made with FlippingBook HTML5