Vault 7
Many things can be derived form the most recent stream of Wikileaks. What RDN want to focus on is the Remote Development Branch. We can see that at any time, any place intelligence agencies are able to access our web cam, smartphone, personal computer. They even know what were typing. We only bring this up, do to the most recent allegations from Mr. Trump, accusing the Obama administration of tapping his campaign. Plenty of never trumps insist that this is insane, but we beg to differ.
We can go back to November of last year, when Heat Street a piece by former Conservative British politician Louise Mensch stating that "two separate sources with links to the counter-intelligence community have confirmed" that the FBI twice sought warrants to "examine activities of 'U.S. persons' in Trump's campaign with ties to Russia." The article states that a June warrant request was denied, and that a second request in October was approved.
Intelligence officials, continuously deny any allegation of the tapping of Mr. Trump or his associates directly. The director of the FBI, James Comey, asked the Justice Department to publicly deny the allegation. The Justice Department hasn't said anything.On NBC's Meet the Press on Sunday morning, James Clapper, who served as the director of national intelligence under Obama, said that to his knowledge there was no wiretapping on then-candidate Trump or his campaign.He also explicitly denied that there was any intelligence court order authorizing electronic surveillance of Trump.
In order for us to understand completely what is going on here, i think we need to understand what FISA court is. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, court is responsible for considering communication-monitoring requests from U.S. intelligence agencies.So, if the FBI wanted to listen in on telephone calls or other communications to and from Trump Tower, it might have requested a warrant from the FISA court, if the reasons for the surveillance pertained to foreign intelligence.
A federal agency can also ask a federal district judge for a warrant to conduct electronic surveillance on U.S. citizens it believes are committing serious crimes. Such a criminal wiretap would go through the regular federal court system, not the special FISA court.
All this aside, the claims are based on the idea that Mr. Obama could declare these taps alone and unaided. Unfortunately, that could not be further from the truth. Surveillance of an American citizen by U.S. intelligence or law enforcement requires that a federal judge or the FISA court sign off, and those orders are requested not by the White House, but by the FBI or Justice Department if they believe a crime has occurred.
Because the requests and the FISA court orders are secret, it's difficult to get information about them.
NPR's Mara Liasson reports that, as president, Trump could release any court order allowing surveillance of Trump Tower, if such an order exists. "He's the only one in the United States with that power," she explained. "He could also easily ask the appropriate agencies whether there was a wiretap."
White House press secretary Sean Spicer said such action would be interfering in an investigation, and that Congress should look into it, Mara reported.
