No system of mass surveillance has existed in any society that we know of to this point that has not been abused. —Edward Snowden
Legal and bureaucratic impediments to surveillance should be removed. —Former CIA Director Mike Pompeo
Entire populations, rather than just individuals, now live under constant surveillance. It’s no longer based on the traditional practice of targeted taps based on some individual suspicion of wrongdoing. It covers phone calls, emails, texts, search history, what you buy, who your friends are, where you go, who you love. —Edward Snowden
The last thing we need is another swamp creature, but it appears that is what we’re getting with our new Attorney General (AG). Bill Barr is a DC insider who praised Comey, Rosenstein and Mueller during his confirmation hearings — how is President Trump going to drain the swamp if Mueller’s best friend is running the DOJ? Barr and Mueller worked together when Barr was Bush’s attorney general from 1991 to 1993 and Mueller oversaw the department’s criminal division.
During William Barr’s confirmation hearings, Senator Lindsey Graham asked the nominee several questions. Barr said he didn’t think Robert Mueller was on a witch hunt, and thought he’d be fair to the country as a whole. He also said he had no reason to stop Mueller’s investigation or terminate it for cause. Barr told Senator Graham that he was committed to allowing Robert Mueller to finish his job, and that he has a very high opinion of Deputy AG (DAG) Rod Rosenstein. Link
Barr has now asked Rod Rosenstein to stay on for a while, and he has said he would. How special. Fired former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe, and two other people who have testified to Congress, claim Mr. Rosenstein repeatedly offered to wear a wire when meeting with Mr. Trump. McCabe also stated that he and other officials, including DAG Rosenstein, did headcounts of which cabinet officials might vote to declare the president “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office” under the 25th Amendment. Rosenstein never actually denied McCabe’s claims.
The very suspicion of impropriety should be reason for Rosenstein’s termination.
Barr and Second Amendment
William Barr served as the 77th United States Attorney General from 1991 to 1993 during the first Bush administration. He is also a past employee of the CIA. The Bushes represent the establishment globalists in their party and rather than vote for their party’s nominee in 2016, they voted for Hillary Clinton.
As I stated in a previous article, William Barr exhibited anti-Second Amendment policies in his 1991 confirmation hearings. Both Gun Owners of America and Dr. John Lott, President of the Crime Research Prevention Center, shared similar sentiments of worry with Barr’s past confirmation statements.
Video here: https://youtu.be/I_9LOX964FY
Asset Forfeiture
It is also disturbing that Barr has been a big fan of taking people’s property through civil asset forfeiture without a conviction. Many poor people in our country have cash taken from them and then the government says, “Prove to us where you got the cash and then you can get it back,” the burden is on the individual. Civil Asset Forfeiture is a terrible thing and William Barr is a big fan.
Government Theft of Promis Software
In October 1991, Barr appointed then retired Democratic Chicago judge Nicholas Bua as special counsel in the Inslaw scandal. Few people understand the full ramifications of Promis software, and the undetectable spying apparatus placed in foreign computers. In 1989, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jack Brooks, D-TX, launched a three-year investigation into the Inslaw affair. In the resulting report, the Committee suggested that among others, Edwin Meese, while presidential counselor and later as attorney general, and Democrat D. Lowell Jensen a former assistant and deputy attorney general and former US district judge in San Francisco, conspired to steal PROMIS software from Bill Hamilton’s company, Inslaw.
Bua’s 1993 report found the DOJ of no wrong doing in the matter, despite a 12-year lawsuit by Inslaw, regarding the government theft of their software. One journalist, Danny Casolaro, died as he attempted to tell the story and boxes of documents relating to the case were destroyed, stolen, or conveniently “lost” by the DOJ. Software piracy, conspiracy, cover-up, stonewalling, covert action…just another decade at the corrupt DOJ.
Ruby Ridge
Senate Judiciary Committee hearings for AG nominee William Barr focused heavily on Barr’s views on Special Counsel Robert Mueller. But nobody asked about Barr’s legal crusade for blanket immunity for federal agents who killed American citizens.
Barr was responsible for both the U.S. Marshals Service and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, two federal agencies whose misconduct at Ruby Ridge “helped to weaken the bond of trust that must exist between ordinary Americans and our law enforcement agencies,” according to a 1995 Senate Judiciary Committee report.
The family had come under federal siege because of Randy’s refusal to become an informant within the Aryan Nation white supremacist group. Randy had been manipulated by an ATF undercover operative named Kenneth Fadeley into selling a shotgun with a sawed-off barrel. Eight months after that transaction, two of Fadeley’s comrades in that detestable organization demanded that Randy become an informant, threatening his home and family if he didn’t cooperate. Ruby Ridge was considered a kill zone.
In a questionnaire by the Judicial Committee, Barr was asked to disclose his past work including pro bono activities “serving the disadvantaged.” The “disadvantaged” that Barr spent the most time helping was FBI agent Lon Horiuchi who slayed an Idaho mother holding her baby in 1992. Barr spent two weeks organizing former Attorneys General and others to support “an FBI sniper in defending against criminal charges in connection with the Ruby Ridge incident.” Barr also “assisted in framing legal arguments advanced… in the district court and the subsequent appeal to the Ninth Circuit,” he told the committee.
U.S. marshals trespassed on Weaver’s land and killed his 14-year-old son, Sammy, and his dog. The following day, FBI sniper Lon Horiuchi killed his wife, Vicki, as she was standing in the cabin doorway holding her 10-month-old baby. Horiuchi had previously shot Randy Weaver in the back after he stepped out of the cabin to collect the body of his son. The suspects were never given a warning or a chance to surrender and had taken no action against FBI agents. Weaver survived.
In August of 1995, the Justice Department paid $3.1 million to settle a wrongful death lawsuit from the Weaver family. In 1998, they paid Elmer “Geronimo” Pratt $4.5 million for a 26-year false imprisonment and false testimony against him by an FBI informant.
Government Surveillance
The fourth amendment originally enforced the idea that each man’s home is his castle, secure from unreasonable search and seizure by the government. The Patriot Act was the destruction of American citizen privacy. Both Mueller and Barr are big brothers who love the “all-seeing eye.”
While serving as attorney general under former President George H.W. Bush in 1992, Barr directed the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) to collect bulk phone data on millions of people, most of whom weren’t even suspected of a crime. This program laid the groundwork for the National Security Agency’s phone record collection authorized by the Patriot Act a decade later, a misnomer if there ever was one. Barr continued to be a cheerleader for warrantless surveillance even after the PATRIOT Act’s passage. During congressional testimony in 2003, he called the bill a “major step forward.”
He went on to say that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the law that authorizes foreign surveillance and has been abused to surveil, “remains too restrictive” because it “still requires that the government establish probable cause that an individual is either a ‘foreign power’ or an ‘agent of a foreign power.’” In other words, Barr objects to the idea that the government should need a warrant before it can spy on citizens. Link
Surveillance and the Patriot Act
The Patriot Act permits FBI agents to write their own search warrants for business records, and it has been used to induce the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) to issue warrants on a made-up basis to read emails and listen to telephone calls in real time. The members of Congress who voted for it were largely unaware of the liberties they were sacrificing. None of them ever read it.
Both the Patriot Act and the USA Freedom Act unconstitutionally do away with the probable cause requirement for warrants. Those two laws permit the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to issue warrants based on the standard of “governmental needs” rather than probable cause. This is a profoundly unconstitutional standard, and one that has resulted in spying on all people all the time.
The Patriot Act vastly expanded the surveillance potential of the FBI, the CIA and the NSA among other intelligence agencies. The US government contracted with Acxiom, Lockheed, Booz Allen Hamilton and many others to build new mass surveillance programs. One program was called Total Information Awareness (TIA), which was an operation where the FBI and other agencies would build profiles, like Acxiom’s, on millions of law-abiding Americans. Link
Mr. Barr strongly supports the Patriot Act which violates every American’s fourth amendment right to privacy. The Constitution provides us with more protection and safety than the surveillance state ever will.
An NSA Whistle-Blower tells all in this video to filmmaker Laura Poitras. She profiled William Binney, a 32-year veteran of the National Security Agency who helped design a top-secret program he says is broadly collecting Americans’ personal data.
Following the June 2013 leak of documents detailing the NSA practice of collecting telephone metadata on millions of Americans’ telephone calls, former Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper was accused of perjury for telling a congressional committee hearing that the NSA does not collect any type of data on millions of Americans. He escaped prosecution because the five-year Statute of Limitations ran out.
Birds of a Feather
Barr and Mueller are birds of a feather. Mueller has claimed one case to validate spying on all of America. It was a Supreme Court case and the tracing of a single phone call to a single robber. Thus, the Supreme Court held that phone metadata is not protected by the fourth amendment. Mueller has repeatedly used this. The case is Smith v. Maryland, which held that people did not have a reasonable expectation of privacy regarding the numbers they call, because they willingly give up those numbers to the company to connect their call.
And so, because the Supreme Court approved the collection of one robber’s phone records in 1979, Mueller insists it meant it was reasonable for FBI and NSA to collect and aggregate the phone records for every American today and forever. Link
Mueller implicitly argues that the perpetual and ubiquitous data collection of the digital and telephonic communications of law-abiding Americans is constitutional. For thorough documentation of same, see Louisiana State Senator John Milkovich’s book, Robert Mueller, Errand Boy for the New World Order.
Conclusion
Rand Paul opposed the confirmation of William Barr. He said, “He’s been the chief advocate for warrantless surveillance of U.S. citizens. I think that the Fourth Amendment should protect your phone calls and your bank information. People shouldn’t be allowed to look at it without a warrant.” Perhaps this one Senator knows an inside player when he sees one.
Surely, we’ve all heard foolish folks say, “Well, I have nothing to hide, I’m not a terrorist.” Edward Snowden said, “Arguing that you don’t care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say.”
Americans do not understand freedom or the Fourth Amendment of our unalienable Bill of Rights. The Jews of Europe had nothing to hide either, but it didn’t stop the Gestapo, and neither did it stop the East German Stasi. The NSA’s algorithms and extensive databases make it far more effective than the Stasi ever dreamed of being.
S139 reauthorizes the FISA for six years through 2023 which governs electronic surveillance of foreign terrorism suspects. The Senate passed it on January 18, 2018 by a vote of 65 to 34. Although put in place to gather intel on foreign targets, it has been used to spy on U.S. citizens. The bill provides provisions to protect the privacy of American citizens, but given the track record of intel agencies, it is unlikely they will follow these rules. Will our new AG make sure they do?
Attorney Joe DiGenova believes William Barr is going to be the catalyst who will clean out the filth from the DOJ. I hope he is right, and I am wrong.
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© 2019 Kelleigh Nelson – All Rights Reserved
E-Mail Kelleigh Nelson: Proverbs133@bellsouth.net
