View Full Version : CIA secretly monitored intelligence committee
Surf n Turf
03-05-2014, 17:37
CIA secretly monitored intelligence committee
Who watches the watchers.... I know this is from the Guardian, but appears not to be covered by the MSM. If true, this sounds like NSA, not CIA, and could start a constitutional dilemma / crisis .
Imagine the potential ---"Here is the list of questions the committee will ask you today sir (with our researched answers), Note that we have to clean up this area, discredit this source, and by the way.. it looks like JONES is providing the oversight committee with information... we should have a talk with him about his job prospects if he lost his clearance" :eek:
SnT
Obama knew CIA secretly monitored intelligence committee
A leading US senator has said that President Obama knew of an “unprecedented action” taken by the CIA against the Senate intelligence committee,
The subtle reference in a Tuesday letter from Senator Mark Udall to Obama..... threatens to plunge the White House into a battle between the agency and its Senate overseers.
the CIA had secretly monitored computers used by committee staffers preparing the inquiry report, which is said to be scathing not only about the brutality and ineffectiveness of the agency’s interrogation techniques but deception by the CIA to Congress and policymakers about it.
Independent observers were unaware of a precedent for the CIA spying on the congressional committees.... “In the worst case, it would be a subversion of independent oversight, and a violation of separation of powers,”
the prospect of the agency spying on its Senate overseers who prepared their own inquiry potentially places the agency right back into the legal morass it has labored for years to avoid.
the CIA confirmed.... that it is subject to the Federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which makes it a crime to access government computer networks without authorization
“If, as alleged in the media, CIA accessed without permission or authority a computer network dedicated for use by a Senate committee, it would be an extremely serious matter. Such activity, if it occurred as alleged, would impede Congress’ ability to carry out its constitutional oversight responsibilities and could violate federal law,”
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/05/obama-cia-senate-intelligence-committee-torture
Obama knew CIA secretly monitored intelligence committee
A leading US senator has said that President Obama knew of an “unprecedented action” taken by the CIA against the Senate intelligence committee,
The subtle reference in a Tuesday letter from Senator Mark Udall to Obama..... threatens to plunge the White House into a battle between the agency and its Senate overseers.
the CIA had secretly monitored computers used by committee staffers preparing the inquiry report, which is said to be scathing not only about the brutality and ineffectiveness of the agency’s interrogation techniques but deception by the CIA to Congress and policymakers about it.
Okay what makes this any difference from Watergate? I mean it is tapping, computers here and not telephones or rooms, etc.
Surf n Turf
03-06-2014, 23:09
Okay what makes this any difference from Watergate? I mean it is tapping, computers here and not telephones or rooms, etc.
MtnGoat,
It is like watergate, but no one has the balls to threaten impeachment on Obama.....:mad:
SnT
I know it is, but I don't think the reason is because members are ball less. I if so many members on both side are tied into "things." If everyone is living in glass houses who's going to throw the first rock kind of thing.
Okay what makes this any difference from Watergate? I mean it is tapping, computers here and not telephones or rooms, etc.
The difference is Nixon was a Republican and Obama is a Democrat.
Since that is the case the MSM says "No harm, no foul" move on and the low information voters flip back to American Idol - or that new cooking show.
Okay then why aren't the Republicans cry foul? I get what you are saying, but not much reported on this.
I know this is from the Guardian, but appears not to be covered by the MSM. If true, this sounds like NSA, not CIA, and could start a constitutional dilemma / crisis .
I think you have it backwards. If it's from the Guardian it's true, MSM not true. The Guardian are the people running Snowden. This is from the Snowden leaks. But you are right. I can't believe that this isn't a bigger story.
The US government has always been a direct reflection of our society at the time. Right now most Americans just don't give a shit. We get the government we deserve.
Okay then why aren't the Republicans cry foul? I get what you are saying, but not much reported on this.
The GOP-e still wants to do lunch with the Prez, Harry R and his posse.
The GOP-e still wants to do lunch with the Prez, Harry R and his posse.
I don't see any benefit for any of them other than a personal gain, or kicking the cans down the road. So why would they want to spend time with the people who are responsible for demonizing them on such a consistent basis?
The US government has always been a direct reflection of our society at the time. Right now most Americans just don't give a shit. We get the government we deserve.
You're totally correct on are politicians are a reflection of current society, which is early soup sandwich.
Behind Clash Between C.I.A. and Congress, a Secret Report on Interrogations
It was early December when the Central Intelligence Agency began to suspect it had suffered what it regarded as an embarrassing computer breach.
Investigators for the Senate Intelligence Committee, working in the basement of a C.I.A. facility in Northern Virginia, had obtained an internal agency review summarizing thousands of documents related to the agency’s detention and interrogation program. Parts of the C.I.A. report cast a particularly harsh light on the program, the same program the agency was in the midst of defending in a prolonged dispute with the intelligence committee.
What the C.I.A. did next opened a new and even more rancorous chapter in the struggle over how the history of the interrogation program will be written. Agency officials began scouring the digital logs of the computer network used by the Senate staff members to try to learn how and where they got the report. Their search not only raised constitutional questions about the propriety of an intelligence agency investigating its congressional overseers, but has also resulted in two parallel inquiries by the Justice Department — one into the C.I.A. and one into the committee.
(Cont'd)
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/08/us/politics/behind-clash-between-cia-and-congress-a-secret-report-on-interrogations.html?_r=0
Hunh.
Richard
When I read an article on the same subject, it read to me as something we all expect in our jobs of proper use of automation and handling of sensitive material.
You click yes to consent in monitoring when you log into AKO. You consent to it when you sign your AUP. Even on your home PC.
I read this as the Agency was practicing their own review processes to monitor traffic and use of removable media, print jobs, etc.
I wouldn't say this is spying on them, I'd say that the staffers should get what they deserve for wrongfully removing info not cleared for the purposes. The staffers are doing bidding by someone seeking power and dirt. This is political posturing to remove themselves and establish cases against politicians who sanctioned the programs (successful or not) as we near mid-terms and the inevitable shitstorm that will ensue for 2016.
House Committee members for Intelligence and Budgets associated will be rolled out for failure to toe the party line.
On the surface it looks like another "domestic spying case". To me it looks like people are getting cleaning supplies on hand to wipe the house, hands and staff clean of any associations.
Badger52
03-10-2014, 16:37
that Richard posted.
Their search... has also resulted in two parallel inquiries by the Justice Department — one into the C.I.A. and one into the committee.Now we're into the YGBSM realm. Can successfully kicked down road.
1. Get caught.
2. Express outrage.
3. Launch inquiry.
4. Grab latte' and put out more staff PR guidance indicating the new topic they don't have to answer questions about because it's "under investigation."
Rinse, repeat PRN.
Plus ca change...
:rolleyes:
Badger52
03-11-2014, 13:31
Update: Sen. Feinstein, Intel committee chair, made an extended speech this morning on the floor (while I laughed over my breakfast) about how outraged she was at the 180° view of this that is being perpetuated by the media against the committee and her staff, and furious at the CIA on a number of fronts. Gosh, gee-willickers - she was really pissed.*
Counter-Outrage expressed: check.
* Breakfast was just fine, thanks - I was listening, not watching.
Update: Sen. Feinstein, Intel committee chair, made an extended speech this morning on the floor (while I laughed over my breakfast) about how outraged she was at the 180° view of this that is being perpetuated by the media against the committee and her staff, and furious at the CIA on a number of fronts. Gosh, gee-willickers - she was really pissed.*
Counter-Outrage expressed: check.
* Breakfast was just fine, thanks - I was listening, not watching.
Someone should just give her one of those little pills for women that cure bitchy.
Someone should just give her one of those little pills for women that cure bitchy.
So this FOG has been meaning to ask. How have hand grenades evolved over the past 20 years?
LongWire
03-11-2014, 19:27
So this FOG has been meaning to ask. How have hand grenades evolved over the past 20 years?
Think "Star Wars" thermal detonator!!!
ddoering
03-12-2014, 06:54
Update: Sen. Feinstein, Intel committee chair, made an extended speech this morning on the floor (while I laughed over my breakfast) about how outraged she was at the 180° view of this that is being perpetuated by the media against the committee and her staff, and furious at the CIA on a number of fronts. Gosh, gee-willickers - she was really pissed.*
Counter-Outrage expressed: check.
* Breakfast was just fine, thanks - I was listening, not watching.
Hypocritical bitch. Its fine with her that regular Americans are spied upon by their government as long as she and her co-conspirators aren't.
Hypocritical bitch. Its fine with her that regular Americans are spied upon by their government as long as she and her co-conspirators aren't."Do as I say; Not as I do!"
Surf n Turf
03-12-2014, 20:46
Hypocritical bitch. Its fine with her that regular Americans are spied upon by their government as long as she and her co-conspirators aren't.
Maybe Dianne will get her come-uppance. Some speculate that the "Panetta document" was given to her by a whistle-blower at the CIA, and she is in a lather to show how bad Jorge Bush was, and how bad he treated the poor innocent ROP adherents captured on the battlefield, killing Americans
SnT
The Democrat-controlled committee has largely kept silent about the tussle with the White House, even as some members have decried what they contend has been the CIA’s refusal to surrender key materials on the agency’s use under the Bush administration of interrogation methods denounced by the panel chairwoman as “un-American” and “brutal.”
The chairwoman, Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, made no mention of the White House documents during a blistering floor speech Tuesday in which she charged that the CIA may have undermined the Constitution and violated the law by searching computers used by her staff to compile the study
In question are some 9,400 documents that came to the committee’s attention in 2009, McClatchy has learned. It’s unclear whether the CIA first gave the committee staff access to the materials before the White House withheld them.
In a related episode in 2010 as described by Feinstein in her speech on Tuesday, the committee staff discovered that it was no longer able to access hundreds of documents that it previously had been able to read.
Feinstein, however, did not say what happened to the documents
“This was done without the knowledge or approval of committee members or staff and in violation of our written agreements,” she said.
The records being held by the White House are separate from materials generated by an internal CIA review of some 6.2 million pages of operational cables, emails and other top-secret documents made accessible to committee staff in a secret CIA electronic reading room in Northern Virginia.
Chambliss took to the Senate floor late Wednesday afternoon to launch an apparent counterattack on Feinstein’s speech
“Although people speak as though we know all the pertinent facts surrounding this matter, the truth is, we do not,” said Chambliss, who pointed out that the committee’s Republican staff didn’t participate in investigating the detention and interrogation program.
“We do not have the actual facts concerning the CIA’s alleged actions or all of the specific details about the actions by the committee staff regarding the draft of what is now referred to as the Panetta internal document,” Chambliss said. “Both parties have made allegations against one another, and even speculated (on) each other’s actions, but there are still a lot of unanswered questions that must be addressed.”
“No forensics have been run on the CIA computers . . . at the CIA facility to know what actually happened either regarding the alleged CIA search or the circumstances under which the committee came into possession of the Panetta internal review document.”
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2014/03/12/221033/despite-vows-of-help-white-house.html
Surf n Turf
03-12-2014, 22:13
More from the CSMonitor, speculating on what space alien provided the "Panetta report" to the committee, OR did the committee gain Unauthorized Access to the document from a fellow traveler.
Enough for me, I think they should burn witches in Salem and DC
SnT
At issue is how Intelligence Committee staffers obtained portions of a sensitive internal CIA study named the “Panetta report,” after former agency chief Leon Panetta.
Senator Feinstein in essence said that the Panetta report fell from the sky into the committee’s lap. Staffers flipping through millions of pages of digitized CIA documents, about Bush-era harsh interrogations of terror suspects, simply found the report via a CIA-provided search tool
“We have no way to determine who made the internal Panetta review documents available to the committee.... Further, we don’t know whether the documents were provided intentionally by the CIA, unintentionally by the CIA, or intentionally by a whistle-blower,” Feinstein said.
Per an agreement with the CIA, panel staffers worked on this investigation in a CIA building with a CIA-provided computer system walled off from the agency’s main networks.
In late January of last year, Feinstein officially requested that the agency turn over the full Panetta document. The CIA declined. Then in January of this year, Director John Brennan informed Feinstein that the CIA had searched the walled-off committee computer network in response to indications that the staff had already seen portions of the Panetta study. Which it had.
In this context, how the Intelligence Committee gained access to the Panetta report becomes legally and politically very important.
But it is also possible that a third-party whistle-blower slipped the Panetta documents into the pile of material to be provided to the committee, on purpose. That’s a more interesting answer to the mystery of where the document might have come from.
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/DC-Decoder/2014/0312/Did-secret-CIA-whistle-blower-leak-to-the-Senate-video
Great reads S&T. So let's see who will be the first to be thrown under the bus.
I hate Feinstein with a passion.
If the computers in question were provided to the Senate Committee by the CIA... were they not just exercising maintenance and control over their own property?
Just had to post this
Perhaps the CIA individuals were not properly vetted, I am sure she will get to the bottom of this, she's already there.
YM Cating
04-18-2014, 02:09
I'm going to paraphrase a line from The Good Shepard.
"You know, people often ask why I say "CIA" instead of "The CIA" and in response I ask them, do you put "the" in front of God?"
Nough Said