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Obama's Corruption Chronicles:

Obama commutes sentences of convicted spies

http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/17/politics/chelsea-manning-sentence-commuted/

This is so big, even CNN is upset.
-------------------------------------------------

Washington (CNN)President Barack Obama on Tuesday overruled his secretary of defense to commute the sentence of former Army soldier Chelsea Manning, who was convicted of stealing and disseminating 750,000 pages of documents and videos to WikiLeaks.

The decision -- which a senior defense official told CNN was made over the objections of Secretary of Defense Ash Carter -- immediately touched off a controversy in the closing days of the Obama administration.

A former intelligence official described being "shocked" to learn of Obama's decision, adding that the "entire intelligence community is deflated by this inexplicable use of executive power." The official said the move was "deeply hypocritical given Obama's denunciation of WikiLeaks' role in the hacking of the (Democratic National Committee)."

The President also pardoned James Cartwright, the former vice chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, who pleaded guilty in October to a single charge of making false statements to federal investigators in 2012 when he was questioned about leaking top secret information on US efforts to cripple Iran's nuclear program to two journalists.

A presidential commutation reduces the sentence being served but it does not change the fact of conviction, whereas a pardon forgives a certain criminal offense.

Manning, a transgender woman, was serving a 35-year sentence at Fort Leavenworth, an all-male Army prison in eastern Kansas, despite her request to transfer to a civilian prison. A White House statement on Tuesday said her prison sentence is set to expire on May 17.
 
BTW...

35 hrs & 11 mins. Left.

No days... just hours now.

Bye bye Barry.
Don't let that big white door hit you in the ass on your way out.
 
I forgot we're on Pacific Time and they'e on DC time.

Less than 24 hours now....
 
Border Patrol Alters Stats to Hide Release of Criminal Aliens, High Recidivism
JANUARY 19, 2017

The U.S. Border Patrol alters statistics involving the apprehension of criminal illegal immigrants to conceal that thousands are being released, a new federal audit reveals. The frontline Homeland Security agency charged with preventing terrorists and weapons—including those of mass destruction—from entering the country also skews figures to drastically deflate the high recidivism rate of aliens caught entering the U.S.

The distressing details of this crucial agency’s crafty record-keeping practices are outlined in a scathing report issued this month by the investigative arm of Congress, the Government Accountability Office (GAO). The probe focuses on a Border Patrol system developed to address a smuggling crisis along the southwest border. It’s officially known as Consequence Delivery System (CDS) and is used to identify the most effective and efficient consequences to deter illegal cross border activity in each of the agency’s sectors. For the system to work, the Border Patrol must report accurate information involving illegal aliens who are apprehended.

Instead, it appears that federal agents on the ground are being ordered to fudge the numbers as part of a broader Obama administration effort to protect illegal immigrants and falsely portray the Mexican border as safe. The GAO report suggests that Border Patrol headquarters directed agents to misclassify criminal illegal aliens, presumably to hide the fact that they were being released instead of prosecuted. Officials interviewed as part of the probe “said that agents received oral direction from headquarters to reclassify criminal aliens who cannot be given a consequence of federal prosecution, and that written data integrity guidance to sectors did not include activities for checking the accuracy of alien classifications,” the GAO report states.

The misclassification of apprehended illegal immigrants resulted in nearly 4,000 criminal aliens being returned to their home country rather than prosecuted between 2013 and 2015, the GAO found. After analyzing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) data, congressional investigators determined that an astounding 94% (109,080) of the 116,409 aliens given a consequence of warrant or notice to appear still had an open case and “may remain in the United States.” Thousands more escaped criminal prosecution because they were not properly classified. “Specifically, of the approximate 15,000 apprehensions of criminal aliens who were not classified according to CDS guidance between fiscal years 2013 and 2015, 8 percent were recommended for criminal prosecution (3,912 apprehensions) compared to 47 percent of all criminal aliens during that timeframe,” the GAO writes.

In some cases, Department of Justice (DOJ) restrictions limit the number of illegal aliens that can be referred for prosecution, the report says. This leaves agents in a bind and hesitant to apply consequences that require referral to federal partners. Here’s an example: “Rio Grande Valley sector officials said that while agents apprehended over 129,000 aliens in fiscal year 2015, the sector can only refer about 40 immigration-related cases each day to the corresponding USAO District (Southern District of Texas) for prosecution. Once this daily limit is reached, agents must apply an alternative consequence that is not the Most Effective and Efficient as defined by the CDS guide.”

Recidivism numbers are kept down by using an unscrupulous system that only classifies an apprehended illegal alien as recidivist if he or she had been previously caught within a fiscal year. The system doesn’t account for immigrants with no record of removal after apprehension and who may have remained in the United States without the opportunity to recidivate. The Border Patrol guidance also states that a first-time apprehension classification may be used on an alien that has been apprehended by another agency. Congressional investigators determined that the Border Patrol system slashed recidivism numbers in half. In one outrageous case cited in the report an “alien apprehended 54 times in the Rio Grande Valley sector between October 2012 and May 2015 was classified as a First Time Apprehension 6 times.”
 
Time left until Obama leaves office:

0 Days...2 Hours...25 Minutes...13 Seconds

Time until Friday, January 20, 2017 at 12:00:00 noon (EST)
 
Looks like I missed one...

Ammo Ban
: The Obama Administration’s ‘Parting Shot’ at Hunting Community


On January 19 — the last full day of Barack Obama’s presidency — U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Director Dan Ashe issued an ammo ban on the use of “traditional ammunition on Service lands.”

The ammo ban was issued unilaterally via Director’s Order 219.


National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) reported:
[D.O. 219] requires several initiatives to go into effect immediately. Regional Directors are to work with state agencies to ban the use of traditional ammunition. It also ends the use of traditional ammunition on Federal land, including National Parks, tribal lands and national wildlife refuges in order to mirror policies in states where traditional ammunition is already restricted.

D.O. 219 also stipulates that the “Assistant Director, Migratory Birds, in consultation with National Flyway Councils and individual states, will establish a process to phase in a requirement for the use of nontoxic ammunition for recreational hunting of mourning doves and other upland game birds.” In other words, the use of traditional ammunition for dove and upland bird hunting is going to be heavily restricted and eventually eliminated.

NSSF senior vice president Lawrence Keane responded to the Obama administration’s “parting shot” at the hunting community:

This directive is irresponsible and driven not out of sound science but unchecked politics. The timing alone is suspect. This directive was published without dialogue with industry, sportsmen and conservationists. The next director should immediately rescind this, and instead create policy based upon scientific evidence of population impacts with regard to the use of traditional ammunition.​
 
This is an easy one for Trump to over-turn since it's an executive order and not law.
 
Yes sir...My man Trump will tear that crap to shreds...

But...it goes to show what a arse Obama IS/WAS his last days in office...
then he goes to Palm Beach on OUR DIME ( 2.4 Million $$ )
 
DIRECTOR'S ORDER NO. 219

Subject:
USE OF NONTOXIC AMMUNITION AND FISHING TACKLE

Sec. 1 What is the purpose of this Order? The purpose of this Order is to establish procedures and a timeline for expanding the use of nontoxic ammunition and fishing tackle on Service lands, waters, and facilities and for certain types of hunting and fishing regulated by the Service outside of Service lands, waters, and facilities.

Sec. 2 What is the legal authority for this Order?
a. Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act (16 U.S.C. 668a-d).
b. Migratory Bird Treaty Act (16 U.S.C. 703-712).
c. National Wildlife Refuge System Administration Act of 1966, as amended by the National Wildlife Refuge System Improvement Act of 1997 (16 U.S.C. 668dd-668ee).
d. National Wildlife Refuge Recreation Act (16 U.S.C. 460k-460k-4).
e. Endangered Species Act (ESA) (16 U.S.C. 1531-1543).
f. Fish and Wildlife Act 1956 (16 U.S.C. 742a-742j).
g. Migratory Bird Conservation Act (16 U.S.C. 715-715r).
h. Emergency Wetlands Resources Act of 1986 (16 U.S.C. § 3901b, 100 Stat. 3583).

Sec. 3 What is the Service’s overall policy? It is the Service’s policy to:
a. Require the use of nontoxic ammunition and fishing tackle to the fullest extent practicable for all activities on Service lands, waters, and facilities by January 2022, except as needed for law enforcement or health and safety uses, as provided for in policy.
b. Collaborate with state fish and wildlife agencies in implementing this policy.

Sec. 4 What are the effects of lead on fish or wildlife health?
a. Exposure to lead ammunition and fishing tackle has resulted in harmful effects to fish and wildlife species. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, lead poisoning is a toxicosis caused by the absorption of hazardous levels of lead in body tissues. Ingested lead pellets from shotgun shells have been a common source of lead poisoning in birds. The Service recognized the problem of avian exposure to lead shot used for waterfowl hunting and enacted restrictions in 1991 and hunting and waterfowl populations have thrived since.
b. The use of lead ammunition continues for other forms of hunting, presenting an ongoing risk to upland or terrestrial migratory birds and other species that ingest spent shot directly from the ground or as a result of predating or scavenging carcasses that have been killed with lead ammunition and left in the field. Many states have enacted nontoxic shot and ammunition requirements to address this concern.
c. Ingestion of lead fishing sinkers and other fishing tackle have been documented in waterbirds. Six states currently restrict the use of lead fishing tackle under certain circumstances to protect wildlife health.

Sec. 5 What steps will the Service take to phase in the use of nontoxic ammunition and fishing tackle?
a. The Service will continue to support targeted research to understand the human, fish, and wildlife health benefits of using nontoxic ammunition and fishing tackle.
b. The Service will continue to work with states and other partners on education efforts regarding the benefits and effectiveness of nontoxic ammunition and fishing tackle.
c. To ensure the public experiences a consistent approach to nontoxic ammunition and fishing tackle requirements, over the next 24 months, each Regional Director, in coordination with relevant Assistant Directors, should work with individual states, regional state fish and wildlife associations, and tribes to identify opportunities to expand existing state, Federal, or tribal requirements for use of nontoxic ammunition and fishing tackle on Service lands, waters and facilities.
i. Where states have enacted nontoxic ammunition or fishing tackle requirements for certain forms of hunting and fishing on state lands such requirements should be expanded to national wildlife refuges in those states through amendments to state or Service regulations, as appropriate.
ii. Where states have enacted nontoxic ammunition or fishing tackle requirements for certain forms of hunting and fishing that apply to state, private, and Federal lands throughout their states, Regions should ensure these requirements are enacted and enforced on Service lands, waters, and facilities in those states.
iii. Where individual Federal land units administered by other Federal agencies including the National Park Service, the National Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the Department of Defense, or other agencies, have enacted requirements for the use of nontoxic ammunition or fishing tackle, Regions should adopt such requirements on Service lands, waters and facilities in the same states as those units through amendments to Service hunting and fishing regulations, as appropriate.
iv. Where individual tribes have enacted requirements for the use of nontoxic ammunition or fishing tackle, the Regions should adopt such requirements on Service lands, waters and facilities in the same states as those tribal lands through amendments to Service hunting and fishing regulations, in consultation with the appropriate tribe and state.
d. When available information indicates negative impacts of lead ammunition or fish tackle on sensitive, vulnerable or Service trust resources, the appropriate Regional Director, in coordination with the appropriate Assistant Director(s), will take steps to expeditiously require the use of nontoxic ammunition or fishing tackle to the fullest extent practical under Service jurisdiction to benefit such species or resources.
e. The Assistant Director, Migratory Birds, in consultation with National Flyway Councils and individual states, will establish a process to phase in a requirement for the use of nontoxic ammunition for recreational hunting of mourning doves and other upland game birds.

Sec. 6 When is this Order effective? This Order is effective immediately. It remains in effect until we incorporate it into the Fish and Wildlife Service Manual, or until we amend, supersede, or revoke it, whichever comes first. If we do not amend, supersede, or revoke it, the provisions of this Order will terminate on July 31, 2018.

/sgd/ Daniel M. Ashe
DIRECTOR
Date: January 19, 2017
 
President Trump Readies Pen to Reverse OBAMA'S Anti-Gun Executive Orders

In one of the first pro-gun actions of his administration, President Donald Trump is expected to shortly move to revoke Barack Obama's illegal actions to effectively outlaw gun collecting.

Obama’s anti-gun “executive action” was announced on January 6, 2016 – in the wake of Obama’s unsuccessful attempt to scapegoat law-abiding gun owners for the actions of a Muslim terrorist in San Bernardino.

Obama’s action was implemented as a “clarification” because he knew that his lawless moves could never pass muster under the rule-making procedures of the Administrative Procedures Act.

Under Obama’s now-moribund “clarification,” a gun owner could have been imprisoned for up to five years and fined $250,000 for “only one or two [firearms] transactions,” according to a White House fact sheet.

Note that, under Clinton, tens of thousands of licensees lost their licenses because they didn’t have “brick-or- mortar” stores. Now, in a Clinton/Obama Mutt-and- Jeff routine, Obama proposed to imprison hobbyists who didn’t have licenses because the government refused to issue licenses to them.

Hence, a hobbyist who bought a firearm one day and sold it the next day at a profit could go to prison for five years. Obviously, the intent was to create such a cloud of ambiguity that gun owners would refrain from constitutionally protected activity (private firearms sales), for fear that they would run afoul of Obama’s amorphous rules.

Tragically, in some cases, Obama’s unlawful actions had exactly the intended effect.

But, thanks to President Donald Trump, Obama's unlawful action will soon be repealed -- as one of the priority actions of the incoming administration.

Gun Owners of America is optimistic that this is only the first in a series of Trump actions overturning illegal Obama actions. We are also asking for Trump administration action:
  • Removing the U.S. from the Anti-Gun UN Arms Trade Treaty
  • Repealing bullet and gun import bans going from Obama back to George H. W. Bush’s semi-auto import ban;
  • Repealing the suspension of health privacy laws with respect to gun owners;
  • Repealing executive actions encouraging doctors to inquire about gun ownership and to enter this information into a federal health database;
  • Restoring gun rights for 257,000 law-abiding veterans;
  • Repealing Obama’s efforts to strip Social Security recipients of their guns, merely because a guardian processes their checks.
There is a joke that goes:

“What do you call 10,000 anti-gun lawyers at the bottom of the ocean?

Answer: "A good start.”

The work of restoring the Second Amendment to its Pre-Obama status has only just begun...

Tim Macy
Chairman
Gun Owners of America

 
WELL...IT LOOKS LIKE THE OBAMA CORRUPTION SCANDALS HAVE NOT YET ENDED:

========================================================

Obama Final Travel Tally: Nearly $100 Million

There may be no better way to keep on eye on our leaders’ penchant for pretending to royalty than to tally the cost of their travel and accommodations. Our nation has granted its presidents exquisite transport because we need for our leaders to be efficient and safe. However, we don’t need for them to luxuriate on our tax dollars.

As you know, we have carefully tracked the travel costs President Obama incurred, and we have an update on that this week. We have obtained records from the Secret Service and the Air Force in response to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests that show Obama family travel cost taxpayers a grand total of $99,714,527.82.

The newly obtained Obama White House era travel records show:
  • The March 2014 trip to Key Largo during Spring Break – where the First Family stayed at the exclusive Ocean Reef Club – cost the Secret Service $247,827.50:
  • $182,120.33 for hotels and $65,707.17 in travel expenses. The total cost of that trip, with previously released $885,683 in flight costs from the Air Force, is $1,133,510.50.
  • Other documents show that Michelle Obama’s February 2015 Aspen vacation cost the Secret Service a total of $64,807.41: $47,109.28 for hotels, $3,559.43 in rental cars and $14,138.70 in other travel expenses. The total cost of the trip, with $57,068.80 in flight costs from previously released Air Force records, is $121,876.21.
  • Judicial Watch released documents from the Air Force concerning the 2016-2017 Obama family Christmas trip to Honolulu showing 17.9 hours flying at $142,380 per hour, bringing the total flight cost to $2,548,602.
We have also filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Homeland Security for Secret Service records associated with President Obama’s movements, schedule and activities since his departure from the White House. The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security (No. 1:17-cv-00928)).

The suit was filed after the Secret Service failed to respond to a March 24, 2017, FOIA request seeking:

All records of former President Barack Obama’s movements, schedule, activities, and/or meeting for January 21, 2017 through March 21, 2017. Such records include, but are not limited to, U.S. Secret Service schedules and activity reports.

Although Obama is no longer in office, he continues to receive Secret Service protection at taxpayer expense. In January, the Obama family traveled to Palm Springs, CA. The former president also spent a few weeks in French Polynesia. And all the while, taxpayers paid the protection tab.

For eight long years, the Obamas spent our tax dollars for a lavish jet-setting lifestyle. Many in the media only focus on President Trump’s travel, but Barack Obama continues to cost taxpayers with his luxury travel, and we aim to document it.
 
Hundreds Vote Illegally in North Carolina after Court Bans Election Integrity Law
APRIL 26, 2017

Less than a year after a federal appellate court sided with the Obama administration to strike down North Carolina’s election integrity reforms, a state audit reveals that hundreds of votes were illegally cast by felons and non-citizens in just one election. Voter impersonation, double voting and irregularities in absentee ballots sent via mail also tainted the election, according to the investigation conducted by the North Carolina State Board of Elections (NCSBE). The probe analyzed records from the 2016 general election.

State auditors found that about 500 ineligible people voted in 2016, more than 440 of them felons. Dozens of non-citizens from 28 different countries also cast ballots, the probe found. “A number of non-citizens said they were not aware that they were prohibited from voting,” the report states. “Interviews and evidence show that some non-citizens were misinformed about the law by individuals conducting voter registration drives or, in at least one document case, by a local precinct official.” North Carolina authorities are also investigating 24 substantiated cases of double voting in 2016. “Some violators appear to be ‘testers’ trying to find holes in the system,” according to the report. “Others claim property ownership in multiple jurisdictions should allow them to vote in each, and others brush past the law to support their candidate by any means necessary. Additionally, a case that initially appears to be a double voter—an individual who votes twice—may actually be a case of voter impersonation—an individual who casts a ballot using the identity of another person.”

The NCSBE concedes that there are probably many more cases of double voting but identifying them is difficult and there’s no reliable method to consistently find them and other types of election fraud. “While no audit exists to catch all possible cases of voter impersonation, double voter or deceased voter audits may detect such cases,” the report says. This brings up another alarming point; if duplicate registrations are voted, there’s no way to tell if that’s fraudulent voting by a single individual—which everyone assumes—or impersonation fraud. Even in the North Carolina probe, we’ll never know if that’s the whole number. “These kinds of stories are a feature of every election and that’s despite the fact that most states often don’t even track these crimes in a systematic way,” said Robert Popper, a former Deputy Chief of Justice Department Voting Section who heads Judicial Watch’s Election Integrity Project. “Some states admit they don’t track them at all,” Popper added.

Judicial Watch has been heavily involved in the North Carolina case and in 2015 filed an amicus curiae brief with the U.S. Supreme Court in opposition to a lower court ruling preventing the state from implementing its election integrity reform law. Passed by the legislature in 2013 the measure requires voters to present a photo identification, eliminates same-day registration, shortens the early voting period from 17 to 10 days and requires voters to cast ballots in their own precinct. The Obama administration joined a group of leftist organizations to challenge the law in federal court, alleging that it disparately and adversely affects minority voting rights. A federal judge, Thomas D. Schroeder, rejected the claims and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit ruled against North Carolina just prior to the November 2014 elections. State officials asked the Supreme Court for a temporary stay of the Fourth Circuit’s ruling and the high court granted it, allowing North Carolina’s election integrity rules to be used in 2014.

In its unanimous decision, the three-judge panel from the Fourth Circuit wrote that North Carolina’s voter integrity law harmed blacks, who overwhelmingly cast ballots for Democrats. “The new provisions target African Americans with almost surgical precision” and “impose cures for problems that did not exist,” the appellate ruling states. “Thus the asserted justifications cannot and do not conceal the State’s true motivation.” Under the racial “disparate impact” theory, which is at the heart of the controversial Fourth Circuit opinion, a defendant can be held liable for discrimination for a policy hat statistically disadvantages a minority group, even if that negative impact was neither foreseen nor intended. The more broadly accepted view by courts under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) says that a violation occurs only when voting practices are motivated by a discriminatory intent and that any incidental racially disparate impact of a voting law is not sufficient on its own to prove a violation of Section 2.
 
Obama intel agency secretly conducted illegal searches on Americans for years
by John Solomon and Sara Carter

May 24, 2017

The National Security Agency under former President Barack Obama routinely violated American privacy protections while scouring through overseas intercepts and failed to disclose the extent of the problems until the final days before Donald Trump was elected president last fall, according to once top-secret documents that chronicle some of the most serious constitutional abuses to date by the U.S. intelligence community.

http://circa.com/politics/barack-ob...s-of-illegal-nsa-searches-spying-on-americans

More than 5 percent, or one out of every 20 searches seeking upstream Internet data on Americans inside the NSA’s so-called Section 702 database violated the safeguards Obama and his intelligence chiefs vowed to follow in 2011, according to one classified internal report reviewed by Circa.

The Obama administration self-disclosed the problems at a closed-door hearing Oct. 26 before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that set off alarm.

Trump was elected less than two weeks later.

The normally supportive court censured administration officials, saying the failure to disclose the extent of the violations earlier amounted to an “institutional lack of candor” and that the improper searches constituted a “very serious Fourth Amendment issue,” according to a recently unsealed court document dated April 26, 2017.

The admitted violations undercut one of the primary defenses that the intelligence community and Obama officials have used in recent weeks to justify their snooping into incidental NSA intercepts about Americans.

Circa has reported that there was a three-fold increase in NSA data searches about Americans and a rise in the unmasking of U.S. person’s identities in intelligence reports after Obama loosened the privacy rules in 2011.

Officials like former National Security Adviser Susan Rice have argued their activities were legal under the so-called minimization rule changes Obama made, and that the intelligence agencies were strictly monitored to avoid abuses.

The intelligence court and the NSA’s own internal watchdog found that not to be true.

“Since 2011, NSA’s minimization procedures have prohibited use of U.S.-person identifiers to query the results of upstream Internet collections under Section 702,” the unsealed court ruling declared. “The Oct. 26, 2016 notice informed the court that NSA analysts had been conducting such queries inviolation of that prohibition, with much greater frequency than had been previously disclosed to the Court.”

Speaking Wednesday on Fox News, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) said there was an apparent effort under the Obama Administration to increase the number of unmaskings of Americans.

"If we determine this to be true, this is an enormous abuse of power," Paul said. “This will dwarf all other stories.”

“There are hundreds and hundreds of people,” Paul added.
 
The American Civil Liberties Union said the newly disclosed violations are some of the most serious to ever be documented and strongly call into question the U.S. intelligence community’s ability to police itself and safeguard American’s privacy as guaranteed by the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment protections against unlawful search and seizure.

“I think what this emphasizes is the shocking lack of oversight of these programs,” said Neema Singh Guliani, the ACLU’s legislative counsel in Washington.

You have these problems going on for years that only come to the attention of the court late in the game and then it takes additional years to change its practices.
“I think it does call into question all those defenses that we kept hearing, that we always have a robust oversight structure and we have culture of adherence to privacy standards,” she added. “And the headline now is they actually haven’t been in compliance for years and the FISA court itself says in its opinion is that the NSA suffers from a culture of a lack of candor.”

The NSA acknowledged it self-disclosed the mass violations to the court last fall and that in April it took the extraordinary step of suspending the type of searches that were violating the rules, even deleting prior collected data on Americans to avoid any further violations.

“NSA will no longer collect certain internet communications that merely mention a foreign intelligence target,” the agency said in the statement that was dated April 28 and placed on its Web site without capturing much media or congressional attention.

In question is the collection of what is known as upstream “about data”about an American that is collected even though they were not directly in contact with a foreigner that the NSA was legally allowed to intercept.

The NSA said it doesn't have the ability to stop collecting ‘about’ information on Americans, “without losing some other important data. ” It, however, said it would stop the practice to “reduce the chance that it would acquire communication of U.S. persons or others who are not in direct contact with a foreign intelligence target.”

The NSA said it also plans to “delete the vast majority of its upstream internet data to further protect the privacy of U.S. person communications.”

Agency officials called the violations “inadvertent compliance lapses.” But the court and IG documents suggest the NSA had not developed a technological way to comply with the rules they had submitted to the court in 2011.

Officials "explained that NSA query compliance is largely maintained through a series of manual checks" and had not "included the proper limiters" to prevent unlawful searches, the NSA internal watchdog reported in a top secret report in January that was just declassified. A new system is being developed now, officials said.

The NSA conducts thousand of searches a year on data involving Americans and the actual numbers of violations were redacted from the documents Circa reviewed.

But a chart in the report showed there three types of violations, the most frequent being 5.2 percent of the time when NSA Section 702 upstream data on U.S. persons was searched.

The inspector general also found noncompliance between 0.7 percent and 1.4 percent of the time involving NSA activities in which there was a court order to target an American for spying but the rules were still not followed. Those activities are known as Section 704 and Section 705 spying.

The IG report spared few words for the NSA’s efforts before the disclosure to ensure it was complying with practices, some that date to rules issued in 2008 in the final days of the Bush administration and others that Obama put into effect in 2011.

“We found that the Agency controls for monitoring query compliance have not been completely developed,” the inspector general reported, citing problems ranging from missing requirements for documentation to the failure to complete controls that would ensure “query compliance.”

The NSA’s Signal Intelligence Directorate, the nation’s main foreign surveillance arm, wrote a letter back to the IG saying it agreed with the findings and that “corrective action plans” are in the works.
 
... Agency officials called the violations “inadvertent compliance lapses.”

Conversations that happened never.
images


Driver: No, Officer. I am sure that wasn't a traffic violation. It was only an inadvertent compliance lapse.
Officer: Oh, excuse the inconvenience. You are free to go. Have a nice day.
 
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