This is a complicated situation and if you look at who is trying to get this information, it is the hardcore Left, not some bunch of inquisitive liberals.
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore), hardcore Leftists, 24/7
ACLU - Jameel Jasser - all you have to know is that he’s a bigwig with the ACLU, one of the most anti-intelligence organizations in American history, and whose onetime leader at Yale Un’s project on Intelligence Surveillance was a key Communist Party USA “security officer” Frank Donner.
Brennan Center for Justice - one of the latest far-left anti-intelligence organizations hiding in a major university. Some of the key staffers/professors are well-known Marxists or sympathizers. I’ll try to find the names of the top ones and post it.
Intelligence intercepts overseas are extremely valuable to protecting the US homeland because most major espionage, subversion, and sabotage operations start there, not at a McDonald’s.
And yes, Americans or foreign nationals in the US do communicate with our enemies by the internet, phone systems, mail, and in face-to-face meetings. It is just that you don’t know about it (9/11 ring any bells - Germany)?
Their is at least two major lists of key members of the so-called “anti-war” or “anti-Vietnam” protest movements which have the names of scores of Americans who met with the Cubans, No. Vietnamese communists, Red China communists, and Soviet intelligence/KGB and possibly GRU, in Moscow and around the world, esp. at Soviet “peace” front meetings (Paris, Bratislava, Montreal, Helsinki, Jakarta, E. Berlin,etc) to help defeat the US in Indochina.
One such list is found at www.keywiki.org. Search under the terms “North Vietnam/Hanoi Visitors during the War” . Another major list is at the massive 25,000 page+ study of the Hanoi Lobby put together by veteran researcher/journalist Roger Canfield in his “AmeriCong” study.
Our nation’s enemies don’t sleep, be they communists, Islamic jihadists, ISIS, Hamas, Hezbollah, PA, or Mexican irredentists, among others.
We need to know what they are doing, and who they are communicating with.
Our laws to address these threats need to be realistic, up-to-date, functional, and widespread.
Right now I wouldn’t trust 90% of the members of Congress from either party to understand what is going on in the world of subversion and espionage, let alone understand the real scope of the threat our nation is facing.
Even the FBI has been caught flat-footed (pardon the term, no pun intended) many times in the past few years. The Dept. of Homeland Security as a guiding institution is almost worthless as is its leader Jeh Johnson, a man who proves the axiom that incompetence rises to the top.
The Red Chinese naval and air build-up has caught our Dept. of Defense with their proverbial pants down around their ankles, as has Peking’s cyberwarfare programs which are extremely effective.
Thanks to Hillary Clinton, some of our classified lines of communication have been breeched. Edward Snowden and his fairy friend Chelsea Manning have done untold harm to our security as well as that of our allies.
If you know how to read between the lines of public statements on what Snowden has released, you will understand just how badly he has hurt our international intelligence operations.
Remember, just because someone is elected to Congress or the presidency, it doesn’t mean that they are pro-America. Nor are some members of their staffs. Friends and myself have helped expose major internal security leaks and enemy operatives in Congress, ranging from KGB operatives to local communists and sympathizers.
One day I hope that all of this will be declassified and released to the public (only a tiny part of this story has actually been published in a few conservative papers. The Wash. Post and NY Times couldn’t afford to publish these exposes because it would reveal that they often used some of these people are sources/leakers).
Just because someone in Congress wants to expose what the CIA or FBI is doing, even if it only what their budgets are, don’t assume it is because they care about having these agencies run properly.
bkmk
Bump