- Key point not made by one who should have
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So David Harsanyi writes at Town Hall: Democrats Shouldn’t Dismiss Nunes’ Spying Claims So Quickly
The article asserts some solid points about concepts relevant to the issue of Donald Trump’s charges of being “tapped”. It is a worthwhile read. Having said that, in my estimation Harsanyi has not learned that there is a difference between journalistic skepticism and his use of snark to keep his anti-Trump creds in evidence. It causes him to carry Democrat narratives about the matter. Excerpt:
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes told reporters yesterday that members of Donald Trump’s presidential transition team — and possibly Trump himself — may have been caught up in surveillance during the last days of the Obama administration. Nunes says the surveillance, by both the FBI and NSA, looked to be legal “incidental collection” that had nothing to do with concerns over Russia collusion.
If true, this isn’t the wiretapping of Trump Towers, as Trump claimed in his infamous tweet a few weeks ago, but it is spying in any commonly understood sense of the word. The NSA routinely listens to calls and reads emails of Americans and collects other data “incidentally” from third parties, avoiding warrants. Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which has been found constitutional, states that government doesn’t need a warrant to collect information on Americans as long as the target of the collection is a foreigner.
The above makes points that hopefully brings home the implications of all this to every citizen. Not just Trump but YOU are being spied on. So why the degree of skepticism and choices of words to reflect that by tut tutting Trump’s use of the word “tapping” . Even the picayune understand it to be a generic term — wherever such spying/ tapping occurred, — a server, a data communication hub, on campus, off campus anything of an electronic nature, whether part of a universal grab and then honed down to a target or initially targeted.
There are a couple more word choices or phrases we object to because they carry a condescending nuance or narrative , but so be it. Our main complaint is the failure to identify the particular scandal in this, apart from the grand scandal of the surveillance state.
“Obama,” as in he or people under his control, was personally aware of or failed to control his people in their proclivities, and that makes him arguably culpable as he was likely aware of the information and the source, or should have been. Does Trump have to set that out in a “tweet”?
This was NSA obtained stuff they were distributing, analyzing, perhaps operating on, gossiping about, not stuff the result of political operatives with no responsibility following Trump or his people around, and reporting what they found to other hacks.
Harsanyi writes “that government doesn’t need a warrant to collect information on Americans as long as the target of the collection is a foreigner.” Whether or not Nunes uses the word the point is that the dissemination of the material is illegal by the nature of how it was obtained, even if obtained legally. That is one of the protections supposedly built in to such “legal” surveillance, a protection now unmasked as being worthless.
Harsanyi goes on:
That’s one thing. But if we’re to believe Nunes, the names of Trump associates were “unmasked,” and “details with little or no apparent foreign intelligence value, were widely disseminated in intelligence community reporting.” CNN reported that some of the communications picked up were of Trump transition officials talking about the president’s family. What possible need was there for those details to be passed around in an intelligence report? Who ordered the unmasking of the people involved? Was the information properly minimized? If the investigation wasn’t aimed at collusion with the Russians, what investigation ensnared the president-elect and his transition team?
While the answers might not vindicate Trump, they are legitimate questions.
“If we’re to believe Nunes “ then why the hell would it not vindicate Trump unless you impart more credence to Democrat denials. Indeed “if true” clearly vindicates Trump.
And then there is this : If it turns out intel wasn’t properly minimized, this is the kind of abuse that civil libertarians have long warned undermines Americans’ privacy,” Right on. But what Harsanyi refers to is the dissemination as “abuse”, so why not use at least the term potentially illegal because even if the collection was not illegal (no skepticism about Nunes characterization on that score, “maybe it was illegal” ) the dissemination about particular people is illegal if obtained under government auspices.
More to be cranky about on other subjects later.
R Mall
