Slotkin presses intelligence chiefs for assurances that spy agencies are not targeting Americans

[marmar]

(Michigan Advance) U.S. Sen. Elissa Slotkin said Friday she is urging the nation’s top intelligence leaders to confirm in writing that no intelligence personnel, tools or resources are being used to surveil or target Americans, raising alarms that the Trump administration may be illegally using national security capabilities against U.S. citizens.

In the letter dated Wednesday, directed to Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, CIA Director John Ratcliffe and several other leaders in the intelligence community, Slotkin said she fears the intelligence community is being drawn into domestic political conflicts, “in violation of our laws and the Constitution.”

“I write today with my deep concerns that the Trump Administration is using our intelligence community to target American citizens and to request your assurances that you have not and will not focus the organizations you oversee on the American public,” Slotkin wrote. “As you know, the IC exists to defend the United States against foreign adversaries — not to monitor, investigate, or target Americans.”

Slotkin, a former CIA analyst, added that abusing those tools “would not only be illegal but would undercut longstanding American values of a right to privacy and ability to speak out against our government without fear of retribution.” .............................(more)

https://michiganadvance.com/briefs/slotkin-presses-intelligence-chiefs-for-assurances-that-spy-agencies-are-not-targeting-americans/

[Scrivener7]

1. Can you believe that this is where we are?

[LessAspin]

2. Tulsi & Trump

More to the point who do Tulsi and Trump work for?

Link to tweet

Russian TV: what about our girl .. Tulsi?

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Spoiler Alert

Tulsi and Trump work for PooTin..

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Link to tweet

[dutch777]

3. Just FYI. The US has for years shared intelligence internationally. This leads to reciprocity. US citizens do not....

...have to be surveilled by the US government for the US to get info on them. Australia,, Japan, Britain and many others can and do monitor US interests, including and especially, anything electronically generated, and pass that back to US agencies as they see fit. Bottom line, the US has not had to spy on its own folks, others do it for us and have for decades. Now, given how obnoxious the US has been in the last year, I would suspect that those foreign countries may be a tad bit less interested in helping the US

Given AI, very accurate speech recognition and broad spectrum/large capacity electronic collection and automatic sorting capability, I would not be surprised if some non government entities aren't already collecting data from a distance and selling it to the highest bidder. Whether this is business intelligence or targeting individuals for whatever purpose it would be amazing if this has not already been in place for sometime.

Bottom line, nothing you do electronically is secure unless you are using end to end encryption. And anything you do in plain sight is obviously open to recording.