I don’t know for sure. I talk to a lot of people. I talk to vendors, I talk to clients, I talk to my friends and family. I don’t think any of them are targets of criminal investigations, but it entirely possible that in some of my conversations with the fairly large number of people I communicate with, that some of them may have been.
I do know the content of those conversations is nothing illegal, so even if for some reason one of them had done something to catch the eye of some LEO, they won’t have any interest in me. I would not consider any incidental recordings of someone I spoke to who LEO is watching to be me under surveillance. If I hang up the phone with the suspected individual, and call someone else, I am no longer being recorded.
If Trump and/or his team get done talking to the criminals and/or spies that they are talking to, and then pick up the phone to call someone who is not a criminal or a spy, and they are not recorded at that time, then that means that they are not under surveillance.
What part of this are you not understanding? Are you trying to claim that somehow, Trump and/or his team should be exempt from being recorded? That if a criminal or spy gets a call from Trump and/or his team, that whatever agency is watching that criminal or spy must turn off their collection equipment?
Under the current rules, unless the identity of the third party is indispensable to the intelligence contained in the intercept, unmasking that identity is a crime. Even if it is done for political purposes to embarrass that third party. Is that the part you’re not understanding?
According to Nunes, based on the documents he has seen (and note that Schiff went strangely silent after viewing the same documents) such unmasking was clearly not necessary. Thus a crime.
Why play semantic pretzel games just to justify an ill-advised and evidence-free tweet? Trump just saw something on Fox News and said it as if it was a fact, thus continuing his history of making baseless claims about Obama. That’s dumb and indefensible, no matter what word games you try and play. Why defend it?
My understanding of the situation was not that the people were “unmaseked” as it were, but that it was relatively easy to tell, from the content of their convestaions, who the people were that were being recorded.
There is also the fact that “masking” involves simply generalizing, so a [Minimized presidential candidate] would be perfectly within the masking rules, even though it’s not really all that discreet.
But I do take it that since you are on the unmasking path, that you have completely at this time given up making the claim that they were “under surveillance”, right?
You are admitting that Trump’s tweets about Obama being bad or sick for having his wires tapped was complete fabrication based on absolutely nothing but what he half remembered from a Fox segment?
We’ll see about Nunes’ credibility later, but even taking his claims at face value, it’s still not surveillance, and it’s still not necessarily unmasking.
You should also note that the reason that Schiff may have “gone silent” is because they were looking at classified intelligence, and talking about it, as Nunes did was a crime that Schiff did not want to join Nunes in committing.
AFAIK the “silence” is because what you claim could be a crime,** if there was evidence**, as it is so far Schiff does not care much because the unmasking does not change the issue. (it is also telling that the evidence being used to claim that there was an unmasking is coming from the say so of the informants on the White House and the very unreliable narrator who is Nunes)
No, there’s a substantive difference you are overlooking. The FISA 215 program to collect metadata from phone calls is directly intended to sweep up as much data as possible on anyone calling anyone in the United States. To the extent that one seeks to argue that everyone in the US is being surveilled for who is calling whom, I would say that there is an important nuance that the surveillance is extremely low levels of intrusion.
If I call you and we talk about Cecil Adams, and someone in the government collects the actual content of our conversation about Cecil, and shares that content about Cecil with other people, there isn’t any fucking possible universe in which Cecil is under surveillance. Nothing Cecil did in this scenario was monitored or collected. It is impossible to call this surveillance of Cecil.
And even with that “low level” Reuters still called those people “under surveillance”. Some of the other links I gave describe much higher “levels” of surveillance. None of the links described court-ordered surveillance of people, and they were still characterized by those news sources as “under surveillance”.
That article is from more than a week ago. A lot more facts were uncovered since. And yes, in spite of what the article says, if Nunes’ allegations are correct, it would show that Trump was in fact “under surveillance” and that a crime has been committed by people in the intelligence community under Obama administration.
The “fact” that it was White House people that gave Nunes the materials is bullshit:
“Nunes has known about the unmasking controversy since January, when two sources in the intelligence community approached him. The sources told Nunes who was responsible and at least one of the Trump team names that was unmasked. They also gave him serial numbers of reports that documented the activity.”
…
"Nunes had asked intelligence agencies to see the reports in question, but was stonewalled.
He eventually was able to view them, but there was only one safe place to see the documents without compromising the sources’ identities – the old executive office building on White House grounds, which has a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF) required to view classified or top secret reports. The White House did not tell Nunes about the existence of the intelligence reports, but did help him gain access to the documents at his request, the source said."
"…"Nunes had asked intelligence agencies to see the reports in question, but was stonewalled.
He eventually was able to view them, but there was only one safe place to see the documents without compromising the sources’ identities – the old executive office building on White House grounds…"
And still one that relies only on the say so of an already unmasked unreliable narrator. And so is FOX, that Farkas bit is really bullshit as others reported.
Which article are you talking about? None of them seem to have anything at all to do with “if A and B are talking about C and D tells E about the A&B conversation; then C is being surveilled by D.”
Your definition is beyond crazy; it is patently obvious it is only being made for partisan political purposes.
And if that was the case in the Nunes-revealed reports, I would agree. But it doesn’t seem to be. It seems to be about conversations where Trump or some of his people were actually one of the parties and were unmasked in the reports. If so - then yes, they were “under surveillance”.
Uh, I would think though that we are working with people that are telling us that those names that were allegedly unmasked were not supposed to be: in other words, the very fact that they were were supposed to be masked points to those people as not supposed to be under surveillance. This seems to me that we have agents that support Trump that decided to make their own narrative and like in the case of the emails in the Weiner laptop to push the authorities to do their bidding.
Everything that I saw about the Weiner emails points to agents on the field that also spiced their reports so as to get people like Comey to react in a predictable way and influence the election. In this case I suspect that the agents have also used pumped accusations to get Nunes to dance just as they wanted him to do so as to prop up president Trump.
This conspiracy theory has nothing to do with whether Trump et al were “under surveillance” or not. Whether the unmasking was justified or not has nothing to do with whether “under surveillance” applies.
You are missing the point spectacularly. The unreliable narrator has insisted that the names were supposed to be masked: IOW: people that were not under surveillance.
Be my guest if you want to say that they were then under surveillance because then the point comes that Nunes and others lied about the unmasking. Because the logic tell us that if you are correct, and they were under surveillance there would never be any need for unmasking. If Trump and others in his admin were under surveillance then there would not had been any need whatsoever of doing any masking by the spy groups.
The trouble is that the narrative from the unreliable ones like Nunes is telling us that the names were unmasked. Again the point I make here is that unmasking makes no sense unless they were indeed originally masked **AKA not under surveillance. **