Sharyl Attkisson explains what we are up against

This is easily the read of the day.  Sharyl Attkisson is the bravest reporter of her generation, so much of a threat to people with access to the capabilities of our intel agencies that she was spied upon and worse. Today she faces the ugly truth about what recent reports (if true) reveal:

Nobody wants our intel agencies to be used like the Stasi in East Germany; the secret police spying on its own citizens for political purposes. The prospect of our own NSA, CIA and FBI becoming politically weaponized has been shrouded by untruths, accusations and justifications.

She goes on to review a number of instances of us being lied to about spying, about spying on journalists, and then gets to her personal experience in fighting back against an actual hack she experienced while at CBS News:

I have spent more than two years litigating against the Department of Justice for the computer intrusions. Forensics have revealed dates, times and methods of some of the illegal activities. The software used was proprietary to a federal intel agency. The intruders deployed a keystroke monitoring program, accessed the CBS News corporate computer system, listened in on my conversations by activating the computer’s microphone and used Skype to exfiltrate files.

We survived the government’s latest attempt to dismiss my lawsuit. There’s another hearing Friday. To date, the Trump Department of Justice — like the Obama Department of Justice — is fighting me in court and working to keep hidden the identities of those who accessed a government internet protocol address found in my computers.

Sharyl is fighting back, and is not shying away from what she sees, though she wisely avoids terms like deep state or establishment. She is reporting:

It’s difficult not to see patterns in the government’s behavior, unless you’re wearing blinders.

·       The intelligence community secretly expanded its authority in 2011 so it can monitor innocent U.S. citizens like you and me for doing nothing more than mentioning a target’s name a single time.

·       In January 2016, a top secret inspector general report found the NSA violated the very laws designed to prevent abuse.

·       In 2016, Obama officials searched through intelligence on U.S. citizens a record 30,000 times, up from 9,500 in 2013.

·       Two weeks before the election, at a secret hearing before the FISA court overseeing government surveillance, NSA officials confessed they’d violated privacy safeguards “with much greater frequency” than they’d admitted. The judge accused them of “institutional lack of candor” and said, “this is a very serious Fourth Amendment issue.”

Read the whole thing, I mean it.

Hat tip: Ed Lasky