Media Moves to Make "Wiretapping" Purely About Phones

CBS: " Former president Barack Obama has denied President Trump's claims that the Obama administration wiretapped phones..."

Independent: "The FBI disputing Donald Trump's claim Barack Obama had his telephones tapped..."

AP: "President Donald Trump on Saturday accused former President Barack Obama of tapping his telephones..."

The FISA warrant apparently targeted a server, so it would be surprising if they tapped a telephone to find out what the server was saying to another server. I'm going to guess that the Obama team's careful denials, parroted by all these media outlets, mean that no actual telephones were "tapped." So we're only talking about internet traffic, servers being penetrated and covertly examined, maybe reading emails... but no, absolutely no "telephones."

The right thing to do would be to come clean on what spying was done, but of course they can't: all the information is surely classified at a high level. Still, some sunlight and honesty -- and not these carefully construed denials -- is the only way to restore any sort of trust.

6 comments:

Cassandra said...

The Most Transparent Administration Evah (TM).

Anonymous said...

I'm just going to leave this here. The explanation is long and partisan, but the links carry the story of the reportage fairly clearly.

http://investmentwatchblog.com/in-bizarre-plot-to-discredit-trump-ny-times-says-ny-times-is-fake-news/

Valerie

Grim said...

It is curious that the same author who confidently asserted that Team Trump was "wiretapped" would later declare that there was absolutely no evidence to back up Trump's claim that he was "wire tapped."

douglas said...

I've pointed this out to people and they parse it into 'that was about trump associates, not trump'. Of course, that ignores the Hillary tweet of 31 October 2016 where she says "Computer Scientists have apparently uncovered a covert server linking the Trump Organization to a Russian-based bank". But I guess they'd now say she was lying.

jaed said...

If they were tapping traffic in and out of Trump Tower, they had access to all of it. Including voice calls.

TCP/IP is TCP/IP, and there's no distinction on the network level between kinds of data, so if you're tapping traffic, you get all of it. Then you can differentiate based on the content, and ignore phone calls if you want. But if he's correct that Trump Tower was surveilled, they certainly had access to the phone call data and metadata.

Ymar Sakar said...

Demoncrats have been spying on Republicans since at least FDR.

It's nothing new. Only problem is Donald Trum seems not to have been given debriefing on this to his satisfaction.

Welcome to this side of the war, Donald. Very different looking isn't it.