We Can’t Trust Trump With Today’s NSA

[DonViejo]

It would be far too easy for him to take advantage of the agency’s surveillance capabilities.

By John Napier Tye

Donald Trump has shown he’ll stop at nothing to humiliate and intimidate his critics. He published Sen. Lindsey Graham’s personal cellphone number so Trump supporters could harass him. He encouraged the Russian government to hack Hillary Clinton (though he later claimed he was joking) and promised to imprison her. He has tweeted false and embarrassing accusations against Sen. Ted Cruz, former Miss Universe Alicia Machado, and many others.

That’s all bad enough. But if he becomes president, Donald Trump will have a frightening and expansive new tool to persecute his domestic opponents: the National Security Agency, which has access to a huge amount of Americans’ personal communications and data.

Maybe a senator’s “private” bedroom pics will be mysteriously leaked. Or Breitbart will start blogging the details of a journalist’s 3 a.m. Uber rides. Or maybe Trump will find creative uses for five years of email correspondence between a civil rights lawyer and her clients. This might sound like a nightmare that could only happen in China or Russia, but there are simply not enough safeguards in place to protect Americans from our own National Security Agency.

While most NSA operations are directed at overseas targets, the agency can access communications metadata, such as phone numbers and call times, from every American who uses a telephone or email account—more than 300 million of us.

How do I know this is possible? Because while I was a State Department official between 2011 and 2014, I was given top secret briefings on U.S. intelligence activities. (Before I left government service, I filed a complaint alleging that some NSA activities violated Americans’ constitutional rights to privacy. Because I am writing about issues that I worked on when I held a security clearance, I was required to submit this article for prepublication review to the U.S. government, which has no objection to its publication.)

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http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2016/11/we_can_t_trust_trump_with_today_s_nsa.html

[Thinkingabout]

1. Especially since he is influenced by Putin, he will use the NSA and any other agency to

place pressure to get his way.