FISA 'Two-Hop' Loophole Could Have Resulted in Trump Himself Being Wiretapped
Could President Donald Trump have been wiretapped during the 2016 campaign?
Many conservatives think the answer is “yes,” but what is frightening is that the surveillance very well could have been completely legal under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
How is this possible?
According to a commentary by Sharyl Attkisson for The Hill, such surveillance would have been legal under the “two-hop” rule.
What this means is that not only could the FBI listen in on a person who is under a surveillance warrant, like former Trump campaign aide Carter Page was, but that the FBI could also listen in on any phone conversations by those with whom Page was in touch or by those who were talking to people Page was talking to.
“If you ever see the paper trail [for the reverse-engineered wiretaps] it will all look legitimate,” an unnamed intelligence officer told Attkisson. “There will be legal memos from the White House counsel’s office justifying them. It’s all worked out to hide that they are really going after somebody else.”
In fact, the “two-hop” rule makes it easy to legally spy on someone who is not named in the warrant.
As noted in a 2016 report in Spectrum magazine, published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, a study by Stanford University’s Computer Security Laboratory revealed that in some cases, as many as 25,000 people could be under surveillance due to a version of “two-hop” rule that involved contacts over a period of 18 months.
That rule applied to the National Security Agency and was imposed after the revelations by Edward Snowden.
The Stanford study also noted that under an old rule put in place after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the NSA was allowed to collect data on people three “hops” from a suspect over a five-year period.
The number of people under surveillance per that rule could reach as high as 65,000 on the second “hop” and up to 20 million on the third “hop.”
While the NSA surveillance was primarily the gathering of metadata, the results of the study show the potential of abuse from the “two-hop” rule is considerable.
In a 2018 commentary for NBC News on the surveillance of Carter Page, Ladar Levison wrote, “On the basis of hearsay, business associations, and possibly Page’s political opinions, the FBI received a classified surveillance warrant and then renewed it three times.”
It should be noted that Page was never charged and that special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation found no evidence of any collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.
The failure to find such evidence has raised serious questions about whether the process was abused during the 2016 campaign.
While Trump has declared he will not sign a FISA extension without reform, the fact remains that we do need capabilities to combat espionage and terrorism.
However, we must trust those who will wield them, and trust, when broken, is hard to restore.
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