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For the last three weeks, privacy advocates have been buffeted by two political whirlwinds. First, the reauthorization of the FISA Amendments Act two weeks ago, authored by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes. And then today, the release of a partisan memo, authored by Nunes’ staffers, purporting to show FBI and Department of Justice abuses of the individual Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act application process.

Because Nunes and others ― up to and including House Speaker Paul Ryan ― claimed to be motivated by a concern about civil liberties, it was generally assumed the privacy community would join the clamor. But those of us who’ve been through several surveillance fights with these posers know the reality is far more complex. Ultimately, two principles are at issue: the rule of law and privacy. In both instances, Nunes and Ryan are on the wrong side of the issue.

The FISA Amendments Reauthorization Act extended a key part of FISA, called Section 702, that lets the government ask domestic telecommunications and tech providers for help spying on foreigners overseas. But that word “target” is misleading, because under the program, the government obtains the American side of any conversation with a targeted individual. The FBI can obtain that information in raw form and routinely queries the data when it gets leads to find out if Americans have been speaking to suspicious foreigners. That amounts to warrantless access of Americans’ communications, and exposes certain groups, like Chinese-Americans and Muslims, to far more scrutiny than others.

Also under Section 702, the government obtains certain entirely domestic communications that have obscured their location. While it has to purge most of those communications, the NSA can keep any that it shows are evidence of eight enumerated crimes. Again, this is warrantless surveillance of Americans, done in the guise of foreign intelligence collection.

During the 702 reauthorization debate, reformers like Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.), and Reps. Justin Amash (R-Mich.) and Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), tried to add protections in these instances, most notably by requiring a warrant before the FBI searches for communications involving Americans. The law authored by Nunes, however, only provides such protection to people for whom the FBI already has probable cause that they are committing a crime. Nunes’ law flips the Fourth Amendment on its head, providing protection only to criminal suspects and not for those against whom the FBI has no evidence of wrongdoing.

A mere three weeks ago, Nunes and Ryan were happy to have Americans surveilled with no evidence whatsoever of wrongdoing. Back then, Ryan backed suspicionless, warrantless searches of Americans as a necessary trade off. “This [bill] strikes the balance that we must have between honoring and protecting privacy rights of U.S. citizens, honoring civil liberties, and making sure that we have the tools we need in this day and age of 21st century terrorism to keep our people safe.”

Today, however, when a former Trump campaign adviser is at issue, Nunes and Ryan have discovered the due process they personally refused for so many Americans. The Nunes memo purports to show that an individualized FISA application against Carter Page did not adequately inform the FISA court about the political source of one piece of evidence among others. The memo argues the FBI did not adequately reveal “the political origins of the Steele dossier,” intelligence reporting paid for by the Democratic Party.

The application instead presented Steele as someone (the memo admits) who was a “longtime FBI source” with a “past record of credible reporting.” But even on that key issue, the memo is unclear whether DOJ knew precisely who was paying for Steele’s work. Indeed, it makes no mention that Republican billionaire Paul Singer was the first political actor to pay Fusion GPS, the firm that hired Steele, for dirt on Trump, though Singer himself did not fund any of Steele’s work. In other words, on the central question of whether the FBI could have attributed Fusion’s intelligence to Hillary Clinton and the Democrats or to someone else, the memo doesn’t make its case.

Now, the role of consultants like Steele in judicial proceedings is a matter of grave concern. Consultants with an inadequate grasp of the Arabic language or Islamic faith have long been used by DOJ as witnesses against terrorism defendants, and defense attorneys have suspected consultants ― perhaps the very same ones ― provided intelligence used in FISA applications, just as Steele provided intelligence for the Page application. More recently, consultants assessing crime patterns and recidivism rates have been shown to rely on biased algorithms.

Yet none of the people pushing this Nunes memo have ever uttered a peep about due process concerns posed by outright incompetent consultants in the past. Here, however, they’re wailing that a consultant they admit has been reliable in the past got paid differently than in the past and that wasn’t fully briefed to the court.

The way to deal with both of these issues is to conduct actual oversight of the general problem, not extend protections just to one man like Page.

The sudden interest in problems Nunes and Ryan showed no interest in just weeks ago is all the more telling, given several details about this memo.

First, as the memo lays out, starting in October 2016 the FBI obtained and then renewed a FISA warrant against Page four times. That means over the span of at least nine months, the FBI demonstrated that a wiretap of Page demonstrated useful foreign intelligence, and FISA judges agreed with that assessment over and over. The memo either doesn’t mention or obscures an earlier FISA warrant, obtained in 2014 during a period when Page was being actively recruited by Russian spies who were either expelled or imprisoned. Effectively, then, the GOP memo admits that something about Page, something well beyond the Steele dossier, raised real concerns about whether he was spying for Russia. And the FISA court agreed that it was a real concern.

The memo also complains that the Page application mentions George Papadopoulos, another former Trump foreign policy aide who in October pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with people working on behalf of Russia. It reads: “The Page FISA application also mentions information regarding fellow Trump campaign advisor George Papadopoulos, but there is no evidence of any cooperation or conspiracy between Page and Papadopoulos.” That’s not entirely true. As the committee itself learned in testimony, Page was copied on at least one of the emails Papadopoulos sent to the campaign detailing his own activities.

Moreover, the memo is silent about whether the Papadopoulos reference in the application served to do anything more than inform the court that, in response to a tip about Papadopoulos’ actions, the FBI opened a counterintelligence investigation into whether Russians were attempting to compromise Trump via his foreign policy advisers. Effectively, this amounts to saying that because the FBI was investigating Page in the context of other concerns that Russians were trying to infiltrate the Trump campaign (concerns Papadopoulos’ guilty plea validate), it should be deemed an abuse. As with 702 reauthorization, they’re trying to extend protections just to those against whom there is credible evidence of wrong-doing.

Finally, there’s the larger conduct. This memo was written for a guy, Devin Nunes, who was a Trump transition official. That transition period has already netted one guilty plea ― that of former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, for lying to the FBI. Multiple reports make clear that Trump permitted the release of this memo explicitly as a way to delegitimize a legally constituted investigation into him, his family, and associates like Nunes. In the same way that Nunes and Ryan are pushing for further review only for a man who, abundant other evidence suggests, fostered legitimate suspicion, they’re also saying that they only care to scrutinize FBI and DOJ actions if they themselves might be subject to them.

Every single privacy activist I know cares about privacy in significant part to ensure the rule of law and to prevent the arbitrary exercise of justice to focus just on select groups like Muslims or Chinese-Americans, rather than those who pose the greatest risk to society, like people allegedly doing Russia’s secret bidding. Yet the actions of Ryan and Nunes reverse that, using a sham concern for civil liberties as a way to prevent themselves, their associates, and the president from being subject to the rule of law like the rest of us would be.

If we’re going to have this secret surveillance ― and Nunes and Ryan insist we need it ― the key to protecting Americans is drafting the law to provide protections and ensuring those standards are met. Section 702, as Nunes and Ryan reauthorized it, fails that test, because it permits the warrantless access of completely innocent Americans’ communications. And for all its bluster, the Nunes memo doesn’t tell us critical details we need to assess whether what happened to Page was improper specifically, or simply indicative of known concerns about outside consultants that Nunes and Ryan have long ignored (and continue to ignore with all other Americans). By all means let’s examine the role of consultants in FBI investigations. By all means let’s scrutinize whether the FISA process works as well as the DOJ claims.

But let’s do that for all Americans, and not just those about whom the FBI has real reason to worry.

Marcy Wheeler is an independent journalist writing about national security and civil liberties. She writes as emptywheel at her eponymous blog and is the author of “Anatomy of Deceit.” Follow her on Twitter at @emptywheel.

If you haven’t heard about HQ Trivia yet, I envy you. It is a terrible, infuriating app that taunts you with the promise of winning up to multiple dollars twice a day (once a day on weekends and holidays) in exchange for correctly answering 12 absurd trivia questions presented by a live host. The app is wildly popular; some 1 million people take part in each session, at least according to HQ’s own counter. And it is to those million people that this plea is addressed: Delete HQ from your phones immediately. Do it now or support a vampire plutocrat superintending the destruction of the free press, pluralist democracy and just about everything you claim to hold dear, unless you’re particularly against women’s suffrage. 

HQ has already lost much of its original charm. That early sense of communal fun began to attenuate as the community grew to an unwieldy size, causing the app to lag, if not crash outright. Its native annoyances magnified. Later questions, the harder ones, are not exactly trivia so much as bits of highly specific and unknowable information, forcing you to guess for the entire second half of the game. And the constant banter from Scott Rogowsky, the host, is as delightful as an ice pick in your forehead.

Far worse than that, though, is the fact that HQ’s founders, Rus Yusupov and Colin Kroll, apparently have a history of troubling behavior. According to Recode, investors have kept their money away from the app after finding out that Kroll had “earned a reputation while working at Vine for exhibiting ‘creepy’ behavior toward women that made them uncomfortable.” One investor went so far as to call Kroll’s behavior “egregious.” Yusupov, for his part, was fired from Twitter in 2015. But you might remember him as the guy who threatened to fire HQ’s host essentially for talking to the Daily Beast about salad.

All of which brings us to our latest reason for deleting HQ. This guy: 

After every other major investor in Silicon Valley bailed on the app for its questionable money-making abilities and the allegedly creepy behavior of its founder, Trump supporter and megalomaniacal seasteader Peter Thiel decided this was something he very much wanted to be a part of. According to an article posted on Recode last night, Thiel’s venture capital firm, Founders Fund, is planning to give the app $15 million in its latest round of fundraising. 

As Select All noted earlier today, Thiel also gave $1.25 million to Donald Trump’s campaign — after the release of the “Access Hollywood” tape, which saw our president discussing his passion for grabbing women “by the pussy.” Thiel’s other hobbies have included financing a war against Gawker, where I worked until Thiel’s millions of dollars, disbursed in secret, finally suffocated the news outlet. And he recruited far-right troll Chuck Johnson “to recommend, vet and give something of a seal of approval to potential nominees from the so-called ‘alt-right’” to serve in the Trump administration, according to a report last year in Forbes. Evidence suggests their relationship may actually go back much further than that. 

In case you’re still not convinced, in 2009, Thiel wrote that giving women the right to vote was bad for democracy. And while he bankrupted an entire company for writing things about him and his businesses that he didn’t like, Thiel, as a law student at Stanford, defended a fellow student’s right to scream, “Faggot! Faggot! Hope you die of AIDS!” ― in addition to, “Can’t wait until you die, faggot!” 

Now, the standard argument that there is no ethical consumption under capitalism obtains. And deleting HQ is not going to strip Thiel of the billions of dollars he uses to further the hell world in which we find ourselves. There are, however, degrees of complicity, and it’s time to see Thiel on the same end of the continuum as, say, the neo-Nazis who thrilled to his open support for Trump. If you can ever avoid doing something that might help Peter Thiel, the world will be ever so slightly better for it. Instead of HQ, why not try Cash Show? It follows the same general principles, and at least for now, it’s not about to be funded by supervillain with friends in the White House. 

Or do one better and throw your phone in the nearest lake. But reader, no matter what you do, please remember this one thing: Screw Peter Thiel and the seastead he rode in on.

WASHINGTON ― For weeks, Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee and their allies have been promising that they have a memo with damning evidence undermining special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian election meddling and Russian ties to President Donald Trump’s inner circle. 

“This is far worse than Watergate. This is an abuse of surveillance and intelligence to win an election,” Fox News host and loyal Trump defender Sean Hannity said Monday, adding that Mueller’s “witch hunt” would be over. 

That memo, written by GOP committee staffers, was finally released on Friday. And it has no smoking gun to discredit Mueller or any other top Justice Department officials that Trump wants to get rid of.

Its purpose is to muddy the waters, raise questions in people’s minds and provide a distraction from the fact that at the end of the day, there is still zero evidence that there was a “deep state” plot to elect Hillary Clinton president.

The crux of the memo, pushed out by committee chair Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) is that law enforcement officials abused their surveillance authority by relying on a controversial “dossier” with unproven claims to spy on Trump campaign official Carter Page.

It says then-FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe testified they would not have “sought” a surveillance warrant for Page without that dossier.

But the memo never answers the question of whether the dossier was the basis of the FISA court’s decision to grant the warrant. It doesn’t reveal what else was included in the application for a warrant. And at the end of the day, there’s far more to the Russia investigation than the Page surveillance. 

Russian operatives tried to recruit Page as a spy in 2013, even before he joined the Trump team. Former FBI Director James Comey has testified that officials began looking into Trump-Russia connections in July 2016, long before the Page warrant in October 2016.

The memo actually confirms a New York Times report that what started the investigation was a slip-up by Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos, who admitted to a diplomat that he knew Russia had dirt on Clinton.

In other words, the House GOP memo undercuts conspiracy theories that the probe started because of the dossier. The memo also does nothing to dispute any of the potential collusion between Trump and the Russian government:  

• It does not dispute the Papadopoulos contacts.

• It does not dispute the infamous Trump Tower meeting between Trump’s son and Russian officials to gain opposition research on Clinton.

• It does not dispute Trump’s own involvement in crafting an inaccurate statement about that meeting.

• It does not dispute that Russians hacked into the emails of the Democratic National Committee and a top Clinton campaign official. 

• It does not dispute that Trump fired Comey because he was unhappy with his continued pursuit of the Russia investigation. 

All of those omissions only serve to highlight the central fact that makes the Republicans’ attack on Mueller, and the law enforcement establishment more broadly, so absurd: The information leaked and released by the FBI and the rest of the so-called “deep state” during the election didn’t undermine Trump — it helped get him elected.

The FBI was investigating both the Trump and Clinton campaigns during the election. But it only revealed its investigation into Clinton. Just 11 days before the election, Comey revealed that he was reopening the investigation into Clinton’s emails, even though she had been already cleared. The announcement cast enough suspicion and changed the conversation in the final stretch that Clinton and the site FiveThirtyEight say it cost her the presidency.

If the “deep state” wanted to hurt Trump, someone could easily have leaked information about the FBI’s investigation into his campaign. No one did.

Republicans tried to argue that they are releasing the memo because they believe in transparency. But it’s been clear all along that the document is a particularly effective bit of partisan gamesmanship. Republican staffers wrote the thing, after all. The GOP-controlled committee voted against allowing Democrats to release their response memo at the same time. And conveniently, the findings of the memo found their way into the hands of Byron York, a conservative columnist who published a piece about the document just minutes after Trump declassified it ― and before nearly everyone else had seen it.

Some Republicans were urging members of their party to slow down on the memo release, recognizing that it likely didn’t have the smoking gun some lawmakers claimed it did. They didn’t want to cross the FBI, and they worried that by overhyping something so insignificant, they’d look silly or worse.

That handful of Republicans might be missing the bullshit factory for the cow pies. It’s true that the memo shows almost nothing. But Trump supporters can still use it to question Mueller’s investigation ― and cite it when they continue standing behind the president no matter what he does. And that’s the whole point.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) delivered a harsh rebuke against fellow Republicans who agreed to release a memo by House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes against the wishes of the U.S. intelligence community.

Nunes on Friday released the memo after President Donald Trump declassified it. The memo alleges that officials at the FBI and Department of Justice displayed active bias against the Trump campaign in the early stages of the Russia investigation, which was later taken over by special counsel Robert Mueller. 

In a statement shortly before the memo’s release, McCain didn’t pull any punches. 

“In 2016, the Russian government engaged in an elaborate plot to interfere in an American election and undermine our democracy,” McCain said. “Russia employed the same tactics it has used to influence elections around the world, from France and Germany to Ukraine, Montenegro and beyond.”

McCain said Russia’s interference has, at best, sown political discord and succeeded in “dividing us from each other.” Attacking the intelligence community is not how to fix the discord, he said.

Ahead of its impending releases, the FBI took the extraordinary step of issuing a public statement to express its “grave concerns about material omissions of fact that fundamentally impact the memo’s accuracy.”

“The latest attacks against the FBI and Department of Justice serve no American interests ― no party’s, no President’s, only Putin’s,” McCain added. “The American people deserve to know all the facts surrounding Russia’s ongoing efforts to subvert our democracy, which is why Special Counsel Mueller’s investigation must proceed unimpeded. Our nation’s elected officials, including the president, must stop looking at this investigation through the lens of politics and manufacturing political sideshows. If we continue to undermine our own rule of law, we are doing Putin’s job for him.”

On Thursday, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi sent a letter to House Speaker Paul Ryan to demand that Nunes be removed from his position.

WASHINGTON ― In a move intended to undermine special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into his campaign, President Donald Trump on Friday approved the declassification of a Republican-authored memo that alleges wrongdoing at the highest levels of the Justice Department and the FBI.

The unprecedented move, confirmed by a White House spokesperson and multiple reports, comes as the Mueller investigation zeros in on key figures in Trump’s orbit, and as Republicans make sweeping attacks on the nation’s premier law enforcement agencies.

In an extraordinary statement this week, the FBI ― headed by a Trump appointee ― said the bureau had “grave concerns about material omissions of fact that fundamentally impact the memo’s accuracy.”

The memo reportedly accuses law enforcement officials of abusing a surveillance authority to spy on Trump campaign official Carter Page. It was drafted by staffers in the office of House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), who was a member of Trump’s transition team. Republicans on the committee voted last month to allow all members of the House to read the memo and later voted to send it to Trump to approve for public release. At the same time, the committee’s Republicans blocked Democrats from simultaneously releasing a rebuttal memo.

Congressional Democrats accused the Republicans who backed the memo of distorting classified information as part of an effort to undermine law enforcement officers and the ongoing Trump-Russia investigation.

This story is developing. Check back for updates.