GOVERNMENT DOCUMENTS: Obama FBI Took Personal Info From Citizens of 14 States, Exposed It To Russia
Tore Lindeman
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WASHINGTON — Former president Barack Obama’s Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) under James Comey made secret agreements with fourteen state attorneys general to obtain personal identifying information on all private citizens and residents in those states. The information was used directly by the Obama White House, through its White House Special Surveillance Group led by Obama, James Comey, and Andrew McCabe.
This personal identifying information from millions of American citizens — including more than 50 million photographs obtained from Facebook and gas-station surveillance cameras for facial recognition — was then exposed to Russian hackers by a French contractor that snuck Russian code into FBI biometric data, according to top national security sources and published reports.
House Oversight Committee information yet to be published but reviewed by Big League Politics shows that the Obama FBI entered into secret agreements with fourteen (14) different states to tap all of its personal identifying information (one such secret contract, forged between Obama’s deputy FBI director and the attorney general in North Dakota, is presented below). A previous Government Accountability Office (GAO) published report states that the FBI entered into agreements with seven states as of 2015 and was seeking to add more, and that the FBI was allowed to tap the state-level facial recognition software programs of sixteen total states.
The FBI under Obama and Comey, during the 2016 election, launched an attempt to formally exempt all of its biometric facial recognition and fingerprint-analysis programs from the Privacy Act to prevent citizens from being able to sue. Meanwhile, James Comey’s top deputy at the FBI David Cuthbertson lied about the existence of the program in an interview with “Sixty Minutes.”
Government documents show the full scope and vision of “SpyGate” as enacted by top Obama administration officials for more than a decade.
The vision of “Lifelog,” later known as “Citizen Log,” was created back in 2004 when Deputy Attorney General Comey with then FBI Director Mueller began to create the solid foundations to penetrate the consumer markets to start collecting data-mining data. Their memorandums of understanding (MOU’s) had stipulations like this:
Robert Mueller even threatened to resign along with Comey if the Bush administration didn’t agree that wire tapping was “Constitutional.” Basically, Mueller and Comey bullied then-President George W. Bush to violate privacy rights of citizens. It all went downhill from there, but the plan was in motion. In 2005, Comey left and moved over to Lockheed. The Lockheed CEO then went on to become CEO of L3- Communications one of the leaders in transcription/foreign language contracting globally.
Here is the Timeline put together by the Government Accountability Office (GAO).
This Timeline shows that the Department of Justice approved major new FBI personal identification surveillance programs in June 2008, at the tail end of the Bush presidency. President Obama’s FBI started collecting and transferring the “facial images” and other records in 2010, then added new programs including an “Interstate Photo System” and a “FACE” program, which stands for “Facial Analysis, Comparison, and Evaluation.” The programs were fully operational under Obama by April 2015.
In order to obtain all of these photographs and pieces of personal identifying information, the Obama FBI under James Comey had to make secret agreements with state attorneys general around the country. Fourteen (14) states ended up signing away the privacy rights of all their citizens and residents.
The GAO reported in 2016 in a published official report (emphasis added):
“The Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) operates the Next Generation Identification-Interstate Photo System (NGI-IPS)— a face recognition service that allows law enforcement agencies to search a database of over 30 million photos to support criminal investigations. NGI-IPS users include the FBI and selected state and local law enforcement agencies, which can submit search requests to help identify an unknown person using, for example, a photo from a surveillance camera. When a state or local agency submits such a photo, NGI-IPS uses an automated process to return a list of 2 to 50 possible candidate photos from the database, depending on the user’s specification. As of December 2015, the FBI has agreements with 7 states to search NGI-IPS, and is working with more states to grant access. In addition to the NGI-IPS, the FBI has an internal unit called Facial Analysis, Comparison and Evaluation (FACE) Services that provides face recognition capabilities, among other things, to support active FBI investigations. FACE Services not only has access to NGI-IPS, but can search or request to search databases owned by the Departments of State and Defense and 16 states, which use their own face recognition systems. Biometric analysts manually review photos before returning at most the top 1 or 2 photos as investigative leads to FBI agents…
Local, state, federal, and tribal law enforcement agencies can be authorized to submit face recognition searches for law enforcement purposes. From the beginning of the pilot in December 2011 through December 2015, the number of search requests by states ranged from under 20 by one state to over 14,000 by another state.”
Big League Politics has exclusively obtained documents, presented below, showing that Comey’s FBI was storing facial-recognition and DMV records of private citizens, and that Comey’s assistant director David Cuthbertson lied about it on television just four days after signing the agreement.
On May 15, 2013, Cuthbertson entered an agreement with the North Dakota Attorney General’s Office. The official in that office who signed off on the deal, Dallas Carlson, is now President Trump’s nominee to be U.S. Marshall. This agreement was a Memorandum of Understanding between the two agencies that the Attorney General would be providing all DMV photos and other Personal Identifying Information (PII) to the FBI to store and house on their database. Other state attorneys general refused to enter the agreement, with Vermont’s attorney general in December 2017 calling the program “illegal.”
Please examine the date of the agreement. Now look at what they agree to exchange.
When whistleblower Edward Snowden released his tell all he referred to something in code named #LifeLog. The program’s name was changed to FBI FACE SERVICES, which is also called #CitizenLog.
There was an uproar in early 2013 when a secret unit created by President Obama in 2010 called the High Value Intelligence Group (HVIG) became public knowledge. According to insiders, the HVIG members and directors included Robert Mueller, James Comey, Christopher Wray, H.R. McMaster, Rod Rosenstein, Andrew McCabe, David Cuthbertson, and many more FBI officials and intel components that reported directly to President Obama. This group was centrally involved in spying on private citizens. Insiders also believe that Jeff Sessions was involved with the HVIG.
Americans were in uproar that their rights to privacy were being violated because the FBI was proposing to get access to DMV photos and other personal identifying information from their state to house in a searchable database. The ACLU was briefly involved but mysteriously stopped being involved.
David Cuthbertson was the brain child of FBI FACE SERVICES and Comey was promoted from the HVIG to Director of the FBI, with Cuthbertson as Comey’s Assistant Director to the FBI, in 2013.
David Cuthbertson was interviewed by Lesley Stahl on or around May 19, 2013 during a 60 Minutes segment. In the segment, he was firm and strong on stating that the FBI DOES NOT have any photos or Private Identifying Information except from whatever information is collected if you are ever arrested. Mug shot, DNA, info collected then and there at the crime scene only. The video is very convincing and it looks like the FBI is honest right?
HERE IS THE VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1y9xtjL8rI&feature=youtu.be
Now we know definitively that Cuthbertson was lying. That interview was FOUR DAYS after the FBI signed the agreement above with North Dakota.
During her written testimony to the House Oversight Committee, Jennifer Lynch, Senior Legal Counsel at www.eff.org stated:
“As of December 2017, NGI included more than 74 million biometric records in the criminal repository and over 57.5 million records in the civil repository. By the end of fiscal year 2016, it also already contained more than 51 million civil and criminal photographs searchable through face recognition.”
“Without transparency, accountability, and proper security protocols in place, face recognition systems—like many other searchable databases of information available to law enforcement—may be subject to misuse. This misuse has already occurred in other contexts,” Lynch testified, citing her paper “Face Off: Law Enforcement Use of Face Recognition Technology.”
A state audit in Minnesota found that half of police officers misused access to Driving License Records.
In North Dakota, estimates find that over 95% of law enforcement officers check plates and or licenses at their discretion especially when they are out on patrol and with their new “License plate” readers.
The Russians Obtained This Personal Information Of American Citizens
We report this information as the mainstream media finally acknowledges that Russians obtained personal information from the American people. The mainstream media even acknowledged that the FBI exposed personal identifying information to the Russians — but without discussing Obama’s secret program or the extent of the Obama administration’s spying on the American people.
CNN’s Jake Tapper aired a segment Wednesday reporting that the Russian Mail.Ru, which is closely linked to Vladimir Putin, obtained “millions” of Americans’ personal identifying information in part through Facebook.
The Russians hacked into all of the Obama FBI’s biometric data on facial recognition and fingerprints through a French contractor that snuck Russian code into the program.
Buzzfeed reporter Chris Hamby reported in December 2017, in a piece headlined “FBI Software For Analyzing Fingerprints Contains Russian-Made Code, Whistleblowers Say”:
“The fingerprint-analysis software used by the FBI and more than 18,000 other US law enforcement agencies contains code created by a Russian firm with close ties to the Kremlin, according to documents and two whistleblowers. The allegations raise concerns that Russian hackers could gain backdoor access to sensitive biometric information on millions of Americans, or even compromise wider national security and law enforcement computer systems.
The Russian code was inserted into the fingerprint-analysis software by a French company, said the two whistleblowers, who are former employees of that company. The firm — then a subsidiary of the massive Paris-based conglomerate Safran — deliberately concealed from the FBI the fact that it had purchased the Russian code in a secret deal, they said…
The Russian company whose code ended up in the FBI’s fingerprint-analysis software has Kremlin connections that should raise similar national security concerns, said the whistleblowers, both French nationals who worked in Russia. The Russian company, Papillon AO, boasts in its own publications about its close cooperation with various Russian ministries as well as the Federal Security Service — the intelligence agency known as the FSB that is a successor of the Soviet-era KGB and has been implicated in other hacks of US targets.”
Patrick Howley contributed to this report
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