Sometimes the hardest secrets to expose are those that are hidden in plain sight.  When President Trump commented on Twitter that "My wires were tapped in Trump Tower," he brought attention to just such a secret.

Since 9/11, the National Security Agency has been engaging in a practice beyond most Americans' comprehension and our understanding of electronic surveillance.  The NSA have been capturing all our electronic communications, emails, and phone calls, and storing them in giant data centers to be later accessed, presumably based on a Constitution-based process.

The most recently constructed of these centers is called Bluffdale and is located in the Utah desert, with lots of room for expansion.  That it's physically possible to capture all this data is difficult for most people to get their minds around, but realize that the Library of Congress is about 10 terabytes in size and could easily be carried on 10 hard drives in a briefcase.  The taps on the fiberoptic network that intercept this data can capture at session rates in real time.  In other words, the capture rate exceeds the line's transfer rate.

All of this has been revealed, to anyone who will listen, by former technical director for the NSA and American patriot William Binney, who has been sounding the civil liberties alarm for years.  Never has there been a whistleblower who has blown so long and so loud.

Americans are used to thinking about wiretapping and other forms of electronic surveillance as being based on probable cause with a warrant and targeted at an individual prior to the collection of personal information.  That's not how it's done any longer, and Trump has stumbled on to this reality.

The way it's done now is that an intelligence or law enforcement agency gets a warrant to access the data that has already been collected and stored.  Sometimes this probable cause is based on patterns of the metadata of the electronic communications – the header information that courts have found have no privacy protections, like the outside of an envelope.

The problem (other than the obvious potential for police-state abuse) is that the process appears to be honor-based, with no actual gatekeeper to validate authorized access to the data.  This has allowed Deep State operatives to access and leak Trump's and his team's communications. 

And if they will do this to the President of the United States, just imagine what they are doing to ordinary citizens.

A former battalion fire chief from Atlanta, host Jim Daws is an America First activist, having worked on Pat Buchanan's presidential campaigns in 1992, 1996, and 2000.  He hosts America First Radio, which is broadcast on the Treasure Coast of Florida.