Sharyl Attkisson: How I Learned I Was Being Spied On, Most Likely By The Government
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Before we knew the government had subpoenaed secretly records of AP reporters, before we knew they'd spied on James Rosen of Fox News.
But during the same time period, I was reporting on controversies under the Obama administration and quite frankly, other controversies, so I didn't know who would be spying on me if somebody was.
I never suspected that was the case, but intelligence sources, two in a row in the same time period, came to me and said that the Obama administration was violating civil rights through surveillance in ways that most Americans would find shocking.
Both of them used similar phrases and didn't even know each other and suggested that I should was probably being monitored.
Sounded crazy because it just never occurred to me.
I won't be laboring the whole journey, but long story short, through a series of forensic examinations, the first being an intelligence community insider who was able to locate software that had been implanted in my computer, intrusions that have been going on illegally at the hands of the government using government IP addresses and government proprietary software were found in my computer in a long term monitoring effort.
At least one and perhaps more than one.
I've since learned the government is surveying so many people.
journalists, politicians, members of Congress and citizens.
These operations are probably tripping over each other and crossing paths, you know, in some instances.
When I learned that the FBI was probably involved through the forensics and the FBI didn't want to investigate and was holding information from me, and when there was a concerted effort to try to controversialize the announcement by CBS that my computers had been remotely intruded on, then I saw that there was a narrative being pushed forward by powerful people inside the government to make all this sound like it wasn't true.
Fast forward all these years later since the government won't hold itself.
responsible.
I've been suing, but these are very hard cases.
I thought you have the forensic evidence, the government comes to you and apologizes, case closed.
But no, you have to get to court, to a jury, and to do that, you have to get discovery.
To get that, the court requires certain things.
The burden is very high for someone like me, spending over a million dollars to try to bring justice, which means they want you to know and have all the documents of who personally did it and ordered it when you couldn't possibly have the information without discovery.
But they won't give you discovery until you bring them the information to justify the discovery.
So this has gone in circles for over a decade.
This is just sort of this never-ending journey with the Department of Justice fighting and delaying every step of the way.
My last salvo was, I was hoping under the second Trump administration, I wrote petitions to everyone I could think of that might have some control, asking them to acknowledge the forensics, which are undeniable, and issue an apology even if they don't want to investigate at this late date.
You could find out who is responsible, but at least issue an acknowledgement and apology.
I can't get anywhere with that.
The reason this case, for me, is important is I certainly wasn't the only one they were doing this to.
And if somebody had taken care of business back when this came to light in the 2010 time period, maybe this wouldn't have happened to other people that we know it happened to, whether it's Donald Trump or both Democrats and Republicans in Congress who've been improperly surveilled by the intelligence community, or who knows who else it's happening to today.