this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2023
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I like how it's suddenly a problem only when they do this to Americans for a change.
FISA stands for "Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act." By definition, it's only supposed to be used in the surveillance of people foreign to the U.S.A. The FBI's job is domestic law enforcement. It's the FBI's job to investigate crime involving U.S. citizens.
Officially, the NSA does not spy on U.S. citizens. You can believe whatever you want about whether it actually "unofficially" does, but unless you do a lot of business overseas, chances are high that Google and Amazon and Facebook all have collected way more personal information about you than the NSA has.
Even if the NSA does surveil U.S. citizens, it can't use any information it obtains in any legal or political way, or in any otherwise public manner.
If a U.S. citizen has communications with a foreigner, however, it is possible that those communications will be surveilled. The NSA does spy on foreign citizens, just like foreign intelligence agencies spy on U.S. citizens. If you're a U.S. citizen communicating with a foreigner who's being surveilled, then your communications with that person are going to be surveilled as well.
But again, it's not the FBI's job to police international crime -- that's the job of the CIA. As the article describes, this is why it is a bad idea for the FBI to be using FISA intelligence. This is why "it's a problem when they do it to Americans."
Interesting, thanks for this context! Then if I understand correctly FBI spied on a USA citizen but in an international matter. So it's not really relevant that one party was a USA citizen: what is relevant is that since the other party wasn't, so it wasn't FBI's job. Did it get it right?
Think of it another way:
The CIA and NSA will do their things collecting foreign intelligence on largely non-US persons. They store that information in a database somewhere with a big old "foreign" sticker.
The FBI will do their things collecting domestic intelligence on largely US-persons, storing their information in a database with a "domestic" sticker.
Intelligence agencies will share information between each other at times when their jurisdictions cross and for certain interesting mission sets, but it needs to be a deliberate and measured act. The FBI shouldn't be able to just sift through the "foreign" database without any supervision for things that look interesting to them - they need to be granted access to a certain tailored box within the "foreign" database with extraneous information (to them) redacted or removed.
Additionally, there's a whole 'other can of worms on how much information they were able to access. It's one thing to catch an American committing tax fraud from their emails between a foreign bank lets say. What if an FBI agent knows their (ex) spouse has some overseas dealings and they want to snoop or find some dirt? They can't legally use their organic tools to find this information on someone they are connected to without probable cause, but who's to say their "foreign" database accesses account for the US person who isn't the focus of surveillance? They aren't looking for "Spouse, bank fraud," which would probably raise suspicion with supervisors, but rather "foreign banker, any conversations with spouse@hotmail.com," which the other 3 letter agencies probably don't care about.
Our issue here is that the FBI is using information that they shouldn't have access to. You can argue legitimacy one way or another, but the way these agencies are funded and authorized to operate necessitates this separation. The FBI may have had a valid case for querying and using this information, but only under through the proper channels, which it seems were not used.
Yes, that sounds right, except that I think it really is relevant that one party was a U.S. citizen.
There are strict laws against the U.S. government surveilling U.S. citizens without a warrant. By using FISA information gathered through warrantless foreign surveillance, the FBI appeared to be taking a backdoor around those laws.
Ftfy. Everyone is spying on other countries all of the time; the US is just one of the most capable in that capacity but not different in its aims.
Of course they do. It just baffles me how it's always a sudden outrage when they happen to do to "us" what they normally openly do to "them" which is considered totally fine. Not really specific to FBI and USA, except they are the biggest in this game, as you've mentioned, so we hear mostly about them, and maybe China or Russia.