Comment on FBI Made 'Inappropriate Use' of Foreign Surveillance Program To Spy on Americans

TheEntity@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

• Bipta@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I like how when American laws are broken in America it becomes an issue for Americans

  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.

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  • TheEntity@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    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.

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• ggBarabajagal@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  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.”

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  • TheEntity@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Interesting, thanks for this context! Then if I understand correctly that 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?

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    • Car@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      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.

      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.

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