I have not thought this through, but it seems like that is what you get for implementing such a law in the first place? Why should an agency be allowed to spy on non-americans more anyway?
If they have a good reason, they can spy, and they can get a warrant for it. If they don't have a reason, they shouldn't be able to search anything, American citizen or not.
> Why should an agency be allowed to spy on non-americans more anyway?
The answer is that most democracies have various fundamental protections against spying on their own citizens (including the USA), because citizens want that. But governments still want to spy on their own citizens anyway, because terrorism and think-of-the-children and the war on drugs and geopolitics and general control of 1%ers over 99%ers. So it's not even really about non-Americans.
So what to do? How to get around that, in a way that citizens don't mind? Why, you set up a secretive Five Eyes agreement (also the other "Eyes"). UK spies on USA citizens, USA spies on UK citizens, the USA shares that gathered intelligence with UK, and UK shares their intelligence with USA.
Voila! Now each government can spy on all its citizens via trusted foreign proxies. It's legal, and the citizenry is not informed enough to care.
Anyway, that is the answer to your question. 1%ers want it, and citizens are not informed enough to care.
U.S. Director of National Intelligence, Admiral Dennis C. Blair, said in 2013: "We do not spy on each other. We just ask."
"In recent years, documents of the FVEY have shown that they are intentionally spying on one another's citizens and sharing the collected information with each other."
In order to ask for that data, the US needs to obtain a warrant. Similar laws apply in the other countries.
Your quote is just saying that the parties think that any information they could get by spying on each other they could get by directly asking the person they would have spied on instead.
I mean we are seeing that they didn't even bother with a loophole 280k times, just straight up broke the law. Do you really think they might follow procedure in this situation.
Are you of this? I have seen examples to the contrary even though most of this activity is very secretive since they are not allowed to disclose activity to third parties per the five eyes agreements. The agreements are about sharing of information. The patriot act explicitly allows spying on foreigners' communications and the five eyes agreements allow sharing by default. If you can share where in the five eyes agreements that spying on people in the five or nine eyes jurisdictions is not permitted, I would really like to see.
The controversy which caused this misunderstanding is that incidentally collected SIGINT (i.e. not intentionally targeted) of UK citizens, collected by NSA, was shared back with GCHQ.
Because this 180 degree myth about skirting domestic law by spying on each other's citizens is so widespread, it actually makes accurate information difficult to find.
The Wikipedia page is squatted by editors who refuse to admit they are wrong, but this article is pretty clear [0]; "The partnership has one core rule, that the members agree not to spy on each other."
Wikipedia implies this is limited to governments but it is not.
This is an article for an AU government-funded policy think-tank, written by a China-hawk who is also a fellow at America's government-funded, war-hawk Center for Strategic and International Studies, saying that 5Eyes is actually fine. His main thrust seems to be that AU just needs super-effective oversight like the US has with its secret rubber-stamp courts and nothing-to-gain-from-it Congressional review.
> The partnership has one core rule, that the members agree not to spy on each other.
The US's core rule #4 is that you can't rifle through people's shit without convincing a judge of the crime you suspect them of committing, and why you need to look, and what the narrow limits of your search are.
Uh oh. I'll need to look into this myself. I thought I've learned enough about keeping track of the provenance and validity of any information I consume, and weighing my beliefs by it - but this one, if true, will be something that completely blindsided me. I'm wondering how I never heard anything like this over what's now few weeks short of a decade.
You've never heard anything like this because it's the intelligence agencies responses to the Snowden documents. They're usually mentioned in the same articles but nobody really buys their excuses.
NSA previously hosted the original UK-USA 1946 agreement[0] which was declassified in 2010 i.e. pre-Snowden (seems to 404 now). It is limited to sharing of "foreign communications" which is defined as those not being UK/USA.
The Snowden leaks included material acknowledging that this was the purpose of the agreement. The reason the incidental collection was controversial was _because_ it was against a strict reading of the agreement.
See this article[1] which I believe is quoting straight from Snowden leaks; "[The March 1946 UKUSA agreement] has evolved to include a common understanding that both governments will not target each other's citizens/persons. However, when it is in the best interest of each nation, each reserved the right to conduct unilateral Comint action against each other's citizens/persons.
"Under certain circumstances, it may be advisable and allowable to target second-party persons and second-party communications unilaterally when it is in the best interests of the US."
Note that this is saying that they reserve the right to do it unilaterally i.e. without the knowledge of the other, and this is considered against the purpose of the agreement.
I stand by the statement that the general understanding of the agreement - that it is a way for countries to request surveillance of their own citizens to skirt domestic law - is 180 degrees wrong. The agreement is the opposite.
You keep looking at what the intelligence agencies are publicly saying and ignoring the leaked documents showing they are regularly spying on each other's citizens and then using the agreement to share the data. Like this comment
>Note that this is saying that they reserve the right to do it unilaterally i.e. without the knowledge of the other, and this is considered against the purpose of the agreement
Yes, the US independently decides to spy on Brits. What makes it malicious is they then share that data with the British. The UK didn't request anything, but the end result is the UK intelligence agencies having sensitive data on UK citizens.
My mistake, that one part (that says it's fine for us to spy on Five Eyes citizens) was a directive to staff, not the public. Nothing in my post changes.
Yes, if they are not spying on OTHER countries in the agreement, what that actually means something worse:
The five countries are actively spying on their own people if they are respecting the agreement, Constitutions be damned.
Because modern governments are going to spy on everything they can.
We already know FBI agents used domestic spying infrastructure to stalk women and mistresses and ex-wives. That level of casual use means there is a 99.9999% chance it is used by the government for tracking journalists, leakers, liberal activists (but not right wing ones), profiling uppity citizens, etc.
If facebook and internet ad companies have complete information on you and your associates and post history and beliefs and location, the government has it. Multiple government have it.
We're already running shameful (Obama and Trump) concentration camps for immigrants (aka "lesser" humans), have detained US citizens as enemy combatants, performed extrajudicial assassinations on US citizens overseas, have two gestapo departments (Immigration Customs Enforcement and Customs Border Patrol) with radicalized right wing membership in their ranks.
All it takes is a charismatic strongman (probably from the right but can be from the left too), a false flag event like Gulf of Tonkin, do McCarthy hearings in Congress to stoke fear of external enemies within us, and start rounding up people.
The US could turn into a fascist regime in record time aided by complete IT awareness, soon with AI for profiling and analysis, AI agents for complete propaganda, and all the legal, historical, and dirty pool history to enable it.
As I understand it, the 5 eyes are not allowed to spy on their citizens nor on the citizens of the partner nations. How are we here then discussing these problems?
Specifically in this context -- 9/11 and perceived ongoing threats from international terror.
A shocking and terrible event happens, a report identifies that intelligence agencies collectively had all the pieces to prevent it but were unable to see the entire picture due to compartmentalization, and the country decreases that compartmentalization.
Cause, reflection, and effect.
After that, it's been the intertia of "hidden privacy erosion" vs "visible perception of safety." (Yes, actual safety has poor statistical support)
But democracies generally discount hidden evils and multiply visible goods when voting.
Bill Binney, technical director of NSA at that time, disagrees. He already had a system in place that heavily used filters to only collect what was needed and excluded citizens, which was called "ThinThread." Later, Gen Michael Hayden (NSA Director at the time) switched priorities and went after everything, called TrailBlazer. They got way too much data and couldn't sift through it, even though they had the info in their systems. Binney quit the day after 911 and later revealed the program and the Gov't went after him, along with Thomas Drake and others.
I'd watch the linked interview below. It gets really interesting when Binney talks about how much money and contracts were awarded to make TrailBlazer. All of the data storage, etc. Huge, massive contracts to keep it going. It also greatly increased their annual budget. ThinThread was internal, and fairly cheap.
Not to detract from your point, which I agree with- it's very arguable that the order is wrong. The Patriot Act was written and ready before 9/11- it just needed a catalyst to allow it to be passed.
Feel free to watch this interview with Bill Binney, who was technical director of the NSA at the time. He goes over it in detail. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3owk7vEEOvs
I am aware of ThinThread. The assertion made was "The Patriot Act was written and ready before 9/11". Do you have any specific pointers into where in this 2 hour 35 minute video that claim is made? Or better yet, does anyone have a pointer to anything in writing?
Yes. I believe that myopic, reactive legislators were able to go to the NSA/CIA/FBI and get lots of input on what they would like in a new bill. I am skeptical that "the Patriot Act was written and ready before 9/11".
9/11 is what people point to but it's really just modern national security ops. We live in a time of peace for those lucky enough to be in developed nations with democracies, but war is always one button press away. When WW3 happens any and all information will be an asset for maintaining stability and enabling attacks in wartime operations, particularly with how the next world war will be fought by causing direct harm to the economy and companies of foreign nations via cyber attacks and stealing information.
There you have it, all the reasons you ever need to explain why foreign countries are not very thrilled about the prospect of having to share personal data about their citizens. Given this attitude, and the evidence of misuse, why should any sane country cooperate willingly and put their citizens at risk?
Constitutionally, I believe this is largely untrue. Non-citizens can't vote or hold federal office, but are otherwise granted the privileges assigned to all people by the remainder of the US Constitution. This likely (IANAL) only applies within the bounds of US borders/territories/holdings, but that's where the FBI should only be operating, IMHO.
The exceptions written to this by Congress (FISA, USA PATRIOT, etc.) are unconstitutional and should be struck down.
One of the differences in the US is that evidence obtained by espionage is rarely admissible in court. Often spying bypasses constitutional and legal protections and renders evidence unusable. In the US, cases get dismissed all the time because evidence was "fruit of the poisonous tree" where law enforcement attained evidence unconstitutionally or illegally. This evidence is not allowed in court. This often renders the work of agencies like the CIA, DIA and NSA fairly useless BUT NOT ALWAYS useless for law enforcement. A lot of the problem with FISA and PATRIOT act is they create loopholes in the line between espionage and law enforcement.
I agree. The ethos of the US is described in the Declaration of Independence.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
Our laws, particularly those restricting government power, apply equally to all humans.
This logic doesn't work because in many cases the spying is on things like communications. And you can't tell whose communications they are until after you've spied on them. Bytes don't have little US flag stickers on them.
EU human rights law doesn't make this distinction between citizen and non-citizen.
All enemies, foreign and domestic, specifically those operating within the federal borders of the United States, it's territories, and any foreign holdings (e.g., embassy grounds).
Investigation should begin with crimes that have occurred, suss out those circumstances where there is a bigger picture, and attain warrants for further investigation. Lack of probable cause means no search, a right extended by Amendment IV to all people (at least within US holdings as described above, which is where I think the FBI should be operating).
The fault here lies with Congress. FISA is their doing, and it expressly violates all clauses of Amendment IV. The FBI is at fault for swinging this particular bat in a room full of citizens, but they shouldn't have been given the bat to begin with. Why FISA hasn't had a Supreme Court challenge on constitutional grounds is beyond me, but IANAL.
What experience, metrics, literally any data are you basing this on? Do you believe Russia is a current enemy of the US? How about North Korea and China?
The life I've lived would be my experience. I have had zero direct interactions with any of these enemies. Enemies to the US aren't necessarily enemies to me. Should I be forced to inherit these enemies?
I agree with self defense. However, I'm not sure this is always the case.
Do you believe nuclear or conventional weapons choose only military targets when they explode? Do you believe standing in any major city that you are safe from any kind of bomb? Or are we going to play the game of “it hasn’t happened yet”? Perhaps the US military should just lay down their weapons cause there’s clearly no threat?
There doesn't need to be an enemy, but there is never not an enemy. I mean this on the petty, day to day, citizen level, not the global political scale. Organized crime exists and must be investigated and prosecuted to avoid endangering the everyday life of the citizenry. When this crime crosses state borders, a federal investigatory body can be an asset.
I think the FBI has succumbed to scope creep and overstepped what I perceive as their remit; however, that doesn't mean they're an unnecessary body.
Classic self-fulfilling prophecy. I don't think the spying made any friends, on the contrary. And in effect it didn't increase security either because people are way more distrustful.
It think this ignores the simple economics of surveillance and information gathering.
Mass surveillance of this type is always directed at a countries own sphere of influence, domestic and at close allies. There is little camaraderie between people in power and the average citizen. On the contrary, to keep the power, you must collect info on everyone that could become a danger to you.
In racing teams your largest opponent is often your racing partner.
Surveillance of foreign adversaries is best done by getting info on key players. Why would info on the average foreign citizen matter at all? It just isn't interesting information.
I strongly suspect that post-January 6, the ease with which Americans can draw that border has decreased.
You poll 10 random Americans on whether they think the government should have all powers necessary to defend against another January 6th riot and I don't know what they'll say.
1 person was murdered on January 6 and she was a Trump supporter killed by a careless trigger happy cop that was known for leaving his gun in the bathroom
>A spokeswoman for the department told Roll Call that Lt. Mike Byrd will be investigated after his Glock-22, which has no manual safety to prevent unintended firing, was found “during a routine security sweep” by another officer in a bathroom on Monday.
You are aware that you are conversing with many such "enemies" every day, through venues like this site? What about US citizens that regularly converse with your enemies? Can they be spied on too?
There are no natural rights absent power to enforce them.
One could say there are natural desires, or natural ethics/morals, but these have no weight without a granting and enforcing entity.
E.g. "my personal right to not pay taxes"
At its heart, the Constitution and Bill of Rights are a formal trade between the people and the proposed government, each of whom start with some power.
People: "We will give you legitimacy and support, if you give us these rights."
Government: "We agree to give you those rights, in return for your legitimacy and support."
The people and the government can believe they have other rights (e.g. a right to privacy), but until they're codified and agreed to by the government they don't exist.
Hence why it usually takes revolution, civil disobedience, or riots to force a government to grant (natural) rights it doesn't want to.
That's a strange negative. How about, my personal right to control my body (without harming others including not stealing from others).
I do not have a right to steal from you. Goverment is granted some authorities from the people to the government. People can't grant to others what they don't have (like a non-existent right to steal). Therefore, government does not have a right to steal from you or me.
If you want to enter into a commercial agreement with government for some purpose then sign whatever forms and contacts you desire. For me, taking the fruits of my personal labor is theft.
This is contrary to Enlightenment philosophy, that influenced the Founders, that reasoned that the rights of man exist outside of government. Yes, the US government was established to protect those rights. But, individuals can protect their own rights as well absent government.
That's muddling hypothetical rights with de facto rights.
Which was the same argument that lead (rightly, IMHO) to their enumeration in the Bill of Rights, in contrast to the unenumerated British system.
Individuals protecting "their" un-enumerated rights risk the violent wrath of the state, or are able to do so only because the state chooses to ignore them.
>Non-Americans don't have the same rights as Americans.
It is precisely this violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that is causing so much calamity in the world today, alas. Americans should really, really not accept this state of affairs - either American lives are human lives, and are thus as valuable as any other human life, or they aren't - and therefore international law need not apply to Americans in other aspects of life, either.
The efforts to which an American citizen will proclaim their exceptionalism over the rest of the world and duplicity in applying that exceptionalism is a major cause of the diminished trust that the world feels for the USA, today.
> It is precisely this violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Pretty much all countries distinguish citizens from non-citizens. This isn't an American thing. And you're committing a category error, namely that rights Americans have aren't a superset of any internationally agreed rights. They are.
Bah, this is just another example of how Americans' can be convinced to buy their own doom by packaging it as exceptionalism instead.
Human rights supersede citizenship, which is as it should be - especially for those human beings who want to exercise their rights while not being citizens of any state, whether by choice or by war, etc.
Non-citizens are humans too, and therefore have the same rights citizens do.
Sure, no. The cop with a gun pointed at you shouts your rights at you; rights which the government wrote down.
In all seriousness though, I've no idea what this means in any practical sense. I don't know what being a subject of a government is, not how it compares to being a sovereign.
But is this is not missing the point? Just as with any country, if the US didn't agree them, then they aren't agreed. Thus they aren't an example of the US differentiating between its citizens and its non-citizens on its agreed human rights.
I agree with the counter-conclusion you propose, which is that these international laws need not apply to Americans either. (Although I agree with the notion, in a reply, that they aren't 'real' or binding law anyway.)
It's still the case that spy agencies will have more of a difficult time in court and in public perception dealing with the ramifications of spying on citizens. Nonetheless, I don't think this means very much, and if the Federal government would like to, they could take this 'right' away, lie about not violating it, or violate it and ignore the fact that it's happening.
And this isn't about American citizens proclaiming exceptionalism. I suggested no such exceptionalism, and I highly doubt there are many citizens who agree with this any more. I would guess that somewhere near a majority of Americans prefer that we don't waste money spying on anyone. You can put this on the citizens if you like, but I view it similarly to hearing some Americans complain about "the Chinese" rather than "the Chinese government." It doesn't reflect what I believe reality is, that most normal people are not in support of these policies, and normal citizens from 'foreign adversary' nations are not our enemies, and we should not talk about them that way. (Edit: A caveat on this, the US is a democracy so I can see it being argued that the citizens are complicit in their government's behavior. Briefly stated, I disagree, but that's a really long argument and tangent I don't want to go down this morning.)
Here's a poll touching the subject from 2021 (no idea about the veracity, just a result I found Googling "poll americans who support spying"):
> In particular, 46% of Americans say they oppose the U.S. government responding to threats against the nation by reading emails sent between people outside of the U.S. without a warrant, as permitted under law for purposes of foreign intelligence collection. That’s compared to just 27% who are in favor. In an AP-NORC poll conducted one decade ago, more favored than opposed the practice, 47% to 30%.
American law enforcement also has the power to throw Americans in jail. Therefore it is much more important to strictly regulate what information they obtain and how they obtain it when it pertains to Americans. Non-Americans generally don't run the risk of having their civil rights violated by US agencies (barring extraordinary cases, eg. extradition requests). And even then, extraditions can be contested if the evidence was obtained through improper means.
I assume that this article is true, written in good faith and it seems like a powerful reminder that the FISA court is a disgrace to the American democratic process. Therefore in all likelihood the US Executive is even now racing to identify it as having all the hallmarks of Russian misinformation. Turns out Putin's fell grip extends even to Rudolph Contreras, FISA Court Judge. Who knew?
There is a general rule in public discourse that it is best to assume good faith of all parties. It is difficult to apply that to the FISA court while still believing the legislators can be allowed to legislate. They are looking past a system that was always going to be used for political suppression that, if tested, is likely to be scandalous and probably illegal. Someone has to be lying in the conversation.
The only silver lining here is that the political right wing of the US were the ones who championed it most strongly and it is their candidate who is being hit the most effectively. The world isn't fair, but occasionally karma happens. They should have listened to the human rights advocates and people standing up for honourable legal traditions.
Almost certainly correct. The change was implemented because the firewall between domestic and foreign surveillance was highlighted as one of the unforced errors in the 9/11 attacks succeeding, but this was the anticipated consequence of it.
If you ask the average American whether they're comfortable with this tradeoff (added general scrutiny for added ability to prevent the next attempt at a 9/11), I don't know what they'd say.
The Americans being surveilled almost certainly have the right to vote both for the people who make these laws and the people who oversee enforcement of them at the top level.
The problem isn't an unaccountable minority; it's that if you poll ten Americans on whether these are actually good policies, you get different answers depending on how you structure the question (and that's borne out in the voting booth, where Americans keep sending the Congresspeople who passed these laws back to Washington).
It's tough to foresee that something like FISA or PATRIOT Act would even be on the table during the previous election when voting for representatives. Yeah, you're right, incumbents tend to keep getting reelected, and while I think the similarities of Democrats and Republicans are overblown, one place where they are very similar is supporting law enforcement, intelligence agencies and the military industrial complex. Taking that into account, even if my senator answered the phone, they have no accountability to me for up to 6 years, and political parties can play games with votes when they know they have the numbers to make sure congress people representing risky districts or having elections coming up soon vote in a safe way.
There are some politicians who side with the American people on this, sure, but they are few and far between, even if you look at who is running in primaries. People who voted against the patriot act, like Bernie Sanders or Ron Paul are considered political extremists, even from their own parties. Add to that silence from SCOTUS on the matter (as recently as this: https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/22/supreme_court_wikimed...), and it becomes clear that to say that my right to vote for congressional representatives gives me a say secret surveillance is awfully hand wavy, I think to the point of naivety or victim blaming.
In the wake of Snowden's leaks, Gallup found that only 37% of American adults approved of the program, even saying it was designed to fight terrorism: https://news.gallup.com/poll/163043/americans-disapprove-gov..., which is a very charitable way to frame the question for proponents of the program, but again, it doesn't matter what Americans think even when they go into the voting booth, because intelligence community is going to continue doing this anyway.
Name one country that does not spy on it's non citizens.
The core part of story was the spying on citizen part without warrants.
A Little history...in early 20th century there was a big concern when the pen warrant precedents were established as the FBI felt that it was somewhat illegal. Several SC cases changed their view on that namely specifying that they needed to get a pen warrant for telecommunication eaves dropping.
current 702 upended that as pen warrants generally applied to US citizens even out of country whereas 702 changed that to a probability of there being a US citizen caught in the telecomm eaves dropping.
What would be nice is a revamp of 702 to be warrant based wire-taps that go through a special court for the warrants with the appropriate increase in judges to handle such a change.
Shockingly, even the smallest micro-states participate in surveillance of non-citizens.
> San Marino
Is 23 square miles of land with a population of 33K and is land-locked by Italy. Even still -- as a tiny micro-state land-locked by a friendly NATO and EU member state -- San Marino participates in foreign surveillance in a variety of ways; e.g., a member of the Customs union it collaborates with Europol on counter-terrorism.
> Tuvalu
Is 10 square miles with 10K people, and even then collaborates with a Five Eyes nation on maritime surveillance.
> Costa Rica
Unlike the other two examples, Costa Rica is a reasonably sized country. Like other countries which are not tiny micro-states, Costa Rica has its own dedicated intelligence agency independent of collaborative agreements/treaties. It additionally collaborates with both INTERPOL and western intelligence agencies.
If they have a good reason, they can spy, and they can get a warrant for it. If they don't have a reason, they shouldn't be able to search anything, American citizen or not.