The best example of this I can think of is the "100 mile from the border Constitution-free zone", which was the stated position of some moron at DHS that was then (maddeningly, given how great they normally are) picked up by the ACLU. In reality, the notion that there's a 100 mile zone of warrantless personal searches extending inward from every border was a notion that was litigated by SCOTUS in the '70s and, obviously, found wanting.
I would support a public policy that would make statements of this sort ("the CIA has no limits when working with the NYPD!", "We can ghost your laptop as long as you're within 100 miles of any airport!") a firing offense, but short of that, there's not a lot you can do about this problem; if the USG employed 1/4th the number of people it does now, that'd still be over a million people, and no group of one million people can possibly avoid a couple crazy people.
The real check on this sort of stupidity is the courts.
The Border Patrol is able to operate in that zone, and they operate under somewhat different rules than other forms of law enforcement. Furthermore they sometimes interpret their ability to operate somewhat more generously than a court would agree to. So while in theory they can't do what they sometimes do, in practice they are the ones there with guns and they do it anyways.
(In particular the court has ruled that they can stop and question everyone on a public thoroughfare because the intrusion is short in duration. I've seen documented cases where agents in the field clearly believed that they could question for as long as they wanted to question. The reasoning of the court would not support that conclusion...)
So, very much not really a constitution-free zone. But certainly the border patrol walks closer to the edge of constitutional protections that we take for granted.
The fact is that there are individuals abusing their power and often times they are getting away with it, even when it becomes widely known.
P.S. To add to this, it's important to understand the relation of law to society. There is nothing inherently special about law other than that people generally follow it. The more that people, especially people given power through positions in government, start ignoring or misinterpreting the law the less the law actually matters. What is the truth of legality is irrelevant to the facts on the ground. Murder may be illegal but that won't stop you from being murdered. Similarly, "constitution free zones" may not be legal but that doesn't help you if the police think otherwise. For that particular point, for example, consider the many immigration stops the police make in states near the mexican border. Legally they can't force you to stop and submit to a document check but that doesn't stop them from doing so anyway, and from most people complying to a simple request from a police officer.
The less oversight there is, the less punishment there is, the more likely it is that abuses of power will become more common.
Also known as "the lone wolf" - "bad apple" explanation / defence.
It's not about what he said (which sounds like a BS excuse in the first place) -- or even if he "had no limits" or not. Of course he had limits. He couldn't open fire in 5th Avenue and expect it to be OK.
The issue is what he was doing there and in what authority. Also, does anybody really believes they respect the limitation of operations inside US, because "it's the law"?
The unrelated case of the "100 mile from the border Constitution-free zone" is also not about the legal basis. Dismissing the legend part of it doesn't change the reality of border patrol more often than not taking the law into their hands and doing whatever the fuck they like with little repercussions.
That's the main question. If they had limits or not is secondary.
http://www.amazon.com/Securing-City-Americas-Counterterror-F...
.. something other than the topic at hand, where only the gullibe just take "retarded statements" on faith, even if only as much to further discuss them, while the super heroes of intellectual honesty dismiss them on the same basis and blame bad apples.
"Nothing to see here", in however many words it is said, is really just a meme as well.
I fully understand that this is case of little boys playing cops and robbers and making the rules up as they go.. but they are playing with real guns.
"That officer believed there were 'no limitations' on his activities, the report said, because he was on an unpaid leave of absence, and thus exempt from the prohibition against domestic spying by members of the C.I.A."
I don't think either CIA or NSA have any respect left for the spirit of the law. They "just do what they have to do", and figure out the legal issues later through whatever loopholes they can find.
This is similar to the American flying tigers who resigned their commissions with the US army to become mercenarys - which is presumably the precedent that the lawyers woudl have used.
EDIT: I forgot to mention that he had worked with the NYPD on behalf of the CIA as a counter-terrorism adviser from late 2001-2004. Then he want back to working with the CIA, but the NYPD asked if they could hire him onto staff and he stayed with the NYPD after that, retiring from the CIA in 2009.
I think people have been getting confused by the NYT's use of the word 'embedded' which implies he was working for the CIA while spending his days with the NYPD, much as a journalist files reports to his TV or print media employer while embedded with the military. It's an odd choice of words, as nothing in the report suggests that this was the case.
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/717864-cia-nypd-ig.h...
What's incredible is that people will take the excuse at face value --or even believe he really was on "unpaid leave" and still allowed to be there.
You violate some law online (knowingly or unknowingly, doesn't matter), and the NSA records it and flags it for later review based on some pattern matching. Upon review, it gets forwarded (at the discretion of an agent who will make his determination with little oversight) to an embedded CIA agent in your local PD. Forbidden from operating against you themselves by federal law, they inform the local PD of the problem and you get a SWAT team at your house at 2am.
I don't think we are there yet, but I'm actually not convinced that the average American will see this as a problem - after all, they have nothing to hide.
The real divide is really between progressives who want less corporate involvment in government and more real government regulations, and those who benefit from regulatory capture. In the middle are those who don't know what to believe. For example, GMOs. The corporate interests want them permitted and unlabeled as much as possible. Progressives make noise about how they (or the associated pesticides/herbicides) could be dangerous to people and/or the environment. Government run by corporate interests doesn't want the information to spread to the less informed, they don't want people thinking about those things.
Protests and information campaigns are essential to a working democratic republic, and they will be the first targeted by the surveillance information.
Turning secret inadmissible evidence into legal admissible evidence seems tricky.
The only game plan I can see is this: You find out someone is up to something illegal; then you just happen have have a police officer walking by the coffee shop when you're discussing it with an associate.
No, not really. They have to show e.g. probable cause but they can happily use secret information to create serendipity: "We happened to be parked outside the suspect's location at just the right time to wittiness them talking to a known communist sympathizer."
Its not unusual for information from paid informants to get washed in this way in order to conceal their identity and prolong their usefulness.
Even your crimes are secrets to be withheld from you.
The FBI, CIA and military intelligence agencies are known for hiding information from each other.
1. Air Force Intelligence, Army Intelligence, CIA, Coast Guard Intelligence, Defense Intelligence Agency, DoE, DHS, State Department, Treasury, DEA, FBI, Marine Corps Intelligence, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, National Reconnaissance Office, NSA, Navy Intelligence
To me, this is actually a little confusing. My assumption has always been that the CIA was the intelligence agency which...gathers intelligence. If the government itself is forbidding them from domestic surveillance, it makes me question their tactics and methods that would be unconstitutional...I guess it could be that this is suppose to be the work of the DHS and NSA.
It is smart to divide them up really, the idea is they communicate with one another and provide some checks on each other. There is also the DIA primarily intelligence for the military. There have been some CIA and DIA butting heads after 9/11.
Whats gonna happen next? Well thats up to you. How many more times are you going to let government entities operate outside their defined jurisdictions and boundaries?
Honestly?
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/717864-cia-nypd-ig.h...
Even if a document was declassified, when will you believe things and not believe things.
Do you think this could just be a document the government is feeding us compared to actual witnesses? Cops are expected to tell the truth even in court. So I guess this begs the question who is really telling the truth.
Point is, the government overall just can't be trusted to keep a straight answer.
Revealed: how the FBI coordinated the crackdown on Occupy
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/29/fbi-coor...
Once they started going over the collected data, how much further to specifically target key organizers? It could have been through blackmail (ala FBI's threatening letter to MLK) or just simply hyper-vigilant enforcement of all laws made so much easier thanks to the constant surveillance the NSA can provide.
As tptacek says, this isn't a new thing. It's not even something that's all that interesting, frankly. People from various agencies cross-pollinate all of the time. If worked a boring analyst job at CIA, I might love taking a leave of absence and helping the cops out some. Sounds like fun.
Sure, it would be news if the CIA actually ran operations in NYC, but this story is about employees of the CIA being embedded in the NYC police, not about secret CIA operations inside the country. That's a different can of worms. Perhaps something bad happened. Don't know. This story doesn't inform us of it. Instead we just get vague allegations without proof. As the report states, this is an unusual personnel situation, not some massive policy disaster. The rest of it is just blown out of proportion by this author.
I've said this before, and I'm sure I'll say it again: the biggest problem with these freedom or safety stories is that people get way too passionate, try to interject their own narrative about how things work, lay on the paranoia thickly, and have a good old Donnybrook. Might get a lot of page views like that, but it's not useful.
People should be really concerned about what's going on in the US with regards to the security state. This is a serious problem and it deserves our passion. But "being concerned" and "having your chain yanked" are two different things. Smart folks know the difference. I'm not pointing a finger at this author precisely, but I'm starting to see a lot of overly-emotional, hand-waving tripe coming across the wires in the guise of various kinds of "breaking stories"
