Comment by RobotToaster
16 days ago
It's also worth noting that one of the ways the five eyes get around domestic spying laws is to spy on each other's citizens. So the CIA spy on British citizens the UK government want to spy on, and GCHQ spy on American citizens the US government want to spy on. So this would indirectly allow the US government to spy on US citizens (even more than it already does, anyway)
Its data laundering
Jurisdiction arbitrage
True. The data taken can end up anywhere, and where it came from is obscured. Too much circumventing of laws or purposefully violating the privacy and human rights of one's own citizens, even for profit.
This is a fun theory that I've heard repeatedly, but with no evidence. Is there any indication that this is actually legal and happening? I have friends who work in the space that tell me that it's neither.
Why do you think 3 letters agencies care about the law? Ever heard of Snowden leaks?
Actually my takeaway from the Snowden leaks was that the government tried really hard to stay within the confines of the law, even if they wildly stretched the legal theory to get there.
https://www.blankenship.io/essays/2020-07-13/
Doesn’t justify what they were doing, or make it legal, but it’s an important distinction when trying to reason about government surveillance programs.
By that use of the phrase, sovereign citizens try really hard to stay within the law.
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I would call that wanting plausible deniability (in a different sense than how the phrase is normally used). "Yes we may have a done a bad thing but we believed it was allowed."
You don't have to have a sound legal theory that will hold up in court. You just have to have a sound bite that you can vomit up when someone says "Wait a minute, isn't that blatantly illegal?"
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one of the Snowden leaks was exactly about the five eyes countries coordinating in this way to dodge oversight though?
Right, but the point is they went through the motions to attempt to follow the law. They weren't simply saying someone else was doing the work and then doing it themselves. They at least attempt to follow the law internally. Which is not something we knew for certain or not in the public.
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Didn’t these leaks precisely show that the agencies were effectively above the law? I mean, they tried to make it look like they were abiding by the regulations, but effectively tried every work around they could come up with. Including subcontracting domestic spying to foreign intelligence agencies, using the exact mechanism the parent mentioned? It seems you’re contradicting them by making their point.
It show that no matter the scope of the law there are always loopholes.
There is an important distinction between blatant disregard for the law like you would see in authoritarian countries and this trying to twist the letter of the law into allowing something that it wasn’t intended to allow. Both are bad of course, but the latter shows some fear of the checks and balances. Being nefarious is much more expensive if you fear the courts, and have to spend time and effort circumventing it. Trumps recent behavior shows none of this fear of the courts. Even if the courts overturn the executive orders, much of the damage has already been done.
I think stuff like Parallel Reconstruction show that they do care about the law. They care about working around it.
That doesn't mean they care about the law, it just means that they care about maintaining the public perception that they care about the law. They're perfectly happy to keep up the pretense as long as they can still get what they want anyway, even if they have to add a couple extra inconvenient steps to the process. What they won't do is allow the law to stop them from getting what they want.
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Correct. The 'law' exists to provide common citizens something to argue on, and a sense of justice, even if not real.
A revolting citizenry can be potentially dangerous than a citizenry that is endlessly bickering amongst each other about the 'law'.