7 ms·

CIA Agents Were Embedded With NYPD And Had “No Limits”

201 points by eightyone 13y ago

cobrausn 13y ago
So, theoretical surveillance state nightmare for an average citizen: 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.
- leot 13y ago
  Yeah. One reason why it's much safer if surveillance is restricted to foreign sources, is that, unlike foreign surveillance, domestic surveillance is combined with the legal power to fine, imprison, and execute. Citizens of foreign countries, on the other hand, are presumably protected from this by their own governments.
- mhurron 13y ago
  Fundamental problem with this: Military (NSA) and civilian (CIA) agencies don't like each other and don't work well together. The FBI, CIA and military intelligence agencies are known for hiding information from each other.
  - dsl 13y ago
    Not anymore. All of the members of the "Intelligence Community"[1] now report up to the DNI, and sharing and coordination are a core mission. 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
- 205guy 13y ago
  You left out the part where you go to some protest (OWS, anti-gmo, anti-KeystoneXL, anything that opposes the corporate interests that run the government). That's what makes this whole surveillance thing scary is that it can easily be used to quelch opposition, not just to the government, but to the corporations whose interests are protected by the government. 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.
- temp453463343 13y ago
  Wouldn't the PD need to show in court why they suspected you in the first place? If their raid is based on illegal info, then it's not legal. 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.
  - wavefunction 13y ago
    "National security" Even your crimes are secrets to be withheld from you.
  - nullc 13y ago
    > Wouldn't the PD need to show in court why they suspected you in the first place? 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.
    - temp453463343 13y ago
      Yeah, but that's often hard to pull off. For instance in the original example you're violating an internet law. It's not exactly something the PD can just pretend to stumble upon unless you're really careless and do it in a public place.
  - ZachPruckowski 13y ago
    Or walk down the street from the precinct and use the payphone to anonymously phone in a tip. Or launder the info through an existing CI. Or gin up an unrelated minor excuse for a home visit and leverage that to find probable cause and then just "happen" to find the evidence with your warrant.
rayiner 13y ago
Headline is misleading. From the article: "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."
- ferdo 13y ago
  It's not misleading. If the CIA agent believed that he had no limits, then there were no limits.
  - rayiner 13y ago
    If we're pretending to be severely brain-damaged to the point where we can't see the difference between different things, then yes, the title is totally accurate.
    - foobarbazqux 13y ago
      Are you somehow suggesting that if I jump off this building and flap my wings that I won't actually be flying?
    - ferdo 13y ago
      When someone acting under color of law "believes" himself to be without limits, there's no difference. The brain damage is displayed by those who keep giving authoritarians the benefit of the doubt.
  - mtgx 13y ago
    Not to mention that's probably a tactic they use to skirt the law, so if they assassinate someone, and it gets found out later, the agency is not responsible. 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.
  - dllthomas 13y ago
    I'm not entirely clear whether it meant "he believed he did not have the usual limits regarding being involved in domestic police work," as opposed to "he believed he had no limits - he could assassinate people, spy on anyone, &c." I think it was the former, but am not positive; the headline seems to lead to the latter. If it was in fact the former, then the headline is misleading.
tptacek 13y ago
You see things like this all the time, where some government functionary declares something manifestly retarded to be true, and the statement is then taken on faith by (the media, message boards, politicians). 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.
- aasarava 13y ago
  The real check on this sort of stupidity is actual journalist doing actual journalism.
- gasull 13y ago
  Why are CIA agents being embedded with NYPD? That's the main question. If they had limits or not is secondary.
  - rdouble 13y ago
    After 9/11, the CIA were tapped to help the NYPD set up an anti-terrorism intelligence wing. This is a pretty good book about it: http://www.amazon.com/Securing-City-Americas-Counterterror-Force-The/dp/B004J8HXL8 http://www.amazon.com/Securing-City-Americas-Counterterror-F...
    - mindcrime 13y ago
      We should call / email the CIA and see if they can loan us some agents to help establish a "Hacker News Anti-Surveillance Wing".
spoiledtechie 13y ago
What you see here is a blatant disregard for the CIA's Direct Guidelines. 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?
- anigbrowl 13y ago
  According to the recently declassified IG's report (on which this story is based), that doesn't seem to be the case. Could you explain specifically what you're referring to? https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/717864-cia-nypd-ig.html https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/717864-cia-nypd-ig.h...
  - spoiledtechie 13y ago
    The guidelines that the CIA operates outside of the USA. Not within. 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.
quackerhacker 13y ago
National Security Act of 1947 explicitly forbid the CIA from conducting domestic surveillance 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.
- drawkbox 13y ago
  FBI handles that internally in the US, CIA externally to the US. NSA handles both in terms of gathering and intelligence mainly for both. DHS is primarily Coast Guard, Border Patrol, specific police/fire personnel etc. 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.
  - quackerhacker 13y ago
    I was actually guessing that it had to be a way to better allocate government resources.
- hondje 13y ago
  CIA uses contractors domestically.
gasull 13y ago
Related: Revealed: how the FBI coordinated the crackdown on Occupy http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/29/fbi-coordinated-crackdown-occupy http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/29/fbi-coor...
- Amadou 13y ago
  Ever since the publication of the NSA leaks I've been wondering if any of the NSA intel has been used to disrupt Occupy. With the well established lack of actual terrorists, it doesn't take much to imagine a bit of scope creep / budget justification for Occupy to have been classified as potential terrorists and thus in need of monitoring. 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.
DanielBMarkham 13y ago
This discussion on the NSA/CIA/DOJ/etc is teetering on the edge of respectability. Now every Tom, Dick, and Harry with an axe to grind is out running around yelling about some new abuse -- even if the story is a bit thin. 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"

201 points by eightyone 13y ago

So, theoretical surveillance state nightmare for an average citizen: 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.

leot 13y ago
Yeah. One reason why it's much safer if surveillance is restricted to foreign sources, is that, unlike foreign surveillance, domestic surveillance is combined with the legal power to fine, imprison, and execute. Citizens of foreign countries, on the other hand, are presumably protected from this by their own governments.
mhurron 13y ago
Fundamental problem with this: Military (NSA) and civilian (CIA) agencies don't like each other and don't work well together. The FBI, CIA and military intelligence agencies are known for hiding information from each other.
- dsl 13y ago
  Not anymore. All of the members of the "Intelligence Community"[1] now report up to the DNI, and sharing and coordination are a core mission. 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
205guy 13y ago
You left out the part where you go to some protest (OWS, anti-gmo, anti-KeystoneXL, anything that opposes the corporate interests that run the government). That's what makes this whole surveillance thing scary is that it can easily be used to quelch opposition, not just to the government, but to the corporations whose interests are protected by the government. 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.
temp453463343 13y ago
Wouldn't the PD need to show in court why they suspected you in the first place? If their raid is based on illegal info, then it's not legal. 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.
- wavefunction 13y ago
  "National security" Even your crimes are secrets to be withheld from you.
- nullc 13y ago
  > Wouldn't the PD need to show in court why they suspected you in the first place? 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.
  - temp453463343 13y ago
    Yeah, but that's often hard to pull off. For instance in the original example you're violating an internet law. It's not exactly something the PD can just pretend to stumble upon unless you're really careless and do it in a public place.
- ZachPruckowski 13y ago
  Or walk down the street from the precinct and use the payphone to anonymously phone in a tip. Or launder the info through an existing CI. Or gin up an unrelated minor excuse for a home visit and leverage that to find probable cause and then just "happen" to find the evidence with your warrant.

rayiner 13y ago

Headline is misleading. From the article: "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."

ferdo 13y ago
It's not misleading. If the CIA agent believed that he had no limits, then there were no limits.
- rayiner 13y ago
  If we're pretending to be severely brain-damaged to the point where we can't see the difference between different things, then yes, the title is totally accurate.
  - foobarbazqux 13y ago
    Are you somehow suggesting that if I jump off this building and flap my wings that I won't actually be flying?
  - ferdo 13y ago
    When someone acting under color of law "believes" himself to be without limits, there's no difference. The brain damage is displayed by those who keep giving authoritarians the benefit of the doubt.
- mtgx 13y ago
  Not to mention that's probably a tactic they use to skirt the law, so if they assassinate someone, and it gets found out later, the agency is not responsible. 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.
- dllthomas 13y ago
  I'm not entirely clear whether it meant "he believed he did not have the usual limits regarding being involved in domestic police work," as opposed to "he believed he had no limits - he could assassinate people, spy on anyone, &c." I think it was the former, but am not positive; the headline seems to lead to the latter. If it was in fact the former, then the headline is misleading.

tptacek 13y ago

You see things like this all the time, where some government functionary declares something manifestly retarded to be true, and the statement is then taken on faith by (the media, message boards, politicians). 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.

aasarava 13y ago
The real check on this sort of stupidity is actual journalist doing actual journalism.
gasull 13y ago
Why are CIA agents being embedded with NYPD? That's the main question. If they had limits or not is secondary.
- rdouble 13y ago
  After 9/11, the CIA were tapped to help the NYPD set up an anti-terrorism intelligence wing. This is a pretty good book about it: http://www.amazon.com/Securing-City-Americas-Counterterror-Force-The/dp/B004J8HXL8 http://www.amazon.com/Securing-City-Americas-Counterterror-F...
  - mindcrime 13y ago
    We should call / email the CIA and see if they can loan us some agents to help establish a "Hacker News Anti-Surveillance Wing".

spoiledtechie 13y ago

What you see here is a blatant disregard for the CIA's Direct Guidelines. 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?

anigbrowl 13y ago
According to the recently declassified IG's report (on which this story is based), that doesn't seem to be the case. Could you explain specifically what you're referring to? https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/717864-cia-nypd-ig.html https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/717864-cia-nypd-ig.h...
- spoiledtechie 13y ago
  The guidelines that the CIA operates outside of the USA. Not within. 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.

quackerhacker 13y ago

National Security Act of 1947 explicitly forbid the CIA from conducting domestic surveillance 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.

drawkbox 13y ago
FBI handles that internally in the US, CIA externally to the US. NSA handles both in terms of gathering and intelligence mainly for both. DHS is primarily Coast Guard, Border Patrol, specific police/fire personnel etc. 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.
- quackerhacker 13y ago
  I was actually guessing that it had to be a way to better allocate government resources.
hondje 13y ago
CIA uses contractors domestically.

gasull 13y ago

Related: Revealed: how the FBI coordinated the crackdown on Occupy http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/29/fbi-coordinated-crackdown-occupy http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/29/fbi-coor...

Amadou 13y ago
Ever since the publication of the NSA leaks I've been wondering if any of the NSA intel has been used to disrupt Occupy. With the well established lack of actual terrorists, it doesn't take much to imagine a bit of scope creep / budget justification for Occupy to have been classified as potential terrorists and thus in need of monitoring. 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.

DanielBMarkham 13y ago

This discussion on the NSA/CIA/DOJ/etc is teetering on the edge of respectability. Now every Tom, Dick, and Harry with an axe to grind is out running around yelling about some new abuse -- even if the story is a bit thin. 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"