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No, they're not allowed to target foreigners inside the US. Spies inside the US fall under the jurisdiction of the FBI. See page of the leaked incidents repor
by csandreasen 13y ago
No, they're not allowed to target foreigners inside the US. Spies inside the US fall under the jurisdiction of the FBI. See page of the leaked incidents report [1] on page 6 where it talks about the types of incidents, specifically:
"Roamers: Roaming incidents occur when valid foreign target selectors are active inside the U.S. Roamer incidents continue to constitute the largest category of collection incidents across E.O. 12333 and FAA authorities. Roamer incidents are largely unpreventable, even with good target awareness and traffic review, since target travel activities are often unannounced and not easily predicted."
[1] http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/758651-1qcy12-violations.html http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/758651-1qcy12-violati...
- anigbrowl 13y agoWhat you're quoting is an operational manual. Executive orders are law, until such time as the legislature or judiciary sees fit to restrain the executive branch. They most certainly are allowed to target foreigners; whether they hand their data over to the FBI for the arrest process is beside the point.
- csandreasen 13y agoWhat I'm quoting is not an operations manual, it's the executive summary of the 1st quarter 2012 intelligence oversight report from NSA's internal oversight and compliance section. According to that document, NSA considers it a violation of both EO 12333 and the FISA Amendment Act to target foreigners on US soil. I should have cited a link to EO 12333 [1] in my previous comment; the section that indicates that the FBI has the lead in domestic counterintelligence is section 2.3 (b). I'll admit it's not the most clearly worded, but it does go out of its way to single out the FBI: "Collection within the United States of foreign intelligence not otherwise obtainable shall be undertaken by the FBI or, when significant foreign intelligence is sought, by other authorized agencies of the Intelligence Community, provided that no foreign intelligence collection by such agencies may be undertaken for the purpose of acquiring information concerning the domestic activities of United States persons" The section on the NSA responsibilities (section 1.12(b)) speaks primarily to collecting signals intelligence for foreign intelligence purposes in support of the Department of Defense; it doesn't mention anything about counterintelligence. The FBI is singled out again in 1.14(a) as having the responsibility to conduct domestic counterintelligence. Other parts of the DoD have the responsibity to work with the FBI on matters of domestic counterintelligence (1.12(d)). [1] http://www.archives.gov/federal-register/codification/executive-order/12333.html http://www.archives.gov/federal-register/codification/execut...
- anigbrowl 13y agoThanks for the clarification. I misread your post above and thought this was based on one of the Snowden Powerpoint slides. However, I think part of the confusion here is over the US persons term. As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, that term refers to citizens and green card holders, plus associations/corporations made up largely of those two groups. A tourist or someone on a temporary visa, for example, is not a US person. therefore, any activities they engage in are by definition those of a forieng person. I stand by my argument that 'foreign/domestic' is a function of the people involved and the scope of their activities, not of geography.