it has been all but self-evident since shortly after the snowden revelations began, that the nsa was acting as data collection agency for the various federal policing agencies.

congress’ mandate for data sharing provided excellent legal cover to do so.

the fbi and the doj’s prosecutors, not to mention dea, dhsec, secret service, etc would have quickly discovered the value of an all-seeing electronic spy agency. all that was required afterwards was parallel construction of prosecutions, a technique already well-developed in the federal police community.

looking backward, the nsa’s failure to adduce successful examples of thwarting terrorism, its likely failure to seriously thwart cyberterrorism (why not refuse to talk about what you haven’t done – it keeps the mystery alive), and its likely failure to deal with arms proliferation (is this nuclear only?) would be understandable consequences. none of these three rationalizations was the true driving motive.

furthermore, the doj’s extraordinary alacrity and deviousness in protecting the nsa from revealing its conduct to the courts, the congress,or the citizenry is now understood as the doj protecting its new secret weapon against crime (and disorder, pethaps especially, disorder) can be taken as signs that the nsa was not engaged primarily in foreign data collection.

of course the biggest give away is the enormous spying effort doj/nsa have undertaken to collect personal data on every american citizen. you see, mindlessly agressive prosecutors like those that have infected the doj for the last decade + could not resist the opportunity to create a national database to make prosecutions easier. funny thing is, all we hear about are childporn prosecutions and plea deals. funny thing! where are the cases involving drug busts? white collar fraud? corporate illegalities? police misconduct? anti-trust?

then there is the retrospective-only nature of the nsa electronic spying – the nsa can not know the future, except as it conducts historical analysis of what it has initially randomly collected.

welcome to the world of hidden federal policing on an individual-by-individual national scale brought to you by incompetent presidential and congressional oversight of the united states department of justice.

Never fear, Lawfare has begun cranking out posts designed to tarnish the Review Group’s recommendations and support the NSA (aside from its already carrying NSA’s water through interviews and other pro-NSA rhetoric).

I’m growing more and more jaded about Lawfare.

I’m actually more curious about Booz Allen. They seem to be the umbrella organization for the NSA and and other agencies. Seems like Booz Allen doesn’t mind throwing the NSA under the bus to protect it’s IP.

I guess it doesn’t matter if a private company does it.

I read your great piece on the Guardian about unanswered questions from the NSA WH Review panel. I have another, if I may?

I did a post recently concerning many of the other surveillance agencies, both public and private, but this piece from Foreign Policy Magazine was interesting, if not just smoke and mirrors. It starts:

“With every fresh leak, the world learns more about the U.S. National Security Agency’s massive and controversial surveillance apparatus. Lost in the commotion has been the story of the NSA’s indispensable partner in its global spying operations: an obscure, clandestine unit of the Federal Bureau of Investigation that, even for a surveillance agency, keeps a low profile.

When the media and members of Congress say the NSA spies on Americans, what they really mean is that the FBI helps the NSA do it, providing a technical and legal infrastructure that permits the NSA, which by law collects foreign intelligence, to operate on U.S. soil. It’s the FBI, a domestic U.S. law enforcement agency, that collects digital information from at least nine American technology companies as part of the NSA’s Prism system. It was the FBI that petitioned the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to order Verizon Business Network Services, one of the United States’ biggest telecom carriers for corporations, to hand over the call records of millions of its customers to the NSA.

But the FBI is no mere errand boy for the United States’ biggest intelligence agency. It carries out its own signals intelligence operations and is trying to collect huge amounts of email and Internet data from U.S. companies — an operation that the NSA once conducted, was reprimanded for, and says it abandoned.”

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/11/21/the_obscure_fbi_team_that_does_the_nsa_dirty_work#sthash.IXMjVF2k.dpuf

Now my question is, since the FBI hasn’t been called to hearings in Congress, and is operating fairly freely without much scrutiny, will any of the ‘reigning in’ of the NSA mean a whole lot unless the FBI and private operations are either curtailed or stopped specifically?

@emptywheel:

I know, right?

This accurately captures my reaction.

@bevin: And Spitzer’s. And (although it did not result in prosecution) Petraeus’s.