NSA and FBI: Bosom Buddies in Creepiness

A while ago I
wrote about an ACLU report that the NSA and FBI work
hand-in-hand when it comes to domestic surveillance. The civil
liberties organization reported that the NSA relies on the Bureau
for much of the authority for its snooping within the country’s
virtual borders. Now,
declassified Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court orders
make it clear that it’s a two-way street. The documents illustrate
how the FBI wields its authority on behalf of the NSA, and that it
receives lots of information in return.

Says
a 2006 order:

A verified application having been made by the Director of the
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) for an order pursuant to the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978…requiring the
production to the National Security Agency (NSA) of the tangible
things described below….

The tangible things to be produced are all call-detail records
or “telephony meta data”…

The order goes on to specify continued production of the data on
an “ongoing daily basis.”

It’s a partnership made in privacy hell, with the spy agency
originally established to snoop on foreign governments essentially
borrowing the jurisdictional authority of the domestic
law-enforcement agency.

And what does the FBI get for its efforts? “The Court
understands that the NSA expects that it will continue to provide
on average approximately three telephone numbers per day to the
FBI,” reads a footnote in a
2007 order. That’s an annotation to an assurance that:

With respect to any information the FBI receives as a result of
this Order (information that is passed or “tipped” to it by the
NSA), the FBI shall follow minimization procedures set forth in The
Attorney General’s Guidelines for FBI National Security
Investigations and Foreign Intelligence Collection.

So the FBI is supposed to control the intrusiveness of data
collection it commissions the NSA to perform on its behalf in an
arrangement that defies the jurisdictional boundaries established
to keep spies focused outwards and away from the law-enforcement
agencies that interact with the American people. Got it.

On the plus side, federal officials seem to play well together.
That’s nice.

More seriously, this illustrates the artificial and permeable
nature of the firewalls supposedly established between government
agencies to keep the use of certain powers within presumably
appropriate limits, and to keep agencies from sharing information
they have no business sharing. Yes, there are institutional turf
battles and power struggles, but at the end of the day, it’s all
the government. And paper limitations are just obstacles to be
worked around, redefined, or ignored.