> Also, back in that era, information sharing between CIA and FBI was not even permitted.
What possible reason could there be for this? Both are supposed to serve the same government, one domestic and the other foreign. What would be the negatives with sharing information with each other?
One is a law enforcement agency that primarily focuses on domestic cases. It is set up to follow requirements that protect constitutional rights, with the ultimate goal being a prosecution through the justice system.
The other is an intelligence agency that focuses on foreign collection, analysis and action. Its activities are definitionally illegal in the places where it operates, with the ultimate goal being to inform and enforce American foreign policy using means other than the US justice system.
The CIA sharing information with the FBI generally means that the 4th amendment has been violated, because the CIA operates with an "ends justify the means" framework that the FBI isn't supposed to use.
Edit: I worked with defense/intel forensics as Iraq was transitioning from wartime (intelligence based) to peacetime (justice based) frameworks for dealing with terrorists. There is a massive difference between intelligence briefings needed in a wartime environment to prevent IEDs through "kinetic action" and the evidence packet needed to prosecute terrorists in court as civil society reasserts itself.
I feel so uneasy with a ‘division?’ of government defined as “ends justify.” The Constitution does not exist in those halls (as evidenced), and if one assumes an limit to infinity state, many tyrannical actions could take place.
Do you feel that fear is misplaced? Or do we derive societal level benefit from the unfortunate things that could (and do?) occur?
Different contexts require different paradigms. For example, you can't operate in a war if you require your soldiers to arrest everyone who is shooting at them and collect evidence for an eventual trial. You also can't operate as even a regional power (let alone a global superpower) without keeping tabs on your adversaries.
The difficulty is in structuring agencies that have to follow different paradigms and determining how they should interact. One key bifurcation is supposed to be that intelligence services face outward, dealing with people who don't have constitutional protection because they are not residents or citizens. That outward focus has gotten muddied by the focus on preventing domestic terror attacks, the reality that much of the internet's physical infrastructure exists within our borders, and the difficulty in automatically determining the nationality of online personas.
No, the CIA is one of the most evil and dangerous organizations on Earth.
They ran torture centers, got caught, got investigated by congress, lied under oath, then got caught hacking congressional computers to delete evidence of the lies.
Worse, the 92 tapes of torture were destroyed, and the incoming Democratic president announced that there would be no torture prosecutions, even for the woman who intentionally destroyed the evidence. Gina Haspel was appointed Director of the CIA by his Republican successor.
The list is endless. Similarly, intelligence agencies worldwide operate outside the law. Although there aren't any ex-"intelligence" heads of state... well, that's not entirely true.
Throughout history, those in power have often lied to those they govern, and it's a crucial aspect of their operation.
However, using torture, violence, false flag operations, and being an adversary to one's own people isn't necessary, except when it's deemed necessary for the "greater good."
It's a dark rabbit hole that can shatter one's faith in society, and even asking questions can lead you down that path. Therefore, most of us turn a blind eye to it.
Undermining one authority can undermine the credibility of all authority because all authority is built on faulty logic and falsehoods, despite being a necessary component of a functioning state.
> all authority is built on faulty logic and falsehoods
That’s a big claim. If you’re talking about current national and state-level governments, sure, granted. But there is plenty of legitimate authority out there.
If you think the CIA is one of the most evil and dangerous organizations on earth, you probably haven't had a lot of exposure to organizations around the world. I'm not saying their mission and means of achieving it is necessarily angelic. I'm saying that there are hundreds or thousands of much more evil organizations in this world.
Belarusian KGB, Chinese Ministry of State Security and United Front Work Department and 610 Office, Cuban Intelligence Directorate, Iranian Ministry of Intelligence, Haitian Service d'Intelligence National (funded by the CIA), Israeli Mossad, Pakistani ISI, Myanma OCMSA, North Korean Ministry of State Security and RGB.
The constitution does exist in those environments. Lawyers and judges review plans for covert action, assessing whether it’s constitutional, authorized by congress, and in accordance with executive policy.
"Both are supposed to serve the same government, one domestic and the other foreign. What would be the negatives with sharing information with each other?"
Any sufficiently large organization develops its own factions, with their own internal goals and culture, which will inevitably conflict with the other factions. The larger the organization, the more distant the factions can be from each other, and it doesn't take all that long before they don't even see each other as on the same side "under the hood" anymore, but simply as rivals.
The US government is way, way beyond the "sufficiently large" size, which is more down around the size of any organization that exceeds the Dunbar number. In the real world, even assuming the FBI and the CIA are themselves unitary organizations is only useful as a very rough approximation. I don't have the info to know what the factions are or who they want, I just know from general principles that they are individually far beyond the size where they are most assuredly factions within them, and probably large enough that the factions have their own quite distinct factions within themselves.
There are protocols for this sort of thing, so a given department takes the lead by default. On national security for example the FBI does the counter-intelligence investigations, but obviously affected agencies can, and do, decide to feed disinformation instead of allowing an arrest to proceed. This needs coordination to overcome the faction thing.
I believe that was the case. The 9/11 Commissions Report is actually really, really well written and quite a gripping read. Highly recommended but IIRC that was the reason. And the report is freely available if you don't want to pay for the book: https://www.9-11commission.gov/report/911Report.pdf
I would imagine this is a large portion of it. I worked with multiple agencies in the post 9/11 world when I was a govie. We still had a lot of limits and oversight over certain projects. The varying title authorizations exist for a reason. The good sometimes comes with the bad, that dance is delicate.
Let's preface everything I say here with "on paper" or "theoretically" or "in an ideal world" ...
The FBI's goal is to arrest people, charge them, and send them to jail. Everything they do will be presented to the public, at trial, and examined by the opposing side and presented to a jury. There's not a lot of room for nuance here. There's also not a lot of room for secrecy. The accused has the right to confront their accuser.
The CIA's goal is to "protect the nation" and almost by definition deals entirely in secrets and ambiguity. "Sources and methods" are some of the most closely held and valuable secrets. "A person we kinda trust, sometimes, accused someone of possibly planning to maybe do something nefarious." -- not going to hold up well in court, even if it's totally reasonable to now put that person on some kind of watch list (and yes, at this point, all of us are on some sort of watch list -- see the disclaimer above; we're now at 30,000 days of the condor and counting)
So -- intelligence sharing between the CIA and the FBI sounds great in theory; in practice it may be tricky.
The FBI uses parallel reconstruction a lot to hide how they actually became aware of a suspect. As a jailhouse lawyer it was interesting reading cases where some FBI field agent did something really technical and comparing that with the their public testimony in cases that demonstrated a lack of the technical knowledge/capability needed make those technical jumps.
Ostensibly their goal is to find criminals and arrest them and in doing so they'll also be preventing foreign spies from spying, or domestic terrorists from domestically terroring; both of which are illegal in some way, I think.
Isn't one of the primary reasons for the FBI counterintelligence? I was under the impression that their other general-purpose law enforcement functions were secondary.
I believe the CIA cannot legally operate intelligence gathering on US soil or on US citizens, them sharing info to the FBI might reveal that they did that.
If the CIA accidentally collects intelligence about a US citizen’s overseas business dealings, for example, that shouldn’t be passed along to domestic law enforcement, right?
I was young at the time, but my recollection is that that was my understanding back then, and it seemed sensible. I'm not convinced it wasn't sensible.
See for example the following, from Wikipedia's Alfreda Bikowsky entry[1]:
> Bikowsky was a senior staff member at the Bin Laden Issue Station in January 2000.[16] She was the direct supervisor of Michael Anne Casey, a CIA staff operations officer who was assigned to track future 9/11 hijacker Khalid al-Mihdhar at an al-Qaeda operatives' meeting in Malaysia in early January 2000.[9] Casey blocked a draft cable written by Doug Miller, an FBI agent detailed to the Bin Laden Issue Station, to the FBI warning that al-Mihdhar had a multiple-entry visa for travel to the U.S.[17][18]: 240 Mark Rossini, another FBI agent first assigned to the Bin Laden Issue Station in 1999,[18]: 233 testified that Casey also verbally ordered him to not share information with FBI headquarters about al-Mihdhar or Nawaf al-Hazmi, who was traveling with al-Mihdhar.[2][19] Rossini further stated that Bikowsky told congressional investigators in 2002 that she hand-delivered al-Mihdhar's visa information to FBI headquarters. This was later proven false by FBI log books.[2] The CIA shared some details about al-Mihdhar with the FBI at that time, but not that he had a valid visa to enter the U.S.[18]: 244–7
This kind of story is inconsistent with the notion of a ban on information sharing between the two TLAs.
Of course, Bikowsky's story, and Ray Nowosielski and John Duffy's documentary Who Is Rich Blee, in which her identity was revealed, may be relevant to the linked article in their own right.
I know that information sharing between FBI and intelligence agencies existed in the late 90's, but the CIA was not directly part of that activity. If you look at my links in the GP post, you will see that Clinton's deputy AG was responsible for creating a "wall" between CIA & FBI. It's easy to look at that as a bad thing with the hindsight of 9/11, but I would rather live in a world with such a wall today vs. what we have now.
How do you square that with 1) two FBI agents "detailed to" the CIA's Bin Laden Issue station ("Alec Station"), 2) "CIA shared some details about al-Mihdhar with the FBI at that time"?
Compartmentalisation (i.e. an information "wall") does not equal a total ban on information sharing, as your comment might imply, it just mandates that there are filters and checks on information channels, rather than unfettered sharing, for obvious and sensible operational reasons.
Perhaps it's worth quoting at length from the source[1] for Wikipedia's statement that "CIA shared some details", which has a section on CIA / FBI information sharing:
> 4. Passing of intelligence information by the CIA to the FBI
> The CIA shares intelligence with the rest of the Intelligence Community through a communication known as a “TD” (“Telegraphic Dissemination”). TDs can be sent to other Intelligence Community agencies, including the FBI, and are available to the Intelligence Community through the Intelink system.
> Another type of intelligence report used by the CIA when conducting business with other agencies is a CIR, or “Central Intelligence Report.” CIRs are used for disseminating information to a specific agency or group of agencies. CIRs to the FBI normally concern something occurring in the United States, involving a U.S. person or an ongoing FBI investigation.
> In addition to formal methods of communicating by the CIA to the FBI, much information can be shared with the FBI informally. CIA and FBI employees who have similar positions and expertise develop relationships and communicate informally while working together on related matters, either by secure telephones or in person. In addition, meetings are sometimes held to discuss a matter or a piece of intelligence that is of value to both agencies. According to the CIA employees we interviewed, when the CIA passed intelligence information or other kinds of information verbally or by another informal mechanism to the FBI, the information exchange normally would be documented through a TD or a CIR. However, they said that not every telephone call or conversation was documented.
> C. FBI detailees to the CIA Counterterrorist Center
> In 1996, the FBI began detailing employees to work in the CIA’s CTC. During the time period relevant to this chapter of the report, five FBI employees were detailed to the CTC’s Usama Bin Laden Unit in four separate positions. Two of the positions were filled by personnel from the FBI’s Washington Field Office, and one position each was filled from the FBI’s New York Field Office and FBI Headquarters.
Ironically? Because back in the day we (the US) were terrified that the CIA or the FBI, given too much liberty of information sharing, could mutate into a USSR-esque KGB, keeping an eye on foreign powers but also scanning for domestic political dissidence and connecting the dots between exterior and interior threats. It was seen as a hallmark of a police state to have citizens under the same level of scrutiny as potential foreign threats.
9/11 changed a lot about how Americans perceive risk factors. The CIA, FBI, and DHS are still separate orgs, but there are now mechanisms by which they share information and the walls between domestic and foreign spying are a lot thinner.
> back in the day we (the US) were terrified that the CIA or the FBI, given too much liberty of information sharing, could mutate into a USSR-esque KGB, keeping an eye on foreign powers but also scanning for domestic political dissidence and connecting the dots between exterior and interior threats
The fear was, of course, justified, but the hard lesson learned in 9/11 was the old engineering lesson: everything is trade-offs.
Once it became clear that there was a decent chance the plot could have been foiled had the various orgs not firewalled information from each other, the writing was on the wall for the old fears. New fears had displaced them.
So the irony of that quote is that most people use it as caution against government overreach.
In context, Franklin was talking about a plan by the Penn family to buy the right to never pay taxes in exchange for providing private mercenaries to bolster the western Pennsylvania front against native attacks. The "those" he was referring to was government... The government of the PA colony. The "liberty" in question was the legislature's authority to determine how taxes should be levied. Hence the "deserve neither" part... "Make a short-sighted decision like that, as the leaders of this government, and you don't deserve the power vested in you."
This is true, but I think the original intent of quotes (for long dead figures whose lives have been mythologized anyway) is not very important. It isn’t like we’re trying to figure out the original intent of some law or something.
The quote as misinterpreted is what has entered the cultural consciousness. One guy meant to say one thing, but millions gave it a timeless meaning.
So it would be extremely relevant as the US government gives overt and tacit concessions to China as they are reliant on their manufacturing base for US security / arms
This wasn’t a purely hypothetical fear. Look up the findings of the Church Committee in the 1970’s regarding programs such as the CIA’s MKULTRA, the FBI’s COINTELPRO, and the NSA’s Project SHAMROCK.
The FBI, and the rest of DOJ, has more constraints as to how it can collect information due to it focused on law enforcement. The CIA on the other hand is focused on gathering intelligence so does not have those same constraints.
Following the exposure of COINTELPRO, the FBI dialed back its presence information gathering apparatus publicly, though critics of beaueau practices maintain similar programs have persisted through the following decades. Either way, 9/11 offered a chance to reinstate some of the FBI's old power and influence.
Yes, but that was curtailed due to abuses during/against the civil rights movement. It started coming back with Waco & the Oklahoma City bombing and then roared back after 9/11.
That they persecute using their law enforcement powers. The CIA operates using different powers, they don't need a warrant to surveil a subject for instance
It turns out that in practice, you only need a warrant if your endgame is to prosecute and convict people in court. The FBI’s methods have historically included criminal prosecution, but are not restricted to it.
Yeah, their involvement in the assassination of Fred Hampton and blackmail/suicidal encouragement of MLK Jr. makes this pretty clear.
I'm sure if some brave activists were to rob the correct field office (which is the only reason we ever found out about COINTELPRO) today, they'd find similar evidence for the murders of Darren Seals and other BLM figures.
> Two other men connected to the protests, Darren Seals, 29; and Deandre Joshua, 20, were found killed under similar circumstances. Joshua was found dead in a torched car in November 2014 during the Ferguson protests. Two years later, Seals was found dead in a torched car after having been shot.
Because it’s completely untrue. People could actually read the memo rather than repeat Ascroft’s and institutionsl lawyers attempt to blame another admin/party for 9/11:
“We believe that it is prudent to establish a set of instructions that will more clearly separate the counterintelligence investigation from the more limited, but continued, criminal investigations. These procedures, which go beyond what is legally required, will prevent any risk of creating an unwarranted appearance that FISA is being used to avoid procedural safeguards which would apply in a criminal investigation.”
Which should make all of HN’s sing, but easier to repeat the “wall” meme.
The CIA wanted to recruit, the agencies don’t play together, and when they get caught with their pants down it’s blame someone else. It’s really amazing how HN is 99% doubting of FBI/CIA/NSA/DOJ but be completely uncritical of something when convenient.
In theory, the CIA isn't supposed to operate domestically at all. In exchange, they're given a lot of slack with regards to their extrajudicial/unconstitutional activities. Slack in their respect for the law is not a desirable characteristic in your law enforcement agencies.
CIA is a surveillance organization with no significant restrictions on what they do outside the US, including on US citizens. FBI is an internal law enforcement agency (ostensibly) limited by american civil protections and due process.
If you take the organizations at face value by stated mission, it makes sense that the CIA would have a tremendous amount of information on US citizens that would be proscribed for the FBI. Allowing shared access is just asking for parallel construction and secret courts and shit.
Because a domestic covert spying agency is a secret government. See the Stasi, or the Church Committee hearings, or the Iran-Contra hearings.
A domestic spy agency would spend all of its time trying to control government, strategic industries, and self-dealing. There are no checks on an organization like the CIA other than the old limitation that it couldn't target US citizens. There's no way to oversee an agency that isn't obligated to explain itself to Congress, is supplied by secret budgets, and information on whose outputs is protected by the Espionage Act (or ultimately, indefinite imprisonment and torture, threats made to family members, etc.)
We're sacrificing democracy for a secret hierarchy of secret police. You've cut government completely out of the equation if you have a government department with the latitude and ability to control domestic politics. It's basically a military coup.
In the pre-9/11 era, one way of protecting domestic citizens against secret-police style spying was a literal hard firewall between the legally domestic FBI and legally international CIA.
Also, police agencies tend to be fiercely territorial about their jurisdiction and this rivalry was no exception.
Historically, CIA was supposed to be doing international intelligence gathering things while the FBI was more along the lines of the federal government's domestic crime investigation unit. CIA never really had to care about privacy rights because their targets were practically always foreign nationals not protected by the US Constitution. The FBI was almost exclusively operating domestically where Constitutional rights are practically always in effect.
Just putting a note here that whether or not foreign nationals are subject to the protections of the Constitution is a contentious issue.
IANAL, but in many places the Constitution specifically calls out citizens vs non-citizens and in other places does not make an explicit distinction. The bill of rights is one place it doesn't explicitly specify, and indeed uses language that elsewhere was used to indicate it applying to citizens and non-citizens. Of course that interpretation fell away during the cold war and is less popular now.
> The Patriot Act was written with “sunset” provisions requiring Congress to re-authorize the program every few years. Although the Act expired in March, 2020 without being reauthorized, federal law enforcement agencies retain most of the authorities granted by the act. The surveillance infrastructure that the Patriot Act created exists to this day. The Patriot Act is a prominent example of the use of terrorism to justify expanding government surveillance.
> Although the Act expired in March, 2020 without being reauthorized, federal law enforcement agencies retain most of the authorities granted by the act.
By what statute do they maintain those authorities if the authorizing legislation has expired?
It looks like those were sections 206 and 215, which were somewhat weakened by the same act.
Confusingly, there's a third provision, the "lone wolf" provision, which was extended during the Obama administration; that seems to be part of the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 and got rolled into the "USA Freedom Act" reauthorization in 2015.
You will note that US companies are still effectively, theoretically banned in the EU because violating fundamental human rights of persons located in the EU - and will likely still be as long as the Patriot Act-like laws, the NSA, or the EU still exist :
"What would be the negatives with sharing information with each other? "
In general in the dark world of secret services, there is a "need to know" principle, about protecting sources.
Meaning, what someone does not know, he cannot leak.
Because when the enemy knows, that file X leaked and he knows that only 5 persons had access to that file, they can find the source easily.
That has been happened a lot of times accidently, but likely has even been used to activly sabotage each others operations, as the bosses of each others service did not liked each other to put mildly.
Absolutely, it’s an organization designed to wreak havoc on the rest of the world to protect our interests… Im not ok with that being a thing at all to be perfectly honest.
Sure. Now if we could just make sure other countries did the same and never step in in future to fill that vacuum, then we'd have a better world. The CIA is uniquely bad by degree but not category.
The CIA is not supposed to be looking inward unless it's directly related to a foreign intelligence mission, and open collaboration with law enforcement would make it almost impossible to enforce that principle.
Separation of powers refers to the division of a state's government into "branches", each with separate, independent powers and responsibilities, so that the powers of one branch are not in conflict with those of the other branches.[1]
Like the Dept. of Justice, Dept. of State, Dept. of the Interior, the FCC the EPA, etc. etc., both the FBI and the CIA are housed with the executive branch of government, and are both executive branch agencies. The FBI is organized under the Justice Department and answers to the Attorney General, is a law enforcement agency but also an intelligence agency that reports to the Director of National Intelligence, just like the CIA, which is organized under the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Congress, the legislative branch, has oversight via control of both FBI and CIA budgets, but the point to be gleaned here is that it is not the separation of powers that prevents FBI and CIA from sharing information, but instead, generally speaking, their separate mandates. FBI is a domestic law enforcement and intelligence agency, while CIA is not a law enforcement agency but instead an intelligence gathering agency that does intelligence analysis, and specifically information only regarding foreign countries and their citizens. Unlike the FBI, CIA is prohibited from collecting information regarding "U.S. Persons," which includes U.S. citizens, resident aliens, legal immigrants, and U.S. corporations, regardless of where they are located.
> Wouldn't the actual power be with the courts who would be the people convicting anyone accused of a crime by either FBI or CIA
Now let's think about how this would work.
The CIA obtains some information on a US citizen who is suspected of a crime, using methods that would be a violation of their constitutional rights, and therefore not be admissible as evidence against them in court.
The CIA can then (a) not share the information with the FBI; (b) share it with them, but they are not allowed to use it for anything because of how it was obtained; or (c) share it with them, and then they use it via parallel construction, in violation of the constitutional rights of the accused, and without revealing where they actually got it, causing "public trials" to become mendacious and opaque.
But (b) and (c) are the same thing, because the only use of (b) is to let (c) happen in secret.
I know they have a lawyer-drafted justification on file with the DOJ, but to the point of “courts permission” has that actually ever been tested in a real court (not FISA)? And if so is the decision public?
The CIA operates outside the law by design. They just need to say they're doing it for "national security reasons". There are laws that attempted to curtail these powers, but it has never done anything other than creating additional paperwork.
When I saw they comment I had a similar thought. Of course the separation of powers is about balance between the branches of government, and the CIA and FBI are both in the same branch.
But having them separate allows the Administrative branch to operate in a way that hypothetically shouldn’t step on the toes of the judicial. (Well, that is the hope at least).
Having law enforcement and intel separate is a common seperation of powers thing (e.g. in canada intel was separated out from police after a controversey where rcmp burnt down a barn where they thought terrorists were meeting)
IANAL, but one sensible reason could be that the CIA investigates in a manner which is not always consistent with the FBI's rules for gathering evidence. Sharing the wrong information could poison prosecution.
Saying that it was not permitted doesn't mean that the information was not shared in some ways. After all, the whole purpose of CIA is to gather information by whatever means.
The origin is that the CIA came into existence when the FBI/J Edgar Hoover were at their height of their influence.
The FBI, military, and state department had an effective veto over new powers for the CIA, so the CIA agreed to lots of rules to make them happy: no overlapping function, no recruiting current employees, etc.
The argument was: “combining domestic and foreign intelligence is something the Nazis and Communists do, so it’s bad.”
There have evolved good reasons for the distinctions. The CIA never engages in criminal prosecution, so doesn’t need to worry about revealing evidence as part of a prosecution. FBI agents, by contrast, are paranoid about what information they are exposed to, for fear it could come out in court.
That’s much more recent, and would have been a surprise to Hoover. In fact, Hoover used the FBI to filter information gleaned from the Vernona Project. The president would receive summaries of analysts reports that were simply “vouched for” by Hoover.
By contrast the DEA was formed during an era when federal law enforcement and intelligence were at a low point in influence, so they stole people, mission, and influence. That’s why the DEA has its own foreign intelligence, domestic intelligence, diplomatic corps, and even judicial system.
A state is also a threat to its citizens. It's power must be limited through careful checks and balances. These create intentional inefficiencies. Combining the internal policing function with external espionage creates an organisation wilding the state monopoly on violence against its own citizens and able to claim it's actions are state secrets. Go ask how those released after years of imprisonment and torture in Guantanamo Bay without access to anything but a cruel mockery of due process how they feel about unchecked state power? Would prefer to talk to Uyghurs who managed escape from China instead?
The state must be kept limited in all its powers even in its power to protect from harm. Accepting the consequences of these intentional limitations is a price a society must pay for liberty or face the consequences.
In my opinion the USA has repeatedly fallen short in this regard. Coming back to your question here is an example of harm caused by (one-sided) information sharing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction .
What possible reason could there be for this? Both are supposed to serve the same government, one domestic and the other foreign. What would be the negatives with sharing information with each other?