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

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).<p>The best example of this I can think of is the &quot;100 mile from the border Constitution-free zone&quot;, 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&#x27;s a 100 mile zone of warrantless personal searches extending inward from every border was a notion that was litigated by SCOTUS in the &#x27;70s and, obviously, found wanting.<p>I would support a public policy that would make statements of this sort (&quot;the CIA has no limits when working with the NYPD!&quot;, &quot;We can ghost your laptop as long as you&#x27;re within 100 miles of any airport!&quot;) a firing offense, but short of that, there&#x27;s not a lot you can do about this problem; if the USG employed 1&#x2F;4th the number of people it does now, that&#x27;d still be over a million people, and no group of one million people can possibly avoid a couple crazy people.<p>The real check on this sort of stupidity is the courts.

So, theoretical surveillance state nightmare for an average citizen:<p>You violate some law online (knowingly or unknowingly, doesn&#x27;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.<p>I don&#x27;t think we are there yet, but I&#x27;m actually not convinced that the average American will see this as a problem - after all, they have nothing to hide.

Headline is misleading. From the article:<p>&quot;That officer believed there were &#x27;no limitations&#x27; 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.&quot;

What you see here is a blatant disregard for the CIA&#x27;s Direct Guidelines.<p>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?<p>Honestly?

Related:<p><i>Revealed: how the FBI coordinated the crackdown on Occupy</i><p><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/29/fbi-coordinated-crackdown-occupy" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.guardian.co.uk&#x2F;commentisfree&#x2F;2012&#x2F;dec&#x2F;29&#x2F;fbi-coor...</a>

This discussion on the NSA&#x2F;CIA&#x2F;DOJ&#x2F;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.<p>As tptacek says, this isn&#x27;t a new thing. It&#x27;s not even something that&#x27;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.<p>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&#x27;s a different can of worms. Perhaps something bad happened. Don&#x27;t know. This story doesn&#x27;t inform us of it. Instead we just get vague allegations without proof. As the report states, this is an unusual <i>personnel situation</i>, not some massive policy disaster. The rest of it is just blown out of proportion by this author.<p>I&#x27;ve said this before, and I&#x27;m sure I&#x27;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&#x27;s not useful.<p>People should be really concerned about what&#x27;s going on in the US with regards to the security state. This is a serious problem and it deserves our passion. But &quot;being concerned&quot; and &quot;having your chain yanked&quot; are two different things. Smart folks know the difference. I&#x27;m not pointing a finger at this author precisely, but I&#x27;m starting to see a lot of overly-emotional, hand-waving tripe coming across the wires in the guise of various kinds of &quot;breaking stories&quot;

<i>National Security Act of 1947 explicitly forbid the CIA from conducting domestic surveillance</i><p>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.