[criley2]

I get the implication but America isn't Russia and they just don't do it, too big of a headache, too easy to blowback into political realm. Officers hate when clandestine work erupts into public political drama.

Plus, why would you hire a team of people to kidnap a citizen and beat them when you can assign a ticket to a government blackhat at the NSA who will run the commands against your devices and take what they need without you ever knowing.

Even then, there is substantial risk of whistleblowing for illegal data collection against citizens (Snowden et al) so they would instead in a clandestine manner ask a fellow member of the Five Eyes to perform the surveillance "legally".

Our society has known about Five Eye roundabout spy agreements for a long time and has largely shrugged, so the risk of public political blowback doing this would be minimal.