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by safety-third 2317 days ago
This would be more NSA jurisdiction and they do. The problem is most people's assumption is that if one part of the government has it, then everyone gets it. This is wildly false. Even within the FBI itself, different departments and cases get different tiers of access.

Even when the case agents get access, policy dictates what evidence is allowed to be taken to a public trial. Otherwise you get repeats of the FBI/4chan/8chan debacle. This is especially true for legal "grey areas" like mass surveillance. This means that agents will often get evidence they won't use in order to guide active surveillance using more legal means in order to collect evidence they feel comfortable admitting in public court.

2 comments

This is not accurate. The NSA launders evidence that would otherwise violate the 4th amendment through its "special operations division" using "parallel construction".
What FBI/4chan/8chan debacle? Are you referring to when an agent's search warrant evidence revealed their own 8chan posts? (https://ceinquiry.wordpress.com/2019/06/17/fbi-8chan/)