[hugh-avherald]

An intelligence agency cannot have the following properties simultaneously:

(1) The ability to detect espionage from China and Russia (2) The inability to access journalists' phones

If you want an intel agency to be able to thwart Chinese intelligence activities, you can't also publicly state you won't be looking closely into members of a profession who act a lot like spies.

[criley2]

We understand that the intelligence agencies can and do monitor a number of people associated with hostile foreign governments. For example, this is believed to be how "Tucker Carlson got surveilled by the CIA" -- he is believed to have contacted a surveilled Russian agent to discuss interviews with the Russian president.

This is called "incidental collection" and it's a touchy subject for sure.

But this subject is different than the DoJ directly surveilling journalists who leak, which is a problem, and governments surveilling their own citizens directly, not incidentally.

We can and should hold our government(s) to a standard of effective fire-walling of acceptable intelligence gathering and holding them accountable when they go beyond to surveil citizens directly, or indirectly through spying agreements.

We can make sure that the people who surveil Chinese or Russian "diplomats" are totally different than the people who execute search warrants against our citizens, and expect there to be zero crossover there.

[cronix]

> For example, this is believed to be how "Tucker Carlson got surveilled by the CIA" -- he is believed to have contacted a surveilled Russian agent to discuss interviews with the Russian president.

Yes, that happens all of the time but one difference here with Tucker is he was deliberately "unmasked." Normally when an American is caught up in foreign surveillance, their identity is blocked out or masked, "incidental collection" as you said. Someone purposefully unmasked it. And someone purposefully leaked it. The same thing was done to General Flynn.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unmasking_by_U.S._intelligence...

[criley2]

That is not the case, and it seems like you've been misled. It's completely routine and legal for unmasking to occur, and in fact is integral to understanding the intelligence.

How could an analyst understand the conversation without knowing both parties?

My understanding is that some 10,000 legal unmaskings occur per year, and Gen Flynn and Tucker's unmasking were both routine, legal, and integral to analyzing the intelligence

When one considers the litany of crimes the disgraced lunatic Flynn committed, it's no wonder he got caught up in collection and that his identity was important to understanding the collection!

[wolverine876]

In fact, in (most/many) advanced democratic countries intelligence agencies can and do exactly that.