[RobotToaster]

It's also worth noting that one of the ways the five eyes get around domestic spying laws is to spy on each other's citizens. So the CIA spy on British citizens the UK government want to spy on, and GCHQ spy on American citizens the US government want to spy on. So this would indirectly allow the US government to spy on US citizens (even more than it already does, anyway)

[jsisto]

Its data laundering

[throwaway48476]

Jurisdiction arbitrage

[baranul]

True. The data taken can end up anywhere, and where it came from is obscured. Too much circumventing of laws or purposefully violating the privacy and human rights of one's own citizens, even for profit.

[throw10920]

This is a fun theory that I've heard repeatedly, but with no evidence. Is there any indication that this is actually legal and happening? I have friends who work in the space that tell me that it's neither.

[ekianjo]

Why do you think 3 letters agencies care about the law? Ever heard of Snowden leaks?

[r3trohack3r]

Actually my takeaway from the Snowden leaks was that the government tried really hard to stay within the confines of the law, even if they wildly stretched the legal theory to get there.

https://www.blankenship.io/essays/2020-07-13/

Doesn’t justify what they were doing, or make it legal, but it’s an important distinction when trying to reason about government surveillance programs.

[whatshisface]

By that use of the phrase, sovereign citizens try really hard to stay within the law.

[speerer]

But this is true, right? The whole movement is based on their legal theory giving them rights to behave in a certian way, and the idea that everyone else wastes that 'right' through ignorance and state manipulation. It's dumb, but not dishonest.

[skeaker]

No, the sovcit movement is sourced from actual, literal paranoid schizophrenia and spreads via social media.

[whatshisface]

Let's consider it through a personal example. Suppose you are on a call rotation, and agree that the on-call engineer can wake you up at 4AM, but only if it's really important, and that the matter at hand has to involve some knowledge that you have, but didn't put on the wiki. Later, you are woken up at 4AM to discuss the results of a football game, and when challenged your coworker defends that they upheld their end of the bargain. They claim that it wasn't specified who it had to be important to, and that once you had been told who won, you had knowledge related to the call that you hadn't put on the wiki.

Would a fair manager consider them as having broken the agreement, or as having tried really hard to comply with the rules?

[yencabulator]

I would call that wanting plausible deniability (in a different sense than how the phrase is normally used). "Yes we may have a done a bad thing but we believed it was allowed."

[reverendsteveii]

You don't have to have a sound legal theory that will hold up in court. You just have to have a sound bite that you can vomit up when someone says "Wait a minute, isn't that blatantly illegal?"

[nozzlegear]

> You don't have to have a sound legal theory that will hold up in court.

What? Why? The natural continuation of "Wait a minute, isn't that blatantly illegal?" is "We're going to sue you to make you stop."

[r3trohack3r]

At least in the context of the presidential surveillance program, the ACLU did sue to make them stop. But the program was classified which made getting evidence of the program's existence a crime. The supreme court ruled that they couldn't make a decision without evidence. Shortly after, Snowden leaked the evidence the supreme court had requested. That leak provided the ACLU the evidence necessary to bring the case back to the supreme court and win, "stopping" the program.

[thaumasiotes]

So... what part of the program stopped?

[fn-mote]

Wasn’t this exact route taken? Government got cases dismissed for lack of standing - plaintiff could not prove they were being spied on… because the government wouldn’t reveal anything.

[reverendsteveii]

"We're going to sue you to make you stop" is exactly where you deploy the semilegal sound bite. You then use that as the public justification to stall, deny, countersue, delay, appeal, defend, depose and do everything you can to avoid a decision happening one way or the other until you've already gotten and done what you wanted to get and do.

[nozzlegear]

That strategy relies on courts always being slow and expensive though. It often feels like it, but that's not a universal truth of the court system. If the damage is high enough, courts can fast-track cases. Judges can also issue injunctions before the delays start, and if the argument is too flimsy it can backfire on the defendant.

I'll concede that if whoever's being sued is going to rely on secret legal interpretations like the NSA/intelligence agencies did with the FISA court rulings, then it makes things a lot trickier.

[nemomarx]

one of the Snowden leaks was exactly about the five eyes countries coordinating in this way to dodge oversight though?

[0xCMP]

Right, but the point is they went through the motions to attempt to follow the law. They weren't simply saying someone else was doing the work and then doing it themselves. They at least attempt to follow the law internally. Which is not something we knew for certain or not in the public.

[Nevermark]

> They at least attempt to follow the law internally.

What you are describing are successful attempts to subvert the law, avoid letting know they are subverting the law, and carefully crafted legal defenses in case they have to fight the real law’s enforcement.

That isn’t remotely what trying to follow the law looks like. It shows no respect for what the writers of the laws meant or the law’s purpose.

It shows no good faith attempts to firewall legal interpretation from parties interested in stretching the law. Blatant legal corruption used as a standard process.

It demonstrates no honest or genuine curiosity for collaborating on legal interpretations with other relevant constituencies.

Relevant constituencies for good faith legal interpretation include the law’s writers, the legislatures who passed the law, the courts who are ground truth for interpretation, a wider audience of constitutional experts in the executive branch beyond limited specific lawyers chosen to stretch the law, or citizens.

[kergonath]

Didn’t these leaks precisely show that the agencies were effectively above the law? I mean, they tried to make it look like they were abiding by the regulations, but effectively tried every work around they could come up with. Including subcontracting domestic spying to foreign intelligence agencies, using the exact mechanism the parent mentioned? It seems you’re contradicting them by making their point.

[tastyfreeze]

It show that no matter the scope of the law there are always loopholes.

[MobiusHorizons]

There is an important distinction between blatant disregard for the law like you would see in authoritarian countries and this trying to twist the letter of the law into allowing something that it wasn’t intended to allow. Both are bad of course, but the latter shows some fear of the checks and balances. Being nefarious is much more expensive if you fear the courts, and have to spend time and effort circumventing it. Trumps recent behavior shows none of this fear of the courts. Even if the courts overturn the executive orders, much of the damage has already been done.

[taurknaut]

I think stuff like Parallel Reconstruction show that they do care about the law. They care about working around it.

[autoexec]

That doesn't mean they care about the law, it just means that they care about maintaining the public perception that they care about the law. They're perfectly happy to keep up the pretense as long as they can still get what they want anyway, even if they have to add a couple extra inconvenient steps to the process. What they won't do is allow the law to stop them from getting what they want.

[MobiusHorizons]

It is still a good thing that they had to spend so many extra resources hiding. It means at least some of the checks and balances were imposing a cost on bad behavior.

[dennis_jeeves2]

Correct. The 'law' exists to provide common citizens something to argue on, and a sense of justice, even if not real.

A revolting citizenry can be potentially dangerous than a citizenry that is endlessly bickering amongst each other about the 'law'.