Unlawful in New Zealand. I'd be surprised if what they did wasn't legal under US law.
A fairer question might be, why is the mission of the NSA to enforce copyright law for media companies? Shouldn't they be busy trying to hunt down terrorists, prevent attacks against the USA and it's people abroad, things like that?
The GCSB was found to be illegally wiretapping him, sadly since that time the govt changed the law to make all that stuff legal. It's election year here in NZ if we want to change these laws we need to change the govt.
It's probable they do things that are illegal under US law, but I doubt this is one of them.
Though NSA's actions may or may not be illegal in the US, there are other standards used to judge or analyze military action in the global economic marketplace.
Perhaps the constitution allows the president to do whatever he or she wants with the military (as long as it is within the historic bounds of what militaries do) without triggering the need for congressional approval unless it reaches a "state of war" at which point people might actually start dying.
That would seem like the sort of practical level of discretion that a country would give its executive branch, but I can't help thinking that there could or should be some law somewhere that gave the president's actions against allies some type of legislative basis, so that voters had an idea of how the president would use these secretive powers, and could hold the executive to account at the ballot box.
Similar to how "The president can't have a conflict of interest", the three-letter agencies can basically do whatever they want and get away with it.
The government does lots of things that are probably illegal but there's no precedent set. That gives them the opportunity to argue in court why the specific instance in question is different.
Sadly the US Court Systems has stated it does not have the authority to apply the Constitution to the US Government when the US Government is acting outside US Soil, it is a ridiculous standard but....
No. There's no support for this view in constitutional law.
Otherwise, those people might as well wipe their backsides with their Form 2555s and mail them back without checks attached!
They just have a problem applying the law to the government when the actions are over seas..
Nice little loop hole they carved out for themselves...
And that's before you even consider the willingness of US courts to prosecute foreign nationals for breaking US laws on foreign territory, where one or more US citizens may have been tangentially affected by it.
Law enforcement cannot be above the law. It destroys the principles that make laws worth having and enforcing.
then there Article 2 Section 8 which does not grate the authority to create and agency such as the NSA or preform international Spying thus since the constitution does not expressly grant such authority the Federal Government is barred from such activity
That being said, this story is incredibly thin.
>It aimed to explain why Dotcom and others charged in the FBI's Megaupload investigation were spied on for two months longer than previously admitted.
There's no reason this would even be improper, if the FBI had gone through due process in the US, which it appears they had. This story appears to be entirely Kim Dotcom's lawyer trying to politicize his case in order to fight a lawful extradition.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Code_of_Military_Justi...
That's why drones and seal teams are transferred to those agencies for short periods of time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_war_crimes#Comma...