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Comment by gergles | Hacker News Reader

Just a note to try to derail the inevitable political handwringing: these documents are all dated from 2014 or 2015 and therefore have nothing to do with the current administration, beyond that they haven't revoked them and replaced them with something else.

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I'm more curious about the status quo before the rules. They might have been put in place due to abuses in the absence of clear policy. The government shouldn't target journalists at all, but it will, and clear policy may rein in darker impulses.

FISA surveillance is intended to go after spies. If government shouldn't target journalists at all, won't spies just become journalists?

Government is going to target journalists regardless of the ethics and legality of it. Joining a profession with less access to vital government secrets and more scrutiny by government than any other seems like an odd choice for a spy.

Journalist is also a good cover. There are a lot of secrets that are not actually secret if you just spend some time looking in the right places. However normal people do their day job and go home to the family so they don't figure out much.

An example: a "office building" that has a large underground lab. Normal people see a construction site with a few dump trucks of dirt leaving. A spy will watch long enough to figure out it isn't just a few dump trucks, a lot more dirt is leaving than should be. A journalist has cover to watch long enough.

It is a double edge sword. A spy who can copy the real blueprints, or works in the lab is better. However the people who have that access to that might not talk at any price so you take what you can get.

Journalists are complementary to government agencies. Complicit journalist looking for access can leak anonymous scoops that can then be used as a pretext to launch a FISA request.

So? Isn't the harm of spies that they get access to secret information and export it? Pretty sure they already are working to make sure journalists don't do that; you don't need special laws and special courts for that.

Spies who become journalists are still spies. You could have a journalist suspect of spying. But that is not the same as going after legitimate journalists when there is no suspicion of spying.

The article is very clear about this being directed at journalists that are not suspect.

Why do you bring up this argument?

I mean, hit man could pose as doctors, I don't think you would argue that doctors should be patted down before going to work. Because the conflation is ridiculous.

This 'spies could become journalists' thing seems like a sophist government apologist point.

When a FISA request is granted, the government is granted the ability to spy on people within "two hops". E.g., spying on their contacts, and on their contacts' contacts. This is on the presumption that they all could be spies. If a journalist were one of these contacts, there would be the presumption that they could be a spy, given the above logic.

What determines a "spy"? What prevents every other contact from being a "spy"? What prevents a foreign US agent approaching a target to have them tagged as a "spy"?

The whole thing is a farce designed from the beginning to be abused.

I don't disagree. There is good evidence that the FISA system was weaponized against the Trump campaign through Carter Page. That's what the present battle to get sections of the Page FISA warrant declassified is about.

If that's the case, and any of us (HN readers) are within those 2 hops, I bet a lot of us would look very suspicious just by our nature. At least when viewing online habits are concerned. How many of us have multiple online personalities, or opposite with very little social presence? How many of us go out of our way to avoid online tracking? How many of us use tools like TOR or even VPN, use encrypted apps to chat, etc? After all, only the guilty try to hide things. You must be a spy worth further scrutiny.

I don't doubt that there are some US spies in the hacker community. Certainly not inconceivable that there wouldn't be foreign spies in it too.

If one counts hops arbitrarily casually one could count 100 casual contacts from one person and 10000 one step removed.

Then if one is especially suspicious one could put say 40k Americans on a list of suspicious people.

This is basically just saying none of us has any right to privacy which is the actual present case.

> FISA surveillance is intended to go after spies. If government shouldn't target journalists at all, won't spies just become journalists?

There's a long tradition of journalist/spies, already.

There's also a long tradition of journalists being falsely accused / convicted as spies.

Makes me think of various comments Sharyll Attkisson made about freedom of the press obstructions during those challenging times.

I assign a low probability that Sharyl was spied on based on the evidence she brought forward which seemed to indicate that she was confused about things. For her I think this is one of those things that she wouldn't question too strongly because it has ending up benefiting her a lot. I guess I have slightly increased my probability estimate that she was spied on after these latest revelations because presumably there are not that many 'interesting' journalists for the government to spy on and presumably they spied on multiple 'interesting' journalists.

However, I think it would be funny if it turned out she was a target of a FISA warrant. I can imagine the scrambling in the media to explain how it was completely legitimate for the government to use a FISA warrant to spy on her.

Sadly such a revelation wouldn't change anything. The mainstream press would defend the use of a FISA warrant, Senate and Congressional Democrats would generally approve and Republicans might make a fuss but end up doing nothing because law_and_order. Republican's on the intelligence services committee were aware of what they considered FISA abuse against their political allies and did nothing about the FISA renewal.

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