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Comment by yasp | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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