What possible reason could there be for this? Both are supposed to serve the same government, one domestic and the other foreign. What would be the negatives with sharing information with each other?
The other is an intelligence agency that focuses on foreign collection, analysis and action. Its activities are definitionally illegal in the places where it operates, with the ultimate goal being to inform and enforce American foreign policy using means other than the US justice system.
The CIA sharing information with the FBI generally means that the 4th amendment has been violated, because the CIA operates with an "ends justify the means" framework that the FBI isn't supposed to use.
Edit: I worked with defense/intel forensics as Iraq was transitioning from wartime (intelligence based) to peacetime (justice based) frameworks for dealing with terrorists. There is a massive difference between intelligence briefings needed in a wartime environment to prevent IEDs through "kinetic action" and the evidence packet needed to prosecute terrorists in court as civil society reasserts itself.
Do you feel that fear is misplaced? Or do we derive societal level benefit from the unfortunate things that could (and do?) occur?
They ran torture centers, got caught, got investigated by congress, lied under oath, then got caught hacking congressional computers to delete evidence of the lies.
Nobody went to jail.
Belarusian KGB, Chinese Ministry of State Security and United Front Work Department and 610 Office, Cuban Intelligence Directorate, Iranian Ministry of Intelligence, Haitian Service d'Intelligence National (funded by the CIA), Israeli Mossad, Pakistani ISI, Myanma OCMSA, North Korean Ministry of State Security and RGB.
We are terribly lucky to have such wonderful people protecting ${ideology x} /s
Singling out the CIA is like trying to give speeding tickets to NASCAR drivers; they're all gonna get one, the CIA is just going the fastest.
Good retirement hobby: summarizing everything from dead tree niche books to the web.
Throughout history, those in power have often lied to those they govern, and it's a crucial aspect of their operation.
However, using torture, violence, false flag operations, and being an adversary to one's own people isn't necessary, except when it's deemed necessary for the "greater good."
It's a dark rabbit hole that can shatter one's faith in society, and even asking questions can lead you down that path. Therefore, most of us turn a blind eye to it.
Undermining one authority can undermine the credibility of all authority because all authority is built on faulty logic and falsehoods, despite being a necessary component of a functioning state.
I forgot to mention this sucks.
That’s a big claim. If you’re talking about current national and state-level governments, sure, granted. But there is plenty of legitimate authority out there.
The difficulty is in structuring agencies that have to follow different paradigms and determining how they should interact. One key bifurcation is supposed to be that intelligence services face outward, dealing with people who don't have constitutional protection because they are not residents or citizens. That outward focus has gotten muddied by the focus on preventing domestic terror attacks, the reality that much of the internet's physical infrastructure exists within our borders, and the difficulty in automatically determining the nationality of online personas.
Any sufficiently large organization develops its own factions, with their own internal goals and culture, which will inevitably conflict with the other factions. The larger the organization, the more distant the factions can be from each other, and it doesn't take all that long before they don't even see each other as on the same side "under the hood" anymore, but simply as rivals.
The US government is way, way beyond the "sufficiently large" size, which is more down around the size of any organization that exceeds the Dunbar number. In the real world, even assuming the FBI and the CIA are themselves unitary organizations is only useful as a very rough approximation. I don't have the info to know what the factions are or who they want, I just know from general principles that they are individually far beyond the size where they are most assuredly factions within them, and probably large enough that the factions have their own quite distinct factions within themselves.
(If it’s indeed true that the CIA only looks at what’s going on ex-US)
But I doubt the two would play nice with each other if the flow was only 1-way.
The FBI's goal is to arrest people, charge them, and send them to jail. Everything they do will be presented to the public, at trial, and examined by the opposing side and presented to a jury. There's not a lot of room for nuance here. There's also not a lot of room for secrecy. The accused has the right to confront their accuser.
The CIA's goal is to "protect the nation" and almost by definition deals entirely in secrets and ambiguity. "Sources and methods" are some of the most closely held and valuable secrets. "A person we kinda trust, sometimes, accused someone of possibly planning to maybe do something nefarious." -- not going to hold up well in court, even if it's totally reasonable to now put that person on some kind of watch list (and yes, at this point, all of us are on some sort of watch list -- see the disclaimer above; we're now at 30,000 days of the condor and counting)
So -- intelligence sharing between the CIA and the FBI sounds great in theory; in practice it may be tricky.
The CIA, NSA, etc. aren't allowed to track domestic stuff; they're codebreaking and/or foreign intelligence.
But they sure as hell can share their tools with the FBI, who are authorized to do domestic surveillance.
Love the reference, BTW :-)
See for example the following, from Wikipedia's Alfreda Bikowsky entry[1]:
> Bikowsky was a senior staff member at the Bin Laden Issue Station in January 2000.[16] She was the direct supervisor of Michael Anne Casey, a CIA staff operations officer who was assigned to track future 9/11 hijacker Khalid al-Mihdhar at an al-Qaeda operatives' meeting in Malaysia in early January 2000.[9] Casey blocked a draft cable written by Doug Miller, an FBI agent detailed to the Bin Laden Issue Station, to the FBI warning that al-Mihdhar had a multiple-entry visa for travel to the U.S.[17][18]: 240 Mark Rossini, another FBI agent first assigned to the Bin Laden Issue Station in 1999,[18]: 233 testified that Casey also verbally ordered him to not share information with FBI headquarters about al-Mihdhar or Nawaf al-Hazmi, who was traveling with al-Mihdhar.[2][19] Rossini further stated that Bikowsky told congressional investigators in 2002 that she hand-delivered al-Mihdhar's visa information to FBI headquarters. This was later proven false by FBI log books.[2] The CIA shared some details about al-Mihdhar with the FBI at that time, but not that he had a valid visa to enter the U.S.[18]: 244–7
This kind of story is inconsistent with the notion of a ban on information sharing between the two TLAs.
Of course, Bikowsky's story, and Ray Nowosielski and John Duffy's documentary Who Is Rich Blee, in which her identity was revealed, may be relevant to the linked article in their own right.
Compartmentalisation (i.e. an information "wall") does not equal a total ban on information sharing, as your comment might imply, it just mandates that there are filters and checks on information channels, rather than unfettered sharing, for obvious and sensible operational reasons.
Perhaps it's worth quoting at length from the source[1] for Wikipedia's statement that "CIA shared some details", which has a section on CIA / FBI information sharing:
> 4. Passing of intelligence information by the CIA to the FBI
> The CIA shares intelligence with the rest of the Intelligence Community through a communication known as a “TD” (“Telegraphic Dissemination”). TDs can be sent to other Intelligence Community agencies, including the FBI, and are available to the Intelligence Community through the Intelink system.
> Another type of intelligence report used by the CIA when conducting business with other agencies is a CIR, or “Central Intelligence Report.” CIRs are used for disseminating information to a specific agency or group of agencies. CIRs to the FBI normally concern something occurring in the United States, involving a U.S. person or an ongoing FBI investigation.
> In addition to formal methods of communicating by the CIA to the FBI, much information can be shared with the FBI informally. CIA and FBI employees who have similar positions and expertise develop relationships and communicate informally while working together on related matters, either by secure telephones or in person. In addition, meetings are sometimes held to discuss a matter or a piece of intelligence that is of value to both agencies. According to the CIA employees we interviewed, when the CIA passed intelligence information or other kinds of information verbally or by another informal mechanism to the FBI, the information exchange normally would be documented through a TD or a CIR. However, they said that not every telephone call or conversation was documented.
> C. FBI detailees to the CIA Counterterrorist Center
> In 1996, the FBI began detailing employees to work in the CIA’s CTC. During the time period relevant to this chapter of the report, five FBI employees were detailed to the CTC’s Usama Bin Laden Unit in four separate positions. Two of the positions were filled by personnel from the FBI’s Washington Field Office, and one position each was filled from the FBI’s New York Field Office and FBI Headquarters.
.. and so on ...
1: https://oig.justice.gov/sites/default/files/legacy/special/s...
9/11 changed a lot about how Americans perceive risk factors. The CIA, FBI, and DHS are still separate orgs, but there are now mechanisms by which they share information and the walls between domestic and foreign spying are a lot thinner.
Good thing that never happened. Unfounded fears
Once it became clear that there was a decent chance the plot could have been foiled had the various orgs not firewalled information from each other, the writing was on the wall for the old fears. New fears had displaced them.
“Giving up a little liberty for temporary security is totally cool, no big deal.” I think that was it at least, maybe I’m a couple words off…
In context, Franklin was talking about a plan by the Penn family to buy the right to never pay taxes in exchange for providing private mercenaries to bolster the western Pennsylvania front against native attacks. The "those" he was referring to was government... The government of the PA colony. The "liberty" in question was the legislature's authority to determine how taxes should be levied. Hence the "deserve neither" part... "Make a short-sighted decision like that, as the leaders of this government, and you don't deserve the power vested in you."
The quote as misinterpreted is what has entered the cultural consciousness. One guy meant to say one thing, but millions gave it a timeless meaning.
I'm sure if some brave activists were to rob the correct field office (which is the only reason we ever found out about COINTELPRO) today, they'd find similar evidence for the murders of Darren Seals and other BLM figures.
> Two other men connected to the protests, Darren Seals, 29; and Deandre Joshua, 20, were found killed under similar circumstances. Joshua was found dead in a torched car in November 2014 during the Ferguson protests. Two years later, Seals was found dead in a torched car after having been shot.
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/ferguson-d...
“We believe that it is prudent to establish a set of instructions that will more clearly separate the counterintelligence investigation from the more limited, but continued, criminal investigations. These procedures, which go beyond what is legally required, will prevent any risk of creating an unwarranted appearance that FISA is being used to avoid procedural safeguards which would apply in a criminal investigation.”
https://www.globalsecurity.org/security/library/report/2004/...
Which should make all of HN’s sing, but easier to repeat the “wall” meme.
The CIA wanted to recruit, the agencies don’t play together, and when they get caught with their pants down it’s blame someone else. It’s really amazing how HN is 99% doubting of FBI/CIA/NSA/DOJ but be completely uncritical of something when convenient.
The other side of the story: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/2004/04/18/t...
If you take the organizations at face value by stated mission, it makes sense that the CIA would have a tremendous amount of information on US citizens that would be proscribed for the FBI. Allowing shared access is just asking for parallel construction and secret courts and shit.
A domestic spy agency would spend all of its time trying to control government, strategic industries, and self-dealing. There are no checks on an organization like the CIA other than the old limitation that it couldn't target US citizens. There's no way to oversee an agency that isn't obligated to explain itself to Congress, is supplied by secret budgets, and information on whose outputs is protected by the Espionage Act (or ultimately, indefinite imprisonment and torture, threats made to family members, etc.)
We're sacrificing democracy for a secret hierarchy of secret police. You've cut government completely out of the equation if you have a government department with the latitude and ability to control domestic politics. It's basically a military coup.
See the second link above (added after your comment, sorry.)
Could you maybe give a short summary of the reasons for the restriction of information sharing between the FBI and CIA?
Also, police agencies tend to be fiercely territorial about their jurisdiction and this rivalry was no exception.
The "Patriot Act" (which was supposed to be temporary) has permanently eroded those rights.
By what statute do they maintain those authorities if the authorizing legislation has expired?
> The reauthorizing legislation makes permanent 14 of the 16 sunsetted USA PATRIOT Act provisions and places four-year sunsets on the other two
> and places four-year sunsets on the other two
It looks like those were sections 206 and 215, which were somewhat weakened by the same act.
Confusingly, there's a third provision, the "lone wolf" provision, which was extended during the Obama administration; that seems to be part of the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 and got rolled into the "USA Freedom Act" reauthorization in 2015.
IANAL, but in many places the Constitution specifically calls out citizens vs non-citizens and in other places does not make an explicit distinction. The bill of rights is one place it doesn't explicitly specify, and indeed uses language that elsewhere was used to indicate it applying to citizens and non-citizens. Of course that interpretation fell away during the cold war and is less popular now.
I mean, just this year a high ranking FBI counterintelligence agent was arrested for spying for Russia.
To be fair, we don't know what that data sharing prevented, so that leak might just be the price to pay for preventing another 9/11.
In general in the dark world of secret services, there is a "need to know" principle, about protecting sources.
Meaning, what someone does not know, he cannot leak. Because when the enemy knows, that file X leaked and he knows that only 5 persons had access to that file, they can find the source easily.
That has been happened a lot of times accidently, but likely has even been used to activly sabotage each others operations, as the bosses of each others service did not liked each other to put mildly.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wedge:_The_Secret_War_Betwee...
Government entities have budgets, and people will always fight over resources. Even to the point that the mission is like 2nd or 5th priority.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posse_Comitatus_Act
This principle has been softened and defanged quite a bit since 9/11.
Example: https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-court-yemen/u-s-appeals-...
Now let's think about how this would work.
The CIA obtains some information on a US citizen who is suspected of a crime, using methods that would be a violation of their constitutional rights, and therefore not be admissible as evidence against them in court.
The CIA can then (a) not share the information with the FBI; (b) share it with them, but they are not allowed to use it for anything because of how it was obtained; or (c) share it with them, and then they use it via parallel construction, in violation of the constitutional rights of the accused, and without revealing where they actually got it, causing "public trials" to become mendacious and opaque.
But (b) and (c) are the same thing, because the only use of (b) is to let (c) happen in secret.
But having them separate allows the Administrative branch to operate in a way that hypothetically shouldn’t step on the toes of the judicial. (Well, that is the hope at least).
FYI, SoP concerns branches, not agencies:
Separation of powers refers to the division of a state's government into "branches", each with separate, independent powers and responsibilities, so that the powers of one branch are not in conflict with those of the other branches.[1]
The FBI, military, and state department had an effective veto over new powers for the CIA, so the CIA agreed to lots of rules to make them happy: no overlapping function, no recruiting current employees, etc.
The argument was: “combining domestic and foreign intelligence is something the Nazis and Communists do, so it’s bad.”
There have evolved good reasons for the distinctions. The CIA never engages in criminal prosecution, so doesn’t need to worry about revealing evidence as part of a prosecution. FBI agents, by contrast, are paranoid about what information they are exposed to, for fear it could come out in court.
That’s much more recent, and would have been a surprise to Hoover. In fact, Hoover used the FBI to filter information gleaned from the Vernona Project. The president would receive summaries of analysts reports that were simply “vouched for” by Hoover.
By contrast the DEA was formed during an era when federal law enforcement and intelligence were at a low point in influence, so they stole people, mission, and influence. That’s why the DEA has its own foreign intelligence, domestic intelligence, diplomatic corps, and even judicial system.
The state must be kept limited in all its powers even in its power to protect from harm. Accepting the consequences of these intentional limitations is a price a society must pay for liberty or face the consequences.
In my opinion the USA has repeatedly fallen short in this regard. Coming back to your question here is an example of harm caused by (one-sided) information sharing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction .