When the CIA spied on American citizens using pigeons

It gets far more sordid than that if you're willing to look back to times long enough for classified material to have been declassified. Operation Northwoods [1] is something that somehow was formulated, discussed, and made its way all the way to the top. It was stopped only because one man refused to sign it into action - JFK. Then there was the FBI trying to get MLK to commit suicide [2], and much more.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI%E2%80%93King_suicide_lette...

> This is a string argument for the US being no more a country with the rule of law than China or Russia.

As somebody who has lived in the soviet bloc I get goosebumps every time I hear something like this. "Corruption is everywhere", yeah, sure. But how much? This like saying the pacific ocean has water, the sahara desert has water, so there's no difference.

We will never know for sure whether these agencies (the NSA especially) do what they want because the elected officials like the idea of getting illegal shit done OR because no sane official can cross them and live. Or rather what the mix is between those two motives. They really are parallel power structures...

Congress doesn’t care about how strictly any agency follows its mandate. Its kind of fortunate that the agencies follow it so closely at all.

When agencies learn how to make their own money, there is even less accountability because they don’t have to beg Congress.

Things would be different if this funding and mandate enforcement process was also delegated to an agency, or maybe better: a court.

"So you accept the risks and try to deal with them as best as you can."

Dealing with it, would mean there would be consequences. Are there? I rather see they get more and more power. Not exactly how I would reward wrongdoing. (not US citizen, but here in the EU it is pretty much the same)

It's as simple as "entity does bad things and faces no consequences == system is broken."

No, that's too much nutrition. Same reason Baby Formula 1 racers never took off.

Heard of horse races?

The only thing that's implausible is the claim that all birds are spy devices.

It seems inconceivable that some modern spy devices aren't camouflaged as flying birds. A perfect smokescreen would be to widely disseminate the patently ridiculous ("joke") claim that all birds are spy devices, thus muddying the waters.

It's a simple logical shift: "there exists" vs. "for all."

Don't be so hard on yourself. There was a NYT article about it. Plus it's part of the cultural zeitgeist: government conspiracies and protesting.

Obviously they're purpose is to implant tracking devices in your stomach. Aren't you the least bit suspicious that they're being sold to you by a colonel?

See for example [0]

[0]https://www.brown.edu/Research/Understanding_the_Iran_Contra...

Congress could defund them or perhaps even shut the whole org down. But I have to imagine a congressman that starts snooping around what the CIA is up to will almost certainly end up mired in mysterious controversy, accusations of malfeasance, etc.

This is one of the astounding loopholes revealed by Snowden's revelations.

The US government could not spy on Americans without a warrant. But they convinced themselves that mass surveillance was legal as long as the USA did not search their own database on Americans without a warrant. And making the whole thing available to other https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes was also OK.

So analysts in England got all the data. And nothing about UK law says that THEY can't do searches on Americans. So they do. And if they find anything, they can give the USA an affirmation that they know that person X is up to no good and crime Y is likely to turn up if they do a search of A, B and C. That affirmation is sufficient under the 4th amendment to get a search warrant from a judge. Armed with said search warrant, the USA can now search the database, verify what they are told, and then they have probable cause under which they can take further actions.

And so they convinced themselves that by simply outsourcing the initial search, they could conduct unlimited surveillance on Americans and still have satisfied the letter of the Constitution.

Question was about the CIA. The two are not the same.

Bruh introducing unconstitutional evidence is so 20th century. Parallel construction is the hot new thing and bypasses those pesky issues.

That is what a strict originalist reading of the Constitution would conclude - the same reading that decided the Constitution doesn't support a right to privacy because the word "privacy" doesn't appear anywhere in the document, and that the Second Amendment can only be interpreted under the rules of 18th century English. Either we believe the Constitution is a living document and that the context of modern society matters in its interpretation, or we don't and that only what was comprehensible to the specific minds of the Founding Fathers in their time, place, idiom and cultural context is legitimate. Since we've clearly decided as a society that originalism wins out, we should stop being hypocrites about it and accept the consequences in totality.

> The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects ...

Ha! See that? _Papers_. Guess these electronic records are free game!