a) Both contracts are tiny ($150k each) although obviously these may be pilot programs.
b) Finding evaders of sanctions seems like it should fall under a national security agency's purvue. We all take it for granted that the NSA could pinpoint our locations pretty easily, right? One thing that's particularly insane about the US government is how many departments have intelligence agencies. Obviously the ideal would be to have a small handful of well regulated intelligence agencies (emphasis on "well regulated", and you only have to look at the overreach by e.g. the CIA over the past 50 years to know that the US has had issues with that.)
c) The tax evasion contract looks at social media posts to find tax evaders. I wouldn't be particularly upset if the IRS had their own internal tech department doing this - if you're going to have a tax agency, you want it to be able to prevent cheating, otherwise the tax system falls apart. Finding people who have declared themselves to have beaten the system in a public forum is a cheap and easy way to go after cheaters.
There's a lot of pork in contracts that government agencies give out to private contractors, but this seems like a relatively low spend, and so it doesn't seem particularly bad that the IRS has decided that this is outside of their current expertise and given out a contract to chase it.
> We all take it for granted that the NSA could pinpoint our locations pretty easily, right?
In the same way we take it for granted that a SWAT team could kill any of us pretty easily. They have (and probably should have) the ability, but the authority to use it should be very limited and subject to stringent oversight.
No doubt. But, say that the NSA were given the purvue over enforcing sanctions (because they are the national security agency). Should they be able to monitor who is visiting the country with the sanctions?
Sanctions are kind of like the tax agency situation - if you're going to wield them as a national security tool, then you want to be able to enforce them, otherwise they're relatively meaningless. And enforcing them necessarily involves watching to see if your country's citizens are evading them.
I don't want the NSA to perform domestic civilian law enforcement functions any more than I want the army to, for similar reasons.
The type of oversight applied to military and foreign intelligence action is fundamentally political. Whether and how to impose sanctions against, spy on, or invade another country are questions for congress and the president in the US and rarely involve the courts.
The type of oversight applied to law enforcement is fundamentally legal. Courts apply existing law to the set of facts in a given case. Congress and the president do not get involved directly and any attempt by political officials to influence the outcome is scandalous, if not criminal.
So should the NSA hack Iran's immigration database to see who's been going there? Perhaps. Should anything discovered that way be admissible in a criminal trial? Almost certainly not. Should the NSA tip off the FBI about domestic crimes? Mostly no, I think, but perhaps in a very limited fashion when the crimes involve national security or foreign policy. Gathering evidence that can be used in a criminal trial would still be the responsibility of the FBI.
What about when Russian hackers shut down American hospitals and can't be extradited? Who's going to hack back and enforce the law? The FBI can't do it.
When foreign actors commit such an act from outside the country, and their government isn't cooperative about stopping/punishing them, that's exactly the kind of thing intelligence agencies should be involved with.
Certainly not. I want US intelligence agencies to take action against foreign threat actors to reduce their capacity to cause harm to US citizens and infrastructure.
So if the FBI can arrest them, they're criminals and we should follow criminal procedure, but if the FBI says they can't arrest them, then we "take action" (what action)?
The original author said: "I don't want the NSA to perform domestic civilian law enforcement functions"
In other words, the FBI (and police, etc) perform domestic law enforcement, following criminal procedure. The NSA, CIA, etc handle non-domestic (foreign) threats, in whatever manner they see fit.
b) Finding evaders of sanctions seems like it should fall under a national security agency's purvue. We all take it for granted that the NSA could pinpoint our locations pretty easily, right? One thing that's particularly insane about the US government is how many departments have intelligence agencies. Obviously the ideal would be to have a small handful of well regulated intelligence agencies (emphasis on "well regulated", and you only have to look at the overreach by e.g. the CIA over the past 50 years to know that the US has had issues with that.)
c) The tax evasion contract looks at social media posts to find tax evaders. I wouldn't be particularly upset if the IRS had their own internal tech department doing this - if you're going to have a tax agency, you want it to be able to prevent cheating, otherwise the tax system falls apart. Finding people who have declared themselves to have beaten the system in a public forum is a cheap and easy way to go after cheaters.
There's a lot of pork in contracts that government agencies give out to private contractors, but this seems like a relatively low spend, and so it doesn't seem particularly bad that the IRS has decided that this is outside of their current expertise and given out a contract to chase it.