I think it's probably legal given he is a foreign national on foreign soil. (I'm not sure if there is anything in the laws that empower the NSA that limits their scope for what matters they investigate on, if so, they may have violated that. If not, there probably should be.)

A fairer question might be, why is the mission of the NSA to enforce copyright law for media companies? Shouldn't they be busy trying to hunt down terrorists, prevent attacks against the USA and it's people abroad, things like that?

No, he was a legal NZ resident, the law protected all residents equally

The GCSB was found to be illegally wiretapping him, sadly since that time the govt changed the law to make all that stuff legal. It's election year here in NZ if we want to change these laws we need to change the govt.

Correct. I was wondering the entire time reading the link what exactly was illegal since it is fairly common knowledge that all nations spy on each other and in the US it is totally legal for the US government to spy on foreigners who are not on their soil.

It's a confusing headline. What the NSA does is probably illegal in every country but the US, but the implication is it's illegal in the US.

It's probable they do things that are illegal under US law, but I doubt this is one of them.

The concept of legality gets awkward when talking about the military force of a nation, but even in the United States there are limits to what the military (NSA, DOD, etc.) are authorized to do. Though the matter at hand could be framed as a matter of 'economic security' to the US, it is unclear that such an argument is sound. And if that argument is not sound, the consequences that stem from the US military being involved in the domestic law enforcement of another state against their will are not desirable to the US from a policy perspective.

Though NSA's actions may or may not be illegal in the US, there are other standards used to judge or analyze military action in the global economic marketplace.

I don't know enough about US law, but if the president is required (at least in theory) to receive authorisation from congress before (or after) attacking an enemy nation, is there not some equivalent requirement for using the military apparatus against an ally?

Perhaps the constitution allows the president to do whatever he or she wants with the military (as long as it is within the historic bounds of what militaries do) without triggering the need for congressional approval unless it reaches a "state of war" at which point people might actually start dying.

That would seem like the sort of practical level of discretion that a country would give its executive branch, but I can't help thinking that there could or should be some law somewhere that gave the president's actions against allies some type of legislative basis, so that voters had an idea of how the president would use these secretive powers, and could hold the executive to account at the ballot box.

Short of political assassination, is anything done by the US government outside the US illegal under US law?

Political assassination has been a thing for the US gov for a while https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/may/05/cia-long-his...

Yes, thank you.

Similar to how "The president can't have a conflict of interest", the three-letter agencies can basically do whatever they want and get away with it.

There's a difference between being illegal and there being a precedent of it being illegal.

The government does lots of things that are probably illegal but there's no precedent set. That gives them the opportunity to argue in court why the specific instance in question is different.

It should be, the US Constitution should apply to government actions ANYWHERE not just actions on US Soil, the US Constitution was never designed to be geographically limited, it was designed to limit what the government was allowed to do, period, in all cases in all lands, everywhere

Sadly the US Court Systems has stated it does not have the authority to apply the Constitution to the US Government when the US Government is acting outside US Soil, it is a ridiculous standard but....

>It should be, the US Constitution should apply to government actions ANYWHERE not just actions on US Soil, the US Constitution was never designed to be geographically limited, it was designed to limit what the government was allowed to do, period, in all cases in all lands, everywhere

No. There's no support for this view in constitutional law.

How so, the entire purpose of the Constitution is to be a limiting document on what the States and we the people have authorized the government to do on our behalf, not just do on our behalf with in the Geographical regions commonly known as the United States

If the IRS can collect taxes from expatriate US citizens living and working overseas, the federal courts can certainly prosecute US citizens for breaking other federal laws while abroad.

Otherwise, those people might as well wipe their backsides with their Form 2555s and mail them back without checks attached!

The courts have no problem enforcing many many criminal laws on people even when the crimes occur over seas

They just have a problem applying the law to the government when the actions are over seas..

Nice little loop hole they carved out for themselves...

Exactly. It's extremely hypocritical.

And that's before you even consider the willingness of US courts to prosecute foreign nationals for breaking US laws on foreign territory, where one or more US citizens may have been tangentially affected by it.

Law enforcement cannot be above the law. It destroys the principles that make laws worth having and enforcing.

Congress is capable of enacting laws with extraterritorial reach. I am unaware of any law that should be interpreted to criminalize the NSA's international spying.

for starters 4th Amendment, and 10th amendment,

then there Article 2 Section 8 which does not grate the authority to create and agency such as the NSA or preform international Spying thus since the constitution does not expressly grant such authority the Federal Government is barred from such activity

Strictly staying within US law is not the only thing that the US intelligence apparatus tries to do. There are also agreements not to monitor the citizens of "Five-Eyes" citizens in those countries without due process; even if not illegal, it would violate the intelligence-sharing agreements we have with those nations and would be highly improper due to the damage to national security that risking those intelligence-sharing agreements would entail.

That being said, this story is incredibly thin.

>It aimed to explain why Dotcom and others charged in the FBI's Megaupload investigation were spied on for two months longer than previously admitted.

There's no reason this would even be improper, if the FBI had gone through due process in the US, which it appears they had. This story appears to be entirely Kim Dotcom's lawyer trying to politicize his case in order to fight a lawful extradition.

If it's done by a member of the United States military, there's the Uniform Code of Military Justice. I'm not sure if it applies to the NSA or CIA, though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Code_of_Military_Justi...

Doesn't apply to the Intel agencies, at least not fully.

That's why drones and seal teams are transferred to those agencies for short periods of time.

To quote Malory Archer: "It's the government! Even if it wasn't legal they'd enforce it."

only if its forbidden by treaty.

Even then it doesn't really matter. I'm pretty sure it's now fact that the US broke the United Nations Convention against Torture during the war on terror. I seem to remember the USG even admitting this. Nothing was done. For now the US is powerful enough that it will do what it wants.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_war_crimes#Comma...