Former FBI Director James Comey wrongly asserted on Thursday that electronic surveillance is not, as Attorney General William Barr suggested earlier this week, “spying.”
Speaking at a cybersecurity conference, Comey explained that Barr’s suggestion is “concerning because the FBI and the Department of Justice conduct court-ordered electronic surveillance. I have never thought of that as spying.” He continued “If the attorney general has come to the belief that that should be called spying, wow.”
No wow — Comey is just plainly wrong.
While he is correct that the FBI’s technical surveillance activities are nearly always court-ordered, such surveillance is obviously a form of spying. As the Merriam-Webster dictionary notes, to “spy on” someone or something is to “watch [them] secretly.” That’s exactly what technical surveillance entails: secretly gathering intelligence or evidence. In the FBI’s case, that alternate interest is national security or criminal detection.
But it’s not simply Merriam-Webster that regards spying this way. Take the definition of espionage, another name for spying, as defined by the FBI’s British equivalent surveillance agency, the Security Service, or MI5. MI5’s website notes that “Espionage is the process of obtaining information that is not normally publicly available, using human sources (agents) or technical means (like hacking into computer systems) …”
Is that not what the FBI’s surveillance activities entail? Indeed, it is.
So again, the question here as Barr rightly noted is not whether the FBI spied, but whether its spying was lawful, as narrowly targeted as necessary, and conducted appropriately.
