The government’s need to evade constitutional oversight, argues legal scholar Jon Michaels, leads to secret public-private intelligence collaborations that tend to be “orchestrated around handshakes rather than legal formalities, such as search warrants, and may be arranged this way to evade oversight and, at times, to defy the law.”88 He observed that intelligence agencies are irresistibly drawn to “and in some respects dependent upon” firms’ privately held data resources.
