Could an FBI agent on a case speak to a US Army Ranger on duty?

[ariseishirou]

To clarify: this is on American soil, in the near future, outside a fictional town on the eastern seaboard.

Comments

[anonymous]

It's only been a day since the riots started? I find it very unlikely the Army would have been called in that early; it likely wouldn't be until the Guard had conclusively proven they couldn't deal with the riots, which would take at least a couple days. (How big are these riots?) Plus, terrorism operations within the US are FBI's jurisdiction, and they are *very* protective of that. I think there'd have to be an extremely compelling reason to have the Army take it over.

(For the rest of this, please note this is written with a general knowledge of how information gets shared within the government and similar agencies, but I work for neither Army nor FBI.)

All that said, presuming they were in fact called in for whatever reason, I suspect the situation would be so weird there's basically no precedent for it and information sharing would default to the judgement of the individuals involved, as long as none of it's classified.

In general, the Army would be working jointly with the FBI and the Guard. The FBI/Guard would be aware of the operation, at least at the higher levels. However, an FBI agent working an unrelated case would likely not be privy to those details.

There's nothing stopping the Army guy, the commanding officer and the FBI agent from talking to each other. FBI investigation data is unclassified, and does frequently get shared with the military, so they could probably share it-- though he might have to strip out data on US persons, I'm unclear on how that would work; they're generally not allowed to share data on US persons with military, as military aren't authorized to operate within the US or collect data on US persons. He might contact his chain of command to get official blessing on sharing the info. I doubt the Army guy would be able to share much, if any, info on the operation with the FBI guy, but that's just general OPSEC.

As I said, take this all with a grain of salt, as I don't have direct experience with anything like this.

[ariseishirou]

Thanks for the info! I actually miswrote that part, I meant to say it's been a day since the Rangers were put on stand-by, it's been several days since the riots started. (It's good to know that a longer timeline is more realistic; I'll keep that in mind.)

I didn't actually know the military wasn't allowed collect data on US persons, that's very good to know, too.

There's nothing stopping the Army guy, the commanding officer and the FBI agent from talking to each other. FBI investigation data is unclassified, and does frequently get shared with the military

This is basically exactly what I wanted to know, thanks!