What laws made this legal? How as the money appropriated by Congress? What oversight does Congress have?

I'm particularly concerned here because the Republican leadership has already begun insisting they can grant companies total immunity from the all state laws, simply by hiring them with a contract! [0]

With that in mind, how likely are these technical contractors to get tasked with, say, surveilling and hacking supposedly "foreign Antifa"? Perhaps with an extrajudicial slur of "waging psychological warfare" with something that inconveniences the administration, like documenting and sharing videos of Americans getting shot by ICE.

> the NCC shall conduct all Program activities in accordance with the Constitution and all other applicable laws and international obligations of the United States, including section 1030 of title 18, United States Code

Huh? That section [1] is basically the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Yes, it's extremely relevant, but how precisely will they subcontract civilian companies to run "sustained cyber campaigns" and also claim those contractors will scrupulously obey the CFAA and never make any kind of unauthorized access or fraud?

Either there's some trick that reconciles the conflict, or the companies can't do very much except get nice big taxpayer checks, or else they're going to break the law...

[0] https://www.wired.com/story/ices-new-detention-contracts-dec...

[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1030

Yes the cfa very clearly spells out what is illegal, and these activities fall into it. It's possible to break the cfa even as government body executing under title 10 or title 50 authority.

Snowden tried to tell us.