Can the FBI Be Trusted with the Surveillance of Americans? (lawfareblog.com) 123
Slashdot reader Matt.Battey writes: While everyone was at home, hunkered down watching Tiger King, and avoiding COVID-19, America's Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz released an update to his December, 2019 report. The findings weren't reassuring... Over at Bloomberg, they go so far as to say "The FBI Can't Be Trusted With the Surveillance of Americans."
From the national security blog Lawfare: Horowitz's team has reviewed 29 FISA applications involving surveillance of U.S. persons. In four of those applications, the inspector general could not review what's called the Woods File—the documentary material that is supposed to support every factual claim in a FISA application—because the files could not be located. In three of these cases, Horowitz reports, it is unclear whether they ever existed in the first place. In the remaining 25 files, the inspector general found discrepancies and errors in all, an average of 20 issues per application—with a range of a small handful to around 65.
The blog calls Horowitz's findings "something of a worst-case scenario... It appears that the facts presented in a lot of FISA applications are not reliably accurate."
From the national security blog Lawfare: Horowitz's team has reviewed 29 FISA applications involving surveillance of U.S. persons. In four of those applications, the inspector general could not review what's called the Woods File—the documentary material that is supposed to support every factual claim in a FISA application—because the files could not be located. In three of these cases, Horowitz reports, it is unclear whether they ever existed in the first place. In the remaining 25 files, the inspector general found discrepancies and errors in all, an average of 20 issues per application—with a range of a small handful to around 65.
The blog calls Horowitz's findings "something of a worst-case scenario... It appears that the facts presented in a lot of FISA applications are not reliably accurate."
No (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the title says it all...
A.
Re:No (Score:4, Informative)
I think the title says it all...
"No" is the obvious answer.
But just in case we have any visitors from another planet, here is why:
1. Human nature. Power corrupts. Information is power. No one should be trusted with private information about the masses of innocent citizens.
2. Law enforcement attracts people with authoritarian mindsets. These people believe that the ends justify the means and that they are doing God's Work by arresting "bad" people, and the people are obviously bad or why else would they be arrested? A great example is the video of the smug expression on James Clapper's face while lying through his teeth under oath.
3. The FBI is astoundingly incompetent. I have personally dealt with them on two cases, both as the "victim". The first was a computer crime case. I worked with the FBI's "High Tech Squad", which was led by a "special agent" with a history degree. My eight-year-old daughter knew more about computers than he did, and the rest of his team was even worse.
In the 2nd case, they contacted me and told me I was the victim of an online threat. They were mostly clueless, but they gave me enough information that I was able to investigate further on my own. It quickly became clear that the perpetrator was someone I knew with mental health issues. The threat was not anything serious. When I informed them, they refused to drop the case and insisted on going ahead with the prosecution. I refused to cooperate, so they declared me to be "hostile" to the investigation ... despite me being the one and only "victim" of the crime. But they bungled the investigation by accidentally wiping all the information from the defendant's phone while trying to make a backup. In the discovery documents, they admit that they wasted over $100k on the case before it collapsed.
Trust these morons with my private information? Hell no.
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The FBI is astoundingly incompetent.
FBI is the best in the world at solving crimes. No other investigative agency in the world comes close to the success of FBI when it comes to crime solving. Maybe Congress should make them stick to their longest and strongest suit, and relieve them of other duty DHS, ATF, DEAl or other agency can handle better.
You know who is great at watching Americans? NSA. Maybe we should make it part of their mandate, because they're doing it anyway. If you can't trust NSA, who can
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FBI is the best in the world at solving crimes.
No, the FBI is good at getting convictions. 90% of their cases end in plea deals, often coerced. Of the 10% of defendants who refuse plea deals, 80% have their charges dismissed. Only 2% go to trial. So, yeah, their "success" rate on that remaining 2% is pretty good. So what?
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In fact, this pandemic shows just how _damaging_ it is to treat every citizen as a suspect.
This would be very, _very_ helpful to have, but because of how our overlords have lorded over us thus far, we don't trust them. Because of that distrust, people are now going to die.
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Re:No (Score:4, Insightful)
Nobody can be trusted. Checks, balances, and open scrutiny are the only thing that works in the longer run. There is no replacement when human beings are involved. It's what separates us from China and other dictatorships.
You can claim you are careful, read scripture, meditate, and put duty slogans all over the walls, but in the end open scrutiny is the only reliable way to keep riff raff from raffing citizens' riff.
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I think the title says it all...
Yet another nice example of Betteridge's law of headlines [wikipedia.org].
Answer: No. (Score:5, Insightful)
Of Course Not (Score:5, Insightful)
Look, they've abused their position so many times in the past, there's no way they could be considered as 'trustworthy' in any shape or form at this point.
It has nothing to do with the FBI. Or their history. It has everything to do with human nature.
I don't care WHO you give these powers to, at any level of government, in any nation. It's human nature to take maximum advantage of that kind of power. You could put an appointed board of members of your community in charge of policing the neighborhood. But give them to the power to do so, and sooner or later, they'll spy on you and starting telling you what you can and can't do with your life. Your own neighbors. Guaranteed. Because they're human.
The genius of the American Founders was that they designed their system of governance with the corruptible nature of man in mind. They recognized both sides of the human nature coin: that mankind will get away with whatever he can on both the lawbreaking side ("If men were angels, no government would be necessary"), and the law power side ("A fondness for power is implanted in most men, and it is natural to abuse it when acquired." - Hamilton).
The answer isn't "lets find another agency to trust on this". The answer is to roll back these police state powers, period. The US government, at all levels, have acquired powers over the last century (or even two) that the Founding Fathers would consider grounds for another revolution.
Re:Of Course Not (Score:5, Insightful)
The US government, at all levels, have acquired powers over the last century (or even two) that the Founding Fathers would consider grounds for another revolution.
So the question really is: Can any government agency be trusted.
And the answer is still: No.
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"The answer is to roll back these police state powers, period. The US government, at all levels, have acquired powers over the last century (or even two) that the Founding Fathers would consider grounds for another revolution."
I'm personally FINE with that....but then please accept the potential consequences. Don't bitch about 9/11-style attacks...we have to simply accept they'll happen and we won't necessarily catch them.
Honestly, the naivete of "well let's just not use surveillance like this" is eventual
Re: Of Course Not (Score:2)
A white hat never reads someone's mail. Period, end of story.
If you abuse your power to snoop someone's mail, you are no longer a white hat - no longer one of the good guys. There are no exceptions.
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"the agents wipe their ass with the Patriot Act instead of obeying it half the time,"
And since the Patriot Act wipes its ass with the Constitution, that's like using used toilet paper....
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there's no way they could be considered as 'trustworthy' in any shape or form at this point.
Unless they're dishing on Trump to the media and Congress. Then they are infallible hero patriots beyond any reproach. The Star-Spangled Banner literally radiates from their bodies as our hero FBI agents move through the Earth's magnetic field. "Ohh say can you seeeee...."
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Absolutely not... (Score:1)
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and 65% of Americans [justthenews.com] believe the FBI illegally spies on citizens - routinely.
If you mean universal computer/phone surveillance, it is unlikely that the FBI is doing that. They don't have the resources, and they are WAY too incompetent to manage anything on that scale.
If spying is being done, it is being done by the NSA, not the FBI.
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Re: Absolutely not... (Score:1)
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Only one such Inspector General was fired by Trump — and for a good reason [nypost.com].
The other IG(s) let go recently had nothing to do with intelligence/surveillance, so your use of plural is invalid.
They do, and Trump, having been on the receiving end himself [theintercept.com], knows it better than most of us — hence the above f
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Of the 29 FISA warrants the IG inspected, ALL 29 had serious, should-never-have-been-approved errors - a 100% failure rate:
When describing the 29 FISA warrant applications reviewed, four were missing their Woods File (the facts behind the claims alleged), and it appeared three of them NEVER HAD A WOODS FILE...
In the remaining 25 files, the inspector general found discrepancies and errors in all, an average of 20 issues per application—with a range of a small handful to around 65.
I'm reluctant to let any government surveil it's citizenry, but in this specific case the answer is a resounding no, bordering on a "Hell No" when the FBI is part of the surveillance team.
Hahaha. NO! (Score:2)
In the minds of the liberals (Score:1)
They oppose the surveillance of the Americans and normally do not trust the three letter agencies. However, this opposition only lasts up to the point when we find out that rogues inside of FBI doctored a FISA application citing works of fiction such as "the dossier" in order to spy on Donald Trump and his subordinates. We also find out that the same people did other nasty shit, such as entrapping Michael Flynn. At this point, the liberals suddenly start calling the opaque and obscure three letter agencies
Re:In the minds of the liberals (Score:5, Informative)
You are barking up the wrong tree. The FBI is not a political party. It is a permanent feature of the government.
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You are barking up the wrong tree. The FBI is not a political party. It is a permanent feature of the government.
The GPP's point is that both sides are hypocritical about this issue. Both oppose government overreach when it is directed against them, but support it when it is directed against their opponents.
Liberals have been bitten by this many times. The laws they passed to suppress fascist sympathizers in the 1930s and 1940s were used by Joe McCarthy in the 1950s to target the left. Laws passed to infiltrate and spy on the KKK were later used to do the same to civil rights organizations.
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Please, remind me, when the FBI went after someone from the Democrats — the Party of Government — without a very good reason (like this [nydailynews.com]).
Bullshit. Joe McCarthy was a Senator — not an FBI agent.
(He was also absolutely right too [medium.com].)
Re: In the minds of the liberals (Score:2)
Lives ruined by Joseph McCarthy (Score:1)
Citations, please?
Re: In the minds of the liberals (Score:2)
You're thinking of the House committee and the FBI actually. They both acted with significantly less evidence than McCarthy did. He gets all the blame because he was the most visible.
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Please, remind me, when the FBI went after someone from the Democrats
I said "government overreach" not "FBI overreach", and I gave two examples in my post.
But if you want examples of the FBI going after Democrats, look at their infiltration of the civil rights movement and later the anti-war movement.
Although I admit that the FBI hounding of MLK doesn't count since MLK was a Republican.
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TFA is about FBI. Maybe, you can extend it to all Executive Government, but McCarthy was a Lawmaker.
As the link I already posted [medium.com] demonstrates, that was a real — well-justified concern. USSR really was financing American dissent through those — which clever operation actually defeated us in Vietnam. Vietnam war was no different from the Korean war in justificatio
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The GPP's point is that both sides are hypocritical about this issue. Both oppose government overreach when it is directed against them, but support it when it is directed against their opponents.
The problem is the FBI. Last time I checked, the FBI did not have "two sides".
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The problem is the FBI.
The problem is not the FBI. The problem is any concentrated power to snoop. Whether it is the FBI, or DHS, or NSA, is not important.
Last time I checked, the FBI did not have "two sides".
Last time I checked, the FBI doesn't write the laws.
Whether or not the FBI is given the power to legally snoop is not decided by the FBI.
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Last time I checked, the FBI doesn't write the laws.
Whether or not the FBI is given the power to legally snoop is not decided by the FBI.
Secret laws, secret courts. Are you sure about what you just said? Also, what about the FBI snooping illegally, but nobody can do anything about being targeted? I think you mistake how actual power works.
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Secret laws, secret courts.
The FISA courts can issue warrants for particular people, groups, or locations.
The can't legally issue a warrant for mass surveillance.
Also, what about the FBI snooping illegally, but nobody can do anything about being targeted?
If the snooping is "targeted" then it isn't what we are discussing. Mass surveillance isn't targeted.
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Secret laws, secret courts.
The FISA courts can issue warrants for particular people, groups, or locations.
The can't legally issue a warrant for mass surveillance.
So, how do you know they stick to the law? And how do you sue them if they do not?
Also, it seems that 3M requests/year do not count as mass-surveillance in their books: https://theintercept.com/2019/... [theintercept.com]
Also, what about the FBI snooping illegally, but nobody can do anything about being targeted?
If the snooping is "targeted" then it isn't what we are discussing. Mass surveillance isn't targeted.
Don't abuse language, it just makes you look stupid. Of course individuals can be a target of mass-surveillance. They just need to be part of the mass of people being targeted.
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The FBI is not a political party. It is a permanent feature of the government.
The FBI is a government agency, part of the Department of Justice. That government agency hires people, and selects who rises through the ranks. Collectively the employees of the Department of Justice have distinct political leanings:
Government workers shun Trump, give big money to Clinton [thehill.com]
Employees of the Department of Justice, which investigated Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was secretary of State, gave Clinton 97 percent of their donations. . . . . From IRS employees, Clinton received 94 percent of donations.
If the political leanings of the employees of the Department of Justice and the FBI only played out in their outside activities and activism I think few people would care. Unfortunately it appears that in some importan
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The FBI is not a political party. It is a permanent feature of the government.
Exactly. They are very much a part of the deep state.
Re:In the minds of the liberals (Score:4, Interesting)
A presidential candidate appearing to solicit election interference from a foreign government who he is meeting with and stands to profit from is the exact sort of extraordinary circumstance that calls for surveillance. Surveillance in general isn't inherently bad - mass surveillance is, and poorly targeted/justified surveillance is bad. The NSA should be watching Osama Bin Laden and Kim Jong Un, and the FBI should've been watching Candidate Trump.
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A presidential candidate appearing to solicit election interference from a foreign government who he is meeting with and stands to profit from
You just described Hillary Clinton
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In fascist bizarro world. I use facts, not fact-free conspiracy theories.
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In fascist bizarro world. I use facts, not fact-free conspiracy theories.
Clinton met all your criteria. She paid for the Steele dossier which was produced by a British operative and contained disinformation from Russian sources with the goal of using it to defeat her opponent and win the presidency. What part of this hasn't been factually proven?
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/f... [cbsnews.com]
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They've hidden the fact that Christopher Steele was working with Oleg Deripaksa long enough that they don't know this, never mind that we have all kinds of evidence of this including text messages about it and about people wanting to keep their name off of things.
But yeah, the whole thing was a setup that went badly wrong. We paid $32 million dollars to investigate nonsense rumors about whether hookers peed on Obama's bed. The rumors were never meant to be proven one way or another, they were just to give
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Clinton's relationship to the funding of the Steele dossier is quite distant and the DNC's funding of the report was only partial and did not initiate the work on it. Fusion GPS was a private company. Christopher Steele was no longer employed by the British government. No crimes were committed in the creation of the dossier. A foreign government entity did not run a disinformation campaign with the goal of influencing the election.
Meanwhile we had Trump and his closest campaign workers in direct contact wit
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Trump asking Russia to try to hack Clinton's email system on public TV (to which they complied), something that looks like a ...
Joke.* The word you are looking for is joke.
I think an even bigger joke is that you don't seem think that the Russians would have tried to get at the emails of a US Secretary of State and leading candidate to be the next president of the United States without prompting by Trump, or that Trump is a traitor**.
Do you really believe that? Or are you simply engaging in wilful mischaracterization to make a political smear?
Some have styled Trump as, "the great clarifier." That does seem to be one of his super p
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If you think it's a joke when he says it in a serious voice with his serious face and then retroactively calls it a joke when the world it outraged, then the joke is on you. Wasn't the first time, won't be the last. Odd coincidence that phishing attacks against Clinton's offices came around the same time he made the request, huh?
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Odd coincidence that phishing attacks against Clinton's offices came around the same time he made the request, huh?
Not odd at all. There were known phishing attacks against the DNC and Clinton campaign months before Trump made that joke on July 27, 2016.
Timeline: How Russian agents allegedly hacked the DNC and Clinton’s campaign [washingtonpost.com]
March15, 2016. The Russian hackers allegedly begin trying to identify vulnerabilities in the network of the Democratic National Committee.
AD
March 19, 2016. Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta and others are sent “spear-phishing” emails meant to steal the login credentials for their email accounts.
March 21, 2016. Hackers allegedly gain access to Podesta’s account and steal over 50,000 emails.
March 25-28, 2016. Hackers allegedly target a number of additional campaign staffers with spear-phishing emails. That effort apparently included researching staff on social media.
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Clinton's relationship to the funding of the Steele dossier is quite distant and the DNC's funding of the report was only partial and did not initiate the work on it. Fusion GPS was a private company. Christopher Steele was no longer employed by the British government. No crimes were committed in the creation of the dossier. A foreign government entity did not run a disinformation campaign with the goal of influencing the election.
Meanwhile we had Trump and his closest campaign workers in direct contact with Russian agents and close proxies, Trump asking Russia to try to hack Clinton's email system on public TV (to which they complied), something that looks like a VPN-over-DNS tunnel running between the Trump organization and the Russian government, Russia running disinformation campaigns on social media to help Trump get elected, and the Trump Tower Moscow project going on in the background the whole time.
So it's an apples and oranges comparison in a world of facts.
Wow, you really believe all this nonsense, even that silly 'VPN-over-DNS tunnel' thing? TDS truly is a debilitating disease.
Here is the Snopes comment on that one. It's such a laughably dumb story, built on nothing at all.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-ch... [snopes.com]
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You are the living embodiment of the comment you replied to.
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Osama Bin Laden is dead, remember?
Warrantless Surveillance is wrong, no matter if it's everyone or just one person.
The "Presidential Candidate" didn't actually "meet" with a foreign government - a couple campaign staffers met with a female lawyer that has ties (clients) in the Russian Government. (as a reminder, she offered Trump's campaign "dirt" on Hillary, much like Steele offered Hillary's campaign dirt on Trump- the only difference is Hillary's campaign sought it out and paid for it, while the Trump wa
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When a candidate asks on public TV for a foreign government to hack his opponent and they comply, and they're meeting with Russian intelligence proxies who offer the thinnest excuse of plausible deniability, and the same foreign government is running disinformation campaigns to influence the election, and there is what looks like a VPN-over-DNS tunnel running between said candidate and said foreign government, and said candidate is trying to get permission from the same government to build a hotel, a dossie
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When a candidate asks on public TV for a foreign government to hack his opponent and they comply...
I'm sure that the Russian FSB and GRU intelligence agencies were waiting for that permission from someone not in government to be broadcast to millions of people on television before beginning hacking operations against the US government. Lucky for us nobody in the Obama administration invited them to hack so obviously nothing happened.
Tell me transferring ownership to his son, while Jimmy Carter had to sell his peanut farm, is sufficient. Tell me to my face.
Carter didn't sell his farm until after leaving office - it seems the business was failing.
When former president Jimmy Carter left office, his peanut business was $1 million [cnbc.com]
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Nitpicking deflection, it was put into a blind trust which meets the same legal requirements as a sale. Compared to Trump who simply transferred ownership to his son, and has foreign leaders patronising the hotels he still practically owns, and his own government seemingly going out of their way to use them as much as possible. A nonstop running violation of the emoluments clause. The man's a shameless crook fit for a banana republic.
Re: In the minds of the liberals (Score:2)
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if you thought that some "three letter agency" was coming for your guns you'd have quite a different opinion.
Is the DNC [bing.com] considered a "three letter agency"?
Asking for a friend.
Can anyone? (Score:3)
The answer in Latin (Score:1)
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
The answer in English (Score:2)
Answer: No.
Example: https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/federal-bureau-investigation-fbi [stanford.edu]
Example: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/how-fbi-entrapment-is-inventing-terrorists-and-letting-bad-guys-off-the-hook-244905/ [rollingstone.com]
Example: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2017/04/science-march-einstein-fbi-genius-science/ [nationalgeographic.com]
The reason these things are secret... (Score:5, Interesting)
.. is that they are not legitimate in any sense of the word a person with some basic ethics would find acceptable. Hence they give power without oversight or consequences, and it requires people with exceptionally strong morals to not be corrupted under these circumstances. From established historical facts, the FBI and its people cannot even be trusted to have intact regular morals.
This needs to stop. Oversight needs to be by everybody that cares to look (some _limited_ delay is fine). Abuses of the law by anybody (including the judges) needs to come with a real risk of unpleasant and _personal_ consequences. If that happens, maybe some minimal trustworthiness in the process and the participants can be established.
Also, nobody with a clue is the least bit surprised by this sad state of affairs.
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This needs to stop. Oversight needs to be by everybody that cares to look (some _limited_ delay is fine).
Make ratting on the corrupt in government extremely profitable.
Form a non-profit organization to solicit donations for a fund to pay huge rewards and cover the legal costs for those in government from local street cop all the way up to POTUS who come forward to provide evidence that is used to successfully convict those in government who violate civil rights and commit other crimes and violations of the law and the Constitution.
Make them fear that any of the people they must work with might expose their cor
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Form a non-profit organization to solicit donations for a fund to pay huge rewards and cover the legal costs for those in government from local street cop all the way up to POTUS who come forward to provide evidence that is used to successfully convict those in government who violate civil rights and commit other crimes and violations of the law and the Constitution.
Convict members of the system... using the system? The House tried that with Tump. How did it go? And at the far opposite end, it's well known that police are NEVER convicted by local courts. It always takes some oversight court, or federal intervention, before corrupt cops get convicted of anything.
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I think you need to re-read my post. No payoff without a conviction.
Strat
As I said when it happened... (Score:4, Interesting)
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Trick Question? (Score:3)
The obvious answer is the usual, when a title asks a yes or no question.
We haven't been able to trust the FBI since Hoover.
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Oh HELL NO! (Score:2)
SINCE THE FBI had the Carnivore surveillance tools (Easily taken down BTW) I wouldn't trust them to watch a toilet flush.
Even Betteridge knew the answer, long ago (Score:2)
NO!
Breaking news from the 1950s (Score:3)
In a word - NO! (Score:2)
The FBI was NEVER an "honorable" agency; J. Edgar Hoover was a pervert, and was more interested in exploring other people's perversions than he was in protecting the Constitution.
And "Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms" should be a convenience store rather than a government agency.
Need truly independent agencies (Score:5, Interesting)
I think the homeland security concept of combining law enforcement, anti-terrorism defense etc was a terrible idea (beyond just having a name that should send chills up people's spines).
Agencies have different jobs and should have very different tools. In the same way that I don't want my local police department to have attach helicopters and grenade launchers, I don't want them to have access to some types of dangerous personal data.
In this case an agency whose entire job was to track illnesses could make use of detailed tracking data if it was NEVER shared for ANY REASON with other agencies. Not to catch terrorists, or child molesters, or gang members, or illegal aliens, or people downloading illegal music files.
There is a short term gain in combining information, but now we see the huge long term negative consequences: when there is a real need for detailed information to be collected, people have very reasonable concerns that it will not just be used to combat the disease, but for a wide variety of other activities.
Unfortunately this goes against the way we run our security organizations in the US, and once the information is collected, I expect it will become available to all agencies.
So we give up privacy and accept the consequences, or we let a lot of people die. Its not a choice we should have had to make, if we had made better choices earlier.
If Facebook can be trusted with it... (Score:1)
Well the answer (Score:2)
The long answer is "Hell Nooooooooooooooo!""
The FBI (Score:5, Informative)
Can't even be trusted when you give them multiple warnings of imminent threats. Look at the Parkland high school shooter. The whole school knew he was a ticking time bomb. He wasn't allowed a backpack on campus and teachers were told to alert them immediately if he was seen with one. Two tips were called in, one with a threatening video he posted and another with him named directly. The FBI took those tips and threw them right into the trash. They claimed they couldn't find out who posted the video and the other one they flatly ignored. A two minute phone call to the school to ask the staff if he was capable of violence was all that was required. Nope they couldn't even handle that. So I have about as much faith in the FBI as I do the rest of the federal government.
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A two minute phone call to the school to ask the staff if he was capable of violence was all that was required. Nope they couldn't even handle that.
You left out a few interesting points:
- The local sheriff and the Parkland school district elected not to arrest the soon-to-be shooter for any of several infractions because they wanted to lower the number of High School kids that got arrested - allpart of the Democrat's "Tough on Crime, Soft on Criminals" position.
- You complain "A two minute phone call (from the FBI) to the school to ask the staff if he was capable of violence was all that was required. Nope they couldn't even handle that. Ignore
NO, (Score:2)
...also, HAHA, NO.
No! (Score:2)
Hell, No! What are you thinking? You should know better than to even ask this question. Go get some history lessons.
Uuum, no? Invalid question! Shifting the discussio (Score:2)
Since when is toralitarian surveillance just casually assumed to be OK, and we merely concern ourselves who gets this absolutely power to become absolutely corrupted?
It is a horrible treasonois totalitarin crime that puts the perpetrators in one league with Goering et al.
This is is not up for discussion!
But somebody is up for prison.
Too angry too type. (Score:2)
Sorry for this mess of typos. I'm going to bed now.
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Trust isn't the issue (Score:2)
It comes down to this: Even if you trust the current administration (I don't, but that's me), will you trust the next one? The one after that? Because as soon as the agency has this power unfettered, they become a potential means for subtle dictatorship with far more reach than the traditional strongman type. Safety is great. It really is.
But it's a fine line between a safety harness and a straight-jacket.
Just have the courst enforce the law. (Score:2)
1) You must present to the court paper copies of all information required by law BEFORE you get a FISA warrant. Missing paperwork = laughed out of the office.
2) The court gets to preserve this information.
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BEFORE you get a FISA warrant
This assumes that the want to bring a case to court and use the evidence collected. The FBI does a lot of counter espionage and other security work for which prosecution will never be sought. Or if it is, the proper parallel construction will be used.
No (Score:2)
Unfortunately, the FBI's long history of abusing warrants (when it doesn't skip them altogether) suggests that it can't be trusted. Even worse, it appears that the courts cannot be trusted to keep the FBI semi-honest either. If the courts could be trusted to do that, more than 0 of the applications would have been sufficient since the FBI would know by now that otherwise it's a waste of time.
Can the FBI Be Trusted.. (Score:1)
First clue (Score:2)
FBI
Second: _Investigation_
Third: _Federal_
IF AAPL+GOOG coordinated to CDC then Disease Control is the mission. BUT the Bureau mission is criminal.
SO...I don't _think so_ since the information remains in the criminal bureau not disease database.
THAT portends criminalizing COVID and any body crossing state lines the FBI owns 'em.
THUS ' We the People" becomes " We the criminal" immediately after issuance of the Federal Disease Certification and Identification card
Moot point. (Score:2)
The government and specifically the FBI have clearly demonstrated in recent years that they are not concerned with the rights of Americans citizens. It's amazing that there have not been civil uprisings over their behavior. The formal investigations are still proceeding and we will see if the government is capable of healing itself.
No (Score:2)
Next question?
Trust (Score:2)
Can X be trusted with the surveillance of Y?
No. No, X cannot be so trusted. That doesn't mean it may not be necessary; however, "trusted"? No. And X never SHOULD just be trusted with such surveillance. This is the nature of power and humankind.
This is more a problem of the legislature (Score:2)
Anyone anyone tells you they're gonna get tough on crime you should distrust their motives. Yes, crime can be a problem. But the "cure" can be worse than any disease.
Yes (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Where all the rabid 2nd Amendment people are when it comes to standing up for our other rights.
Well... if you have guns, the other rights -- and/or other's rights -- don't really matter ... Not trolling, just sayin'.
Paraphrasing from Ocean's Twelve:
- "John Adams said, 'Every problem is an opportunity in disguise.'” .45 in his mouth."
- "I bet he couldn't say that with a
Re: (Score:1)
Where all the rabid 2nd Amendment people are when it comes to standing up for our other rights.
I wouldn't say I'm a rabid 2A person, though by many people's standards I suppose I would be considered to be.But I could say the same about myself with regards to the 1A, the Constitution, Bill of Rights, or most of the other amendments.
What I don't understand is why any American is not a rabid supporter of our Constitution, Bill of Rights, etc. If you start picking and choosing which amendments are important and which to get rid of, then it all falls apart. Unfortunately this is not taught any longer.
Th