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Comment by jamoes | Hacker News Reader

> I truly don't understand why nothing is done about that. Why doesn't anyone lose their job over this, let alone go to jail?

My suspicion is that the FBI and various three-letter-agencies have dirt on most of the elected representatives. The mass surveillance apparatus is the perfect tool for collecting blackmail material on current and future leaders.

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That is certainly the most amusing and dramatic explanation of what's happening.

A simpler explanation might just be that Congress broadly supports what DOJ is doing, and cares a lot less about the integrity of specific online services than they do about DOJ's role in combating terrorism, nuclear proliferation, and foreign intelligence services.

The FBI's founding director had this very tactic as his modus operandi. It isn't hard to speculate that the culture of the FBI has supported political extortion for well over 80 years now.

That's true. J Edgar Hoover did do this. Of course, Hoover is also one of the great villains of US history, and there was a major course-correction in the 1970s regarding the legal process federal law enforcement has to adhere to.

"The FBI is run by the modern equivalent of J. Edgar Hoover" is also an amusing and dramatic interpretation of the facts we have now. But they don't square well with other facts we know, such as Ashcroft's hospital-bed refusal to reauthorize STELLARWIND. And that was John Ashcroft, who is not exactly a cuddly Sesame Street muppet on these issues.

In case I need to make this clear:

I don't think sacrificing the integrity of online services for DOJ goals is a good tradeoff. The wins seem very marginal, and the long-term costs are huge. But I'm a technologist with a security/privacy concentration, and Congress is composed mostly of lawyers.

But they don't square well with other facts we know, such as Ashcroft's hospital-bed refusal to reauthorize STELLARWIND.

More info:

In March 2004, the Justice Department under Ashcroft ruled that the Stellar Wind domestic intelligence program was illegal. The day after the ruling, Ashcroft became critically ill with acute pancreatitis. President Bush sent his White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales and Chief of Staff Andrew Card Jr. to Ashcroft's hospital bed. They wanted him to sign a document reversing the Justice Department's ruling. But the semi-conscious Ashcroft refused to sign; Acting Attorney General James Comey and Jack Goldsmith, head of the Office of Legal Counsel for DOJ, were there to back him up.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ashcroft#As_U.S._Attorney...

Original Source: http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/09072007/transcript2.html

This story is also featured in Barton Gellman's _Angler_, which is a great book, and if you're following the Snowden drama Gellman's name should be familiar.

Hoover had plenty of apologists who were arguing that he was using these tactics only for good causes (such as against communism, today it would be terrorism or child pornography), it took a long time before anybody dared to speak out against this, he was simply too powerful.

Most likely today such direct blackmail of (domestic) politicians and other officials is not the case but you can't really rule it out completely.

The bad thing is that the reputation of the FBI and other such agencies is now such that an analogy with the Hoover days can no longer be rejected out of hand 'because they'd never do such a thing'.

They did in the past, for many years with many people, we know that for sure, and they quite possibly still do, see the thread linked here, after all what use could a decade old gag order have and do you actually believe that 100's of thousands of gag orders and NSLs can actually have a legitimate foundation?

That's to me beyond belief, that there are 100's of thousands of instances where the authorities issue permanent gag orders with respect to information gathering on individuals and that this is all somehow both legal and proportional use of powers vested in these agencies.

> The bad thing is that the reputation of the FBI and other such agencies is now such that an analogy with the Hoover days can no longer be rejected out of hand 'because they'd never do such a thing'.

Not only that but when someone's life is as public as a politician - and their career dependent on that credibility - it takes far less than Hoover-era style blackmail to ruin such a person.

So even if the FBI is no longer acting like the Hoover era agents there are significant careers risks in standing up to the three-letter agencies, (and their similarily-powerful network of friends and former employees). Those risks have only grown as the power of the NSA/FBI have grown with the spread of technology/internet.

The bar for making such a claim is much lower than in the 1950s, especially in the context of a politician.

You're giving the FBI a whole lot of credit for their ability to orchestrate what would be one of the great conspiracies of the last 100 years: despite the fractious nature of modern politics, with politicians charging through revolving doors of office and then lobbying jobs all the while accusing the sitting President of being a traitor or even a foreign agent, not one of these attempts at blackmail has ever been brought to light, or even alleged, by any member of Congress on either side of the aisle.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/brad-friedman/formerly-gagged-...

Some smoke, but no fire.

"President Obama’s recently convened executive review of the NSA admitted: “In light of the lessons of our own history… at some point in the future, high-level government officials will decide that this massive database of extraordinarily sensitive private information is there for the plucking.”"

From:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/docs/2013-12-1...

Sibel Edmonds alleges that the FBI collected information about the lesbian affair of a Democratic Congresswoman. That is a bombshell accusation, one I'd hazard would be more newsworthy to most people in the US than the Snowden disclosures.

Why can I only find references to that allegation on sites like LewRockwell.com, and not on WaPo or the NYT?

I have absolutely no clue. But that's a weird one, especially since it never resulted in any kind of fall-out either way. You'd take that those accusations would not be left to stand without a solid rebuttal.

...unless they were very obviously made up and the person making them of little public importance, in which case it would probably be more damaging to even acknowledge them as being worth discussion.

That was testimony under oath. If it was false testimony the penalties would be grave which somewhat reduces the chances of it being 'obviously made up'.

The penalties for lying under oath are usually anything but grave. Moreover: to punish her, the state has to prove that she knowingly lied. But I believe she believes what she's saying. That doesn't mean she's right.

Of note, her allegation regarding blackmailing a congresswoman was against Turkish agents whom the FBI was wiretapping, not the FBI themselves. In her deposition she specifically says

> [...] information was being collected for blackmail purposes, and her lesbian relationship, and they, the Turkish entities, wanted both congressional related favoritism from her, but also her husband was in a high position in the area in the state she was elected from, and these Turkish entities ran certain illegal operations, and they wanted her husband's help. But I don't know if she provided them with those. I left. I was terminated.

Very good question... Daniel Ellsberg wrote about a related story that was front page "London's Sunday Times" [1] and various foreign press. But searching Google for 2008-2010 there is zero mainstream American news coverage of that story or the 2009 deposition. Yet they covered her earlier whistleblowing heavily between 2002-2004.

[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/daniel-ellsberg/covering-up-th...

Edit: upon further reading it appears to not be an allegation against the FBI but rather Turkish agents which makes this much less news-worthy:

> Turkish agents started gathering information on her, and they found out that she was bisexual. So a Turkish agent struck up a relationship with her. [ ... ] I don’t know if Congresswoman Schakowsky ever was actually blackmailed or did anything for the Turkish woman. http://www.bradblog.com/?p=7429

It boggles my mind that post-Snowden people still think it's not possible for people to keep quiet about such things, I mean even Apple is able to maintain an enormous amount of privacy of things going on behind closed doors, the idea that one single person being blackmailed and not saying anything about it is difficult to believe.....I dunno.

What did Snowden change about any of this? The programs Snowden revealed were so well-known --- many of them having been reported in the press prior to Snowden's leaks --- that you can find them alluded to in the first edition of Applied Cryptography, back in the 1990s.

Were you surprised by the Snowden leaks? Even after AT&T and Room 641a?

For a variety of interesting reasons I wasn't surprised, but there were moments where I could see how other people could be surprised by it. I spend a lot of time thinking about this stuff, so I saw it coming. The average Joe, well, maybe they didn't.

I think the change was that after the leaks the existence of the programs was incontrovertible - while many with an interest in the topic would have asserted their existence, they could not be discussed in a meaningful way in large-circulation media because dismissing assertions of their existence as 'amusing and dramatic" or "conspiracy theorizing" was always going to be the safer editorial position. After Snowden, that isn't really possible without looking a little foolish.

There might be plenty of reasons why we don't know of such instances.

For example, those being blackmailed might not know or have any proof that it's FBI who's blackmailing them. The FBI of course has endless opportunities of plausible deniability, starting with "rogue contractor".

It all boils down to incentives: what exactly do you have to win from disclosing? What is the chance that people will believe you given that you have no evidence? And what would you even expect your audience to do about it? And how does that scenario compare to the worst that your blackmailer is willing to do?

It would be fairly easy for someone with the power of the FBI to rig the subject's incentives heavily in their favor, and to only pursue blackmail on subjects where they are fairly certain of success. At some point of proficiency a casual observer might not be able to distinguish it from lobbying!

We don't know if these things happen or not, but they're entirely possible. Stranger things have been leaked and declassified over the years.

It's difficult for the FBI to use mass surveillance techniques to blackmail anybody. Sure they can make allegations, even true ones, but if they present evidence it would be pretty clear where it came from. Only so many entities have the ability to gather the kind of data necessary to separate fact from rumor.

In terms of incentives, blackmail is generally a lower tier crime in terms of likelihood of success. Think about if someone tried to blackmail you. There's a good chance you'd think "Sure I can give in to their demands now, but they'll just ask for something else later and they never have to stop asking". Unless the crime being covered up involves significant jail time, most people would rather face the consequences than live the rest of their lives under someone else's control. Many former politicians have successful careers even after mundane scandals (Weiner and Spitzer come to mind).

And depending on the nature of the secret, most politicians would get some slack from the public for having the courage to standup to FBI blackmail. They might even be able to spin themselves as a flawed hero. In fact, having a three letter agency try to blackmail you right now is kind of a get out of jail free card.

As tptacek said, this is really fascinating fiction but it's just wildly impractical in real life. Blackmail is messy and has a lot of moving parts that are difficult to control. The FBI is better off doing exactly what they do now: asking Congress for money and getting it.

Parallel construction should work for blackmail just as well as it does in the courts I think to obscure the true source of information. And people don't do bad things alone, there are always other people involved who could simultaneously be plausibly claimed as source and plausibly deny this. A "stolen hard drive" could explain anything.

Any crimes that the politicians are involved with probably do carry significant jail times, given how corruption and pedophilia apparently still exist.

> depending on the nature of the secret, most politicians would get some slack from the public for having the courage to standup to FBI blackmail

I don't really see this playing out in the politician's favor.

Politician: FBI is blackmailing me! Press: with what? Politician: ... Press: do you have any proof it's FBI? Politician: Nope FBI: We're not doing anything FBI: (anonymously releasing some info) Politician: resigns / get jailed Press: boo bad politician!

Or:

Politician: FBI is blackmailing me! Press: with what? Politician: They say I stole a billion dollars FBI: we're not doing anything, but we should investigate this FBI: wow this guy really did steal a billion dollars, we can't ignore this Press: politician announces he stole $1 billion dollars, gets jailed

I don't get one thing: if politicians' decisions can be purchased by campaign donations and lobbying, why would they be any more resistant to something more persuasive? Again, to reiterate, blackmail does not need to be letters with threats compiled from newspaper cutouts. There's a whole range of methods they could be using that rely on the information they collect.

Suppose the blackmail is against not the politician, but someone they care about more than themselves? Suppose it's not blackmail per se, but the use of the same information for more sinister threats. Does the risk of giving the FBI/others all of everyone's private data still seem acceptable?

I'm not taking a concrete position on the question, but given the secrets that plain ordinary people keep, I would not be surprised if the data available on people is used for coercion and nobody talks about it.

Such a villian, in fact, that a huge building in DC bears his name in order to honor him. The building that houses the very organization we are discussing in fact. Whose employees walk past his plaque and honorifics every day, witnessing a great work done by their colleagues for the sole purpose of giving him his due respect.

I think things are certainly not as bad as when the FBI was literally commanded (founded, really) by a criminal and a traitor (the Ashcroft event was quite encouraging) but I'm not so sure many people in LE consider him so evil and much of his culture lives on.

Though I agree with you it seems like quite a stretch to blame blackmail for any of this. More likely well-meaning people making short-sighted decisions, as it always is.

There are also statues of Jefferson Davis in the south, and buildings at our greatest universities named after John C. Calhoun. That doesn't mean we endorse those people.

Umm, it kind of does.

As someone who lives in the south, it's nice to see things such as the confederate flags _finally_ getting removed.

A large statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest, master military tactician and a founder of the KKK, stands tall over I-65 nearby. It probably would be removed if it was not privately-owned.

HN readers in particular should consider how technology has affected an important part of J. Edgar Hoover's political extortion: COINTELPRO[1].

Technology has made it a lot easier to discredit and disrupt political activists. An obvious example of how to map relationships to find potential organizers that might bring together a larger political movement is the NSA programs COTRAVELER[2], but the methods are not that different from "targeted advertising" or any Facebook-style social network.

Occupy terrified a lot of people in power specifically because it didn't have an obvious minimum spanning tree to target.

We even have documents from Snowden about GCHQ's version[3]. JTRIG even has a wide assortment of tools[4] available for disrupting and discrediting their targets. Their tool for "amplification of a given message, normally video, on popular multimedia websites (Youtube)" doesn't seem particularly useful for national defense or catching terrorists - they have other tools for feeding a specific target false information. On the other hand, amplifying the popularity of a video would be very useful for propaganda.

Obviously very little of this is proof. It was already frightening what J. Edgar Hoover was able to do decades ago. How would the same thing be done with the benefit of modern technology? Would you even notice it?[5]

A even better question might be: given how eagerly the advertising industry used tracking technology and data mining, would you consider it likely that a government agency with little restraint or oversight would refrain from doing the same thing?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/apps/g/page/world/how-the-nsa...

[3] https://theintercept.com/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/

[4] https://www.schneier.com/gchq-catalog.html

[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRzYJullFOs (14 seconds of Max Headroom)

If people in power were terrified of Occupy, recent history has shown that they have had absolutely no reason to be.

Consensus decision making has hamstrung progressive causes since the 70s (http://berkeleyjournal.org/2015/05/the-theology-of-consensus...), predating the technological toolkit which nominally justified not having a targetable leadership.

It is right, fitting, and appropriate to consider how governments abuse technology. One the other hand, to descend into a fearful state about data making it "a lot easier to discredit and disrupt political activists" is both unbalanced and fundamentally disrespectful to our forebearers who faced lynching, Pinkerton detectives, the Raj's army, etc.

So it is your assertion that technology is NOT making it easier to target people?

> 70s

Yes, I'm familiar with history. This is somewhat off topic.

> unbalanced

Insults? Really?

> fundamentally disrespectful

I never made the comparison to lynchings/etc. If anything, modern technology has made these tactics safer. Really, this was my point - you are thinking about tactics as they were used decades ago. You might want to actually read those JTRIG links, as they describe a very different sort of tactic.

I personally think it's a combination of things. Sometimes Congress is just on board with what's happening. Sometimes they don't have an idea what's happening. Other times, the surveillance state has their finger on the scale.

I think the case of Jane Harman is the creepiest example of this -- a case where the DoJ withheld prosecution of a surveillance "friend", derived from NSA surveillance, so that she could continue to support an NSA surveillance program.

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/01/the-dang...

Selective prosecution is one of the stronger abuses of power there is.

Damn straight! it's so demonstrable that our laws are being selectively enforced but what happens when Habeas corpus is selective enforced? We came damn close to losing it in 2006.

You neglect to mention that _Harman herself_ was on the other end of that line.

Although this is a very plausible scenario, I'm not sure it's the "simpler" answer. It requires an incredible political will in favor of an extraordinarily controversial set of programs.

It seems to me that the "simpler" explanation is that these programs, whose existence and scope are no longer in dispute, have indeed generated intelligence about questionable conduct of members of / leadership of one or both houses of congress.

It's surprising that some people still think that terrorism prevention is a true priority.

I don't think that. I think DOJ and NSAs true priority is "maximize headcount".

Nobody claimed that. There are many different priorities the DOJ and NSA may have besides "terrorism prevention" and "maximize headcount".

To be clear: do you mean maximizing the headcount of the USA, i.e., preventing domestic deaths? Or (more likely) do you mean empire building in the sense of increasing the size and power of their own organizations?

I mean increasing the number of people on their payroll. I think power is secondary to that objective.

Saw a level-headed response in a privacy and surveillance thread. Of course it's tptacek.

Hang on a sec before dismissing this notion: this is precisely how Petraeus fell.

> The mass surveillance apparatus is the perfect tool for collecting blackmail material on current and future leaders.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

It's shocking how rarely you hear this angle on things, but it's easily the most sinister aspect of these programs.

It's also the one that will most likely kill these programs dead. Neither party wants security agencies picking winners for them, or deciding who gets to be in Congress.

do not forget that Snowden made it pretty clear the NSA was spying on the German Prime Minister, for the german intelligence agency! ...guess what may have been the offer they had. My guess? One agency spy on the other's leader as part of the job, exchange for its own leader info = ultimate power without the risk of a treason charge while investigating your own leader.

*German Chancellor

That's an awfully charitable view you have of politicians in the United States. The corruption is so deep within the US government that three letter agencies needn't blackmail any elected official. Our elected officials are collaborators; Quisling-types that pay lip service to the founding ideals of our great Republic.

Even if they don't, they can make it. They can bust any politician for career ruining material quite easily. If the FBI says you have CSA images on someone's machine, how many are going to doubt the FBI?

That would also explain why corruption is allowed to happen, kinda. Is there a realistic exit from that situation?

IF this were the case, then the solution would be a whistleblower. Or someone hacking into the system, who makes the information collected public.

Of course this person would face even more risk than Snowden ever did.

On could argue that was why Aaron Swartz died. Of course discussing this is considered "CT".

It's somewhat shocking that smart people will believe this with the only proof being a man who died over 40 years ago.

The proof is quite extensive.

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