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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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

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