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Comment by wildmusings | Hacker News Reader

The ideal situation that you've described is how the FBI actually works. The FBI is highly selective, requires a bachelors degree minimum (though I hear new hires increasingly have even more higher education), treats misconduct very seriously, and pays professional salaries. You'll notice that most controversies about the FBI concern policies set at the very top, almost never abuses of power or denial of rights.

I agree that we need to similarly professionalize local police forces. I'd rather see it done at the state level to maintain more local, rather than federal, control of policing.

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> almost never abuses of power or denial of rights.

Here is the modus operandi of the FBI. They bring a person in for an interview. Two agents interview a person. One agent asks all the questions, while the other keeps a written record of the interview. No audio tapes of the interview are made. At the end of the interview, the official and only record of the interview is the written account prepared by the FBI agent doing the recording.

None of the above is in dispute. Now for the part that you are free to ignore.

The FBI will then interview the same person at a later date, using the same method. They will then comb through the two accounts of the interviews, looking for discrepancies. Amazingly, they will find discrepancies. They will then bring the subject back in, tell the subject that he or she has "lied" to the FBI, a federal offense with non-trivial punishment. The subject will then be "invited" to work off this infraction by becoming an FBI informant.

The FBI does this again and again.

Maybe it's just me, but that's not cricket, my good man.

Can you refuse to be interviewed without a lawyer?

There is a famous video "Don't talk to police" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc

You're totally wrong. Current FBI policy is to record all interviews.

I've worked with the FBI in the past and this is absolutely not the kind of behavior that I experienced. The FBI agent managed to lose the copy of documents that I put on a CD for him and then later claimed that we never gave them to him and that he never came to pick them up. Luckily there was 3 witnesses to him picking it up and the security camera but still, he was threatening us "for not complying" over it.

Then later when he couldn't figure out how to view the documents and didn't want to read the instructions that were sent with it he demanded that we print everything off on paper and again threatened legal action for "not complying". I wound up hand delivering almost a ream of paper for all of the documents and emails that they subpoenaed. In the end, the biggest mistake made was complying with the order in the first place as they were ordering us to provide documents from third parties for the most part who should have been served with a subpoena directly.

Agreed. I worked for the company that was infamously associated with FBI's 'Virtual Case File' fiasco.

Though I joined a few years after it was already finished, there were many employees still around who had worked on the project.

The reason the project failed was almost entirely the fault of the FBI project managers and other bureaucrats. Huge egos, technical incompetence, and petty politics were the biggest issues. This was coming from talented non-mgmt engineers, too, so i'm pretty confident in the veracity of their claims

Anyway, after working in gov. contracting for a decade, I've come to really believe that most Fed workers are actually pretty bright, but they become so fixated on politics instead of results, they end up doing far worse than their less educated counterparts in the private sector.

The more privileged the agency (i.e. FBI, other Intel agencies, State Department, etc.) the worse the politicking becomes as they are far more insulated from scrutiny and less limited with funding from Congress.

> The ideal situation that you've described is how the FBI actually works.

FBI Agents in their off hours have engaging philosophical debates? I hadn't heard about this. Is this from personal experience, or is this a criticism of the FBI of them being too impractical?

EDIT: This was a legitimate inqury. Is it really so absurd to imagine some FBI agents having Thursday Philosophical Book Club? That some people on HN might have gone to them? If so, it sounded interesting.

I'm not referring to your comment (I thought joke...) about what they talk about in their off time, but about a more professional force with greater discipline and pay.

> but about a more professional force with greater discipline and pay.

That would be a nice thing to have.

This may seem overly negative or (internet) contrarian, and I believe yours is a good comment, but these are subject to political forces as much as--or more than--any.

Put your time in (not bankers hours), move when transferred, whoa this is a lot of paperwork, climb the ladder, spend time at HQ and "make friends" at all your stops, go along and get along, now there are kids and spouse/house and schools, do your 20 so you can retire, start new job in security or back to private practice thanks to your well-tended reputation, etc.

Who's gonna stick their neck out anymore? (Besides Snowden.)

of course no one should stick their neck out, In this ungrateful nation, filled with the individualism and everyone looking for their own career enhancement, real whistleblowers get treated very very harshly from Chelsea Manning, to Tim Drake to Ed Snowden.

Whats worse is that the media im talking (CNN,MSNBC,FOX,ABC..Wash Post, NY Times) could have helped argue their case but they dont instead they are fed information from the government and report that as facts, of course this is nothing new, if anyone remembers the NY Times story about Saddam Hussein having WMDs)

Just think of the cost of such professional police forces for every state and county, including training, equipment etc.

Compare to the cost to society of having daft pigs running around shooting people, and generally violating the rights of citizens.

Or maybe I'm still angry from that time I got arrested for cycling on the footpath, or that other time the cops turned my house upside down and stole a $1000 from me and charged me with drug trafficking, all charges for which ended up getting dismissed.

There are real reasons lots of people think the police are barely tolerable. It's high time the police were encouraged to act like professionals, and face the possibility of having their license to operate as an LEO revoked for misconduct rather than the present state of boys-club-protectionism.

I can totally understand you. I lived in a country where things are far worse. False charges don't end up dismissed, people are sentenced to long prison terms, their health fatally undermined, families ruined, etc., etc.

At first I was shocked than situation described in this topic is possible in US. I mean not just the raid against activist, but the level of corruption revealed by ExposeDAT.

But let's face the sad truth: the cost to society of having professional, efficient and corruption-resistant police is unbearable too. At least for large country like US. It's comparable to cost of having professional, efficient and treason-resistant army, counted per one officer/soldier. But you need much more police officers than soldiers. You have to apply very strict selection and certification to ensure only most honest, incorruptible and motivated people are at service. You just won't find enough people, especially in economically depressed regions.

This all doesn't mean we can't or shouldn't improve the situation, of course.

> At least for large country like US. It's comparable to cost of having professional, efficient and treason-resistant army, counted per one officer/soldier. But you need much more police officers than soldiers.

You could certainly argue that there ought to be more policy officers than soldiers, but the military is currently quite a bit larger. The projected number of active duty military members is 1,301,300, with an additional 811,000 in the reserves [1]. The sources for the number of policy officers were around 800,000-900,00. Wikipedia has it pegged at 809,308 for 2008 [2].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Armed_Forces [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...

Wow, didn;t know that. Thanks for clarifying.

In California, a police officer goes through 660 hours of training. A hair stylist/aesthetician goes through 1,600 hours of training before they get licensed....

http://beautyce.com/california-cosmetologists-putting-in-mor...

Maybe when we end the war on drugs, we'll be able to drastically reduce the size of our police forces.

If it weren't for perverse incentives turning every traffic stop into a potential drug hunt, we could move enforcement for minor traffic violations to much cheaper traffic officers without arrest powers.

We could even automate most of it, so the traffic officers don't even have to pull people over except for imminent safety issues.

If we end the war on drugs we'll HAVE to drastically reduce the size of our police forces. We won't be able to pay for them without Byrne funding and asset forfeiture. Let alone the pensions for all the retired police who worked when the drug war was in place.

Which is exactly why the War on Drugs is so contested.

Poll the population, and you'll get about 75% in agreement that it should be wound down or pivoted to a health issue. Even higher stats for the younger generations.

However, you still get half the politicians talking tough on crime, drug punishments, etc. The reason: big campaign contributions from local and federal police agencies, DEA, prison guard unions, and the lawyers and courts that feed off its misery.

The societal net gain would likely be positive.

I have heard anecdotes suggesting the opposite, so no organization appears to be fully immune to corruption.

I disagree with this statement, mostly because we have various examples in history depicting groups and organizations that were, for all intents and purposes, incorruptible.

The most recent and probably also the most well-known example of this is from the Prohibition era, when a federal law enforcement group referred to as The Untouchables brought down Al Capone and his criminal organization.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Untouchables_(law_enforcement)

Each member of The Untouchables was hand-picked by Eliot Ness, the leader, for having an outstanding track record and extraordinarily strong sense of ethics. The result was a stunning success: Capone was simply unable to bribe, intimidate or otherwise blackmail any of the members. The group was instrumental in having him charged and convicted.

Hand-picked out of the rest of the Bureau, who were corruptible? Okay, so you can hand-pick an excellent team out of the bureau. But how is the bureau as a whole?

Your reasoning is not very solid here.

I start another agency and hand pick from the bureau?

If my reasoning isn't solid, how did the strategy work?

If you have to hand pick people who are corruption resistant, it means you have low confidence that a random pick from the larger organization could yield you a corruption resistant candidate.

I could pick one Snowden out of 330 million US Americans. It doesn't mean all 330 million of us are patriotic like he is.

>>If you have to hand pick people who are corruption resistant, it means you have low confidence that a random pick from the larger organization could yield you a corruption resistant candidate.

I'm sorry, but is that not what we are discussing here? The person I was originally responding to said that no organization seems to be fully immune to corruption, and I responded saying that it is possible to form such organizations. You just have to hand-pick each and every individual based on the criteria of "untouchableness."

but how does this approach scale? it might be possible to find 10-20 incorruptible people in a reasonable amount of time. how long will it take to make an agency the size of the fbi, with every employee hand chosen using a super strict criteria?

its not just the agents either. I had a neighbor who was a lawyer and was going to be a legal clerk for the dea. I had to do an interview with an fbi agent, as did all of her family and friends. they already have a process in place to pick trustworthy people, and while I guess it isnt perfect, why would you be so confidant you can do it better?

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