Hacker News Reader

Comment by saganus | Hacker News Reader

"We traced the glasses to your son from the prescription by examining the files of all optometrists in the San Diego area."

Wow, no wonder government agencies salivate at the idea of being able to monitor the whole Interwebs.

I know they now have orders of magnitude more data to process but still... that manual process must have been expensive and boring as hell.

I guess as an agent you would need to convince yourself that this was actually a very important task of defending your country or something. Otherwise I can imagine going crazy just doing this stuff for nothing...

Edit:

Another quote I found amusing:

"The friendlier one eventually described how much it had cost to investigate another recent case where a person was reported to have pulled down an American flag and stepped on it. Only after the investigation was well under way did they learn that the perpetrator of this nefarious act was only four years old."

View on HN

Wait, they actually green lit a case about stepping on a flag? To what end? Does the FBI realize how many open missing persons cases there are? This whole quote is nauseous.

It was in the middle of WWII. The FBI's zeal was pretty high at that time.

It was a tense time, so I can understand why such acts would be flagged (pun not intended).

My hypothesis is that the FBI knows some of its agents are useless, and keeps some busywork lying around to occupy them on slow news days.

I've had passive/aggressive managers saddle me with nonsense before, and sometimes they were just in a mood but if a pattern develops, it's because they can't find a way to fire you.

But, goodness gracious! Toying with people's lives, investigating random nobodies as if they might be criminals, as a side effect of interpersonal difficulties in the workplace? It's more likely than you think.

Just to be really clear since it seems some are missing the point -- this was around 70 years ago during World War II.

Pretty certain the comment could still apply today. Too dumb to promote to expensive to sack, give them shit no one else wants or make work to keep them out of the way.

I think the point is that it only applies today.

Also, nobody has actually pointed out an instance of this happening. The FBI has had several extremely high profile cases in the last year; if they are incompetent, they have managed not to be totally useless.

I am aware of the noted time period.

Just speculating, maybe they wanted to show how omnipotent they where?

If you see someone (an adult presumably) stepping on a flag, and then days or weeks later you see them being taken away, you may start thinking those FBI guys know about everything you do. Kinda like with Santa Claus and kids, so you better not do anything wrong.

Why would the FBI "take someone away" for stepping on a flag? Do you mean arrest them? On what charges?

Communism? Treason? They were japanese? This time period is not exactly a shining example of american justice. The policies seem more inspired by xenophobic and ideological fears than anything rational.

Do you have evidence that people in the last ten years have been arrested for communism, treason, or being Japanese in relation to stepping on a flag?

Well yeah, maybe arrest, maybe just "come with us we need to chat" intimidation. It was figure of speech.

Edit:

Or so I thought until I searched a bit more and found this [0]:

18 U.S. Code § 700 - Desecration of the flag of the United States; penalties:

(a) (1) Whoever knowingly mutilates, defaces, physically defiles, burns, maintains on the floor or ground, or tramples upon any flag of the United States shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for not more than one year, or both.

So I guess if you stepped on a flag the FBI could in fact arrest you.

[0]: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/700

That's not true anymore. Though, the law is still on the books, it cannot be enforced due to Texas v Johnson.[1]

Though, the author says that this is during WW2, so I wanted to clarify to any foreign readers that this isn't the case anymore in our modern judicial system.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_v._Johnson

Investigating victimless crimes is safer then trying to find a maniac kidnapper who steals people for fun.

How many violent crimes are occurring while cops investigate some guy who wants to put drugs in his own body in his own house?

'Political crimes' often generate political pressure to investigate. If a Senator's office calls the FBI making a stir about something they're going to investigate as a matter of course. It's things like that that make me wonder whether lawmakers should actually be held incommunicado in prison-like conditions for the duration of their term, much as juries are sequestered in criminal cases.

this was in the 1940s during ww2

As i've discovered, there was an active law against flag desecration thst had not yet been declared unconstitutional in the general case. This may have less to do with the war than you might think.

Why the hell didn't they contact street car company and ask if someone was looking for them?

Presumably said "spy" would presume that the code was found, and thus useless for them to retrieve, thus making the risk of discovery outweigh any benefit of retrieval. So the "spy" almost certainly wouldn't show up, and now they've been tipped off that the code may be compromised and the FBI may have become involved exactly in the manner they did.

I mean them asking the car company would have Eliminated that. It is the first rational choice anyone would make.

Most of the times starting with the wrong premise is worse than starting with no premise at all.

But now governments can prosecute as soon as they know the act was committed(and have an identity to link it to). I don't think they'd even need to see the age of the child.

A hateful heart has helped many an FBI agent in such tasks. Never underestimate the power of hate. The FBI was practically built on it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com