FBI Questioned Michigan Senate Aide About Tear Gas Bill | Hacker News Reader

FBI Questioned Michigan Senate Aide About Tear Gas Bill

theintercept.com

50 pointsjbegley12 comments

On the surface, looks like poor bureaucratic communication. FBI agent gets a tip that someone said something that triggered an alarm at this address, but with zero other context. Agent proceeds to play Bad Cop and interrogate the subject.

What seems stupid to me is why wouldn't you at least do some due diligence on the address? Are they really hitting so many houses in a day they can't be bothered to figure out who lives there, and are their snooping tools so poor they only get a single point of data "Possible bogey at this address." Real good way to get someone shot IMO. The reason for a visit and the context around it should be much more front-and-center. Like, from their perspective either this was completely innocent, in which case you don't need Mr. Bad Cop in the first place, or you're walking into a house with a bunch of would-be domestic terrorists, in which case you're going to need a lot more than two plain-clothes officers with guns.

Now what seems alarming to me is the idea that Zoom is automatically SWATting people, just like they used to say about the phone lines. If I say I'm going to "bomb the capitol" on a zoom call am I going to get a visit from Mr. Bad Cop?

What should concern you most is that they didn't disengage when they were informed that she was a Senate staffer discussing legislative work and in fact seemed very bent on getting details about the legislation in question.

The FBI is responsible for monitoring lawmakers too, it is possible for Congresspeople and their staff to break laws. It's part of the FBI official list of duties. I specifically and explicitly want law enforcement monitoring elected officials. Imagine if all you had to do was claim you were researching legislation and law enforcement just disengages, that is a ludicrous request.

Why should FBI be interrogating people without their lawyers present, when they have no evidence of a crime? The FBI should not be deploitng Gestapo/Stasi denunciation tactics on anyone.

Talking about tear gas in the privacy of one's home is not a crime. If that appliance repairman was the "informant", he should be in jail for wiretapping.

Nope, if you are stupid enough to talk about important confidential topics in front of rando strangers you have no expectation of privacy. These are the types of people Chinese spies target and harvest information from, if anything this staffer should be let go for mishandling information.

> When she told them about the proposed legislation, they insisted on knowing what it would say, whether it would be formally introduced, and when.

Is that really necessary?

I would imagine that those questions would be easily answerable if true, similar to how a border guard might ask seemingly random questions in that context but a series of 'uh, uh' answers might indicate something else. Sometimes investigators ask questions just to keep the target talking and build a report. Those questions are reasonable to expect a public figure politician and their staff to answer.

Imagine if the FBI did any investigating prior to avoid the easy and obvious authoritarian parallels while questioning a free citizen working for an elected representative.

I want the FBI to do their job; I just don't want them to look like and/or be the bad guys. In this situation, they smell like the bad guys.

What’s the point of doing due diligence, exactly? To prevent a situation that will go unpunished once the agents claim qualified immunity and the agency will just ignore? If there is no feedback mechanism to discourage an action, it will happen if it’s the easiest course of action.

For reference, the CIA penetrated senate computers to delete evidence of their own actions and spy on senators under John Brennan without consequence while the NSA engineered a mass domestic surveillance program and its director perjured himself in televised sworn testimony, executive branch LEO & intelligence doesn’t respect any of the supposed separations between the branches, because there is no consequence.

> It all feels so Iron Curtain (or maybe J. Edgar Hoover)

It's awkward when you are criticizing the FBI and you suddenly remember that the FBI acting as a weapon against freedom and democracy was its original purpose.

Yeah, when entire wings in your headquarters are named after a fascist and authoritarian, that's not a good sign. It'd be like if there was Goebbels building in the German intelligence.

Incredible that everyone in this thread just takes the word of this person like it’s the gospel. Did it occur to you that maybe she is being less than candid about exactly what she said?

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