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Comment by SeanLuke | Hacker News Reader

Did the Stasi also permit you to lawyer up with the ACLU and sue them in open court?

What these FBI agents did, if true, was reprehensible. But surely we can come up with a better comparison than one of the most evil secret police regimes ever to exist.

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The FBI doesn't "permit" you to lawyer up, the Bill of Rights does. Comparison of the tactics used is sound.

The FBI isn't "less evil" because they "tolerate" laws that they have no ability to ignore. They aren't tolerating them out of the goodness of their hearts, or out of a sense of morality. If they had the ability to ignore them, they would.

Edit: Re: responses

I'm not claiming that the FBI is incapable of violating the law, I'm objecting to the parent's claim that they are somehow "less evil" than the Stasi because they "allow" the law to be upheld, when they're not the ones allowing anything. Yes, when they are able to get away with breaking the law, they sometimes do. It's not clear how prevalent this is, because "able to get away with it" implies not getting caught.

>If they had the ability to ignore them, they would

Not to be too inflammatory but there are plenty of cases where they ignore them without technically having the ability.

COINTELPRO

Being the first free generation out of Portuguese dictatorship I never understood this American belief that three letter agencies are angels following the law.

It's mainly a thing reserved for white collar people in urban and suburban areas.

The hicks and the inner city crowd both mostly hate federal law enforcement.

> If they had the ability to ignore them, they would.

They do have the ability to ignore laws, lots of government organizations ignore congressional guidance all the time and it only ever comes back to bite them if someone objects loud enough.

The US legal system doesn't "prevent" people from doing anything, we just punish violations and for those violations to be punished someone who cares about the violation has to be aware of the violation.

It's a pretty common meme in cop shows today that "We can't wait for a judge to give us a warrant - let's bust down the door" to which the audience cheers since bad guy is obviously bad, but that is illegal and, it can potentially destroy a case IRL - but only if the defense finds out the entry was illegal.

I don't see how a legal system could prevent people from doing anything against the law. That's always a personal, moral/ethical choice. Aren't all legal systems going to be reactive because of that?

> the Bill of Rights does

The Bill of Rights doesn't permit anything, but rather lists certain inalienable rights held by all persons on U.S. soil--or so the story goes. The worry that it could be construed as a list of grants was extremely controversial.

The comparison is certainly valid. Almost all the FBI's "terrorism" convictions over the last 20 years have been people set ip by a CI or agent, including the FBI supplying materiel.

The fact that there still exists, to some degree, a mechanism in the USA to challenge this in some cases is indeed something to celebrate, but the quite reasonable comparison is not just legitimate and appropriate but is a tool for trying to fix the injustice, not just retail (one victim at a time) but wholesale (change of law).

> The comparison is certainly valid. Almost all the FBI's "terrorism" convictions over the last 20 years have been people set ip by a CI or agent, including the FBI supplying materiel.

There's a quantitive difference between an FBI agent inviting an idiot to coffee, and fabricating a plot with him to blow up a post office, and an FBI agent getting in touch with an idiot who is plotting to blow up a post office, and offering to give him fake explosives.

The former might be entrapment. The latter is good policework.

But they both result in similar convictions, so it's just another day in the salt mines regardless.

Much of the anti domestic terrorism work which the FBI did was entrapment. The FBI plants were frequently under pressure to show proof that their assigned organisations were in fact terrorist cells.

http://jfk.hood.edu/Collection/Weisberg%20Subject%20Index%20...

The police would plant people in suspect groups who pressure the rest of the group to engage in terrorist activity.

This isn’t exclusive to 1970s USA. Similar things happened in mosques after 9/11 where Imans would know an FBI agent simply because he was the only extremist in the congregation.

And in the United Kingdom, there were long term plants in environmental organisations who engaged in ecoterrorism.

I've read several stories over the years and seen at least one documentary where it's pretty clear they were doing the former. It's generally chalked up as a win, gets good press / pr - keeps the funds going in that direction, and keeps the average headline reader scared enough to be fine with pariot acts and similar things going.

I do not recall any stories of the latter.. perhaps there is one or some - and perhaps things have occurred that saved the X Y or Z and we'll never know - and that's great.

However I think it's high time that people paid more attention to the details of these "be afraid / keep sending us budgets" stories and see that many are fabricated just to check off a PR box.

9 out of 10 sex trafficking headline stories are the same, and similar.

It's not just the top level of the DOJ - the local law agencies use the same playbook (especially vice squads) for the same reasons. imho.

They did also get involved with some bad people and rounded them up too, don't worry. But a lot of their work seems to have been ruining lives in order to look productive. Tragic!

Let’s focus on what’s important. Perhaps the comparison isn’t perfect but I don’t think it matters as much as horror the FBI regularly does.

The more we start comparing to other countries and say “oh well at least we’re better than them” the more complacent people are.

Not to mention many of US’s worst action have had the excuse of “well there was some worse country out there we gotta stop!”

How generous of my government to let me spend years battling them in court, while they get to violate my rights for the duration with little consequence if they end up losing. Much like a corporation getting fined or sued by the government is often just a slap on the wrist and the “cost of doing business,” the FBI has demonstrated time and time again that it doesn’t mind breaking the law to serve its goals. When the recourse for most people when the government violates their rights is to hope that some org like the ACLU will step up and represent you pro-bono, and that the courts will actually rule in your favor, and that even if they do you’ll still have a long time of suffering while the case goes through the courts... it tells the FBI that they can basically do whatever they want, because most people don’t want to deal with that crap.

I mean, the U.S. has been caught running interrogation black sites in our own borders, so the comparison extends further than even some of the other commenters are admitting.

Source for this please? Interested to read more.

I believe parent is talking about what the Chicago PD was doing a few years ago[1]. If there are others, I'd really like to know about those as well.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/feb/24/chicago-poli...

The New York city police also maintain a black site in NE Manhattan.

That's because there are other powers of the state that (may) side with the citizen. The FBI is still behaving like a secret police here.

It seems to me that they were comparing the tactics, not the entire institution, or justice system.

What would you call a better comparison? Would you like a moderately evil secret police regime?

> But surely we can come up with a better comparison than one of the most evil secret police regimes ever to exist.

So we have to be thankful that we are "allowed" to spend our life's saving on fighting a lawsuits against a trillon dollar government ?

For every such case there are probably 100 other people who folded. There is no difference between those cases and cases where stasi might have done the same thing. It is 100% same.

Apples to Oranges. OP was referring to the MO of acquiring collaborators, not the legal environment surrounding it. Which is the same MO used by the secret police in basically all countries behind the iron curtain.

Let's not mention people lacking money for a proper legal defense.

But now that we're talking about it, you might want to read about FISA Courts. Also stuff like https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/federal-court-sides-aclu... and yet..

Edit: Your boos mean nothing, I've seen what makes you cheer.

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