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Comment by vharuck | Hacker News Reader

>It is becoming apparent that the U.S. needs an independent agency focussed on transgressions by law enforcement / a civil rights enforcement bureau.

YMMV, but:

Many agencies have an Auditor General with a cadre of agents whose entire role is to investigate and publicly report on what that agency does wrong. Sadly, I can't think of any Auditor General's office with the power to punish. So if the agency is acting unconstitutionally or illegally because the governor or agency director wants them to, it's on the public to push for change. That's a hard ask.

For issues with state agencies, contact your District Attorney or state Attorney General. I've never done this, but it's stuck in my mind as the path to go. If other people want to report their dead end stories of doing this, I'd welcome the lesson.

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The DAs work with law enforcement on a daily basis. They are in some ways considered law enforcement themselves (they have detectives and investigators working directly for them). My experience is that they don't care.

I've contacted the AG about stuff in the past. He was a complete idiot. I contacted him about a state law that was being violated by a state government policy and he said he would forward the complaint to the FBI. Why? It has nothing to do with federal law!

In my experience, state AG's can be very helpful with consumer complaints.

Yes, but those are usually against companies. Do you have any info when it's a complaint against state agencies?

Better than my state AG. She actively works with state law enforcement to deny people their rights without saying that's what they're doing.

That's kind of what's going on here. There's a state law making it a felony to reveal specific information of citizens except in specified situations. They are revealing that information contrary to law, so a violation of the statutory right to privacy.

You're thinking Attorney General. The correct title in the U.S. is Inspector General, and they fall under OIG, the Office of the Inspector General.

Note: outing classified to an Inspector General not cleared, will still get you thrown in prison. Even pointing in a direction to start asking questions or getting cleared may carry legal consequences that OIG has no authority to protect you from, even if in the end you are in the right.

I've often thought the OIG should be charged with and have authority to countermand and investigate executive agency oversteps through unfettered access to all information regardless of classification in the Executive branch, but it'll never happen.

> The correct title in the U.S. is Inspector General, and they fall under OIG, the Office of the Inspector General.

Note that each agency has its own IG (usually within an OIG directly under the top-level of the agency), there is not a single central OIG.

What you just described is one of the biggest downsides of accepting a security clearance - and, happily, the First Amendment prevents such consequences for those of us (like me) who have never done so.

I very much respect my friends and colleagues who have made the other choice, but it's a lifelong sacrifice of liberties that are otherwise present.

The nature of Auditors General or Inspectors General is explicitly that they cannot punish. If they could, they would essentially just be another layer of management. The tradeoff for not being able to punish here is having unlimited powers to ask for documentation and to investigate.

The system is set up under the assumption that the institutions themselves cannot have systemic issues and all problems are really the work of individual employees acting outside of what they're supposed to do, and so you're supposed to sue them in their personal capacity. Then the Supreme Court basically slammed that door effectively making remedies impossible to obtain. Deetz: https://www.americanbar.org/groups/litigation/committees/civ...

> agencies have an Auditor General with a cadre of agents whose entire role is to investigate and publicly report on what that agency does wrong

This was the case with prosecutors. Then in 1870, President Ulysses S. Grant consolidated them under the DOJ [1]. The common portion of their work, criminal litigation, was specialised and conflicted enough that the benefits of densifying its practitioners outweighed the cost of distance from the field.

I argue a similar problem persists among our Auditors and Solicitors General. Yes, there are advantages to having them in house. But there are disadvantages, too, and the bad outweighs the good.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_Ju...

> For issues with state agencies, contact your District Attorney or state Attorney General.

State agencies often have their own IG or similar office, and DAs may not have jurisdiction over state agencies. Some states have centralized agencies that have general oversight of illegal activities in state and sometimes local agencies, as well (Bureau of State Audits in California, for instance.)

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