FBI Monitored Aretha Franklin for Years, File Shows
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/08/04/fbi-in...
The important part to consider:
> The FBI gave its informants permission to break the law at least 5,658 times in a single year, according to newly disclosed documents that show just how often the nation's top law enforcement agency enlists criminals to help it battle crime.
I know this is talking specifically about informants, and you could make a case that that is necessary, but what reason is there to believe that this doesn’t extend to members of the FBI as well?
Here is a more recent article about this:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2021/11/18/fbi...
Every year, I pay the US government protection money at a higher rate than the mob demanded (~35% vs ~15%). They mark their territory, control who enters and exits, and demand compliance with their rules. If you are under their protection, they give you a little document that tells other gangs not to screw with you.
They back all of this up with guns and threats of violence, held by unelected thugs. They give you a process to prove your innocence, but the process itself is a punishment, since it is a huge resource drain to go through.
The FBI are the most visible thugs.
This is why it is critical to have government established "of, by, and for" the constituency - because even in a best-case scenario, corruption will get in the cracks and make them bigger, etc.
Of course, the Somali government is very small and Somali people are very free, and they aren't doing very well either.
I would say there's a correlation between less government and worse living conditions on average
I think this is true, but I don't think the correlation is causal. Rich countries throughout history have tended to grow their governments after becoming rich by adopting social programs and trying to flex their muscle internationally. Most of Europe followed this model, as did the US.
Edit. Are you claiming social programs are created to flex your country? Do you have proof of this?
Post WW2 for the US, post-Victorian era in the UK, post-Napoleon in France, post-Tarism in Russia, post-oil-boom in Scandanavia, etc. Countries with big social programs are still great to live in, but I only mean that the social programs and big government are clearly not part of the reason why those countries became rich. The big government is caused by the wealth, not the other way around.
Does your mob allow a bunch of deductions, tax dodges, "carried interest" rates, IRA's, and other tricks to cut what the well-to-do actually pay them down to half (or less) of their headline "rate"?
EDIT: Examples so far seem to be limited, one-off "if you're patting the right guy's back" situations. Vs. the US gov't allows an unlimited number of sleazy Wall Street types to launder unlimited amounts of money through various tax dodges. This might be good evidence that the mob is smarter about collecting "taxes" than the US gov't...but it sounds like the answer to my question is "basically, no".
Edit: To be clear, this was not a unique situation. A lot of businesses generally got sweetheart rates from street gangs and mobs because they helped the mob and mob bosses in other ways. The same way Wall Street financiers get a sweetheart deal because they manage the politicians' money and employ their children.
What a ridiculous comparison
* Edit since I'm spent on replies : Sure you can name that one favela somewhere where a few dozen were beheaded by the mob. The idea isn't that you'll win 100% of the time, the idea is you have some chance. I raise your one unnamed favela with several unnamed Mexican pueblos where cartel was run out by campesinos w/ break-action shotguns and rifles. And the mere fact you actually have a chance at winning is often enough to get a counterparty to back off.
Go try this in the favela near me and report back. The last group of locals that tried that were beheaded.
I'm beginning to think there's a time limit on relatively fair and effective states, as citizens slowly begin to become almost unbelievably blind to what actual criminal states are like and start dismantling their own institutions.
In no way has the federal government been 'dismantled' as time goes on. Although arguably the constitution has been dismantled, in no small part through ever expanding interpretation of the commerce clause.
If you lose your dead, that's not the case in a democracy
Governments are institutions. Considering the anarchic alternative, what we currently have is preferable. People as a group, the actual mob, cannot be trusted. They are irrational and are therefore potentially dangerous.
The trick is to safeguard against institutional rot.
So's the mob. It's why they call it "organized" crime.
Do some research about what it's like in places where there is truly no mechanism for people to remove those in power. Look at russia and the mechanisms by which decisions are made and what means there are for the public to change them, and contrast that with all the NIMBYism which often dominates the process in the US.
A democratic government is the means by which the population prevents the monopoly on legal violence from falling permanently into the hands of any individual. It isn't perfect but it's the best option we have. Pretending we would be equally well off with a despot is nonsense.
They are there to stop you from wasting department resources with requests for 500,000,000 copies of an incident report whose content you disagree with.
Bailey: Even some Western governments have issues with low-level corruption.
Also, I never said that we would be better off with a despot or a gang or anything of the sort, as the original reply tried to claim.
That would be nice if we had a “democracy”. Because of both gerrymandering and the design of the constitution - 2 senators per state, and the electoral college - we don’t have one.
The “majority” doesn’t care as long as law enforcement is used unfairly against “them”. There is a reason that during the protests in the US, protestors started using “White shields”. They knew how fast the population would turn against law enforcement when the local news showed them beating up on white people.
https://www.blackenterprise.com/white-protesters-form-human-...
Two Senators per State worked ok when appointed by State because Senators would get recalled and replaced if they voted against State's interests. Now the people vote on Senators and the lobbyists have the access and control.
You realize that the “states interest” back in the 60s was the continuing of Jim Crow laws in the South. How many Trump supporting states would have recalled Senators in the 2020 for not agreeing to give him the Presidency?
You could always reduce the size of the government like conservatives want - at least until they realize that for the most part, conservative states are smaller more rural states that are a net beneficiary of federal income taxes.
30,000 sounds like real representation, would make gerrymandering pointless, and the lobbyists would find it difficult to control even 1/5 of the 30,000. I support this bigger government! They can do zoom calls, meet regionally, or meet in a baseball stadium.
If instead we optimize this democratic republic for cost, then a king will do.
We can fix this together and everyone could have better representation in the federal House. Neither of the big parties, nor you, will discuss it. America is addicted to arguing for their team, while the lobbyists and special interests feed at our tax trough.
> how would that have worked in 1939
About the same as 1839 and 1937 and 1938.
It’s not whataboutism or about Trump. When it came time to certify the electoral votes for the election, there was a huge push for Republican representatives and senators not to certify the votes because of the “stolen election” much of that came from state houses. If the states (not the voters) could arbitrarily recall representatives, many of the Republican representatives who did do the right thing wouidnt have.
Besides, there is all types of coercion that could happen remotely that wouldn’t happen when everyone is one place.
In exactly the same way that monads are like burritos. If thinking that makes it easier to start learning more about the concept, that's great. If instead it stands in for learning, that's bad.
On the other hand, I do have this strange desire to learn Spanish by claiming that Spanish is exactly the same as English. Then I'd take all the critiques as edge cases until I'm able to argue the same point in Spanish.
God is love.
Love is blind.
Ray Charles is blind.
Ray Charles is God.
The actual wording/charge is "providing false statements", which means anything that they can later suggest is untrue.
This is why you should never, ever speak with anyone associated with the FBI even if they are being "friendly".
Say they knock at the door and have questions for you about your shady neighbor down the street. You're not the one under investigation, so what's the harm in talking to them right? Well officer friendly asks the innocuous question of if it was raining last Thursday. You tell them that it was. As it turns out, it was not raining last Thursday and your honest-but-wrong answer means you are now able to be charged with "lying to the FBI".
In practice, they knew it wasn't raining last Thursday and the question was a trap. By answering incorrectly officer friendly can then threaten to charge you at a later date, except there's an out! _You can become an informant!_. By agreeing to spy on your neighbor for the mafia they'll spare you federal inditement. You're now an "asset" that they can work for as long as they please and you have no legal recourse.
EDIT: To expand upon this, lets say it wasn't last thursday but was in fact 60+ days ago. They have a text message from you to your wife saying how beautiful/sunny the day was, because despite being "end to end encrypted" your iMessage private key is stored on Apple servers because you clicked the default CTAs during iCloud setup to enable iCloud backup. They _know_ it was not raining and have "proof" you knew it was not raining, because you texted your wife how nice and sunny it was. You honestly don't remember at the time you were questioned, maybe you think you're 100% telling the truth. Maybe you're confused, and are thinking of the thursday prior where it _was_ raining. None of that matters, they have you on a federal felony and you're their asset now.
https://thehill.com/homenews/286849-fbi-didnt-record-clinton...
The only times I've ever seen this card played is as punishment for deliberately misleading agents and wasting their time, not getting inconsequential facts wrong.
...like the high-profile Gabby Petito murder case, where Brian Laundrie's parents lied to investigators to conceal their son's whereabouts after the murder. Or that other recent one where a woman faked her own kidnapping and started a national manhunt for herself and her nonexistent kidnappers.
There's also the matter that FBI policy is NOT to record interviews, so there's only an FD-302 saying you lied and nobody can see what you actually said, only what the FBI heard.
One of the comments points out that Martha Stewart was convicted for a basket of charges completely unrelated to the securities fraud that she was indicted for in the first place. Among them: two counts of lying to federal agents.
The FD-302 thing is nothing new; anybody adjacent to CPS or domestic violence will have seen the equivalent take place in therapists' offices. Client and/or therapist can rehearse abuse stories with no accountability whatsoever.
But how many times do they use it to control/ruin/subjugate people you and I have never heard of? Who speaks up for them?
Remember, they only have to 'win' once, you have to 'win' every time.
The _actual_ wording of 18 USC § 1001 is "[...] knowingly and willfully" "(1) falsifies, conceals, or covers up by any trick, scheme, or device a material fact; (2) makes any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or representation; [...]" [0], not simply "providing false statements."
The DOJ must show that the statement was false, the fact is material to the case, that you knew it was false when you made it, and that it does not fall under the exceptions carved out by DOJ policy [1]. That is very different from what you're claiming.
In your example, the rain on Thursday must actually be important to the case and you must knowingly be attempting to deceive the federal investigators. Your honest-but-wrong answer does not mean you are now able to be charged with providing false statements to a federal criminal investigator under 18 USC § 1001.
0: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1001
1: https://www.justice.gov/jm/jm-9-42000-fraud-against-the-gove...
The threat of legal action alone is enough to scare _most_ people in this country because they simply can't afford it.
The folks who have do not carry a fear of prosecution because they can afford to remove themselves from any danger. However; those who do not, suffer under the obfuscated rules of law.
Beyond identifying yourself to LEOs, Don't Talk To The Police [0] without your lawyer present.
Great writeup on the topic
Do you have any examples of laws about "giving false statements" to local police? Seems like a rather blatant 1st amendment violation.
It sure would be nice to live in a country where we could have reasonable certainty that agents of the people's collective will (government) would act in good faith, and were bound by reasonable laws ensuring so.
Might anyone point to an example (current or historical) of a large, complex, socially diverse society which has managed to tightly control actually-serious crime, while also managing to keep the "bad cop stuff" well below the level which America has been stuck with in the past ~half of a century?
People can point to horrible police misconduct cases in other countries, but you need an immense amount of police misconduct to reach American levels.
Here's a list of the top ten countries ranked by police killings per year. Note this isn't adjusted by population. Note also that the other countries on this list aren't the sort you'd expect to produce good statistics.
Philippines — 6,069+ (avg 2016-2021—includes only deaths during anti-drug operations)
Brazil — 5,804 (2019)
Venezuela — 5,287 (2018)
India — 1,731 (2019)
Syria — 1,497 (2019)
El Salvador — 1087 (2017)
United States — 946 (2020)
Nigeria — 841 (2018)
Afghanistan — 606 (2018)
Pakistan — 495 (2017)Top 10 Countries with the Highest Rate of Police Killings (per 10 million residents — U.S. ranks 33rd):
- Venezuela — 1829.9 (2018)
- El Salvador — 1703.8 (2017)
- Syria — 819 (2019)
- Philippines — 556.5 (2016-21 avg)
- Nicaragua — 522.7 (2018)
- Jamaica — 472.7 (2018)
- Trinidad and Tobago — 339.7 (2014)
- Brazil — 276.2 (2019)
- Bahamas — 275.7 (2018)
- Saint Vincent and the Grenadines — 181.8 (2018)Mexico, Rwanda, Sudan, and Mali rank 34-37
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/police-ki...
Edit: The closest rich countries are
- Malta, at ~2/3 the US
- Luxumberg, ~ 1/2
- Canada, ~1/3
Malta is notably an anomaly: I can't think of any other rich democracy where journalists reporting on on government links to organized crime get killed by car bombs.
Malta and Luxembourg had one (1) killing each. Statistical outliers, and all that.
As a general principle I believe this kind of data should either be rigorously analyzed in depth or analyzed as little as possible. That's why I originally posted raw numbers: I think raw numbers are the only responsible way to do this kind of internet forum surface-level analysis. It's too easy to trick intentionally or unintentionally with statistics.
It's obvious the US is an outlier from the raw numbers, there's no need to get fancy.
I chose the metric of police killings carefully. In a non-tiny democracy with a police violence problem there are enough that it's not dominated by outliers, but few enough that it's feasible for a few reporters to spot check the data. They're also notable enough a large portion of the incidents generate some publicly available commentary, often in local press.
(In non-tiny democracies without a police killing problem it might be dominated by outliers, but the raw numbers make the fact killings are rare obvious)
In the US, for example, the FBI collects statistics even they acknowledge are poor quality. The Washington Post has a project to monitor publicly available information and enter police shootings into a database, and they generally find publicly available proof of about twice as many shootings as are entered into the FBI database.
The main takeaway I wanted people to take from the data I posted is that there's nearly no country like the US close to it. Either way you read Malta & Luxembourg that's true, so there's no need to get fancy (and I think further analyzing that single stat without country-specific expertise would be questionably responsible).
I thought about saying I expected underreporting from the less democratic poorer countries but I decided I didn't want to spend the time reading their methodology to be confident in that. It's possible they've already attempted to correct for that, possibly even too much in the other way. The definition of police is also complex: Whether a unit is police or military is often historical chance.
But those expecting the U.S. to produce good statistics, will just as likely be disappointed (or happy... depending on point of view). Dare we wonder why that is so?
"Black Americans were 3.5 times as likely to be killed by the police..." (oops, that looks "inconvenient" for accurate reporting).
"...the initial findings of coroners or medical examiners downplayed or omitted the role of the police when a Black man was killed..." Dare we wonder if under full reporting, if that 3.5 times more likely to be killed would go even higher.
More Than Half of (U.S.) Police Killings Are Mislabeled, New Study Says (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/30/us/police-killings-underc...)
*at the border, where most people have this interaction with their child organization CBP.
**Actually happened to me.
If you're within 100 miles of the border or the oceans. That covers something like 2/3rds of the U.S. population.
This kinda reads like a description of the CIA. How many of these have you got there?
That reminds me of the technical equivalent with five eyes, and I've never managed to figure out how that is _not_ treason.
Oh, domestic organization X can't spy on you because of that pesky constitution, but they can "allow" a hostile agency from another country to do all the spying (and vice-versa) then "share" information.
Seems pretty clearcut, our domestic agencies are conspiring with a foreign power to defraud US citizens of their constitutional rights. People should go to jail for that, but somehow it's all considered legal
There is a fixed number of people who can have their rights violated before the population doesn’t have confidence in law enforcement.
And thats what we are seeing now.
How is this any different than local law enforcement?
I’m not saying you are implying this. But it’s strange that the same people who “back the blue” locally, want to “defund the FBI”.
Besides that she played a show with Journey in a venue that supposedly had mob connections in the 80's.
I wonder if they ruled her harmless after 74 or a different organization took over/the documents have a different classification.
> In its original form the act made it a felony to engage in interstate or foreign commerce transport of "any woman or girl for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose". Its primary stated intent was to address prostitution, immorality, and human trafficking, particularly where trafficking was for the purposes of prostitution
The reality however was that it was used to prosecute interracial marriage [2]:
> Also known as the White-Slave Traffic Act of 1910, the law was invoked over and over again to punish black men for their relationships with white women—affairs that challenged the racial status quo. Rooted in fears of women’s growing mobility and racist characterizations of the sexual appetites of non-white men, the law was designed to protect women against the supposed scourge of “white slavery,” a term used to refer to sex trafficking in the early 20th century.
Later there's a dark history of the FBI's involvements with the likes of Martin Luther King Jr, Malcolm-X, the Black Panthers and a bunch of other black leaders and movements.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mann_Act
[2]: https://www.history.com/news/white-slave-mann-act-jack-johns...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO
It's a safe assumption that the FBI was monitoring any given Black person with influence, and we might as well assume they still are.
Wall Street is our Politburo, and we split the CPSU into two parties because it gives better optics.
This doesn’t add anything to the discussion and is akin to a Facebook meme post without the image.
It is hard to view this as anything but the 'deep state'. If the US was not the preeminent leader of the 'free world', American intelligence agencies would be viewed as global terrorist organizations.
People have internalized that HR is on the company's side, not theirs, but sometimes their goals are congruent. Everyone should look at government the same way.
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/651913/the-folk-sin...
* Federal level police (should be policing state/local too).
* Intelligence gathering
* Cyber security
They need more daylight/oversight and a lot more accountability. The DEA can go to hell (legalize all drugs) and the ATF can pound sand (their subjects of interest could be rolled into the FBI).
We need a happy medium between the excesses we have today and having none of those needs addressed.
Organization that operate secretly will always provide some refuge for corruption. There are always blind spots for management.
If the public has no input, how can we ever trust them?
How would we be able to audit an organization (in a timely manner) that puts up as many roadblocks as possible?
The Fed needs to be audited, too. As well as their staff, starting at the very top.
It seems in the government, secrecy and corruption is the name of the game. That's unacceptable and needs to end. The US taxpayer should demand full transparency of all organizations including intelligence services, and the agencies in question should have no choice but to fully comply except in genuine, individual cases of legitimate national security, which would be assessed by an independent reviewer.
Accountability is further complicated by the fact that the entity is political in nature, so the FBI has actual partisan backing through politicians, the court system, and even down to individual jurists.
I honestly don't know what the solution is myself.
The fact that the head of the FBI is an appointee of an elected official, there is some public accountability through voters if there is enough transparency to inform voters of what is going on.
I suppose the same is true for most local police though. As it stands, we don’t get much transparency. For a democracy to work properly, the public needs to be informed. The stonewalling by law enforcement at all levels prevents the public from holding them accountable.
You cite transparency, which is one aspect- but the other interesting problem is the incestuous relationship that our intel agencies have with the media as well.
How much political news coverage was shaped by "anonymous sources" from these intel agencies?
I forget who it was- but I remember one retired agent speaking pretty casually about how the FBI leaks information to journalists by sharing information with retired agents that still hold their clearances.
If you modernize federal drug laws the DEA would lose at lot of its teeth. It’s up to the legislatures to change laws and take power away from federal agencies.
That's precisely what would happen. Look at what's become of the IRS. It's been systematically defunded, despite the fact that the government sees a huge return on investment when they spend dollars there. The IRS has stated publicly that they only go after middle and lower-class citizen offenders because they can't afford to investigate and prosecute the big corporations and oligarchs which are where the vast majority of tax fraud takes place (note: not avoidance, fraud). This is pretty clearly by design.
The good news is with the new "investment" of my tax dollars into the tax and audit arm of the government, they can no go after the top tax dollars AND middle and lower-class citizen "offenders"! Yea!
Let's kill the income tax entirely, it's a completely unfair system. Middle and lower class would thrive, and the "big guys" would not notice because none of their real "income" is taxed, it's designed not to be taxed.
Income tax can be seen as a tax on companies that can't be embezzled. Most people are honest and want to see their full income on documents so a company has to pay the full amount of the taxes.
This leaves the lower and middle classes with less money, but it also forces the market to offer the goods for less.
The alternative would be taxing the companies directly. People would earn more, but companies would also request more for their goods because they have to pay more taxes. But would the tax payout be the same if companies have an even bigger incentive to hide their profits?
Black-and-white thinking leads to very inefficient outcomes.
That is, it makes a lot more sense to reign-in, reform, and redirect intelligence and policing agencies than get rid of them.
I think we want to work on how to align their interests -- as individual agents, intermediate commanding officers, and agency-wide -- with ours as citizens.
• Down-classify everything by 1 designation. Top Secret / Secure Compartmentalized Information becomes Top Secret. Top Secret becomes Secret. Secret becomes Declassified. (I've heard overclassification decreases trust in government)
• Shorten the maximum secrecy timespan (some information is kept secret 50+ years to avoid political blowback against operations that the public would find inexcusable)
• Shorten the average secrecy timespan (see above)
• Ban ISP's from collecting, retaining, distributing, and selling netflow metadata.
• Ban all government agencies from bypassing fourth amendment by way of purchasing surveillance from private organizations.
Edit: if you're going to downvote someone for brainstorming less extreme ideas (not suggestions/demands) as a response to more extreme ideas, please at least offer criticism of the ideas themselves.
But there are other possible reforms, for example, I'd want them to record all interviews (which is currently against policy last I knew) instead of relying on FD-302s.
And I'd like their case management system put under the control of an independent agency that will audit for things like missing Woods files, so they can't just go "oops" on stuff like that. And if they delete something, someone else gets to restore it from backup and report to the courts who did the deletion and when according to the audit logs.
I'd do similar things with police body cam footage. It should not be under the control of the police and if someone has a habit of never turning theirs on, it should be addressed and the cop reprimanded long before it impacts a case.
Same goes for jail footage, as well. So "oops" Epstein's cell camera died just can't be a thing, because it's not under their control at all and they address such things right away, not just when it's a problem.
Not just "defund", but "abolish".
They've solved thousands of missing childen, sexual predators, kidnappings, etc
CIA tortures people overseas. EDIT: CIA also arms militia groups that are against, or later turn on, American interests.
NSA has a habit of spying on every American. (Remember Snowden?)
ATF enforces all the weird gun laws, like how an AR15 is sometimes a handgun.[2] It also engages in sieges that end up killing kids.[0] [1]
DEA is all about the failed war on drugs.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_Ridge
The FBI following civil rights activists had been known for years. They tracked MLK for example