FBI Drops Law Enforcement as 'Primary' Mission | Hacker News Reader

FBI Drops Law Enforcement as 'Primary' Mission

thecable.foreignpolicy.com

90 pointsdredmorbius45 comments

You know, within my lifetime there was an actual state-level adversary with actual nuclear weapons, an active campaign of support of terrorist organizations far more effective than Al Qaeda, and a well-funded espionage program with real, live agents in the most sensitive parts of the US and allied governments. But somehow this threat is worthy of pooping our collective pants over.

You mean the era of J. Edgar Hoover and COINTELPRO, which spied on every domestic activist group and potential subversive from Vietnam war protestors to Martin Luther King? The same FBI that assassinated Fred Hampton? Or a CIA that operated with zero oversight, ran drugs, orchestrated coups, committed assassinations, and experimented on people to see whether LSD was a truth serum?

You think that's a government that's in control? You think all these abuses and expansions of power are a new thing?

I'm not sure you disagree with me. I'm not saying the abuses are new. I'm saying that those abuses happened in the context of trying to, for instance, suppress large-scale domestic insurgency in the context of a cold war against a state-level foe that specialized in generating domestic insurgencies.

Compared to that, you have a "group" so paltry that every couple years the FBI has to convince a mentally unstable guy to "join al qaeda" so he can be busted. Yet, the level of pants-wetting insecurity seems to be much higher.

>You mean the era of J. Edgar Hoover and COINTELPRO, which spied on every domestic activist group and potential subversive from Vietnam war protestors to Martin Luther King?

they were forced to prioritize their limited resources and abilities somehow. Thanks to technology advancements, today the NSA is spying on everybody who uses any technical means of communications.

>The same FBI that assassinated Fred Hampton?

try to gather a group of armed young black men in an appartment in a city today and see what happens. Or imagine if "Occupy" guys were armed.

>Or a CIA that operated with zero oversight, ran drugs, orchestrated coups, committed assassinations, and experimented on people to see whether LSD was a truth serum?

CIA black prisons around the world. Extra-judicial renditions and torture. Drones. The only change here is that the effects of LSD are well known today so no more experiments. I mean with LSD. The stuff they experiment with today is much more interesting.

What happens today is less of a change in direction and more of a logical extension in what covert agencies have always been doing.

NSA has always done dragnet surveillance as long as it's been feasible. Look up Echelon.

I'm not even sure the word "logical" is necessary there, and I haven't seen any indication that the activities are anything other than a continuation of what Hoover started.

Hoover's overreaches were one thing, and certainly created their own set of harms.

The level of overreach possible people's entire existence is logged in minute detail via online and electronic services -- your location, contacts, calls, and texts via your phone, your reading via your browser and ISP, emails, purchases, etc., is simply beyond compare in all of history.

The map circulating a few months back comparing the size of the surveillance archives of East Germany's Stasi vs. the NSA, if both were represented as paper files, is hugely telling:

http://falkvinge.net/2013/07/05/stasi-vs-the-u-s-nsa-back-to...

A quote from that link:

"So where the hated Stasi surveillance was a building in area, the NSA surveillance today is an entire continent."

And:

"As a final note, the word Stasi was a contraction of the East German surveillance agency’s full name, Ministerium für Staatssicherheit. It translates to National Security Agency." (Google translate says Ministry of State Security).

In the French revolution, the group pretty much playing the role of government during the Reign of Terror with many beheadings every day was called the Committee of Public Safety. The original or supposed reason these organizations claim to exist seems to be a justification to claim power and rights from the population.

I get the impression that these agencies are now going for a power-grab.

They've noticed how little the NSA has suffered for what they've done, and now they are all in overdrive trying to abuse their positions in every way possible.

The setup has already happened, though, no grab necessary. Through the PATRIOT Act and others, "national security" is now an official arm of the law enforcement and military establishments. It's just now that people are finding out what is going on, the cockroaches are scurrying from the light under the umbrella of that which can no longer be defined away from them.

Said another way, 15 years ago they couldn't redefine themselves even if they wanted to, because the military and intelligence functions of the nation were already handled by other agencies. By creating an entirely new area of the government for spying and killing, the government has built an open-ended bucket for everybody who wants a piece of the action.

Said yet another way: what's to stop them?

Kinda like HN kills such stories because hey, we're still using it.

Just to remind everyone that there still is a state-level adversary with actual nuclear weapons, and it has ~2.3 million active military personnel.

This is funny because, if there's a good justification for what the NSA has been doing, the word "China" is going to be in it somehow.

... Who will be bankrupt if anything happens to the US as they've invested all their currency reserves in T-bills. The situations are not really comparable.

This one is so much smaller it takes a lot more effort to make it seem threatening.

It's what we do daily on HN. Can it get its own menu item?

I heard a story from a friend the other day who told me about a terrorism investigation in his apartment building. Apparently some guy doused a hotel with gasoline. The NYC counterterrorism unit traced him using image search on Facebook using a photo from the hotel security cameras. They found a picture of him on his mom's Facebook page, got her phone number, and used that to locate him.

And since it's supposedly terrorism-related, they're just giving out all the little details about the case to random people in the area. I think your friend might just be telling a story to make it seem interesting.

I bet the driver's license database would be handy too.

Handy, but less useful. Facebook picture albums have a larger variety of the same face, and is more likely to be up-to-date, and often contain relationship information for help in actually tracking someone down.

Sorry, this relates to the posted link how?

His comment was informative and interesting to me, and yours was not.

Wondering what 'national security' actually was, I find this on the Wikipedia page for it:

"There is no single universally accepted definition of national security."

With 'law enforcement' you have an idea what the laws are, you know what the word 'enforcement' means and you can therefore have an idea of what the FBI is supposed to be doing.

What is this 'national security' thing they speak of? Does it mean it is okay to do COINTELPRO style stuff?

We are living under martial law. The NSA isn't even operating under civil law, but martial law (procedure and customs entirely decided outside of court proceeding, outside of the rule of law, and based on military interpretations of the law).

People just don't realize this yet, or won't admit to it because they're still in denial.

"There is no single universally accepted definition of national security."

Right, which is the point.

If the FBI's main objective was law enforcement, then wouldn't the general populace expect them to pursue other Federal agencies that are actively breaking the law? Where as, if the FBI states their main objective as 'National Security' they can turn a blind eye to the the other law breaking Federal agencies as long as these agencies are acting within the interests of 'National Security'.

And in truth, many citizens are law breakers. And many of the laws that are broken today may not even exist in a couple of years. Where as, ensuring 'National Security' is a non-transitory objective.

I agree with you, except for this:

> And many of the laws that are broken today may not even exist in a couple of years.

In practice, laws are not rolled back but grow like an ever-expanding mesh. This also relates to your comment that many citizens are law breakers: we're moving toward a future where every citizen breaks the law on a daily basis, simply by virtue of living their lives. Combined with arbitrary draconian punishment guidelines, this opens up the fascinating possibility of selective enforcement as a means to weed out unwanted elements. It's a world where pretty much everyone can be taken out of circulation on a whim, and where the threat of overwhelming legal action can be used to enhance compliance.

When Bush created "Homeland Security" I thought for sure it was a matter of time before that name was changed back to something less fascist sounding. Now I'm surprised the trend is still continuing after all these years with "security" creep into an excuse for broader state power.

"Homeland Security" is already the Orwellian name. What is now the Department of Defense was known from 1789 to 1947 as the Department of War. It's the same sort of thing. If you want to call "Homeland Security" what it really is, it would be the Department of Surveillance and Imprisonment.

Curiously, "Homeland Defense" was the term proposed by either Al Gore or Joseph Lieberman, I'm trying to recall which, in the 1990s.

One reference to Lieberman:

http://books.google.com/books?id=r_gH5s4B2SEC&pg=PA454&lpg=P...

As a Brit, I thought the entire point of the FBI was to tackle crimes that individual states couldn't due to jurisdiction not crossing state lines (nor should it). Sort of like Interpol within one country. So who does that now?

> What's not in question is that government agencies tend to benefit in numerous ways when considered critical to national security as opposed to law enforcement.

That's incredibly depressing to read.

Sometimes I wonder why the alphabet soup surrounding intel-gathering isn't collapsed into one department, something that could be called "Homeland Security" or similar.

In 1984, Orwell called it the "Ministry of Love":

"The Ministry of Love serves as Oceania's interior ministry. It enforces loyalty and love of Big Brother through fear, a repressive apparatus, and brainwashing. ... It is arguably the most powerful ministry, controlling the will of the population. The Thought Police is part of Miniluv."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministry_of_Love

United Stated Office of Unspecified Services (U.S.O.U.S.) would be my first pick.

Office of Unusual Size? I don't think that exists.

It does in swamps. Isn't DC built on one?

A possible new business model for the USPS.

All sarcasm aside, this is really an important win. The purpose of law enforcement is not to enforce laws, it is to preserve disorder. I'm not saying that is their mission, but it does clear a big talking point out of the way for real change.

edit: misspelling.

After a moment of consideration I wondered how "investigation", which thought of as "gathering evidence", came to mean "enforcement".

And now that I say it out, I clearly see the surveillance around here.

"We rank our top 10 priorities and CT [counterterrorism] is first, counterintel is second, cyber is third.."

I'd love to know how they're doing on #3, I'm not optimistic.

Cool. One less agency trying to put people through our nation's god awful federal court system, and one more agency that can get slated for dissolution when people finally get sick of being raped and spied on for their own good.

Uh...

They're putting people through the court system and double. It's just now they entrap foolish immigrants with fabricated plots that the immigrants just to commit a little to before they get rushed through those courts.

Not to mention that "terrorism" is a very nebulous term. I've heard of schoolchildren being investigated for "making a terroristic threat". Their crime? Pointing their finger at another kid and yelling "bang". And of course, the FBI can investigate all those people on Facebook who joke about "killing someone". Busting kids is a much less risky way for FBI agents to make a living than chasing after the Mexican drug cartels.

Holly shit.

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