The terrifying surveillance case of Brandon Mayfield
america.aljazeera.com
america.aljazeera.com
If you do cross over them, then you find yourself inside the prison system, in a psychiatric ward, or simply disappeared altogether. If large numbers of people cross these lines at once, I suspect we will find ourselves overnight in a totalitarian system, since all the tools for mass control of the population are already in place.
Also called "managed democracy."
I always call the United States a fascist dictatatorship, but it leaves a bitter taste, since I know that's not entirely true.
There are subtle elements I'm not accounting for.
A "Managed Democracy" is perfect. It accounts for that the corporations took over the government instead of the other way around. It accounts for that protests and free speech are "allowed." It accounts for why people are at the same time militantly patriotic but apathetic at the polls. It accounts for propaganda being distributed rather than centralised.
This guy Wolin has put a lot of thought into this.
It's just that to understand implications of privacy violations and mass surveillance is quite complex topic and definitely something you can't explain to a layman in a few minutes and expect them to understand the importance. If the result is not immediately obvious with concrete examples, "nobody" will give a damn.
Those same "nobodies" act in good faith to increase surveillance to fight crime or terrorism. Then of course there are people who don't believe surveillance is effective against terrorism(as some of the leaks indicate) but have ulterior motives to support it, whatever they may be.
Have you ever heard of Edward Bernays? It's not a conspiracy; it's in the public domain.
If you want to find out more, The Century of the Self [1,2] is a very accessible introduction.
1) Education: provide a relatively weak public education system that teaches patriotism and not a lot about the rest of the world, so the masses are easier to fool. At the same time, have the best graduate schools in the world so you can have the best scientists and engineers (and technology).
2) Media: have a few corporations control 90% of your media. Make them work for you by providing news and shows that distract the masses from political topics, and at the same time instil fear in their hearts. Fear is very important for mass control. If possible, promote capitalist ideals such as meritocracy, free market, working hard, consumption, etc. through your media and school system.
3) Industries: your most important industries are armaments and defence technology, though your prison industry also plays a strategic role. Focus on having a steady flow of wars, preferably in unfamiliar faraway countries. But throw in a few domestic wars too, especially on "drugs"---to promote fear, help you with your prison industry and keep the masses away from the dangerous "psychedelics" that could make people question things. Use fear to gain power and reduce civil rights, then use your more rigorous laws and militarized police to keep the people in line and the prisons full.
4) Intelligence: your intelligence agencies work behind curtains to keep the system working in harmony and further the "national interests", using surveillance and their access to power---and the tools of fear, ignorance and propaganda---to make the masses work for the system while believing they are free and living in a true democracy. Beautiful.
Of course, these are not an US exclusive, many other countries are trying the same tricks, but it seems the US is far in the lead...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_St...
Oh, sure, there are regional variations and exceptions, but Texas is probably the only one with a population behind it worth counting.
I may seem fairly jaded in saying this but you have described, quite literally, every society in the world, and every society in history. Of course, in the West we like to pretend we have broken this pattern but we never did.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideological_restrictions_on_na...
Even if you are hardline nut and totally support the surveillance state it has to be frightening alarming that they were so dead set on harassing this one guy that they would have let the real culprit go free had the Spanish police not called them on their BS.
It's reductionist, but our society is structured around the idea of limiting powers (ie violence) to prevent exploitation. Limiting law-enforcement power, for example via civil courts and not secret ones, as it has been done for a century before this decade, was very sufficient.
This is the end result of letting the state give itself more power at will, with a faux-democratic process to justify it.
It's like the dark cave in Star Wars. It contains only what we bring with us.
Forensics, as most people should know, isn't an "exact" science, its a statistical science. It is entirely credible that Mayfield's fingerprint in their database was the closest match in the database for someone who was known to be in the area. It reads like it wasn't all that close a match as the Spanish authorities had discounted it, but from the FBI's process perspective it was a "lead" to run down.
"Despite finding that Mayfield’s print was not an identical match to the print left on the bag of detonators, FBI fingerprint examiners rationalized away the differences, according to a report by the Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG)."
It seems they need to totally separate the finger print examiner from the investigating officers so that they can't be influenced by outside circumstantial facts.
You can read the actual OIG Report [1] it is online, but the interesting bit is here, in Chapter 7 (page 269):
"Based on our investigation, we concluded that the three FBI examiners who misidentified Mayfield's print were confused by the fact that the fingerprint on the Madrid bag contained as many as 10 points that corresponded to details in Mayfield's known finterprints in relative location, orientation, and intervening ridge count. This degree of similarity is extraordinarily rare and confused three FBI fingerprint examiners as well as a fourth, outside, court appointed examiner."
I don't know how much you know about fingerprint forensics, I just know what I read, but a 10 point match is considered pretty strong from what I've read. And as I mentioned earlier, its a statistical thing not an exact thing.
It is not a new pattern, either. Look back to what we (americans) did to each other in the 50's (are You a communist? Do you act like one?). Had we had the tech then to spy like now, we'd have done so. Which means that despite the sensational news stories, I find almost apathy from normal people I meet - the paranoid has known for years (don't talk on that cell phone, they can listen in on those easily... does anyone remember this attitude?). Privacy intrusions simply exist. They are. You aren't escaping them. It might make one angry, but there is nothing people feel they can do about it. I personally disagree, but also feel the path to balance in this area is an uncomfortable one.
I for one have added it to my list of bookmarks, and hope I remember to pass it on when somebody downplays the dangers of surveillance the next time.
Ultimately, scaling back the mass surveillance state can only be done using popular support. Stories like this one are the best way to get that support, because they are concrete evidence of its danger (rather than the abstract worries that are usually repeated).
There's a difference between reading 1984 and seeing articles of how things play out in real life in your own country.
There is no difference. Nothing has changed. Nothing will change.
I was going to make a lengthy comment detailing all the possible ways that Americans could effect change, and then going point-for-point with reasons why none of those ways could possibly work in this case. But it's too depressing. Besides, I would love to wrong.
Our only hope is if a website manages to act as a "vote multiplier" in the sense that it serves a function analogous to a lightning rod: it focuses people by telling them who to vote for and who not to vote for, and when to vote, and even how to vote. No one will do their own research. Want to make a difference? Make that website, and then achieve popularity large enough to make a difference.
Gov'ts are designed for slow change. The advantage of this being that it should avoid massive populism to dismantle everything in one go (imagine if the Tea Party had control of the Senate). There are movements both in the judicial and the legislative branches to start pulling back the excesses of the executive.
Sure, Obama could "executive order" everything away, but why would the executive neuter itself? Luckily checks and balances are a thing, and we're fixing this.
Except they haven't changed slowly. Think of how far we've come since 9/11.
If the government is designed to change slowly, yet has experienced this period of rapid change, then it seems that we have to ask, "what force is being applied to overcome the slow-change inertia?"
The environment of 9/11 was particularly unique (being the first major attack on American soil from a "foreign entity" in a long time), and it's important to understand a couple things.
It's not the patriot act, but this story on the AUMF (http://www.buzzfeed.com/gregorydjohnsen/60-words-and-a-war-w...) shows the sort of environment in which the AUMF and the Patriot Act were passed. It's slightly insane.
Almost all of the "radical" change post-9/11 is based on things written in these laws written over a 2-month period that was patently different from the status quo.
Policies developed from these acts have been struck down on multiple occasions, and there is a momentum towards rolling things back, rather than going further. But we still get the characteristic slowness of government. Without a strong event to do so, it will be hard. The Snowden leaks seem to be a good trigger for a Church committee-style event, but it won't be instant.
Because I would argue that the momentum is categorically not "towards rolling things back". Honestly, I find that an astonishing statement in light of the fact that 12+ years later, we are still engaged in a rapidly progressing surveillance agenda and just learning about the Snowden revelations regarding same. This does not even touch the fact that drone strikes have risen sharply, we're still engaged in extrajudicial killings, Guantanemo is still open, and on and on.
So, it's not just that we have lingering laws on the books post 9/11 that will take time to unwind. It's that we are still engaging in--and indeed, expanding--activity supported by these laws. What is the driver for this? What is the end goal?
The result is an ossifying system of government, that is slowly, but surely diverging from consent of the people.
Most people will easily rationalize this away and just think that he was a Muslim after all. Good Christians don't have to worry about a thing (except Muslim terrorists of course).
Truly, if it changes one person's mind then it's done some good. This alone won't change anything but spreading this to allow people to see there are kinks in the armour will allow people to perhaps vote in the future for difference.
When the majority is against something, sometimes some good can be done. Not always. The government is all powerful, but there is a chance.
In fact, some might conclude that such a set of circumstances warrants the investigation described, especially given this permanent state of fear in which many now live.
In any case, I do believe the "it won't happen to me" rationalization is one of the biggest reasons people show little concern. And, for those who are concerned, a sense of powerlessness is probably the biggest obstacle to action.
The US, for example, takes fingerprints from all non-residents entering the country. In the EU, most of the countries that make up the borderless Schengen Area require you to provide your fingerprints when applying for a passport (usually from both hands). Last year, a German man refused to give his fingerprints to the German authorities when applying for a passport. His application was rejected. The case went to the European Court of Justice who ruled in favour of fingerprinting. The court stated that, yes, fingerprinting was a violation of an individual's privacy, but was neccesary to prevent fraud.
Whatever the pronouncements of officials about the protection of your personal info, it's certain, as in the story posted, that law enforcement agencies will have access to this data.
Really though?
> The FBI’s Portland field office, however, used that fingerprint match to begin digging into Mayfield’s background. Certain details of the attorney’s life convinced the agents that they had their man. Mayfield had converted to Islam after meeting his wife, an Egyptian. He had represented one of the Portland Seven, a group of men who tried to travel to Afghanistan to fight for al Qaeda and the Taliban against U.S. and coalition forces in a child custody case. He also worshipped at the same mosque as the militants.
I can't help but think I would have fallen for the same conclusion.
That's because confirmation bias is a human and common thing. Scientists have various tools to avoid fooling themselves like FBI did and like you and many of us would do.
It's not patriotism, maybe it is nationalism or more probably plain idiocy. When some innocent guy gets framed up (even when there were only good intentions by the framer-upper), it usually means that the real perpetrator goes free. It is completely irrational to support a system that gets it so wrong so often.
http://blogs.findlaw.com/ninth_circuit/2009/12/mayfield-v-us...
I know We're All Bayesian Now, but does this really seem like the way a "laboratory" ought to work? If fingerprinting really is a science, then it's a study of patterns and how they do or do not match. I'm pretty sure we have computers for that sort of task. Why isn't this totally automated by now? From the outside, the reason that springs to mind is because fingerprinting, as practiced by the FBI, is not scientific at all, and exists merely as window-dressing for the prejudice and misjudgment of agents.
I'm also not sure your assertion that being scientific makes it easy to encode in software is true (easy of course being a relative term).
In fact, Mr. Mayfield wouldn't even have suffered so if computers couldn't already do this job: it's quite unlikely that the FBI has enough staff to compare twenty-year-old military service records to Spanish bombing evidence by hand. The problem, as you nearly realized, was the threshold used in the query. There were no actual matches, yet the FBI required twenty "matches" to "investigate", so it produced twenty "matches". If the FBI had been a bit more overstaffed/bored, they would have pulled 100 "matches". It's like when we pull receivables out of the billing system to write off at the end of the fiscal year: the CFO tells us what the final number should be, and we just get the oldest accounts that sum to the proper total.
You seem to have missed the point, though, which is that if fingerprinting must be done with detailed knowledge of the field agents' pet theories, that implies fingerprinting is not scientific.
Taking a print is not perfect, even in perfect conditions. From a print in an object, not good at all.
And a lot of people have similar prints. You can't have one print you recovered from some place and find a perfect match with 100% confidence in a database (your target may not even be on the database)
Having a known identity and matching a provided sample to that DB is much better, as is having a smaller DB (for example, entering a gym)
So, yes, you can have a computer finding candidates but then you can have a human to match it more carefully (that's what the Spanish did apparently)
Fingerprint matching is automatically done by computers. The FBI has 1/6th of the American population in its database. Prints found in the wild aren't whole, the are usually partial prints. They ran the partials, found 20 people who it could be from that database with whatever degree of probability, probably very small. This of course was misused, but it wasn't the science was wrong so to speak rather the humans utilizing it were wrong and acting without good judgement and ethics.
And all the foreign tourists who crossed its border at least once.
Fingerprinting isn't really a science. The law-enforcement practice pre-dates the common use of the empirical scientific method. The assertion that fingerprints are unique is unproven.
It is normal for law-enforcement to chase down a false lead. Most leads are dead-ends, from my lay understanding of detective work. In retrospect, Mayfield was a dead-end, but the key question is: when should the FBI have realized this? The actions that they took would have been justified, I think, if their suspicions had turned out to be valid. (all except the 2 week incarceration - and even that would have been clearly justified if Mayfield had been charged.)
In any event, this is one of those cases which highlights a growing problem in the US legal system, which is the redefinition of "punishment" to exclude pre-trial incarceration and harassment. Law-enforcement has attained an ever growing list of exceptions and ad hoc powers that override a man's right to a fair trial before being punished. City police can "detain" you for up to 72 hours, for no reason. The FBI (apparently) can "detain" you for at least 2 weeks, again without charges. I believe that these rights to ad hoc, extra-judicial incarceration need to be rescinded, by an act of Congress, as these rights enable systematically arbitrary and abusive behavior on the part of law-enforcement at both the local and federal level. I believe they make the general population, whether they know it or not, unsafe from predatory police behavior.
In the end what criminal investigators do is they find details and piece together a narrative from those. One huge problem with massive surveillance is the ability to piece together whatever narrative the investigator wants to put together based on a much larger field of information to mine.
Whats happening right now is a organization and its supporting organizations, finding it hard to stay on the line of justice in a world, where America is a small word, compared to what it was like before. Patriotism is nice, but it has reduced meaning today, this is no longer a world, where you can stay within your borders and hurt everybody outside it.
A good example, is from the movie Hobbit 2, where the elf king is reluctant to look outside of his wooden kingdom.
With great power comes great responsibility.. if you have power over Americans, you have responsibility over Americans, but in case of NSA, they have power over the data of all the people, thus their responsibility is towards everybody.
This is surprising to me, that he knew what he was being investigated for. Is there any reason why they would tell him?
It is absurd to claim that this should not have happened. All detection methods have a false positive rate. Judging by what has shown up in the media, the FBI has a counterterrorism false positive rate of one person every few years. That is a stupendously low rate for such a rare yet politically-charged task.
Let's not forget their other famous false positive terrorism case: the anthrax case. Their needle in a haystack search turned up a false positive, but it also turned up the true positive.
The only terrifying thing here is that they suspected him of being a serial mass murderer, and then proceeded to apply such poor spycraft that a false positive was spooked. There are going to have a hard time catching real baddies being that sloppy.
And this is why truly independent oversight of any and all police/justice/secret service-activity is required.
Please, please, stop wallowing in this idiotic paranoia or persecution fantasy or whatever it is. This guy looked suspicious as hell during a period of raving government paranoia, in a case involving a public safety emergency, and got interviewed for two weeks.
Yes, that is scary and obnoxious for him, but what more do you want? Investigate mad bombers slowly, carefully, like a stolen car case? Invest $500 billion to raise the false positive rate to one in 10 billion?
The only reason Mayfield is a free man today is that the Spanish police repeatedly told the FBI that the print recovered from the bag of detonators didn’t match Mayfield’s fingerprints. The FBI, however, continued to stand by its lab’s findings until Spanish authorities conclusively matched the print to the real culprit, Algerian national Ouhane Daoud.
That "only" is not rhetorical -- the guy would probably be entombed in a supermax or frying in the electric chair if he had been flagged for a terrorism case in the US, in which case the FBI would have had sole jurisdiction and there would have been nobody with the power to say that a) you guys are mistaken and b) we've nabbed the actual culprit.
Of course the burden of proof for investigating someone's behavior is lower than to get a conviction: if it wasn't, why would there be investigations? I don't want to defend the FBI's idiotic handling of this (namely ignoring all the evidence against the theory), but acting like the FBI has sole discretion to throw someone into prison with so much evidence against their theory is very bizarre.
The only reason he might not be a free man would be that the court system can be very slow.
I'm not trying to say the state of affairs is OK, I'm saying that even with the FBI's craziness, the courts exist as that final checkpoint where all this can end up being reversed.
Is that all you're worried about? This article points out some of the problems of being arrested, like concern that others in the jail will find that the arrestee is accused of being a terrorist. There's also the social taint of being so named, which may make employment more difficult.
Even without arrest, there's still the stress of knowing that one is being observed. See what happened to Steven Hatfill, a "person of interest" in the anthrax attacks of 2001, who was never arrested.
Then there's the issue that some huge majority of convictions (95+%?) are plea bargained, and where the prosecutor's strategy is to give as many charges as possible, so it's in the interest of the defendant to plead guilty to a few of the lesser ones rather than the much more expensive trial needed to defend all of the charges.
Also, there's a strong desire to not question a judgement, keep the case open, and preserve information which might otherwise lead to a reversal. Quoting Wikipedia: "In the case of Joseph Roger O'Dell III, executed in Virginia in 1997 for a rape and murder, a prosecuting attorney argued in court in 1998 that if posthumous DNA results exonerated O'Dell, "it would be shouted from the rooftops that ... Virginia executed an innocent man." The state prevailed, and the evidence was destroyed."
We know there's, what, over 300 overturned convictions based on DNA evidence (meaning, that's limited to only those cases where there was physical evidence that could be used).
All this should be evidence that 1) using court judgements is ignoring a large part of the issue, 2) the trial must not be the final checkpoint, and 3) the legal system is not set up to help aid post-trial exonerations.
In order to have standing, one must prove that a favorable ruling would provide relief. Mayfield wanted information kept by the government from house searches to be destroyed, and the gov't argued that even if the FISA ammendments and PATRIOT act provisions were declared unconstitutional, that this information could still be kept.
Two arguments are pointed out:
>a Fourth Amendment violation occurs at the moment of the illegal search or seizure, and that the subsequent use of the evidence obtained does not per se violate the Constitution
>the Fourth Amendment does not provide a retroactive remedy for illegal conduct
The first point is based off of this case(http://www.casebriefs.com/blog/law/criminal-procedure/crimin...)... it basically says that the notion of illegal evidence only exists in a criminal court setting. In the case mentioned (concerning parole hearings, which are administrative hearings), this evidence can still be admitted. The argument can then continue that the gov't can hold onto the information, they just are not allowed to present it in court (supposedly).
I am not sure of this interpretation, but that was the argument.
Maybe bizarre, but true -- consider how many people have been proven innocent and released after sometimes serving decades for crimes they didn't commit.
http://www.innocenceproject.org/Content/DNA_Exonerations_Nat...
Quote: "There have been 312 post-conviction DNA exonerations in the United States."
The above refers only to people proven innocent using DNA analysis. It's certain that many more innocent people remain incarcerated for whom no DNA evidence exists (or has been retained since the investigation) to prove their innocence.
> The only reason he might not be a free man would be that the court system can be very slow.
False. There are many ways to convict a person besides incontrovertible direct evidence of guilt. Here's my favorite:
http://www.theargus.co.uk/news/1764562.man_served_six_years_...
In summary, a man was convicted of rape by a pathological liar and thrown in jail, served six years and was finally released after his accuser went on to serially accuse many other men of imaginary sex crimes. The woman was admonished by the court and released without serving any time.
And the anti-terror system is constructed to specifically avoid the process of a suspect appearing in front of a judge and being innocent until proven guilty. See, for instance, Guantanamo bay.
Like a confession that they would surely get if guy was not a lawyer himself.
I don't think this case is good evidence of that. The problem was that they really believed he was guilty, not that they were unconcerned with whether he was guilty so long as they had someone to jail.
"It would be like doctors prescribing the nearest drug to hand without bothering to find out what was wrong with the patient."
No, it would be like doctors jumping to a conclusion too early and then prescribing based on that conclusion. That does happen fairly frequently, though, if I understand correctly.
Right, so the process failed (after the agents failed). Nothing stopped the FBI from harming the guy despite their total lack of actual evidence.
> The problem was that they really believed he was guilty,
People will make mistakes. The system has to allow for that. But it didn't.
The FBI has no jurisdiction. Courts have jurisdiction.
A single partial fingerprint would have been laughed out of the prosecutor's office. If the prosecutor was idiotic or careless, the judge would have thrown it out. If by some reverse miracle the judge had believed it, the jury, defense lawyer, and expert witnesses would have stopped it.
There are dozens of layers of reviews and protections, not the ignorant "FBI has sole jurisdiction" theory you are spouting.
Honestly, have you never in you life watched a single episode of a police procedural TV show? Even an episode of Cops?
There is also the matter of the DNA that goes along with every fingerprint, which would have definitively exonerated the suspect.
The FBI was simply doing their job: vacuum up as much information as possible and look for patterns. Their only legal obligation to the suspect is to get search warrants before searching and not torture him. Period. Cops incriminate, the rest of the system sorts it out.
You want an investigator that analyzes the value of evidence and lays criminal charges too, you convene a grand jury. But not the FBI, not cops of any kind.
Haha, c'mon. Your supporting evidence is Law & Order?
When there are judges being sent to prison because they themselves were found sending boys to private prisons for money, do you expect people to have confidence in the justice system? Yes, fabulous, the judges were eventually caught. But in the meantime their corruption inflicted serious harm on all involved.
I'm pretty sure you're trolling. I need to believe you are.
Is it because he converted to Islam? That covers 1.25 billion people. In fact, the fact he did army service (yes I know there was the Fort Hood shooter, but for the most part people who do voluntary military service aren't your best bet for finding a terrorist, least of all one to bomb Spain of all places...), he had no valid passport (travelling under a fake ID In the western world is far harder than other places), etcetera. They ignored anything that would push them in the direction of "Oh he's not a terrorist". That's not very good, and that's horrifying as that could literally happen to any of us by nothing more than some bad luck.
And yeah, I agree with you on the spycraft thing. Those agents should be removed from field work if they're that terrible :/
==================
It seems in some cases they didn't just ignore it, they made up stuff to make it look worse. The "false identity" thing is just insane.
Agent 1: "Hrmm.... there's absolutely 0 evidence that he travelled internationally. That must mean that he's an ubercriminal who has the ability to travel undocumentedly - he's even more powerful and criminal than we thought! This has to be our guy! Anyone who can travel internationally without leaving any trace of it is that much more dangerous!"
Agent 2: "Well, he may just not have travelled at all, and this might not be the bomber."
Agent 1 (speaking in to sleeve): "HQ, we've got a 827 in progress - please proceed with plan XPJ - repeat, 827 in progress, request immediate XPJ."
Try reading my comment again, you fucking dumbass. EVERY DETECTION METHOD HAS A FALSE POSITIVE RATE, AND THE FBI'S FOR COUNTERTERRORISM APPEARS TO BE ABOUT 0.5 PER YEAR.
It could not "literally happen to any of us with a little bad luck". You are several orders of magnitude more likely to be struck by lightning. More people have won $100,000,000 in a lottery than have been held in non-criminal custody by the FBI due to investigation mistakes.
That's an error rate so low it would make jetliner engineers faint with envy. (You are orders of magnitude more likely to be killed by such an engineer than inconvenienced for a few days by the FBI.)
Nevertheless, taking this case as an example, it must be concluded that the FBI would have "inconvenienced" one less citizen if they had applied Occam's razor on some of the evidence, or had not ignored some proof that had ruled out that particular suspect.
Would they constantly do this, their false-positive rate might even be lower(!), they might not have wasted resources on a pointless investigation against this person... But, yes, a further "Uber-Terrorist" which indeed is able to plant false evidence to cast doubt on his guilt might elude them.
What I don't agree with you at all is calling HN user girvo a "fucking dubass", so please leave this community, we'll not miss you.
Living in a free society requires a certain toleration of risk. That means letting suspicious people go, even if they 1 in 100 might be guilty. We don't lock up the other 99 just in case. In fact, we do the opposite as expressed in Blackstone's formulation: "It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer"[1]
Define "excellent" here?
If you mean "the search returned a result" then great, it was technically excellent that they found a best match.
If you mean that the best result was actually relevant and useful, then nope. And they harmed a person and his whole family because of it.
And the excellent response was ... investigate harder. They did not drag him into a jail and torture a confession out of him, Japanese style. They did not torture him and his wife for anything they could get, Russian style. They did not disappear his entire family and business partners, Columbian style.
While waiting for the next few hundred people to be blown up, they ... investigated quietly. When the whole thing fell apart, they sent in a team of trained assassins to, well, actually there were no assassins or torture chambers, just a couple weeks in Club Fed as a material wotness. You know, like all the other witnesses locked up for a few days when they are trying to sort out who is the deranged killer and who can be safely released.
Getting a partial match is a false positive. Using that partial match to investigate the 20 people who have a partial march is the consequence of that false positive.
To then say that he travelled as a terrorist u der a fake passport because they doscovered that his passport had lapsed and that he hadnot travelled abroad - that should not have happened and I do not feel absurd for saying that.
Surveilling someone so poorly that they know you're following them, and using their awareness of being surveilled as evidence of their guilt should not have happened.
Locking him up for 2 weeks should not have happened.
His awareness was not used as evidence of guilt, silly. Not even that idiotic article said that. It was used as evidence that he was a flight risk.
This:
"Because the FBI agents had no concrete evidence that Mayfield was linked to the Madrid train bombings, they decided not to apply for a criminal wiretap...Rather, they applied for a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant..."
This:
"They couldn’t arrest him because their intrusive surveillance still could not find any evidence of any crime. He spent two weeks in jail..."
This:
"The FBI’s belief that it had their man, despite all contrary evidence, was so strong that it provided misleading sworn statements to a judge."
Perhaps the most terrifying aspect of all, though, is that the fact that this lawyer represented a terrorist was considered to be evidence that he himself was a terrorist. Let that sink in for a minute. An accused terrorist hired a lawyer for a child custody case, and the FBI concluded that the lawyer has a connection to a terrorist organization. Replace "lawyer" with "plumber" and "child custody case" with "leaky faucet" if you do not understand the problem.
That's the exact purview of the FBI - they weren't mining databases, all they have to do is send a guy out to chat with some local base personnel, find out where he used to live, look up neighbours etc. This is all active, in-person investigative work.
The FISC is pathetic.
Of course I don't know why I'm bothering at this point - remotely seeming like you disagree with the HN groupthink on surveillance topics is just a magnet for downvotes and not discussion.
The government surveillance program gives MUCH more data to be misused.
The guy was actively investigated - it's not like laws could be passed which are going to bar the FBI from investigating people who potentially are linked to major terrorist attacks, and doing things like asking co-workers, old neighbors, etc about them - or looking up court documents (which would show he was the lawyer on the cases he was on).
Which is my problem with the article - trying to frame this as a data collection issues is absurd. It's a procedure and institutional culture issue, and the big question is how a detention warrant was granted on such flimsy evidence. By focusing on a nebulous data collection issue, we in fact miss the important lesson and we're unlikely to change the part which has direct, real-world consequences (side note: 2 weeks detention is the same amount of time Australia's 'anti-terrorism' laws allow the federal investigators to detain you without notification or charge).