127 comments so far with no mention of the partial solution described at the bottom of the article:
> take all the Play stuff and move it out of its tight integration with the low level system and into userland, where it can be sandboxed. That gives you back granular control over all the resources Play Services wants to use, and what data it and the app which use it want to send back. That's the approach GrapheneOS takes, a Pixel-only open source Android distro – OK, ROM – that by many reports hits the sweet spot of maximum control over security with minimal impact on the daily Android experience.
> Teamed with a second-hand last-but-one generation Pixel, GrapheneOS raises the seemingly oxymoronic possibility that the most data-tight and user-configurable mobile platform costs less than $200, has negligible environmental impact, and is powered by the data ogre Google itself.
> It doesn't matter how badly the FBI, NSA, GCHQ or the dictatorships behave, they can't have your data if you never send it. You'll still have to take care of what you do online and how you do it, but at least you can build that castle on a halfway decent rock.
Yes this is the option striking the best balance of function and security which I have been using for over three years. I have tried other custom operating systems and debloated carrier provided devices, but Graphene tops all the options IMO.
The baseband could be exploited for targeted surveillance. First they would need to identify your device. If your device is anonymous and you carefully use your SIM for data only, identification is difficult.
Brave and patient folks are working on Linux handsets such as Librem and Pinephone that have fewer attack vectors. I hope to switch to one of those when my Pixel stops receiving updates.
Don't forget about your cellular provider. They can always easily triangulate your location. And if they know where it is at night, almost every night...
The more important piece highlighted by your comment is "Why should we have to?" They're the one committing crimes, in pursuit of hypothetical crimes we're not committing, and also with very little evidence that what they're doing even helps.
This sounds like the mindset adopted by folks who accuse others of "victim blaming" (not saying that you accuse folks of this!)
"Why should you have to avoid dark alleys? No one should be mugging you"
"Why should she have to dress modestly just because men can't keep it in their pants?"
An ideal world would be great, and it's awesome to fight for an ideal world.
But until that world arrives, it's prudent to take steps to protect yourself. That's why you lock your car after parking it.
> Why should she have to dress modestly just because men can't keep it in their pants?"
In the entire course of human history, has dressing modestly ever protected anyone from getting raped? Like a rapist is out to rape, and be like 'oh no, that's a modest woman, better find someone else'? Do women that fully conceal themselves for religious reasons not get raped?
Like even the 'everyone should have a gun' narrative makes more sence than this.
Great point - a good threat model usually targets all companies first, such as FAANG, since they are the worst aggressors, and are well known to be leaky (data dumps of personal info are leaked almost daily now), whereas the government tends to be seemingly less leaky and have more narrow data interests, i.e. less interested in the wide array of data that companies extract from people.
It's strange how often the government is the main entity discussed in privacy concerns while completely ignoring the much larger problem of corporations in that area.
You may not realize this but, every cellphones gps is tracked and bought and sold to various companies every day. Every minute of your physical location and identity. Every ad you see, your search interests, also for sale by the petabyte. Your browsing habits, your purchases, even your social media data has likely been bought and sold. Your ISP also sells your data, likely to advertisers.
The FBI actually recently purchased a bunch of this kind of data because the governments restrictions would t allow for it any other way.
Much of the big events of lately are more related to mass surveillance, censorship, and election interference. Check out the Twitter Files, Russiagate, and final Durham report on Racket.news. Congress has been holding a special investigation on the weaponization of the federal government related to this but more broadly. Recently FBI admitted to having many operatives in the capitol on January 6. Then you had the recent revelation that the FBI violated rules ~280,000 times by accessing private information without a warrant. There is so much more, but whatever large centralized internet services or data brokers can gather is potentially available to government agencies.
Get a phone case that lets you have an NFC-capable credit card in the back? Not exactly the same, but might be good enough. (I do appreciate the advantage phones have; you have to unlock the phone first, NFC is not always active.)
We're big users of NFC cards in Australia, so have already been using those for years.
The convenience factor for me is that I don't have to collect the paper receipts! At the end of the week I just bring up the Google Wallet app's transaction history and enter that data into my home finance tracking software.
Are there other trust worthy distros for older not Google android devices? I remember checking out the space half a decade ago and it was dismal. IE, may brick your device, may be malware, may have worse security issues, etc.
The problem with older hardware is that all the phone kernels are such piles of kludges, and once the manufacturer stops maintaining the kernel fork and/or binary driver blobs, you get no security updates for wifi/bluetooth/baseband bugs.
I gave one to my sister, mom, and tech challenged partner. They love them. The area that required help was coaching them on operational security by picking better apps/networks and maintaining their firewall settings properly.
Waco is more an example of the FBI doing something it should have been doing, but doing it incompetently. Which is certainly a discussion to have, but intervening against the Branch Davidians seems well within the mandate of law enforcement given what was going on there. It shouldn't have happened the way it did, but that doesn't mean the ATF or FBI were over-reaching.
I think the ATF has a much higher incident rate of over-reach then the FBI, the FBI tends to create thier own crimes by "infiltrating" non-violent groups, then making them into extremist, providing them with a plan for a crime, then arresting them before they carry out the FBI informants plan...
ATF however tends to just rewrite regulation based on political goals, and then use their new regulations to make people felon's then respond to these new felons with extreme violence.
Ruby Ridge, Waco, and many other famous cases like them were all started by the incompetent ATF not FBI.
ATF routinely violates the civil rights of citizens and an business owners, openly and with out remorse. Personally I think Waco would have turned out far differently if the FBI was the original agency going after them. the FBI only came in after the ATF royally fucked everything up, as usual
I'm mad too because, look six weeks ago. The FBI declared "radical-traditionalist Catholics" to be a potential enemy to infiltrate, develop tripwires for, and put under surveillance. Even more ridiculous was that it actually attempted to define the term by internal theological opinions (do they like the Vatican II council from 1965? Do they accept or reject the Pope?).
Now, one doesn't need to be a fan of far-right or "radical-traditionalist" Catholics to think that this is an absurdity. When is the last time you've heard of a Catholic bombing a plane? The memo itself had not one incident listed, but said that it was a preemptive action (literally no history of violence listed, but they could be!!). Merrick Garland announced after the leak that the memo was atrocious and would be deleted immediately and rushed to declare that the memo did not meet FBI standards and that the FBI would not investigate 1st-amendment protected activities - but nobody's going to face consequences.
And to top it all off, it used the SPLC (Southern Poverty Law Center) as a source and got away with it, even though the SPLC is blocked as a source in the FBI due to bias concerns. So it's OK to use blocked sources if it's the right motive. What the heck...
They had the option to handle it any time between 1957 and 1993
> After the siege, McLennan County Sheriff Jack Harwell told The Dallas Morning News: "I would have tried to arrest him, and I would've never walked out of there alive. One day there had to be a confrontation with them. They were building for this."
The second you grant government agents rights and privileges not given to the general population, and then on top of that provide them immunity from just about all accountability both systemic, and individual you have the makings of Tyranny...
As the saying goes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and we have had plenty of "good intentions" granting both federal and local police ever increasing power, and ever decreasing accountability.
Total armchair hero here, even with accountability tyrannical behavior is still persistent, because at the end of the day you still have to go and actively put your hands on people. It's reminiscent of how DRM is always circumvented because it's inherent that the content must at some point finally be revealed, and how immune cells inevitably kill the occasional normal healthy cells.
The Waco incident obviously had a less than ideal outcome but actually I’m a huge, huge fan of the fact that someone went after a compound of militant child-enslaving rapists.
Kind of weird to put it here as an indictment of the FBI.
I think you can both support going after "militant child-enslaving rapists" and disagree with the methods they choose in waco...
To move it away from political charged event like waco generally the police have a habit today of creating more violent situations, often under the guise of "officer safety" when in reality is "street justice" they are after.
The cause of the fire was thoroughly investigated and found that the child-rapist doomsday death cult brought lit the fires themselves. You know, as death cults tend to do.
It could totally be possible that 1) death cult did not have death-cult level convictions AND 2) FBI felt like burning a bunch of children alive AND 3) no one has offered good evidence of this
Or it's just a really gnarly situation that did indeed need to be handled by someone and came out to a pretty bad outcome still.
Tanks sound ridiculous until you see they had grenade launchers, grenades, several fully automatic rifles, and 200,000 rounds of ammunition for 136 firearms.
Yes the FBI investigated themselves and found they did nothing wrong... ::shocked pikachu face::
That said, even your telling is not the official narrative, as the official narrative was inconclusive as to the cause which the FBI claims was either intentional or accidental by people in the building.
Of course there is no mention of them shooting massive amounts amounts of highly flammable gas into the building, with the full knowledge their primary heat source was open flame heaters....
or FBI and ATF randomly choose to burn dozens of children alive...
Davidians themselves have said the fires were set purposely. There is audio of them prepping fires to burn purposely. Independent experts have separately verified fires started in 3 separate locations with accelerants.
Anyway, the Davidians need not have started the fire for the initial claim, that FBI/ATF started the fire "as a tactic" to be completely and utterly wrong. Divorced from reality.
Edit: And no, they did not find FBI/ATF did nothing wrong. This was in fact a huge reckoning for both entities. But no, they did not purposely start the fires.
Did they actually find the AR-15s with illegal modifications? If I remember correctly, the FBI said they were "destroyed in the fire" and the witness that said they heard automatic gunfire from the compound which kicked the whole thing off either retracted their statement or was found to be unreliable. I don't remember exactly, there were a few of these in the 90s and I don't remember anyone really trusting any of the investigations. One of the last times this country agreed on something.
Per the official reports, they did find several fully automatic weapons, but the report does not list all weapons/ammunition found in a single list, so the following is a subset of firearms/ammunition found:
> ...by May 3 the Texas Rangers had recovered 305 firearms from the compound, and approximately 1.9 million rounds of "cooked off" or spent ammunition. Among the firearms found were at least 20 fully automatic AK-47 assault rifles; at least 12 fully automatic AR-15 assault rifles; at least two .50 caliber semi-automatic rifles; and anti-tank armor-piercing ammunition.
Yes they did and Davidians also testified that they were modifying them
> Davidian Donald Bunds recounted how Koresh ordered him to buy a lathe and milling machine; Bunds said he then learned to use them to help convert 90 to 100 assault rifles to automatic weapons in 1992. Bunds and several other Davidians testified that Koresh issued every male follower an automatic assault rifle and multiple magazines weeks before the ATF raid… at least 48 illegal machine guns were recovered from the burnt compound.
Entire volumes of books have been written about how the ATF screwed up everything in that case... I am not going to write an entire essay. Read some books on the subject
Seems well established that the death cult lit the fires themselves as death cults tend to when under pressure. From audio recordings inside the compound:
```
6:01 a.m.: A combat engineering vehicle (CEV) hits the building and sprays bursts of liquified CS gas powder. A Hostage Rescue Team sniper sees green tracer rounds fired at the CEV from the compound. FBI commanders shift to their "compromise plan" and gas the entire building.
6:09 a.m.: Davidians discuss pouring something in a hallway. One asks, "David said pour it, right?" Another says, "David said we have to get the fuel on."
6:19 a.m.: Koresh says, "Nobody comes in, huh?" Someone answers, "Nobody comes in." "Allright. They got some fuel around here?" Koresh asks. Schneider says, "Yeah, everybody."
6:29 a.m.: FBI commanders report that a CEV accidentally cut the Davidians' telephone line.
7:08 a.m.: A man says, "Real quickly you can order the fire, yes."
7:21 a.m.: Amid talk of spreading fuel, a man says, "So, we only light it first when they come in with the tank. ...right as they're coming in?" "Right," someone replies. A voice calls, "We should get more hay in here."
This suggests that "going after" the compound was not really about the welfare of any children. They could have hardly performed worse in said child welfare unless they had made an itty-bitty Dachau and ran the kids through it.
>This suggests that "going after" the compound was not really about the welfare of any children.
Not just that, but given the way things played out repeatedly (not just Waco, Ruby Ridge, the Elián González situation, etc) it's hard to believe much of what the FBI asserts happened in those cases. It's too difficult to not see some higher up putting their fingers on the scale and trying to whitewash what happened after the fact. What little we do know seems to really reek of REMFer controls over what was allowed to happen.
And who can forget the infamous images of some of the agents standing over the ashes with grins? No the official story on Waco is one of the things that I cannot take at face value. It certainly didn't help going to public school and hearing about the events while attending a church that had an (undeserved) reputation due to busybodies who made up stories. I grew up sincerely wondering if one day the government was going to show up at my church one Sunday.
For all that we're told the Branch Davidians were a cult (and certainly it sounded like they were depending on the sources you read up on) they had all the trappings of being just another church. It is only because we were told that they were cultists, that we were told they were child abusers that we mostly didn't wonder at how the government was acting towards a CHURCH, a place of WORSHIP. It's a serious blindspot, compounded by the fact that it was the government, their accusers who were responsible for all these deaths.
The authorities claimed a belief that doing nothing could lead to a mass suicide[1] (really a mass murder/suicide due to the children). This belief may have been reasonable based on the apocalyptic beliefs central to this Christian cult.
But, the authorities when discussing the decision to go on the offensive with an armored vehicle punching holes into the buildings and firing teargas canisters into those holes made claims that seem contradictory. The authorities said that they were aware that the Dividians possessed enough gas masks for all the adults, but that they hoped that "motherly instincts" would take over, and the parents would allow the children to flee[1]. I don't see why they would believe this, if they believed the Dividians were capable of murdering their children in a mass murder suicide.
Money is usually a factor in all things in the US. Perhaps cost was a factor in attempting to end the stand-off? Neighbors seemed to be becoming fatigued by the standoff too. An even more protracted siege may have ended better, or the Dividians might have chosen murder+suicide rather than surrendering no matter how long they were given.
Wikipedia article[2] states:
"Of the 85 Branch Davidians in the compound when the final siege began, 76 died on April 19 in various ways, from falling rubble to suffocating effects of the fire, or by gunshot from fellow Branch Davidians.[34] The siege had lasted 51 days."
But, skimming through that 34th citation[3], I didn't see anything that stated that Davidians were killed by gunfire from other Davidians (perhaps I missed it, but I don't think so). But, it and the LA Times article report on fire investigators who found various fire accelerants including kerosene and lighter fluid in multiple locations and on multiple members of the Christian cult. And, quite the armory of weapons including over a million spent round casings (many firearms illegally modified to be fully automatic) in the possession of the Davidians.
I heard an interview with an divinity scholar who said he and others had tried to reach David Koresh to try to convince him that his reading of the Apocalypses was incorrect (IIRC these attempts included messages delivered through advertisements taken out with local media). They believed that if they could convince Koresh he would end the standoff. Having interacted with religious zealots, this seems naive to me, but it certainly would have been worth trying. (I cannot remember the divinity scholar's name and my vague subject searches did not return anything useful)
The problem with law enforcement in pretty much any country and with the intelligence services in particular is that they tend to see everyone as a suspect and the group think perspective is that the means justify the end.
And most of the time oversight of these agencies is a joke. Unless a director and its subordinates actually do jail time for what they did, just maybe firing them is a slap in the face of the victims.
The problem I see is, that there is no personal responsibility for anything.
A cop beats someone, plants drugs, fbi does an illegal search, cia trains a future terrorist and people die, etc...
The "best case" that can happen to victims is, that taxpayers cover some costs, and that's it.
For every action, there is a field worker, a chain of command and someone paid to give commands and take responsibility for that. If those people ended up in jail for everything illegal they do (as do all the other people in other industries), the world would be a lot nicer place.
There are several challenges with this: first, courts have adopted the concept of “sovereign immunity” that shields government personnel in most situations. Next, prosecutors usually have a very close relationship with law enforcement and are generally reluctant to prosecute (although there are some that seem to delight in it, different problem).
Finally, we have a judiciary that in general is very deferential to law enforcement (again there are some exceptions but the rule holds).
I think that there are two cultural aspects to the whole law enforcement apparatus that are undesirable- first, that they are a closed brotherhood and have to always take care of each other, and second, that it’s “us against them”, eg that LE is adversarial to the general populace.
For most of US history the armed forces have tried to stamp out these ideas in our officer corps, trying to walk the fine line of encouraging obedience to superiors while emphasizing personal responsibility and ethics. Not always successful but a serious attempt to establish and maintain a culture that avoids the toxic aspects that we see in LE culture.
Let the 'free market' figure it out. Require a private insurance policy to hold a LEO permit; and have the private market decide that specific officers - whole types of policing are too expensive. If a officer has to pay 10,000% of their wages to hold a insurance policy abuse/derliction would have consequences, and department hopping would also be mitigated.
There's practical solutions. If a cop did something bad, it shouldn't be a prosecutor from the same city who they may have to work with one day on a case, it should be one from out of town. And if you say a cop won't cooperate with any prosecutor, then well too bad, that's part of the job and if they don't like it, they should find another career.
Cops and prosecutors are coworkers whose jobs fundamentally depend on cooperation from the other. They aren't and won't ever be adversaries. A given prosecutor having a personal working relationship with a given cop certainly makes this worse but it isn't the core constraint.
An out of town prosecutor will still consider police generally to be allied peers. They still have to go home afterwards and have a working relationship with the local police, who certainly consider the cops a few towns over to be part of the same family and will consider prosecution of one of them an affront to all.
Prosecutors can ask a grand jury of citizens to investigate and indict. Then the prosecutor is the attorney for the State doing the attorney stuff in court.
Grand juries are powerful, and thus can also go off the rails led by prosecutor manipulation.
It's really not reformable in the way people normally mean by that word. The incentives and constraints that create this environment are core to the history, identity, and civil-political mechanics of the systems themselves. The individual people acting within these systems are actively opposed to reform, and there isn't a mechanism to force it without their cooperation. The solution really is to scrap the whole thing and try something else entirely.
Reform and re-form are different words in contemporary usage. Destroying an object to use its resources to make a new one with a different purpose would be re-forming and yes that is what I'm advocating here.
I was careful to indicate which meaning I intended in my originally comment, but of course you can never be so careful as to avoid a bad faith nitpicking here on hacker news can you.
> If those people ended up in jail for everything illegal they do ...
Are you and I included in "those people"? The problem is the western legal system. People don't understand whats illegal. We can't require people to be lawyers just to have a job.
If you shot an unarmed man in the back... would you not be punished for that? Or if you planted drugs on your friend? If you planted a microphone/camera in your friends place?
I’ve got curve 25519 inked on one arm, a stylized “citizen four” on the other, and little else (a Galois quote).
My opinions on this are no secret.
But I don’t see a solution or even mitigation at lower cost than the benefit. It’s just too easy for mediocre technologists with a mandate to do effective surveillance.
I’ve adopted a policy of transparency so extreme that surveillance is a non-issue, and that’s a privilege. I live in a jurisdiction where the authoritarian ambitions of the state are still merely ambitions, and I understand that not everyone has that luxury.
For people really against the wall on this, political dissidents in an authoritarian state, there are ways to be hard as fuck on cryptography and privacy, but it’s a lot of work and you only need to make a mistake once. And that sucks.
The real answer feels like a fantasy but it’s always worth remembering the fantasy: stop capture, the fungibility of wealth into political power, and the ability to inherit legal immunity as well as a mansion.
"Or you can buy a top brand like Samsung, if you're happy with the bloatware and the recent deal with Meta – details not revealed, but it's safe to assume Zuck's hummingbird will be slipping its tongue into your sweet data nectar somewhere along the line. That may not end well."
It doesn't mention Samsung's cloud backup, which is enabled by default. It stores EVERYTHING from your phone on a server in South Korea. (This includes the contents of the removable uSD card, if one is present.) I'm sure the NSA loves this.
Alexander Acosta the US attorney who let off Jeff Epstein reportedly did so because he was told Epstein "belonged to intelligence". Turns out Epstein was an FBI informant.
just yesterday on the pro-cashless WSJ article comments someone mentioned the fbi was a bad actor, and everyone jumped in saying there were so many rules added after JER that something bad would never happen again. sigh.
My perspective is this, and disclosure: I've been working with the FBI on numerous occations.. The FBI is a large organization of around 35 000 - 40 000 employees with 50+ field offices.
The FBI's mission is to uphold the consitution and protect the U.S from foreign intelligence, espionage and terrorism. Note that the U.S. population is ~ 332 million right now.
I think the FBI's dilemma is "damned if you do, damned if you don't", constantly having to find the right balance with regards to "what is too little, what is too much?".
There is also the classic services-dilemma of.. if you get attacked.. everybody will yell "where was the FBI??". If an attacked is stopped in it's tracks the majority of times you won't even know about it.
Another (equally flawed) take on the FBI is that it's main job is serving as the enforcement arm for the organized white-collar crime cartel known as Wall Street. This is supported by the fact that so many FBI executives get lucrative jobs on Wall Street after they retire, and that very few executives are ever prosecuted or investigated for criminal behavior (see 2008 subprime fraud - in contrast, Iceland sent 39 bankers to jail over that).
A nice case example is the HSBC drug cartel laundering scandal, in which HSBC laundered $2 billion in Central/South American drug cartel money and yet noone in that organization ever served prison time for it, due to decisions made by the FBI and the US Justice Department. Indeed, James Comey (later FBI head) got a job as an HSBC consultant.
However, if we didn't have some kind of federal legal enforcement system, then American corporations would start acting like drug cartels, e.g. if Goldman Sachs could steal from JPMorganChase without any consequences, then JPMorganChase might retaliate with violent attacks on GoldmanSachs offices (which is how cartel wars play out in Mexico, and see also alcohol prohibition in the 1920s).
The problem is that the FBI doesn't limit itself to legitimate law enforcement issues, but also tries to manipulate and destroy political movements that are not aligned with the interests of Wall Street, the military-industrial complex, and their corrupt Washington politicians, using illegal surveillance and infiltration tactics, etc., rather like the Gestapo/STASI outfits in German history.
> There are four major classes of threat vector in your phone. Hardware, OS, apps and malware.
I would correct this as hardware, OS, Apps (including malware), and external systems including carrier and destination sites.
In my opinion when it comes to data flow, there is little to no distinction between apps and malware. On the other hard, the carriers do collect both meta and data about activities, so do the other end of most communications.
I am also uncomfortable with not dwelling in to this vector. It is very much akin to "just use Private/privacy/Incognito mode when browsing". It may take care at the device, but nothing outside of the device is protected. APTs often pick their target based on external data availability.
"A fundamental vulnerability in the Network Processing Unit (NPU) chipset has been uncovered recently, which can be exploited by attackers to eavesdrop on data transmitted over a wireless network, affecting over 89% of real-world Wi-Fi networks." [0]
Yeah, in the discussion about privacy, most of it centers on the social networks and the OS, but dishearteningly leaves out the cell carriers and the internet providers. I'm sure AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast, et. al. love this. They're flying under the radar, and I'm convinced that data is a lot of what organizations like the FBI are buying, so that Facebook and Twitter can claim they aren't giving them that data.
To treat state actors as hostile, there are a few things you can do.
When traveling, travel with a wiped/clean system, maybe restore from an image that has casual use so as not to be completely clean and arouse suspicion. Then when on the other side of immigration, download your real image.
Use something like VeraCrypt to protect your data. You can use this in conjunction with a script running in the background, so if the volume dismounts, any sensitive programs open can be closed automatically. Also set it up as a bosskey type thing so it can auto-dismount and close sensitive programs on a specific key combo. Ideally some form of steganography would be used also, but there is no solution I'm aware of that can hide gigs of data in a movie file or something.
If possible, remove vendor keys from SecureBoot and use your own key and sign your own bootloader. Have it boot into Windows unless a specific key combo is pressed, and then it can boot into whatever you want. As a hobby, I'm trying to come up with a way for it to boot into a virtualized windows instance, without giving any signs of it being virtualized.
Software like Prey may also be useful, to allow remote locking of the device.
The challenge is that these are all terribly inconvenient solutions. For ex. what do you do if your flight is delayed and you're stuck in the terminal for an additional few hours?
In effect, we are trying to solve a problem with technology that could be better solved with laws limiting powers and adding oversight.
> For ex. what do you do if your flight is delayed and you're stuck in the terminal for an additional few hours?
Consume recreation materials like books or movies, work on stuff that you don't care if a state actor sees, or do work purely remotely on a server you control.
> In effect, we are trying to solve a problem with technology that could be better solved with laws limiting powers and adding oversight.
It's going to be a long time, probably not in my lifetime, that we would be able to completely trust any state and have such oversight and regulation. We won't get there the way we are going now. I mean I agree with you, it's a better solution, I just don't see it happening anytime soon.
Why do we need an FBI? There are over 200 other federal law enforcement operations, and certainly one (or ten) of them will step up to fill the gaps in cross-state criminal investigation that would be left by disbanding the FBI.
In the US, basically every federal agency is responsible for enforcement of federal regulations in the domain assigned to it. Until 2003, there even used to be a dedicated Library of Congress police for example.
I just leaned that the post office has armed officers as well. That’s so ridiculous. Each of these agencies also stockpile ammo, a portion of which is used each year for training.
I’d be happy to see the FBI take that role on for federal assignments _if_ that reduced budgets and the current rot was excised in some meaningful way with mechanisms put in place to hold individuals accountable.
Just wait until you learn that one of the eight uniformed services of the US, along with the army, air force, and navy, is... the NOAA Corps. Yep, the weather men.
Weather service was militarized almost everywhere up to very recently, mostly due to air-force concerns. Usually this meant that it was provided by a military organization, but the US has a thing for branching its military forces.
(Actually, I don't know about any country where it's completely civilian up to now. But that's not something I ever looked.)
The FBI is the generalist of them, the rest are nominally more specialized to their particular parent department's purview. Inefficiency by just having a separate department for every federal crime is a silly way to try to go about limiting overreach when we haven't even really tried proper oversight and enforcement.
States have their own FBI-alikes and they're not much better when it comes to privacy they just have fewer tools but mostly because they're not getting that much in the way of work that would need it. If they get delegated responsibility they're not going to turn out much better than the FBI.
With the level of gerrymandering at the state level I'm less sure that's true today, in theory yeah you're individually a larger portion of the vote but the same anti-democratic processes freezing things at the federal level are in part rooted at the state level. On top of all of that the Republican party who's benefitting the most in most states from gerrymandering is more pro-police power than not, they're just mad their guy got got by it.
Yeah you don't need the FBI specifically. You do need a group that does what they can do. I think for the most part state agencies could hand what the FBI does. You do not need a national agency.
There definitely needs to be cuts in 3 letter federal agencies. They're out of control.
In the end though, it doesn't matter because eventually over time all of those agencies with too much power will become corrupt. Massive oversight and constant cleaning out of people that have been entrenched too long is necessary.
Disbanding it will just cause an alternative force to replace it, and you'll need to wait to see how that will develop, which could well be worse. Think of it as a variation on the 'don't rewrite' mantra, rewriting it causes massive instability and has an unknown deadline, improving what is there is much easier.
If you want to envision some kind of Utopian view of law enforcement then there is the simple problem of 'who watches the watchers', a question that has been bugging us since antiquity and which I don't think we'll see an effective solution to in this life (or the next). Every law enforcement body consists of people and people are fallible, and will always be fallible. So you need to accept that and design accordingly, and you also will need to accept that mistakes (small ones and much larger and graver ones) will be made, as well as abuses of power.
To re-architect a police force in the United States that transcends the states is an undertaking that in the current political climate is undoable. So advocating for abandoning the FBI effectively advocates for abandoning federal policing in general, and that certainly isn't going to have a net positive effect.
and you'll need to wait to see how that will develop
No. We won't.
You're going to give the FBI's responsibilities and tools to a new agency? It'll be crystal clear how it will develop the next day.
DHS was formed in 2002. By 2003 what we in the public would later know as "extraordinary rendition" became commonplace.
I think you guys are all being naive. Or maybe you guys really are just this innocent that you believe in the inability of newly formed agencies to act with capability and resolve.
Which would be especially simple in a situation where we get rid of the facility for investigating wrongdoing among law enforcement agencies. Which is, (checks notes), Ah, the FBI.
I'd be very careful following anyone telling us that the FBI is not enough. They've done it before, and we ended up with the Patriot Act. Then they told us the problem was not only the FBI, but CIA too! That landed us with a DHS and a FISA court that is illegal for us to even ask information on.
Think long and hard guys, about who exactly are the true people behind all these calls for new, more comprehensive agencies. And what their ultimate goals might be.
jaquesm is speaking reason here. There is no sane point to disbanding the FBI. They're doing their job. If they have made a mistake you don't like. File a complaint. You can even contact your congressperson. But disbanding them is not a reasonable option.
It’s remarkable that the FISA court has been allowed to continue. Hopefully with evidence that it’s being routinely abused someone will having the standing and resources to get the real court to restore some security to the people (ironically, what these agencies are supposed to be protecting).
oversight is the answer.
Crime is real, and the FBI and other law informant agencies do good work but not all of the time. They need proper oversight with genuine consequences.
Instead they get blank checks and too much authority.
Thank you for saying this. For better or worse, US is too big of a country for state enforcement only. That said, FBI should not be an intelligence agency turned against its own populace.
I saw more calls for disbanding recently along news items discrediting it ( for a good reason, but let me finish this sentence ) and in next breath proposing federal police replacing state enforcement.
I personally do not think it is a good idea. I like the idea of oversight ( and one that does not hide behind 'national security' ).
You don't need it in a world without modern technology. Not that you can have it. Technology is this enslaving, centralizing force which leads to all this... everything. Abolish it.
They are in charge. They framed many people and spied on a sitting president.
Huge number of politicians were involved with Epstein’s island. Which is looking like a huge honey pot. They must have crazy dirt on people sleeping with under age girls. They will do what they are told.
CIA met with him multiple times before he was killed in his cell.
Of course they could release his client list and put all those people in jail. But they won’t
If the CIA was accountable to the public, even in the loosest and most vague sense, that list would have been released on day 1. "Hey citizens, here's a list of the people who have been recorded sleeping with under age girls (and boys). Most of these people are powerful individuals who are C-Suite or higher at multiple Fortune 100 companies, or are currently sitting in the Senate or House".
But because the intelligence agencies have their own goals and are unaccountable by nature to the public, that list will never see the light of day, and will be used by the CIA to advance the CIA's desired goals, while funded by the taxpayer.
There's a reason Kennedy wanted to disband the organization entirely.
I can't forget reading declassified case of testing drugs (probably LSD) on unsuspecting people in a motel and surveying them. One particular detail that stuck in my head was the pleasure some agents were getting out of this "test" (documented by other, more adequate agent).
I've done LSD a handful of times, it's wonderful when done in the right set & setting.
Being dosed with LSD some 50-60 years ago without warning and without any knowledge of what LSD is or what it does to you....that's dystopian level shit. And it's not like mushrooms where after a few hours, you're back to normal. LSD lasts 12+ hours (and you're wired as hell for another 12 hours to the point where you can't sleep)....plus now you've got random people spying on you throughout the whole trip and you can't really understand why?
People in power really are sick assholes to their fellow human.
The ideologues who survived WW2 escaped and now have created an impenetrable fortress in the very heart of their enemy, and are using it as the base from which to enforce fundamentally racist, totalitarian-authoritarian ideologies which ultimately result in chaos, death and calamity at massive scale around the world.
Local police forces can be reformed and replaced outright as needed when they become corrupt. There really is a "too big to fail" effect where any institution that is no longer allowed to fail will invariably become about maintaining itself and its own power rather than performing whatever duties it was established for. The question with the FBI however, is whether it has become corrupt, or if it always was.
The problem with the FBI is that it should never have been allowed to be a police force. It should be a scientific advisory agency only. From the civil rights era to the Russian dossier, The FBI has become a political tool and that's wrong
Most people would love for an organization like the FBI that possesses their reach and oversight to protect their values and authority, although particular means may vary.
I’m coming to feel like there are too many ambiguities in regard to anti-State, surveillance, security, etc. sentiment.
A lot of the kind of talk like in this article boils down to disputes over power and its preservation.
I’m not familiar with the Register’s ideological bend, if they possess one at all, nor that of the author’s. Nonetheless it’s worth taking into consideration the liberty and agency that this article is seeking to defend in response to the state’s.
I hear you about people offloading the work of their values being protected by another organization.
However I think that time has shown the following:
- The values of organizations can change rapidly within a human lifetime.
- It's possible that tomorrow you're actions in the past are seen as a problem for these organizations.
What I mean practically by these two remarks is that it can't be relied on for any organization to have your best interests at heart "tomorrow". So I believe that it's in the best interest of the user to always be the first line of defense for their data and privacy. With regards to the register, not sure it matters what way they swing for political affiliation if the end result is that the individual has control.
The real threat is systematic violation of legal and Constitutional rights & protections. That is very different than a law enforcement agency that occasionally overreaches. The threat is the overreach.
So long as we persist with the ridiculous idea of "independent" executive departments, we will have out-of-control bureaucracies and agencies with toothless congressional oversight and impunity versus the president. The president either has control of executive departments or does not. The presidency is the most direct path to voter accountability for executive departments (by design), because we all know Congress slow-walks and sandbags accountability until it ceases to be a campaign concern.
Most of the "dragnet" surveillance technology and operations aren't being operated by the federal govt itself.
The data is (usually) very eagerly handed over from private company CSOs (or equivalent) to agents who ask very nicely in that meeting you weren't invited to that wasn't on the calendar. The cases you hear about with formal warrants etc are some non-existent-percentage of collection. Go look up the legal definition of "collection" "exploitation" etc... because it's not what you think it is.
Collection "at scale" is only possible via the massive and growing privately owned surveillance capitalism systems. Just think of the infrastructure you have to RUN to be able to collect at scale.
I can also tell you that if you can dream up a way to spy on people it's already being done at some level.
[nb. SIGINT and IMINT are different stories so please don't tell me how most of the data we have is MASINT or some shit - citizens don't care about that data (and shouldn't)].
It's not the FBI that is the problem as they are implementing a system that US Congress designed. We need to revisit the statutes that keep getting renewed despite our complaints.
In the non electronic world would we tolerate the post office opening every letter we send and photo copying it and turning it over the FBI?
>The IT security equivalent is an "Assume This Device Is Tapped" sticker on every phone, tablet and computer.
I stick them everywhere, but mostly on toilets as I feel this has the most impact - but its also an eye-catcher on my new electric motorbike, since it makes the point fairly well:
If you're curious about the debates in this comment section over just when the FBI became corrupt or political or conducting illegal surveillance or whatever, you should read Tim Wiener's history of the FBI, Enemies.
(It's available in audiobook form, if that is a format that works better for you these days.)
Flamebait and clickbait get upvoted a lot. That's the bait part.
The general topic has always featured on HN as it is well nested in the Venn diagram of things people are curious about here: security, surveillance, public policy, espionage, you name it.
I'd separate those two issues. That topic is fine, as long as the article is good. If the article is bad, it doesn't matter whether it's this topic or another. (You're exaggerating the frequency with which it happens, though - might be a case of the notice-dislike bias - a terrible name which I'm still waiting for someone to improve on - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...)
Last point - @dang doesn't work. I only saw this randomly. If you want reliable message delivery, you need to use hn@ycombinator.com.
Thanks for the reply! Not to derail any further but there have been numerous events that ought to be a perfect fit if it were only a matter of the Venn diagram. For example there has been no mention of Volt Typhoon malware on Guam or Russia's Snake malware.
I could be biased but I think there is a concerted effort to bury these topics. I would have loved to see a discussion with this crowd! I'm sure you're busy so don't worry about responding, I'm just airing something that's been on my mind.
I'm not aware of any effort to bury those topics or anything similar; but some of those posts did get downweighted by other software filters.
I've sent repost invites for https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36062943 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35913168. If you want to track this and notice that either of them doesn't get reposted within (say) a week, you'd be welcome to post it yourself and email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll give it the SCP treatment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308). (Btw I suppose I should add that I'm not doing this because I think the topics ought to be better represented on HN, but rather because those two articles look interesting. Interestingness is the only thing we care about.)
People draw conclusions from what they see (or think they see) about posts on HN but the conclusions are almost always wrong because they're so strongly affected by the perceiver's priors and are based on such little data. The main reason why an article X doesn't get attention on HN is because that's the default outcome for any article on HN. That simple fact has more explanatory power than most other explanations people come up with, but has the disadvantage that it's boring.
"If the Durham report shows anything, it is that the FBI leadership bent over backward to protect [Hillary] Clinton's campaign while launching a full investigation into [Donald] Trump's campaign on the thinnest of pretexts,"
What I never understood is why people assumed that alliance necessarily involved collusion. It didn't. Russia saw Trump as both ally and self-destructive weapon therefore they acted in his favor. Trump is a greedy fool and sees Russia as a source of profit and so he aided them. These activities do not require a mutual agreement.
How did Trump aid Russia? He was chastising Europe and Germany in particular for being economically tied to Russia. He literally encouraged their decoupling, which would have been extremely detrimental to Russia. I've read in the "news" that Trump supported Russia for 7 years now but I never saw any evidence of him doing much of anything to actually help Russia. Unless you think that encouraging European countries to pay their share of NATO dues actually helped Russia, but that takes some mental gymnastics, since NATO was never actually weakened.
This reasoning is circular. A proper investigation is predicated on evidence of a crime, of which there was none here. Most people view it as immoral to persecute under color of the law, as you advocate.
The Russian regime has a very strong, long term interest in turning the US into a s*t-show, and that's why they support Trump. The reason they want that is to be able to suppress movement towards democracy inside Russia. It allows them to say "see, democracy isn't all it's cracked up to be, just look at how much of a s*t-show the USA has become, move along, nothing to see here, let's get back to our mega yachts...".
btw to learn more about this look for a Frontline PBS show featuring Timothy Snyder called Putin and the Presidents.
As bad as American division had been, it's far worse now. We elected a man who threatened to throw his opponent in jail, and who claimed so loudly that the election had been stolen that hundreds of his followers invaded the US Capitol to steal it back. The US is on the verge of a massive economic crisis because of partisan combat.
Russia seems happiest when the US is divided against itself. It makes cogent policy impossible. They don't need to interfere directly. All they need to do is nudge us to our own worst instincts. And electing the personification of our national id has left us utterly incapable of acting.
That was a partisan affair. The people pushing those prosecutions are just as responsible.
Treating campaign puffery as real existential threat to the continuity of government and spending years pursuing very weak intelligence reports was more damaging than any thing he did.
Leaked US secrets with the Russian Ambassador. Secrets that cost years of political capital with Israel that had gotten those secrets. The leaked info included the name and face of a israeli spy still inside ISIS putting his life at risk. He also did not tell about this meeting to US media and the media found out after Russian gov sources posted photos of trump and 2 senior russian members giggling together in the white house
Eased sanctions on multiple Russian oligarchs such as Deripaska. Also planned on removing multiple sanctions on high end tech for Russia.
Told the international community he believed Crimea was Russian, despite Ukraine still claiming it as theirs. Also froze US aide to Ukraine which helped bost russian mobilisation before the invasion.
In terms of PR, he publically praised Putin multiple times, defended the Russian Syrian invassion, he defended russian allied states like Belarus over the EU. Dismished condeming russian attacks and the poisoning of UK citizens. Hired Manafort, a guy condemed for running pro russian campaigns in Ukraine, as his campaign manager. Publically sided with Russia over US intelligence sources that claimed Russia was using the taliban to kill american soldiers.
So how has Trump aided russia in summary: Reduced sanctions, shared classified info, talked them up internationally, hired their propaganda internationally to run his campaign and sided with russian sources over us intelligence in multiple PR nightmares.
He for sure admires effective cruel dictators. You can add MBS on that list, he bragged pretty openly about 'saving his ass', which even from common media looked exactly like that.
I am sure he did some good stuff, but he made sure its extremely easy to hate him by often behaving like a childish diva. Oh and for anybody in US - basically whole world outside, apart maybe from few friendly dictatorships like russia or saudi arabia, hated him during his presidency. Kind of 'insult your basic intelligence and human decency in 2 easy steps' guy. But current pro-russian, anti-covid etc crowd liked him a lot (when you are getting manipulated like a marionette I guess it doesn't matter if from east or west)
I agree with everything you said, except there is no evidence that Trump aided Russia (or anybody). Russia’s basic approach is to sow discord in the USA any way it can.
What? Even allowing that all those nines are hyperbolic, at various points in time it was reasonably popular for "right wing" people to be concerned about defending from Russia and biological preparedness. The past few years have shown those to be more than mirages.
I don't think so, you can find quotes where George W. Bush showed a reasonably good understanding of Influenza pandemics, and Mitt Romney called Russia "without question, our No. 1 geopolitical foe".
I wouldn't call right-wing reasonable it is quite different than Conservative/Republican. Right-wing is the wildly unreasonable distance cousin of Conservatism.
I have no problem with political Conservatism I've even voted for my local and federal politicians a few times and other times Liberal political parties.
And yes the same applies to the political Left. I like to consider myself politically Centrist as best as I can.
This podcast provides a non-partisan overview of what the FBI did related to Hillary Clinton’s email servers and Trump’s Russian collusion investigation:
Even the extra-informed person could be forgiven from knowing the ins and outs of this because of how long it has gone on. But this is a great summary.
Essentially the FBI is a rogue agency. They have no one watching them. They are beyond repair, and even when it comes to presidential candidates they have no limits to their ability to violate constitutional rights and lie under oath. Their leaders have no dedication to upholding the truth - it’s about protecting themselves. A thoroughly corrupt organization.
When people say “drain the swamp” the FBI is target number 1.
> Essentially the FBI is a rogue agency. They have no one watching them. They are beyond repair...
Outside of dictatorships, is there any law enforcement agency that gets the sort of oversight and accountability which the government departments (say) plowing snow off the roads receive? I am not aware of any. And outside of utopian delusions, "eliminate law enforcement" doesn't actually work in a large, modern-ish society - they are very quickly replaced by even-less-accountable private vigilante groups / criminal gangs / military / etc. Human nature abhors a power vacuum.
Perhaps it would be more useful to look at who benefits from unaccountable law enforcement, and do something about the roots of the problem? Especially look at all the "innocent citizens" who really don't want to believe "good cops" may be rotten creeps, or to hear about the messy details of law enforcement unofficially upholding a social order which is quite beneficial to those "innocent" citizens.
I never said I thought an institution with similar powers to the FBI shouldn’t exist. I said that the FBI itself has proven itself beyond repair and control. So it should be disbanded. I can think of many ways it could be done better but for decades the same problems at the FBI have been occurring so the slate needs to be wiped clean.
With similar powers (and similar lack if oversight), I’m thinking that such an FBI-replacement agency would have similar problems in very short order. Sounds like a laborious feel-good exercise.
Vs. you’ve saying that replacing the FBI with the GCJ, then replacing that with the HDK, … IEL … JFM … would actually improve things? Sounds like you basically regard it as a PR problem.
The fact that the FBI persists "as is" *and* doesn't change its way tells us one very important thing...to those who matter it's doing a great job. It's doing what it's supposed to be doing.
The FBI is similar to the economy. Many complain "...the economy isn't working..." But the economy is working. Quite well. And as designed, expected and desired. That is, the wealth is trickling up. More and more in less hands. Etc. It's working.
So the FBI is working as intended. Changing it would be fixing a symptom.
Note: I'm not siding with the FBI, only hoping to explain why its able to persist.
It's not "partisan" in the sense that it is for Democrats or Republicans. It is partisan in that it's libertarian (small l) leaning. That's not as bad, viewing a civil item through a civil libertarian lens doesn't necessarily mean it's wrong.
It's openly a libertarian organization[1] arguing a government agency should be shut down. Definitely partisan, though doesn't mean their conclusion is wrong here.
I get that some of us are more equal than others, but the ideal is that even the president is not above the law, and a candidate isn't even the president yet.
All law enforcement agencies have the same amount of zero oversight that the FBI has, but local police departments also get to terrorize their local communities with military hardware on top of constant monitoring with stuff like Palantir
Living in NYC as a poor immigrant teen 1990s through upper-middle-class (or whatever) adult through 2021, I did not feel "terrorized" by the NYPD.
Now I live in a small town not far from NYC and the police are literally part of the community, it's a few dozen folks that most people in town know on first name basis. No terrorizing.
To be clear, as someone who grew up in the USSR, I am certainly in sync with the idea that police can be oppressive, it just does not resonate at all with what I see in my now 3 decades in the US.
There are just many privileged people here that are so insulated from reality they confuse their insane social media political talking points with actual reality.
The counter argument is always some straw man pulled from news headlines.
No, but I agree with them. I live in the hood and am white and live an easy life compared to those who are not. Get some perspective.
EDIT: and my whole family is from BK, what was once filled with immigrants is now filled with the rich and privileged in most parts. All I am saying is that if you wanna use anecdotes so can I. Brown people in this country are systemically treated like trash. I see it every day. I don’t fear my life but I sure would if I was a 16 year old black kid in my city (Philadelphia).
I come from the old country that has ( maybe had? ) fairly homogeneous population. We still had locations you did not go to after dark, pathology that rivaled some of the ghetto stories and police that could abuse you if they so chose ( communism - cops could really do whatever ). I posit that the issue is poverty and people. We just kinda suck as a species. I am saying it is not the skin color. I am saying it is generations of living in ways that make integration into society somewhat hard.
<< Get some perspective.
I believe parent is correct. Immigrants from Africa are able to prosper in US, because they are not bound by culture infused in them by the 'street'. The fact is he made it out despite being the 'wrong' color.
Per capita, they go to prison at a rate far higher than any other group of immigrants in the US. Even more surprisingly, they go to prison in higher absolute numbers than any immigrant group other than hispanics. There aren't even close to as many African immigrants as there are hispanics, and yet the Africans still go to prison at a rate far higher. Literally, no other group of immigrants does worse than Africans in this regard.
Economically, the majority of African immigrants occupy the lower working classes. Even when controlling for generation, (ie - only comparing second generation immigrants), hispanics do better at the mean.
Perhaps you meant to say that African immigrants do slightly better than Black Americans at the mean? Because other than Black Americans and Native Americans, African immigrants do better than literally no one else in society. Immigrant or non-immigrant. I certainly wouldn't call doing far worse than Hispanic immigrants "prospering".
Mind you, there could definitely be other reasons for this. It's not that we should jump right to, "Well, it must be racism!" We need more info to make such a determination. But the demography based socioeconomic facts illustrate that the group you claimed to be "prospering", is clearly not "prospering". They don't even manage to get to "matching" the success of other immigrant groups. Note: I was extremely kind to them, and left Asians out of the comparison.
Could you provide me with the data source for that? I might be wrong on this and I am more than willing to acknowledge that as my source in this case is more anecdotal than anything else, but I am curious as to what allowed you to draw that conclusion.
I don't need to have in order to believe the blatant evidence, I'm only saying that generalizing your own personal experience to say that my claim is wrong is wrong itself. Police abuse is very well documented
This one actually goes beyond even empathy. I mean, empathy wouldn't help. xyzelement sounded literally insane in that comment. Like the Iraqi information minister telling the press of the imminent defeat of the Americans with American tanks rolling through the streets behind him.
Guys, if you want to debate, feel free. But try never to get into a rhetorical situation where you're fighting a rear guard action against the facts. People just look at each other while you're talking and say, "Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot." Never lose the audience that badly.
xyzelement's comment is an example of that dynamic.
> which is why crime is rising catastrophically and people are fleeing to states like Texas.
California violent crime rate : 25.2 / 100k
Texas violent crime rate : 24.8 / 100k
California property crime : 35.4 / 100k
Texas property crime. : 38.0 / 100k
Yep, trully a disproportionate crime rate that warrants narratives about "people fleeing", which btw is not happening, demographic movements have been pretty steady. Largest moves have been a few real state companies and some dudes with podcasts.
> at some point y'all have to look at SF and say "huh, maybe we weren't right about everything"
Is SF somehow not part of the american police state? Like what part of California is suddenly this leftist utopia and warrants careful consideration before american follows suit into hell?
Cali is notorious for NIMBYism, where police are called by rich white liberals to keep minorities, homeless etc away. Police action is as violent and as class aware as anywhere else in the US.
The SF police budget is 780 million yearly, that would put them above 60 countries on earth by gdp. The entire country of micronesia, with 500k people could work for 2 whole years and not be able to pay 1 year of the SF police budget.
Pretending that the exodus isn't happening isn't going to change the fact that SF is a failing city. Seattle, Philly, and NYC have just voted in pro-cop mayors who are running on a "fund the police" platform. Most of that vote comes from minorities, particularly Black people (in the case of Eric Adams and Cherelle Parker)
Please, please, please try to address your problems today, before things get worse. Last time I was in Seattle people were shocked that I'd never seen someone shit on the street in Detroit.
> Californians and New Yorkers and Minnesotans are moving to red states in droves.
Literally the same numbers as before the time frame. See how the number to Texas is a digit and not a percentage, because there has been no change.
Also the California population change is ridiculous, the biggest drop in people was out of state students/workers not coming in during 2020 and 2021.
The drop is entirely based on pandemic restrictions, by 2022 you can see the population line back to normal.
> That's why there are fearmongering billboards going up in SF
a yes a political stunt by a media company from Chicago, really a real problem and def something noteworthy.
Holy jesus media literacy is down the drain in this country.
> Pretending that the exodus isn't happening isn't going to change the fact that SF is a failing city.
Exodus, fleeing, failing city. Repeating phrases from a conservative focus group is not gonna make a city that makes 600 billion a year seem a bad place.
> Seattle, Philly, and NYC have just voted in pro-cop mayors who are running on a "fund the police" platform. Most of that vote comes from minorities, particularly Black people (in the case of Eric Adams and Cherelle Parker)
Irrelevant. and oddly seems racist
> try to address your problems today
defund the police, pay for social services, free mental and social healthcare and less people in jail in the land of the free.
The spooky part is we think encrypted/secure communications protect us, but with quantum computers just around the corner and a near unlimited appetite for storing records, very soon all that historical data will be broken into.
Quantum resistant encryption doesn't protect the past.
Perfect Forward Security just requires them to crack the key exchange they stored for each session instead of the static keys. I guess that's somewhat harder, but not that much.
Lots of criticism in this thread and a shortage of empathy for the position that the FBI finds itself in trying to do its job to protect the public. The following quote from "A Few Good Men" encapsulates my feelings about the subject.
“We live in a world that has walls. And those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who’s gonna do it? You? You, Lieutenant Weinberg? I have a great responsibility than you can possibly fathom. You weep for Santiago, and you curse the Marines. You have that luxury. The luxury of the blind. The luxury of not knowing what I know: That Santiago’s death, while tragic, probably saved lives. And my existence, while grotesque and uncomprehensible to you, saves lives. You can’t handle it. Because deep down, in places you don’t talk about, you want me on that wall. You need me there. We use words like honor, code, loyalty. We use these words as a backbone to a life spent defending something. You use them as a punchline. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom I provide, then questions the manner in which I provide it. I’d prefer you just said thank you and went on your way. Otherwise, I’d suggest you pick up a weapon and stand a post.”
This speech by Colonel Jessep is meant to be revealing of his true thoughts and character. Jessep rationalizes the evil and immoral acts he commits or orders because he's "protecting" the rest of society. He lied to cover up his own malfeasance. A soldier died under his command, murdered, as a direct consequence of illegal orders he gave.
How do you completely twist the plot of this movie to arrive at the conclusion that Colonel Jessep's worldview is one to be admired instead of reviled?
For a mainstream Hollywood film, "A Few Good Men" is quite nuanced. Colonel Jessup's actions are plainly illegal, and in the end he is arrested for them, but his point still has merit: society must be protected, and perhaps necessarily, it is protected by people who must do things that society would disapprove of. The actual courtroom proceedings of the movie are less interesting than the philosophical debate, and ultimately one can admire both viewpoints.
The whole quote can be boiled down to "the ends justify whatever means I want them to".
Yet the key takeaway relative to today's world is this - society needs to know what measures are being taken on their dime to ensure their "freedom" (loaded term), as they, as taxpayers, are indeed on the hook for reparations of any and all kinds. The US military destabilized Iraq and Afghanistan and spent untold billions if not trillions trying to rebuild it - yet I have a strong feeling that the Colonels, Generals, etc... didn't liquidate their stock portfolios to fund such an operation - they took that money from taxpayers.
The Colonel doesn't personally pay for the damages to society he caused - that's the taxpayer's job, and they should be, in his mind, grateful for that. But what he misses is that society at large has no time for people who think like that - that's why he's the bad guy. He doesn't care about the risks, and claims we should happily accept whatever comes next because in his mind, he's helping defend the country.
This is a megalomaniacal rant delivered by a character responsible for the murder of one of the soldiers under his command. The "walls" are meant to protect society from the Jesseps of the world, not glorify them and put them in positions of power.
This might be applicable, if the FBI had a group of upstanding g-men at its core, as was once popularly believed. But, it seems that the entire organization is corrupt at this point.
> take all the Play stuff and move it out of its tight integration with the low level system and into userland, where it can be sandboxed. That gives you back granular control over all the resources Play Services wants to use, and what data it and the app which use it want to send back. That's the approach GrapheneOS takes, a Pixel-only open source Android distro – OK, ROM – that by many reports hits the sweet spot of maximum control over security with minimal impact on the daily Android experience.
> Teamed with a second-hand last-but-one generation Pixel, GrapheneOS raises the seemingly oxymoronic possibility that the most data-tight and user-configurable mobile platform costs less than $200, has negligible environmental impact, and is powered by the data ogre Google itself.
> It doesn't matter how badly the FBI, NSA, GCHQ or the dictatorships behave, they can't have your data if you never send it. You'll still have to take care of what you do online and how you do it, but at least you can build that castle on a halfway decent rock.