> According to the declassified FISC ruling, despite paper reforms which the FBI has touted that it put into place to respond to the last time it was caught violating U.S. law, the Bureau conducted four queries for the communications of a state senator and a U.S. senator.
Ironically, it seems that a significant chunk of the progress FBI has made in terms of 702 compliance comes from a pretty trivial "paper reform": changing the default in their search portal to have 702 be defaulted to "off".
> In June 2021, the FBI changed the default settings in the systems where it
stores unminimized Section 702 information so that FBI personnel with access to
unminimized FISA Section 702 information need to affirmatively “opt-in” to querying such information. This system change was designed to address the large number of inadvertent queries of unminimized Section 702 information DOJ had identified in its reviews, in which FBI personnel did not realize their queries would run against such collection. Historically, users were automatically opted-in to querying unminimized Section 702 information in these databases if they had been authorized to access unminimized Section 702 information.
> This recent disclosure proves, in a Groundhog Day-like fashion, that the FBI is not going to suddenly become good at self-control when it comes to access to our data. If the privacy of our communications—including communications with people abroad—is going to actually matter, Section 702 must be irrevocably changed or jettisoned entirely.
Section 702 looks to be expiring at the end of this year, although the Biden admin has expressed intention to renew it[1][2].
This is why America was conceived to be a country where the central government can only exercise enumerated powers; because the framers knew that every organization eventually becomes run (at one point or all subsequent points) by corrupt, evil people.
Any system of governance that depends on an unbroken chain of good people is bound to fail, and fail much sooner rather than later. The only sustainable safeguard against it is to make sure that said system of governance is limited in what it can do.
> This is why America was conceived to be a country where the central government can only exercise enumerated powers; because the framers knew that every organization eventually becomes run (at one point or all subsequent points) by corrupt, evil people.
This is false.
America was reconceived as a country where the federal government had enumerated powers because it started as one where the federal government had no powers and could only act by ad hoc unanimity of the constituent states, and that failed hard, and the particular idea of, and particular set of, enumerated powers chosen was a compromise among the Framers who were called to fix the failing system, and whose preferences ranged from a much more powerful central government (the Hamilton and, less extremely, Pinkney plans) to a vastly less powerful one (the New Jersey plan), and did not represent a shared common vision, contrary to the later-constructed mythology.
Taking this mythological common vision, and then constructiong a rationalization for it, and then presenting it as the original plan of government for America falsely projects into a hotly debated contentious compromise created to deal with particular exigencies arising under the earlier plan into a kind of perfect divine revelation of government, which it very much was not and was not viewed as by participants in the process.
Great stuff... Now knowing what you do, could you speculate how would the current powers of the intelligence committee be viewed by the participants in that process?
Dragonwriter has a great response. My short and sweet answer is, the constitution is a living document for a reason and people ~250 years ago couldn't possibly plan for a world where cell phones exists (or think about the intricacies of that world). That doesn't mean all their work goes out the window, but it means their work does not hold the answer to everything. Trying to define the constitutionality of regulating telecom with words written that couldn't conceive of that world, probably has a few flaws.
I think the general opinion would be, to borrow from King Louis’ Head (by way of Alexander Hamilton, as imagined by Lin-Manuel Miranda): “Do what you want, I’m super dead”.
Though, among those regarded as Founding Fathers, that might be most particularly the view of Thomas Jefferson, who wrote: “On similar ground it may be proved that no society can make a perpetual constitution, or even a perpetual law. The earth belongs always to the living generation. They may manage it then, and what proceeds from it, as they please, during their usufruct. They are masters too of their own persons, and consequently may govern them as they please. But persons and property make the sum of the objects of government. The constitution and the laws of their predecessors extinguished them, in their natural course, with those whose will gave them being. This could preserve that being till it ceased to be itself, and no longer. Every constitution, then, and every law, naturally expires at the end of 19 years. If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force and not of right.” (Letter to James Madison, Paris, Sep. 6, 1789)
Originalism is a mode of interpretation that focuses on how words of a legal enactment would have been understood when written, which is a distinctly different question than what the authors’ opinion would have been of something.
Somewhat ironically, the US Constitution convention was unconstitutional for this reason.
It was drafted to be binding with 9 out of the 13 states signing on in direct Defiance of the unanimity required by the previous Constitution. It was somewhat a moot point because all 13 colonies ended up eventually signing,
>
This is why America was conceived to be a country where the central government can only exercise enumerated powers;
> because the framers knew that every organization eventually becomes run (at one point or all subsequent points) by corrupt, evil people.
That doesn't logically follow, given that the state governments can exercise more than just enumerated powers. And at the moment, quite a few of them are really, really fucking evil, with a few more being highly corrupt.
It makes a lot more sense when you view that separation of power as a compromise made to deal with the problem <one 'evil, corrupt'[1] federal organization in conflict with another 'evil, corrupt'[1] state organization>[2] as opposed to some weird conflict between <'evil, corrupt' federal government versus the people (but the 'evil, corrupt' state governments get a free pass or something..?)>.
The question of 'who gets residual powers' isn't some 250 IQ bit of brilliant statesmanship and foresight, it's a just a decision that quite honestly, has gone either way in plenty of different countries, and none of them are in any quantifiable way worse off for it.
[1] Your words, not mine. I think it's a pretty childish moniker devoid of all nuance, but when in Rome...
[2] Which is actually the lens through which the founders viewed things. [3]
[3] And they have been proven so, so wrong by history. As it turns out, in a high-speed communication society, party unity tends to override these kind of extra-organizational struggles. It's why the party of states rights complaints incessantly about federal tyranny, but only when it doesn't control the presidency.
The federal government's powers are enumerated while everything else is left to the states. You may not like that the OP presented the federal government as corrupt but that doesn't negate the point. There is no accountability at the federal level. The federal government has turned into a mess of alphabet agencies whose sole purpose is to grow. They are not elected but write the laws. Congress has abducted their responsibility. There is recourse at the state level.
Because it's happy with that state of affairs, and you keep voting them in.
> There is recourse at the state level.
No, there isn't. Not at the state level, nor at a more local level. We're at a point where even municipalities aren't able to rein in their police departments!
> municipalities aren't able to rein in their police departments
Where are you seeing this? Seems like there's been fairly significant changes and individual officers are being held accountable. I'm genuinely curious if you have examples.
I believe you can more easily push change at the local level. Our federal government is a monstrous, unstoppable force.
>"I just wish we had an IC that loved America more than its own power."
They probably think that they do love their country more than their power, while believing they need the power to protect their country. This may be a sort of 'moral corruption', though not the conventional sort. It doesn't seem 'evil' to me.
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
> The keys of the castle and keep glinted from the belt at his stout
waist. [...] Keys to lock out all danger... and, if necessary, Ista in.
> It’s only habit, you know. I’m not mad anymore, really.
> It wasn’t as though she wanted her mother’s keys, nor her mother’s life that went with them. She scarcely knew what she wanted. She knew what she feared—to be locked up in some dark, narrow place by people who loved her. An enemy might drop his guard, weary of his task, turn his back; love would never falter. Her fingers rubbed restlessly on the stone.
Exactly. IC people are humans too, just like the rest of us. It's convenient to assume they are sinister evil bastards (some of them are to be clear, but clearly not all of them), but it's an unhelpful and counterproductive stereotype.
I've known a few people involved in intelligence, and they absolutely believe they were serving and loving their country. It reminds me a bit of being an infrastructure person where when you mess up, everybody knows, but when you're doing your job well, nobody knows you exist. They see a constant and non-stop stream of threats that outsiders don't see, and when a threat is stopped nobody knows about it. I would bet it's not too hard to justify the intrusive capabilities and any "mistakes" made with them when you have that visibility into the successes. Humans are wonderful at justifying what they want to believe is true, and intel is no exception.
The individual intel person is not the problem here. It's a systemic problem enabled by legislation that needs to be addressed at the legislative level.
CIA officials told my country's ex-president to stop doubting the voting machines. That's what ultimately convinced me they must have been compromised.
I agree. I think it’s just laziness or being asked to square a circle. During the post-9/11 period there was immense political will and pressure to stop terrorism, and it’s really fucking hard to stop that while abiding by the constitution, so they chose to break the constitution to stop terrorism.
Is it theoretically possible to stop terrorism/catch and guys to the same extent without breaking the constitution? I think so, but it would probably require a lot more boots on the ground, and a lot of creativity and smart thinking from individuals to be able to get as good outcomes as you’d get from just looking at data when you aren’t supposed to.
No. According to the Mujahadeen who did work with CIA, ObL was considered an "extremist" even among them because he expected to go to war against the US immediately after they were done with the Soviets. According to them, he didn't want anything to do with CIA.
How do you know that they love this country? Pure conjecture. Evidence, however, indicates the contrary; they break the laws to suppress people for power. That's pretty much the definition of evil.
It's also pure conjecture to say that they break the laws to suppress people for power.
Have you ever seen how the bottom-level of people in a huge bureaucratic organization behave? They're not evil, they're just being human. Unless you're prepared to say that at least 65% to 95% of humans are evil[1].
There's plenty of evidence that shows how deeply currupted the 3 letter agencies are in this country. The FBI, a Hoover organization, appears to me to be an organization that exists solely to persecute, blackmail and bait populists and small government types, aka the very people bureaucrats hate.
I'm not sure what kind of freedom you advocate for Ben, it certainly doesn't seem to jive with the notion of We the People.
It's conjecture, but the fact that a powerful senator like Chuck Schumer fears going against them is enough to convince me that they need to be severely reigned in.
Both the Soviet apparatchiks running the gulags sincerely believed they were acting for the greater good. The same goes for the torturers at Guantanamo. Idealism doesn't preclude evil.
Unchallenged idealism is the root of many evils. If you are convinced of your own righteousness, its very easy to “ends justify the means” almost anything. Its the danger of even a well-motivated person ending up with a cultivation or otherwise in an ideological echo chamber.
> Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people":
> First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.
> Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.
> The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.[1]
Definitely. I think this very well explains how we got to this position.
I think that's why there is so many checks and balances betweent the different branches of government. The FF knew that politicians (humans?) are bound to be corrupt and try to centralize ever more power (and money) to themselves.
New Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) said Tuesday that President-elect Donald Trump is “being really dumb” by taking on the intelligence community and its assessments on Russia’s cyber activities.
“Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you,” Schumer told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow.
What the context adds is that the quote comes from a political attack against the intelligence services, rather than attempts to legislate restrictions (the context in which the quote was submitted in this thread), requirements, regulations, of regulatory actions through the executive, or court decisions through the judiciary. Of which there is ample history of each.
The Court concludes that the targeting, minimization, and querying procedures, as written, meet statutory requirements.
In Part V, the Court finds those procedures, as written, to be consistent with Fourth Amendment requirements.
Particular attention is paid to FBI querying practices, which have been of substantial concern in prior reviews under Section 702(j). 1 The Court finds that the agencies' likely implementation of their procedures is consistent with applicable statutory and Fourth Amendment requirements
I'm not lawyer, but this doesn't sound like the headline.
What you've quoted is just saying they have found that the policies and procedures the FBI has on the books that it's agents are supposed to be following meet the requirements that have bee imposed on them. The problem is that FBI employees aren't adhering to those policies and procedures, and so far there has been little to no consequences is my understanding.
I don't know why people are surprised by this. The FBI are a pack of small fry when it comes to spying on Americans. The NSA has all the three letter entities beat and has been doing it for decades.
"At home, however, the favored weapon employed is ignorance rather than fear. Like NSA headquarters itself, the United States is surrounded by barriers -- barriers of ignorance that keep its citizens prisoners of the cold war. The first obstacle is formed by the myths propagated about communism and about its aggressive designs on America. The second, and dependent for its rationale on the first, is the incredible barrier of governmental secrecy that keeps most of the questionable U.S. aggressive activities hidden nor from our "enemies," who are the knowledgeable victims, but from the American people themselves. The final barrier is perhaps the highest and is barbed with the sharpest obstacles of all. It is nothing less than our reluctance as Americans to confront what we are doing to the peoples of the world, ourselves included, by organizations like the National Security Agency." [0]
If you had shown me this article in the 90s, it wouldn’t have made a lick of sense.
The FBI is collecting, aggregating, and indexing massive amounts of U.S. citizen’s communication data without a warrant? And the question at hand is whether they followed proper procedures in accessing that data?
Yes, they searched the database. But I’d ask how you got the data into the database originally without conducting a search?
It’s like if you told me you’d record everything I say just in case it’s a crime, but promise not to listen to it unless you think I committed a crime. Or, if once a day, you came into my home and inventoried everything promising only to make use of that dataset if you have reason to believe it’s relevant to a crime. And then the topic at hand was whether you incorrectly accessed that dataset?
It feels like we’ve slid right to the bottom of a slippery slope argument about privacy in the 90s. And one of the senators we were worried about back then [1] is now president, and is probably going to keep the program running. How did we get here?
> The answer is that they are spying on other countries. That usually hasn’t required warrants.
This isn’t correct AFAICT. This is the justification they give.
This was one of the arguments put forward in 2017 after the Supreme Court ruling on the presidential surveillance program. A huge amount of international telecommunications traffic flows through the systems they’re trying to harvest data from and they have a hard time differentiating foreign communications from domestic communications. So they slurp it all up.
But they also intentionally slurp up (or at least during the PSP did slurp up) “metadata” of U.S. citizens.
And they don’t seem to have a problem querying these databases for U.S. citizen’s communications data from “the database” if they feel it’s relevant to crime. Something that they could just say is off limits and taints all downstream evidence.
There are a lot of legal and mental gymnastics at play with these programs. But it does seem like the end goal is to get access to domestic communications content.
Jail time. Violating the law should result in criminal prosecution.
Back in the dark ages, I did a small amount of consulting work for the feds (not the FBI, but a similar agency). Total disregard for rules of evidence, or for legal processes. Shocking arrogance, including flashing badges at women in bars, to - I suppose - impress them.
> Total disregard for rules of evidence, or for legal processes. Shocking arrogance
> Jail time. Violating the law should result in criminal prosecution.
Addressing the failures of one corrupt institution by having them reviewed by...another one? The DoJ's track record is even more hilarious than the FBI's.
Nobody's ever been wrongfully convicted, and those that might have been were immediately released and made whole once exonerating DNA evidence surfaced. Especially if the convicted has run out of appeals-- the DoJ is all about adherence to rules of evidence and legal process. /s
That will never happen. It exists in the same spectrum of "cover your ass" as qualified immunity. Only the absolute most egregious activities will ever be prosecuted.
What laws did they violate? And if they violated laws or the constitution, wouldn't people get out of criminal prosecution. Here's an example of US citizen who got their emails sweeped up by the PRISM because he was emailing addresses that were being 702ed. Court system found this was lawful.
We have seen overwhelming evidence in the US for years that our police forces are not worthy of broad trust, and that they need aggressive oversight and much clearer and surer accountability.
Make officers personally liable for civil and criminal penalties when they break laws or violate rights, even if acting on orders or in accordance with their departmental policies. Simple fix.
Haha! If only that were true, it took the riots during COVID (often regarded as BLM but was at it's core were really about rampant Police abused and corruption as seen erupt in France) and an immense amount of backlash on Gov. Poli-- he seriously risked not being re-elected--and having it's major cities (Denver, Boulder) be lit on fire like lots of the US before that happened [0].
As a person who wished that would have been retroactively applied to my own encounter with police misconduct, I can assure you it is far from simple and took a lot of effort that was paid in blood; but so far it is the only State in the US that has removed protected immunity and made police personally liable for any crimes/injries they commit while on duty. This is the only deterrent that works, I would go so far as to say that if they refuse to terminate them (as it's common to just remove them from their precinct to another) that after so many complaints their pension should be reduced for every infraction.
My experience is that Police and Sheriff's office are still as arrogant as ever but are notably more tame towards civilians than they were before COVID in my interactions with them since, they are not only being constantly recorded which can and will be used against them in court but they were humbled by being restrained and forced to utilize deescalation and communication after a long history of Police abuse being the default mode of operation in what is mainly a predominately White and Hispanic population.
This is a very controversial point to remark here for some reason, but it must be noted as the criminal justice system was not swayed by Black Lives at tall because they comprise a small number of the population (who are disproportional profiled for sure) but rather push back from the abuse that even white women were subject to while being illegally arrested and then repeatedly tased whil ebeing forced and restrained to a chair (viewer warning: its pretty grim) and somehow still had to go to the Supreme Court for it to be properly judicated (settlement reached for the plaintiff with some token reform that just added another footnote to a long list of police misconduct in CO) because Colorado Law exempted police from obvious wrong doing [1]. And I know from personal experience that at least 2 of those officers present in that footage were still kept on the force.
The US is in major needs of a re-vamp to it's criminal justice system and how police should operate (starting by de-militarizing them) and we in Colorado led the way in that regard but it's still not enough, and most importantly is far from a 'simple fix' given the entrenched relationship between Police and politics as well as the strong might of the Police Lobby/Unions that protect 'their own' at all costs in what is still a rather rural and mainly conservative State.
In the English language, it's understood that punishing a behavior is the same thing as punishing the actors, since behaviors cannot directly be punished. So when OP said, "malfeasance will stop if it isn't punished", it's a common and correct usage. It's all about the context.
They are scared shitless about what will happen if we get popular and durable communication networks that they can't reverse engineer or strongarm the data out of.
They are scared shitless that their currency will lose value and they lose favor on the world stage.
It would be easy to keep this position by just being a good country that respects the human lives of its citizens. But for some, with lacking morality, that's a bridge too far.
E2EE will never be totally broken. They'll attack it at weak points where data is unencrypted. You can't beat math, boys!
exactly. I suspect this is why the "vouch" was added because I've seen some comments (on all sides of issues) get quickly buried and killed undeservedly by the kneejerk tribal downvotes. It's an impulse that all humans have so they come by it honestly, but one of the things I love about HN is that for the most part this community values rationality and debate.
> If all of the effort spent to prosecute Trump was truly about "rule of law" then they'd spend at least 1/10th as much energy going after the in-your-face corruption of Joe Biden.
People (many of them members of the US Congress) keep saying this and then failing to come up with actual evidence (which should be easy, if it is really “in-your-face”), of this corruption of Joe Biden, despite spending inordinate amount of time and (often taxpayer) money on the effort to sell the story.
He bragged about leveraging foreign aid to get the lead investigator fired as part of an effort to fight corruption in the Ukraine. Think about. If your trying to fight corruption, and you have evidence this lead investigator is corrupt, couldn't you just present that evidence to get them fired? Unless of course the corruption goes higher. In which case, the futility of the action is obvious.
The defense doesn't make sense on the merits. The investigator who got fired claims it was because of who he was going after. I don't know if he is honest or corrupt, but I do know that Ukraine claims he wasn't fired or pressured to resign but rather resigned on his own. So someone can't get their story straight.
Media outlets who went out of their way to say there was nothing wrong here all pretty much acknowledged that it at least 'looks bad'
> If your trying to fight corruption, and you have evidence this lead investigator is corrupt, couldn't you just present that evidence to get them fired?
Corrupt people (whether the corrupt official or the people corrupting them or both) often have political leverage to make that technique ineffective; that’s rather the point of political corruption.
Using aid as leverage to get other states to act in ways that local corruption would otherwise make politically unviable is neither novel nor evidence of corruption on the part of a US Administration.
In fact, its long been a foundational element of US policy in a number of areas where corruption is viewed as a wide danger.
It's all just a coincidence that this investigator tried to investigate Burisma for corruption, and Burisma attempted to buy access to Joe Biden through Hunter Biden, who was only selling the 'appearance' of access. Which means Burisma was obviously corrupt for attempting to buy said access even if it was in fact an illusion and they were being conned.
And it's just a coincidence that Biden claimed he didn't know his son was on the board of Burisma when it was later proved he did know that. He just, forgot, I guess.
> It's hard to imagine that Comer has completely fabricated all of this as well.
It's not hard to imagine. At all. In fact, given the violation of norms in his Comer has been conducting the investigation (if it is actually occurring at all, and the information through different channels raises real questions about that) makes it hard to imagine anything else.
> It would have to be a lot of really huge misunderstandings.
Your devotion to the assumption of good faith when people repeatedly show their bad faith is... well, something.
How much was spent on Russia, Russia, Russia? The investigations, the lawyers, hell even the airtime devoted to it by the MSM. Probably the most expensive and massive investigation ever. Still somehow no charges.
A lot, and it produced a lot of results. Because there very much was a there there.
> Still somehow no charges.
In the criminal investigation (the only ones that can produce charges) there were numerous individuals and entities charged in (or in at least one case, in a handoff from) the Mueller investigations, including 25 Russian nationals and 3 Russian companies.
Of course, many acts involved in foreign interference are not within the scope of criminal law, and much of the investigatory energy outside of the criminal investigation (e.g., the Senate investigation producing the bipartisan report on Russian interference) was not directed at criminal law particularly.
Are you really proposing an 80/20 rule where if you prosecute someone for a crime you have to dedicate X amount of energy to procedure whom 'besterarm' has designated as opposition to the person who broke the law? Now that sounds like a whacked out legal system. You think Biden broke the law? You think you have evidence? Report it. That is how the legal system works.
Just a crack head that sold access to the second person in charge of the free world for 8 years. Just a crack head sitting on boards making millions. Just a crack head with tens of shell companies with millions flowing through them. Nothing to see here folks just a crackhead.
Your claims are no different from allegations about the Trump kids, except unlike the latter, there is no evidence that associates of the crack head actually had any access to the VP.
Better oversight for FISA Part 702 is needed, not the removal of the authority entirely. FISA 702 is key in the ability of the FBI to collect intelligence on those who seek to harm the United States.
I am a Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley in AI and currently serve as an external advisor to the FBI on AI and AI Policy. I've worked very closely with the teams that utilize FISA Part 702 and have seen the types of issues they are actively preventing with the use of the authority.
Frankly, I don't believe you at all because this pattern has happened before: insiders claim that surveillance is responsible for preventing tons of harm, but when those claims are closely examined (even by other aspects of government) a whole lot of nothing is found.
> In 2013, the President’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies analyzed terrorism cases from 2001 on, and determined that the NSA’s bulk collection of phone records “was not essential to preventing attacks.”
> The NSA has publicly discussed four cases, and just one in which surveillance made a significant difference. That case involved a San Diego taxi driver named Basaaly Moalin, who sent $8,500 to the Somali terrorist group al-Shabab. But even the details of that case are murky. From the Washington Post:
> In 2009, an FBI field intelligence group assessed that Moalin’s support for al-Shabab was not ideological. Rather, according to an FBI document provided to his defense team, Moalin probably sent money to an al-Shabab leader out of “tribal affiliation” and to “promote his own status” with tribal elders.
It's been long enough that if this shit actually worked, there'd be plenty of success stories that could be disclosed without harming confidential interests. They'd be trumpeting them to the heavens to attempt to justify reauthorization. Instead, we get taxi driver man and a whole lot of "just trust us".
I do acknowledge that ProPublica article is dated, but AFAIK no counterexamples have emerged since - which is kind of the whole problem.
This is survivorship bias. No counterexamples emerge because successful and working capabilities can’t and won’t be shared? Not until declassification of those sources kicks in.
The government should not give up powerful intelligence tactics, techniques, and procedures solely because the general public has a want to know. We have elected representatives with clearances for those purposes.
You obviously didn't even try to read the source, because one of the main points is that reviews of classified evidence by people with clearance found nothing even with that access. Furthermore, people like Sen Wyden - one of those elected representatives you mention - assert, on the basis of classified[1] info shared with the Senate Intelligence Committee, the ineffectiveness of these programs[0], along with a - so far unanswered - invitation to share any such classified info behind closed doors, should it exist. The issue of classification is a red herring if even those with appropriate clearances assert a lack of effectiveness.
[1] inb4 "but unclassified programs" - he's talking about unclassified programs on the basis of classified info, as is made doubly clear by the request to share further examples with the SIC
The idea that people who are close to power are “in on the secret” and thus are more correct that people who aren’t doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. It’s a religious idea that extends back to the earliest gnostic cults.
I’m sure it feels good to you to feel close to power, but those feelings are because you feel powerful by association. It does not mean what you are doing is right or just.
There’s no feeling of power here. I took on this role because the FBI needs people to help them answer these hard questions, and your traditional Silicon Valley crypto bros won’t help.
I was raised in this country post-9/11 and was taught to fear the FBI. I grew up strongly critical of our surveillance state and the overreach of power that was reported upon. The FBI hosting a deeply critical voice inside to help provide insight to their processes seems like a pretty just thing to me.
If you have better ideas, then I invite you to help change the institution. Come “be in on the secret” (a security clearance to guard national intelligence?) and do the right thing.
Thanks for the invitation to join your club, I appreciate it.
I’m quite familiar with security clearances from close contacts. It’s also inevitable to run into controlled information in the types of work people like me do.
The real secret is that there is no secret worth keeping. Secrets are a way to cover for incompetence - it’s the same mindset as “security by obscurity.” Even the most secret information regarding nuclear weapons has mostly been leaked. The main thing that prevents nuclear proliferation isn’t secrets; it’s international pressure plus tight controls and monitoring of materials.
The only way to fix the FBI is to dissolve the institution- and even that would be an extraordinary challenge because the criminal networks the agency possesses would still operate, just as the networks built by secret police in other countries persisted post dissolution.
I don't think your credentials mean much here, we all know the basics of the Constitution. We all can read the news and see how 702 was abused over and over. Time to snuff it out and start with a blank slate. We have a method of getting surgical strike warrants for only those communication that are necessary to spy on. It's time for the dragnet methods to die off. Freedom comes at a cost and that cost is not making the lives of the CIA and other TLAs any easier to spy on us.
FISA 702 is not a criminal authority. It’s used in cases of foreign surveillance, cyber attacks, terrorism, and espionage. “Convictions” and “evidence” are not the right words, “intelligence” is.
The FBI is a law enforcement agency. Cyber attacks are crimes. Terrorism is a crime. Spying is a crime. Where are the indictments and convictions that depend on FISA 702?
> The FBI is a law enforcement agency. Cyber attacks are crimes. Terrorism is a crime. Spying is a crime. Where are the indictments and convictions that depend on FISA 702?
The FBI is principally a national security and counterintelligence agency and secondarily a law enforcement agency.
702 is expressly for the counterintelligence and national security function, limited to foreign targets (non-US persons believed to be outside of the US), and if used properly will only incidentally and occasionally result in information related to persons practically able to be subjected to US law enforcement jurisdiction, whether or not they might in theory be committing US crimes.
Lots of indictments or other criminal process tied to 702 surveillance would actually be a sign of something unusual happening (of which “abuse of 702 for purposes at odds with its express terms” would be high on the list.)
The reason to have a counterintelligence agency (which is the role the FBI has in the intelligence community) also be a law enforcement agency is somewhat obvious; domestic law enforcement, at least in that domain, is essential to counterintelligence. (I suppose there is an argument that the counterintelligence agency shouldn't be a broad spectrum law enforcement agency, but I actually think the dangers of an isolated, insular, counterintelligence agency and the kind of culture it would naturally breed would be a bigger problem.
Careful, that logic cuts both ways-- you're inadvertently arguing that 702 isn't really doing much of anything. So there's no harm in continuing it, right?
It's about Intelligence, not Evidence. Intelligence (like anonymous tips) is what you use to find the Evidence, which is what you reference in the affidavit. Much Intelligence is speculative and/or bullshit and wastes everybody's time. Publishing Intelligence tips off associates of the adversary and betrays what you know and what your capabilities are, and possibly who you learned it from.
Absolutely. I was given full access to all of their SLs, EADs, and staff members. I was able to brief Director Wray on my findings and continue to engage with their leadership on strategies for the betterment of the Bureau’s stance on key issues.
Nah, it's time for it to die bruh. They have shown they will abuse it, so it's time to let it sunset like it was meant to. It was meant as an emergency order for 9/11, time to let it join the dodo and passenger pigeon.
The FBI needs to do a better job of communicating to the public the existing oversight mechanisms it has, as well as reporting in aggregate types of issues it has prevented through the use of the authority. Additionally, more frequent (quarterly) testimonies to Congress (closed and open sessions) would be extremely beneficial.
If the FBI actually operated in the open and stopped keeping secrets, the mystery would be removed and they would no longer have any power. Once the mystique is broken, the mundane reality of the FBIs daily ineffectiveness would be revealed. Power requires secrets. What you are suggesting would destroy the FBI.
Glad to see the EFF back on mission instead of dumb shit like spreading FUD to help keep their lawyer friends in the Library of Congress unaccountable to the rest of government.
Ironically, it seems that a significant chunk of the progress FBI has made in terms of 702 compliance comes from a pretty trivial "paper reform": changing the default in their search portal to have 702 be defaulted to "off".
> In June 2021, the FBI changed the default settings in the systems where it stores unminimized Section 702 information so that FBI personnel with access to unminimized FISA Section 702 information need to affirmatively “opt-in” to querying such information. This system change was designed to address the large number of inadvertent queries of unminimized Section 702 information DOJ had identified in its reviews, in which FBI personnel did not realize their queries would run against such collection. Historically, users were automatically opted-in to querying unminimized Section 702 information in these databases if they had been authorized to access unminimized Section 702 information.
https://www.justice.gov/d9/pages/attachments/2023/03/03/rece...
Josh Geltzer (a deputy DHS advisor) said on Lawfare that this probably alone dramatically reduces the number of noncompliant FBI 702 searches:
https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/the-lawfare-podcast-jos...