back
251 comments
The FBI is more or less a legalized criminal organization that is funded by U.S. taxpayers, but is unelected and unaccountable to them. This article is from 2013, but I haven’t seen anything to suggest that this behavior has changed:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/08/04/fbi-in...

The important part to consider:

> The FBI gave its informants permission to break the law at least 5,658 times in a single year, according to newly disclosed documents that show just how often the nation's top law enforcement agency enlists criminals to help it battle crime.

I know this is talking specifically about informants, and you could make a case that that is necessary, but what reason is there to believe that this doesn’t extend to members of the FBI as well?

Here is a more recent article about this:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2021/11/18/fbi...

They also have the seemingly unique and blatantly unconstitutional power to imprison you for ""lying"" to them.

The actual wording/charge is "providing false statements", which means anything that they can later suggest is untrue.

This is why you should never, ever speak with anyone associated with the FBI even if they are being "friendly".

Say they knock at the door and have questions for you about your shady neighbor down the street. You're not the one under investigation, so what's the harm in talking to them right? Well officer friendly asks the innocuous question of if it was raining last Thursday. You tell them that it was. As it turns out, it was not raining last Thursday and your honest-but-wrong answer means you are now able to be charged with "lying to the FBI".

In practice, they knew it wasn't raining last Thursday and the question was a trap. By answering incorrectly officer friendly can then threaten to charge you at a later date, except there's an out! _You can become an informant!_. By agreeing to spy on your neighbor for the mafia they'll spare you federal inditement. You're now an "asset" that they can work for as long as they please and you have no legal recourse.

EDIT: To expand upon this, lets say it wasn't last thursday but was in fact 60+ days ago. They have a text message from you to your wife saying how beautiful/sunny the day was, because despite being "end to end encrypted" your iMessage private key is stored on Apple servers because you clicked the default CTAs during iCloud setup to enable iCloud backup. They _know_ it was not raining and have "proof" you knew it was not raining, because you texted your wife how nice and sunny it was. You honestly don't remember at the time you were questioned, maybe you think you're 100% telling the truth. Maybe you're confused, and are thinking of the thursday prior where it _was_ raining. None of that matters, they have you on a federal felony and you're their asset now.

Governments are basically the mob, except that they figured out that they can exert more control over a longer period of time if they have documents that "constrain" their powers and they offer you a say in some matters.

Every year, I pay the US government protection money at a higher rate than the mob demanded (~35% vs ~15%). They mark their territory, control who enters and exits, and demand compliance with their rules. If you are under their protection, they give you a little document that tells other gangs not to screw with you.

They back all of this up with guns and threats of violence, held by unelected thugs. They give you a process to prove your innocence, but the process itself is a punishment, since it is a huge resource drain to go through.

The FBI are the most visible thugs.

Wait until you find out about the DHS. Unlike interactions with the FBI, it is illegal to record them*. They do not wear body cams. You have no right to a lawyer when interacting with them. They can jail you without charging you or accusing you of a crime. They can search you without probable cause or a warrant. They can put you in cuffs, take you to a hospital, and lie to doctors that you have drugs up your ass, all without a warrant, and then you'll be sent thousands in medical bills for medical services you didn't consent to**. They can stop you on the road without reasonable suspicion / PC / a warrant. They consistently have the among the worst human rights record and hire the lowest quality candidates, and arguably have the least oversight of any of the large federal law enforcement agencies.

*at the border, where most people have this interaction with their child organization CBP.

**Actually happened to me.

Um, yes - bad cops are bad, and there are plenty of bad cops. Very bad.

Might anyone point to an example (current or historical) of a large, complex, socially diverse society which has managed to tightly control actually-serious crime, while also managing to keep the "bad cop stuff" well below the level which America has been stuck with in the past ~half of a century?

> The FBI is more or less a legalized criminal organization that is funded by U.S. taxpayers, but is unelected and unaccountable to them

This kinda reads like a description of the CIA. How many of these have you got there?

> The FBI is more or less a legalized criminal organization that is funded by U.S. taxpayers,

How is this any different than local law enforcement?

I’m not saying you are implying this. But it’s strange that the same people who “back the blue” locally, want to “defund the FBI”.

That's just about explicit permission. All kind of shit also happens via implicit permission (nobody does anything about cops doing it and so is normalized) or no permission.
As bad as the FBI is, it pales in comparison to the international terrorist activities of the CIA.
Just in case stories like this dont negatively affect your view of law enforcement, think of it this way:

There is a fixed number of people who can have their rights violated before the population doesn’t have confidence in law enforcement.

And thats what we are seeing now.

You just got added to the list for saying that out loud.
If you could make the case that it’s necessary then what are we even talking about here?
This is cops in general, and not unique to the FBI.
I was curious what they had after ~1974 so looked at the file, and roughly 200 pages of the 270 total are a 2005 incident where a fan sold/uploaded bootleg recordings of her work. As an aside, it's amusing to see screenshots of webpages complete with ancient online ads that appear to have been printed out then scanned in the report. And another aside, I believe they redacted the soft drink offered to the fan during questioning, which the fan refused.

Besides that she played a show with Journey in a venue that supposedly had mob connections in the 80's.

I wonder if they ruled her harmless after 74 or a different organization took over/the documents have a different classification.

This is unsurprising given American history, in particular the history of the FBI. It began as an so the DoJ had investigators in certain cases where they otherwise wouldn't (eg on reservations) but it really began with the Mann Act [1]:

> In its original form the act made it a felony to engage in interstate or foreign commerce transport of "any woman or girl for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose". Its primary stated intent was to address prostitution, immorality, and human trafficking, particularly where trafficking was for the purposes of prostitution

The reality however was that it was used to prosecute interracial marriage [2]:

> Also known as the White-Slave Traffic Act of 1910, the law was invoked over and over again to punish black men for their relationships with white women—affairs that challenged the racial status quo. Rooted in fears of women’s growing mobility and racist characterizations of the sexual appetites of non-white men, the law was designed to protect women against the supposed scourge of “white slavery,” a term used to refer to sex trafficking in the early 20th century.

Later there's a dark history of the FBI's involvements with the likes of Martin Luther King Jr, Malcolm-X, the Black Panthers and a bunch of other black leaders and movements.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mann_Act

[2]: https://www.history.com/news/white-slave-mann-act-jack-johns...

I'm not surprised by that fact, but what does surprise me is how neither the author of the article or anyone here has mentioned COINTELPRO.

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

It's a safe assumption that the FBI was monitoring any given Black person with influence, and we might as well assume they still are.

The FBI/CIA/NSA complex is the American version of the Soviet KGB.

Wall Street is our Politburo, and we split the CPSU into two parties because it gives better optics.

Yes, every country has intelligence agencies. Aligning them with kgb implies they’re bad guys, which certainly Russian citizens can make the reverse claims.

This doesn’t add anything to the discussion and is akin to a Facebook meme post without the image.

The CIA, FBI & Military industrial complex seem to actively work towards their own interests, separate from the democratic will of the citizens of the US.

It is hard to view this as anything but the 'deep state'. If the US was not the preeminent leader of the 'free world', American intelligence agencies would be viewed as global terrorist organizations.

Military Industrial Media Complex.
Pirke Avot 2.3 applies, as it always does: https://www.sefaria.org/Pirkei_Avot.2.3

People have internalized that HR is on the company's side, not theirs, but sometimes their goals are congruent. Everyone should look at government the same way.

If everyone should look at government the same way, then government has failed tremendously and we should stop pushing this farce of "democracy".
https://archive.ph/Wc2VX
FBI monitoring popular singers is very common historically! I highly recommend this book for an overview:

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/651913/the-folk-sin...

Yes, primarily because of people like Paul Robeson.
And 0 people went to jail for this.
If you have nothing to hide... isn't it the default now?
Defund the FBI, CIA, NSA, ATF, and DEA. They've proven themselves to cause more trouble than to solve problems.
I’m afraid if you were to defund some of those, like the DEA and ATF, they would just come after small time, lowest fruit criminals. They have proven they will charge people with dubious crimes. Similar to how people claim the IRS can’t tackle big time cheats and instead focus on auditing everyday people.

If you modernize federal drug laws the DEA would lose at lot of its teeth. It’s up to the legislatures to change laws and take power away from federal agencies.

I know this is more of an emotional response than a serious proposal, but I'll take the opportunity to point out:

Black-and-white thinking leads to very inefficient outcomes.

That is, it makes a lot more sense to reign-in, reform, and redirect intelligence and policing agencies than get rid of them.

I think we want to work on how to align their interests -- as individual agents, intermediate commanding officers, and agency-wide -- with ours as citizens.

We need public auditing of these organizations.

Organization that operate secretly will always provide some refuge for corruption. There are always blind spots for management.

If the public has no input, how can we ever trust them?

The post-9/11 security state has grown to ridiculous proportions.
Rethink and reform. We still need services that address:

* Federal level police (should be policing state/local too).

* Intelligence gathering

* Cyber security

They need more daylight/oversight and a lot more accountability. The DEA can go to hell (legalize all drugs) and the ATF can pound sand (their subjects of interest could be rolled into the FBI).

We need a happy medium between the excesses we have today and having none of those needs addressed.

Then we'd merely have around 10 national intelligence agencies doing shit like this, in addition to all the more local operations. It's absurd how large the intelligence community is.
And they need to stop thinking that doing illegal stuff is ok for authorities... like parallel constructing evidence / evidence laundering....
The unelected jackboots of the wealthy. They'll likely never stop.
How do you know they cause more trouble than they solve?

They've solved thousands of missing childen, sexual predators, kidnappings, etc

Isn’t the CIA pretty much self-funded? :)
Defund the FBI, CIA, NSA, ATF, and DEA.

Not just "defund", but "abolish".

No need to throw the baby out with the bathwater. They just need more transparency.
Add ICE in there. They serve no useful purpose.
You better think. Think about what you're trying to do to me.
How many people would care that the FBI was monitoring her of they didn't raid Trump
I have seen enough anime to know, they were monitoring her to see if her spiritual powers would keep developing, like a Jedi or something :D