Thordarson reached out to the FBI for "the adventure" and then continued pinging them for cash. I'm not sure if this is a case of "how far the government is willing to go" as much as 'how widely feelings on loyalty can vary'.
How do you get that from this? The FBI is basically an intelligence agency. I would be disappointed if they didn't have tendrils everywhere. That's their job.
Mainly I'm saying that government has made some serious mistakes by violating the rights of US citizens with various programs. Now they are using the fbi and other organizations improperly to try stop the flow of information about those programs.
They are doing this by declaring journalistic and liberty seeking organizations, to be a threat to the US government. This is clearly wrong and they are obviously over-stepping their mission.
"The FBI’s national security mission is to lead and coordinate intelligence efforts that drive actions to protect the United States.
Our goal is to develop a comprehensive understanding of the threats and penetrate national and transnational networks that have a desire and capability to harm us. Such networks include: terrorist organizations, foreign intelligence services, those that seek to proliferate weapons of mass destruction, and criminal enterprises. "
Yes, but they investigate only specific things. Having tendrils literally everywhere (including places outside its jurisdiction) is clearly a very intrusive interpretation of their mandate.
Any good intelligence agency is going to have an information network that spans far beyond the scope of the specific things they are currently investigating, because that network takes time to build.
I actually am not sure whether that violates their mandate. Is it a problem if an agency gathers information outside their jurisdiction? Obviously they cannot make arrests, for example, but can they gather information?
Obviously they cannot make arrests, for example, but can they gather information?
In the USA, it would seem that the public laws say that the FBI can't just gather information. They are supposed to have reasonable cause, as determined by some Court. The laws and traditions demand a little oversight of information gathering, and that the information so gathered is related to a crime.
This is related to the public laws and traditions about suppression of speech, particularly political speech. Speaking freely isn't supposed to be "reasonable cause", and speaking freely isn't supposed to make you an object of surveillance. Doing otherwise "chills" free speech.
I can only conclude that the FBI has become a "rogue" agency, like the CIA has, and is full of people who have no respect for US law and tradition.
And yet they could not stop the Boston bombing. Even after the Russian government had specifically told them that the older brother could be a terrorist. I've lost all respect for them. It tells me that they don't really know what they are doing.
The US Government is warned by a lot of parties about a lot of things.
I'd be very interested in knowing about the signal to noise ratio before I lay down such heavy handed, seemingly uninformed judgement...
Also: If the Boston bombings was the final straw, then WHY ON EARTH wasn't 9/11 the final straw? Several orders of magnitude worse of a cock-up than Boston!
I asked in a thread on this topic a while back, and someone came back with the US being given about 100,000 names a year.
This is the fundamental problem with all the "terrorist" stuff. No matter how accurate various techniques and technologies are, the false positives significantly overwhelm the actual bad guys.
For some bizarre reason it has become acceptable to treat the false positives as though they were terrorists, totally ignoring their rights, due process, basic human decency or even evidence. (The no fly list is a good example.)
And then there is a massive expense (time and money) in order to build up the false positives. Consider the amount wasted at airport "security", and how much better that money and time could be spent elsewhere. I'd much rather individuals kept that money and spent it on goods and services which is far better for the economy (and hence jobs etc). And less future money would be needed to pay down debt.
If the "signal to noise ratio" is such a problem in the intelligence field, it seems funny to raise the noise floor as high as possible by spying indiscriminately on millions of random Americans.
Our intelligence and police agencies certainly don't act like they have more data than they know what to do with. They always seem greedy for more, regardless of its quality.
"You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows." The apparatus has been at work too long and has been too heavy-handed in its operations for us to just blithely pretend that it's telling us the truth. If, with all the resources and rights we've handed over to them, this is the best job they can do, then they're just not very good at it.
...why on earth wasn't 9/11 the final straw? Several orders of magnitude worse...
9/11 was a failure of imagination, on the part of the self-appointed security "experts" who told us we should obey without question terrorists' every command, and oh by the way we should leave the cockpit door unlocked because the pilot might have a heart attack and then some M$ Flight Simulator enthusiast could save the day if you happened to be flying to that one airport by the shore of Lake Michigan and also the weather happened to be very pixelated at the time. I scarcely have to point out that the "experts" were quite wrong. "Another 9/11" wouldn't happen today, because we Americans know in our heads what we always knew in our hearts: when some foreign goat enthusiast threatens you with a knife, you pound the shit out of him. You don't wait for the gub'ment to send help. I mean, they might send the ATF or something.
On the other hand, when the Russian FSB calls to identify a known terrorist living in Cambridge Mass, it would be nice if somebody picked up the phone.
>>Also: If the Boston bombings was the final straw, then WHY ON EARTH wasn't 9/11 the final straw? Several orders of magnitude worse of a cock-up than Boston!
They've been supposedly honing their intelligence skills since then. By now they should be way better at this considering all the additional budget they are getting and by the simple fact that they should have a lot more experience at this.
It's almost like they have something to hide...