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Comment by golergka | Hacker News Reader

> both former CIA analysts

Is it not related to the events? I only skipped through the article, but they didn't seem to mention it ever again.

Smells... Interesting.

The last full paragraph wraps it up thus: The Hartes are also a white, financially sound couple who both happened to have worked for the CIA. Most people on the receiving end of these raids aren’t white, aren’t middle-class, didn’t once work for a federal law enforcement agency and don’t have $25,000 to fund a fight in court.

I believe it to say that even with intimate knowledge of US law enforcement, they still had trouble getting answers and results... the rest of us are equally screwed.

That's not really what I meant though. Could it be something else than a drug bust in reality?

I don't know why they got raided any more than you. (I suspect it to be exactly how the article presents it since I have no reason to think otherwise.) I was just pointing out that they did mention it again in the article since you seemed to have missed it in your skipping through.

> I believe it to say that even with intimate knowledge of US law enforcement, they still had trouble getting answers and results...

While the article by its use of comparisons in that paragraph tries to suggest that (by imply that the CIA is a federal law enforcement agency and therefore, being former CIA analysts, the Hartes would have intimate knowledge of law enforcement), this is false because the CIA is not a law enforcement agency, it is a foreign intelligence agency, and to the extent that it coordinates with law enforcement, it is principally with federal agencies (mostly the FBI) whose law enforcement brief includes national security matters, and there is no indication in the article that this coordination was any part of the Hartes' work as CIA analysts.

I think the reporter here is either being willfully misleading to give the story greater emotional appeal, or has watched too many of the movies and TV shows in which the CIA is portrayed as having a role that is a mix of its own and that of the FBI, and mistaken them for reality.

I don't think that's the implication at all.

The implication is rather that the Hartes are firmly part of the Establishment, and even the privileges bestowed by that membership couldn't help them.

Ironic if FBI counter-intelligence investigate the police over this one. I suspect the article is misleading in parts.

Yes I though that mention would lead to some espionage investigation or something. Perhaps the whole "drug bust" thing was a farce designed to search for evidence of some other covert activity.

I think, perhaps you're giving them too much credit, especially given that they stated that once they'd found no evidence of a grow op, they switched to searching for evidence of personal use (the absurdity of which is a whole other discussion).

My guess is that they did no homework at all before performing this raid; they just built a spreadsheet of gardeners, started checking trash cans and raided the first house that had a positive field test.

Or thry had another reason for the search entirely which they didn't want to make public, so just switched stupid excuse for another one?

Mention the CIA and the conspiracy theories just come flying in :P.

I'm more inclined to side with both Occam's and Hanlon's razor in this case.

Further, if we had data on the number of false positives these "4/20" raids turned up (which, per the article, seems like it could be quite a task to produce), we could come to a reasonable statistical certainty either way.

Were that the case, presumably it would have been a federal agency like the FBI or DEA carrying out the cover raid, not the local Sheriff's department, and it wouldn't have been part of a regularly-scheduled annual publicity-effort raids conducted on 4/20.

Well, unless you get into a fairly deep conspiracy theory.

Seems like overkill -- couldn't the CIA just do a nice quiet blag bag operation, breaking into their apartment during the day while they were away at work?

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