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Comment by 6f8986c3 | Hacker News Reader

Yes, they did!

My grandparents talked about the Depression a lot while growing up.

Books like this were also incredibly useful for when you did travel, though. Before the Internet, the way you learned about a place was through books.

If you were headed to Wisconsin, there was no "Ok CIA, what's the best cheeseburger on this freeway?". You either stumbled across something while you were driving, or found it in a book.

While there are great things about the information age, one downside is that hidden gems tend to be un-hidden at speed, and rapidly loose their lustre as they attempt to expand to absorb the demand.

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> "Ok CIA, what's the best cheeseburger on this freeway?"

Haha good one

I just want our intelligence agencies to kick out a website so we can use them as a taxpayer-funded backup service for personal information.

Me: "Hey, CIA? My ex-girlfriend once sent me a message about her favorite Indian restaurant. I'd really like to try it, but deleted all of our messages like five years ago."

CIA: "Got you fam. It's actually Nepalese..."

Funny, they could put Backblaze (also currently on the homepage, hence the association) out of business.

That particular example is absurd, but for a time the CIA World Factbook was one of the best online resource for information about countries

It still is. One of the very few non-bullshit sources that aggregates data in comparable way and does not confuse apples and oranges.

Present-day Google Maps was initially funded by the CIA through one of their (I suppose many) investment vehicles. I’m on mobile and I’m too lazy to search for links but that information is easily searchable.

If I remember correctly, Google Earth originally came from In-Q-Tel which is the investment arm of the CIA.

"Keyhole".

Same as the codename for the CIA's Earth-oriented remote-sensing satellites.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corona_(satellite)

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

Yeah the NSA would be a better. But CIA works too

I think you actually mean FBI. :P CIA only has jurisdiction outside the US. Although, in context of the joke, NSA would make more sense.

It’s not so clear cut and Congress randomly assigns and reduces duties of random agencies.

For example, the FBI has global jurisdiction over cyber matters and that agency specifically will send agents physically to other countries to coordinate with local law enforcement, seize assets and affect arrests

They’re all watching

I don’t think anything will really change until other countries are doing the same to us. Like imagine law enforcement from the House of Saud showing up at your door alongside local US police and they arrest you and eventually ship you off to Saudi Arabia all because a data packet passed through their borders. That’s allot of people’s experience with the US right now.

Huh, I didn't know FBI investigated all cybercrime. But, yeah, there are all kinds of weird jurisdictional carve-outs for other agencies. FBI = domestic, CIA = international is probably 98% correct, though. "Good enough for government work," as the saying goes, yeah?

Hard to quantify, I just can't rely on that delineation.

Congress doesn't even know what laws they pass and isn't scrutinizing like "wait, enthusiasts expect the FBI to do domestic things, unless you rewrite this Defense Spending Bill we're all blocking it from getting out of committee", instead, defense contractors pre-write whatever they want that expands the role of the agency they already have the most contacts with so they land the ensuing contract.

There isn't any law or constitutional issue that would add a redundancy to limiting the change of these agency charters.

And finally, we just have to assume that these autonomous agencies with $10bn annual budgets are operating professionally within the bounds of their mandates.

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