The FBI as advanced persistent threat

And the millions of people who don't know anyone who knows what half those words mean?

Great point - a good threat model usually targets all companies first, such as FAANG, since they are the worst aggressors, and are well known to be leaky (data dumps of personal info are leaked almost daily now), whereas the government tends to be seemingly less leaky and have more narrow data interests, i.e. less interested in the wide array of data that companies extract from people. It's strange how often the government is the main entity discussed in privacy concerns while completely ignoring the much larger problem of corporations in that area.

Much of the big events of lately are more related to mass surveillance, censorship, and election interference. Check out the Twitter Files, Russiagate, and final Durham report on Racket.news. Congress has been holding a special investigation on the weaponization of the federal government related to this but more broadly. Recently FBI admitted to having many operatives in the capitol on January 6. Then you had the recent revelation that the FBI violated rules ~280,000 times by accessing private information without a warrant. There is so much more, but whatever large centralized internet services or data brokers can gather is potentially available to government agencies.

1. What advertising companies have been abusing power too. Two wrongs do not make a right.

2.

Plenty of examples of 3 letter agencies abusing their powers if you search.

EFF, reason.com, and the register usually make a point of reporting on it.

eg: https://www.eff.org/wp/patterns-misconduct-fbi-intelligence-...

https://reason.com/2023/05/17/the-durham-report-is-right-abo...

For example spying on (ex) girlfriends, seeing people in various state of undress (cameras in devices) etc.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/01/government-releases-do...

Heard of PRISM?

> Why should she have to dress modestly just because men can't keep it in their pants?"

In the entire course of human history, has dressing modestly ever protected anyone from getting raped? Like a rapist is out to rape, and be like 'oh no, that's a modest woman, better find someone else'? Do women that fully conceal themselves for religious reasons not get raped?

Like even the 'everyone should have a gun' narrative makes more sence than this.

We're big users of NFC cards in Australia, so have already been using those for years.

The convenience factor for me is that I don't have to collect the paper receipts! At the end of the week I just bring up the Google Wallet app's transaction history and enter that data into my home finance tracking software.

>They killed twenty-eight kids.

>This suggests that "going after" the compound was not really about the welfare of any children.

Not just that, but given the way things played out repeatedly (not just Waco, Ruby Ridge, the Elián González situation, etc) it's hard to believe much of what the FBI asserts happened in those cases. It's too difficult to not see some higher up putting their fingers on the scale and trying to whitewash what happened after the fact. What little we do know seems to really reek of REMFer controls over what was allowed to happen.

And who can forget the infamous images of some of the agents standing over the ashes with grins? No the official story on Waco is one of the things that I cannot take at face value. It certainly didn't help going to public school and hearing about the events while attending a church that had an (undeserved) reputation due to busybodies who made up stories. I grew up sincerely wondering if one day the government was going to show up at my church one Sunday.

For all that we're told the Branch Davidians were a cult (and certainly it sounded like they were depending on the sources you read up on) they had all the trappings of being just another church. It is only because we were told that they were cultists, that we were told they were child abusers that we mostly didn't wonder at how the government was acting towards a CHURCH, a place of WORSHIP. It's a serious blindspot, compounded by the fact that it was the government, their accusers who were responsible for all these deaths.

Yeah, I've got questions.

Waco was a difficult situation.

The authorities claimed a belief that doing nothing could lead to a mass suicide[1] (really a mass murder/suicide due to the children). This belief may have been reasonable based on the apocalyptic beliefs central to this Christian cult.

But, the authorities when discussing the decision to go on the offensive with an armored vehicle punching holes into the buildings and firing teargas canisters into those holes made claims that seem contradictory. The authorities said that they were aware that the Dividians possessed enough gas masks for all the adults, but that they hoped that "motherly instincts" would take over, and the parents would allow the children to flee[1]. I don't see why they would believe this, if they believed the Dividians were capable of murdering their children in a mass murder suicide.

Money is usually a factor in all things in the US. Perhaps cost was a factor in attempting to end the stand-off? Neighbors seemed to be becoming fatigued by the standoff too. An even more protracted siege may have ended better, or the Dividians might have chosen murder+suicide rather than surrendering no matter how long they were given.

Wikipedia article[2] states:

"Of the 85 Branch Davidians in the compound when the final siege began, 76 died on April 19 in various ways, from falling rubble to suffocating effects of the fire, or by gunshot from fellow Branch Davidians.[34] The siege had lasted 51 days."

But, skimming through that 34th citation[3], I didn't see anything that stated that Davidians were killed by gunfire from other Davidians (perhaps I missed it, but I don't think so). But, it and the LA Times article report on fire investigators who found various fire accelerants including kerosene and lighter fluid in multiple locations and on multiple members of the Christian cult. And, quite the armory of weapons including over a million spent round casings (many firearms illegally modified to be fully automatic) in the possession of the Davidians.

I heard an interview with an divinity scholar who said he and others had tried to reach David Koresh to try to convince him that his reading of the Apocalypses was incorrect (IIRC these attempts included messages delivered through advertisements taken out with local media). They believed that if they could convince Koresh he would end the standoff. Having interacted with religious zealots, this seems naive to me, but it certainly would have been worth trying. (I cannot remember the divinity scholar's name and my vague subject searches did not return anything useful)

[1] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1993-04-20-mn-25027-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Branch_Davidians

[3] (this is wikipedia article citation #34) https://web.archive.org/web/20170511015809/https://www.justi...

What specific methods do you disapprove of in their handling of this child rapist cult?

Seems well established that the death cult lit the fires themselves as death cults tend to when under pressure. From audio recordings inside the compound:

``` 6:01 a.m.: A combat engineering vehicle (CEV) hits the building and sprays bursts of liquified CS gas powder. A Hostage Rescue Team sniper sees green tracer rounds fired at the CEV from the compound. FBI commanders shift to their "compromise plan" and gas the entire building.

6:09 a.m.: Davidians discuss pouring something in a hallway. One asks, "David said pour it, right?" Another says, "David said we have to get the fuel on."

6:19 a.m.: Koresh says, "Nobody comes in, huh?" Someone answers, "Nobody comes in." "Allright. They got some fuel around here?" Koresh asks. Schneider says, "Yeah, everybody."

6:29 a.m.: FBI commanders report that a CEV accidentally cut the Davidians' telephone line.

7:08 a.m.: A man says, "Real quickly you can order the fire, yes."

7:21 a.m.: Amid talk of spreading fuel, a man says, "So, we only light it first when they come in with the tank. ...right as they're coming in?" "Right," someone replies. A voice calls, "We should get more hay in here."

```

They had the option to handle it any time between 1957 and 1993

> After the siege, McLennan County Sheriff Jack Harwell told The Dallas Morning News: "I would have tried to arrest him, and I would've never walked out of there alive. One day there had to be a confrontation with them. They were building for this."

So you need to reform that. "It's always been this way" means that it'll never change.

There's practical solutions. If a cop did something bad, it shouldn't be a prosecutor from the same city who they may have to work with one day on a case, it should be one from out of town. And if you say a cop won't cooperate with any prosecutor, then well too bad, that's part of the job and if they don't like it, they should find another career.

Let the 'free market' figure it out. Require a private insurance policy to hold a LEO permit; and have the private market decide that specific officers - whole types of policing are too expensive. If a officer has to pay 10,000% of their wages to hold a insurance policy abuse/derliction would have consequences, and department hopping would also be mitigated.

If you shot an unarmed man in the back... would you not be punished for that? Or if you planted drugs on your friend? If you planted a microphone/camera in your friends place?

How do you make sure the one who step up won't become next FBI?

Where can we see a list of these 200 other groups? That's fascinating. Perhaps a much larger "re-org" is needed

Yeah you don't need the FBI specifically. You do need a group that does what they can do. I think for the most part state agencies could hand what the FBI does. You do not need a national agency.

There definitely needs to be cuts in 3 letter federal agencies. They're out of control.

In the end though, it doesn't matter because eventually over time all of those agencies with too much power will become corrupt. Massive oversight and constant cleaning out of people that have been entrenched too long is necessary.

The FBI is the generalist of them, the rest are nominally more specialized to their particular parent department's purview. Inefficiency by just having a separate department for every federal crime is a silly way to try to go about limiting overreach when we haven't even really tried proper oversight and enforcement.

Disbanding it will just cause an alternative force to replace it, and you'll need to wait to see how that will develop, which could well be worse. Think of it as a variation on the 'don't rewrite' mantra, rewriting it causes massive instability and has an unknown deadline, improving what is there is much easier.

If you want to envision some kind of Utopian view of law enforcement then there is the simple problem of 'who watches the watchers', a question that has been bugging us since antiquity and which I don't think we'll see an effective solution to in this life (or the next). Every law enforcement body consists of people and people are fallible, and will always be fallible. So you need to accept that and design accordingly, and you also will need to accept that mistakes (small ones and much larger and graver ones) will be made, as well as abuses of power.

To re-architect a police force in the United States that transcends the states is an undertaking that in the current political climate is undoable. So advocating for abandoning the FBI effectively advocates for abandoning federal policing in general, and that certainly isn't going to have a net positive effect.

This is a problem with law enforcement as a whole. I really think the US needs to completely rethink what "police" are.

Same here.

I can't forget reading declassified case of testing drugs (probably LSD) on unsuspecting people in a motel and surveying them. One particular detail that stuck in my head was the pleasure some agents were getting out of this "test" (documented by other, more adequate agent).

> There's a reason Kennedy wanted to disband the organization entirely.

The quote people use to say he wanted this...might not even be a real quote at all.

The CIA is the Fifth Reich.

The ideologues who survived WW2 escaped and now have created an impenetrable fortress in the very heart of their enemy, and are using it as the base from which to enforce fundamentally racist, totalitarian-authoritarian ideologies which ultimately result in chaos, death and calamity at massive scale around the world.

I'm not aware of any effort to bury those topics or anything similar; but some of those posts did get downweighted by other software filters.

I've sent repost invites for https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36062943 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35913168. If you want to track this and notice that either of them doesn't get reposted within (say) a week, you'd be welcome to post it yourself and email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll give it the SCP treatment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308). (Btw I suppose I should add that I'm not doing this because I think the topics ought to be better represented on HN, but rather because those two articles look interesting. Interestingness is the only thing we care about.)

People draw conclusions from what they see (or think they see) about posts on HN but the conclusions are almost always wrong because they're so strongly affected by the perceiver's priors and are based on such little data. The main reason why an article X doesn't get attention on HN is because that's the default outcome for any article on HN. That simple fact has more explanatory power than most other explanations people come up with, but has the disadvantage that it's boring.

He for sure admires effective cruel dictators. You can add MBS on that list, he bragged pretty openly about 'saving his ass', which even from common media looked exactly like that.

I am sure he did some good stuff, but he made sure its extremely easy to hate him by often behaving like a childish diva. Oh and for anybody in US - basically whole world outside, apart maybe from few friendly dictatorships like russia or saudi arabia, hated him during his presidency. Kind of 'insult your basic intelligence and human decency in 2 easy steps' guy. But current pro-russian, anti-covid etc crowd liked him a lot (when you are getting manipulated like a marionette I guess it doesn't matter if from east or west)

That was a partisan affair. The people pushing those prosecutions are just as responsible.

Treating campaign puffery as real existential threat to the continuity of government and spending years pursuing very weak intelligence reports was more damaging than any thing he did.

This reasoning is circular. A proper investigation is predicated on evidence of a crime, of which there was none here. Most people view it as immoral to persecute under color of the law, as you advocate.

Yea because Israel is exactly the same as the US if not worse in terms of terrorizing the Palestinians

Did you grow up as a black american? People from different communities have radically different experiences, which is why we see denials such as yours

Of course this is reality.

There are just many privileged people here that are so insulated from reality they confuse their insane social media political talking points with actual reality.

The counter argument is always some straw man pulled from news headlines.

With similar powers (and similar lack if oversight), I’m thinking that such an FBI-replacement agency would have similar problems in very short order. Sounds like a laborious feel-good exercise.

The fact that the FBI persists "as is" *and* doesn't change its way tells us one very important thing...to those who matter it's doing a great job. It's doing what it's supposed to be doing.

The FBI is similar to the economy. Many complain "...the economy isn't working..." But the economy is working. Quite well. And as designed, expected and desired. That is, the wealth is trickling up. More and more in less hands. Etc. It's working.

So the FBI is working as intended. Changing it would be fixing a symptom.

Note: I'm not siding with the FBI, only hoping to explain why its able to persist.

He doesn't make a good point. I'd rather have people of high moral character responsible for enforcing the law.