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Comment by pclmulqdq | Hacker News Reader

Why do we need an FBI? There are over 200 other federal law enforcement operations, and certainly one (or ten) of them will step up to fill the gaps in cross-state criminal investigation that would be left by disbanding the FBI.

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

I did a Google search for “list of us federal law enforcement organizations “ and this was the first result: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_law_enforcement_in_t...

In the US, basically every federal agency is responsible for enforcement of federal regulations in the domain assigned to it. Until 2003, there even used to be a dedicated Library of Congress police for example.

Maybe the only premise for a cop show that I’d ever watch: library force

Not quite the library, but there was a show about the postal service cops (bankrolled by the USPS): https://yewtu.be/watch?v=OCjG78McFxQ

Postal inspectors will ruin your day, do not mess with them. They are a pretty serious group of individuals.

I just leaned that the post office has armed officers as well. That’s so ridiculous. Each of these agencies also stockpile ammo, a portion of which is used each year for training.

I’d be happy to see the FBI take that role on for federal assignments _if_ that reduced budgets and the current rot was excised in some meaningful way with mechanisms put in place to hold individuals accountable.

Just wait until you learn that one of the eight uniformed services of the US, along with the army, air force, and navy, is... the NOAA Corps. Yep, the weather men.

Weather service was militarized almost everywhere up to very recently, mostly due to air-force concerns. Usually this meant that it was provided by a military organization, but the US has a thing for branching its military forces.

(Actually, I don't know about any country where it's completely civilian up to now. But that's not something I ever looked.)

Seinfeld - The Library Cop : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9tP9fI2zbE

Seinfeld - Newman interrogates Jerry--Mail fraud : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDmA2xoIoFU

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.

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

Well, I'm confident they would become the next FBI. It's a feature of intelligence services. But until they did, we'd have some breathing space.

Or much worse...

Strong states rights protections. Recover the republic from the ashes of democracy.

States have their own FBI-alikes and they're not much better when it comes to privacy they just have fewer tools but mostly because they're not getting that much in the way of work that would need it. If they get delegated responsibility they're not going to turn out much better than the FBI.

Easier to change your state than your country. Also your vote is much more effective at a state level as opposed to a federal one.

With the level of gerrymandering at the state level I'm less sure that's true today, in theory yeah you're individually a larger portion of the vote but the same anti-democratic processes freezing things at the federal level are in part rooted at the state level. On top of all of that the Republican party who's benefitting the most in most states from gerrymandering is more pro-police power than not, they're just mad their guy got got by it.

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.

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