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Comment by stickfigure | Hacker News Reader

It is also possible he is an idiot. There are few valuable sentences that begin with "it is possible..."

To be fair, he probably never once in his wildest dreams ever thought he would be head of the FBI. So he probably didn't think he needed the extra security, because what idiot would put him in charge of the world's largest spy network.

The FBI is not a spy network.

While I understand why you would say that, I think the way "spy network" was meant, was in the way that their job is to spy within the US. And given the resources at their disposition, and the size of the US, "worlds biggest spy network" is not wrong.

Also, they do head up the main counterintelligence effort of the US.

How the mighty have fallen.

You are being pedantic.

I have 2 family members who are/were special agents for the FBI. Much of their job is harvesting evidence to build cases by spying, which frequently comes more in the form of “spying” in the way we saw in The Sopranos.

The FBI is also the premier counter-espionage organization within the US, so it is tasked with spying on suspected foreign / turned spies.

It is much more than a spy network, but it is exactly that as well.

All cleared citizens are subject to warrantless search at any time by the FBI, some for the remainder of their life. You don't have to be a suspect to fall within their panopticon.

> All cleared citizens are subject to warrantless search at any time by the FBI, some for the remainder of their life.

That claim deserves a source.

It's buried in EO12333

That’s at least partly because upping application for a security clearance, they are signing a contract to do that.

We don’t know how much the Trump political officials managed to avoid those onboarding requirements. It has been widely reported that at least some of them bypassed eligibility requirements and polygraph. It’s probably not a huge leap to assume these same people were not required to consent to these forever-after-searches.

World’s largest spy network? The FBI wouldn’t even be the largest spy network within the US.

The same idiot who pushed him into SecDef’s office and DNI in 2020.

He shouldn’t be FBI Director and he shouldn’t have been in the DNI or Secretary of Staff for SecDef either. All of those are high positions of responsibility and require tremendous OpsSec. This guy’s first act as FBI Director was to waive most of the investigations into his staff to bypass security clearance checks.

Sorry if I’m not disagreeing with you. Sarcasm is a bit hard to identify these days.

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