FBI/DOJ wiretapped the Facebook comms of 19 illegal aliens who were MS-13 gangsters in North Hollywood. the wiretaps spanned 2017-2019. the gang murdered 6 people. the last murder was a random killing of a homeless guy as an initiation ritual to get into the gang.
i happened to be 50 yards away from that murder when it happened. i didnt hear a thing because i was sleeping and it was rarely raining in LA that night. those gangsters could have randomly picked me to kill instead of the other homeless guy. i was woken up by a cop politely asking me to move. i looked over and there was a tarp tent over the body of the victim with a dozen cops standing guard.
i may have even helped to open the case because 1 year prior, i emailed the Chief of the NoHo LAPD to tell him i was seeing MS-13 graffiti all over that park where the murder occured. he replied back within an hour thanking me for the tip and the graffito was removed the next day. so MS-13 activity in that area was certainly on LE's radar.
i am an obsessive reader of Snowden leaks and am pretty anti-NSA, but i thank god the FBI was able to order Facebook to hand over the comms of that MS-13 gang. those gang bangers were so stupid that they were literally coordinating murders over Facebook Messenger and boasting about their 100's of crimes spanning years on Facebook.
ACLU is in the wrong here and i support not unsealing the wiretap documents. because think of how many other idiot MS-13 gangsters across America will also broadcast their murders and crimes on Facebook? if they all know for a fact that yes, the FBI is using Facebook to track them, then they will all go dark. that means the next time MS-13 attempts to ramdomly murder a guy like me, then FBI won't be able to so easily convict them.
i have read every page of every Snowden leak. my views on mass surveillance have evolved since 2013. at first i was horrified because of the shock that it was happening. but over time i have come to realize there is no closing Pandora's box. every year the CPUs get faster, storage doubles, bandwidth triples and the software gets smarter. there is no way to freeze computing progress in time. which means every year, mass surveillance gets cheaper like Moore's Law. i now see it is entirely naive and unrealistic to stop mass surveillance. there is no technical solution to a political problem. you can't un-invent the machine gun.
all we can do is demand our Intel Overlords only apply mass surveillance to legit protection of our society, like for busting murderers and rapists and MS-13 and cartels. and we must force FBI/DOJ to stay the fuck out of abusing mass surveillance for corrupt political purposes, like spying on Presidents, or wiretapping 37 Congressmen, or bugging SCOTUS for 12 years, or blackmailing Presidents and Congress with sex tapes, or harassing antiwar activists, or persecuting whistleblowers and legitimate joirnalists who publish leaked top secrets.
this FBI operation to crush a murderous MS-13 cell hit pretty close to home for me--it was terrifying to realize i only got lucky that night being in the right place and right time to avoid being the sacrificial victim. this experience definitely changed my perspective on FBI surveilling Facebook. everyone is opposed to FBI surveillance until they almost get murdered. then it's "great job FBI, do more gumshoe police work and less political meddling!"