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FBI Monitored Aretha Franklin for Years, File Shows
81–90 of 276 posts
Re: FBI Monitored Aretha Franklin for Years, File Shows
#82The FBI is more or less a legalized criminal organization that is funded by U.S. taxpayers, but is unelected and unaccountable to them. This article is from 2013, but I haven’t seen anything to suggest that this behavior has changed: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/08/04/fbi-in... The important part to consider: > The FBI gave its informants permission to break the law at least 5,658 times in a single…
Governments are basically the mob, except that they figured out that they can exert more control over a longer period of time if they have documents that "constrain" their powers and they offer you a say in some matters.
Every year, I pay the US government protection money at a higher rate than the mob demanded (~35% vs ~15%). They mark their territory, control who enters and exits, and demand compliance with their rules. If you are under their protection, they give you a little document that tells other gangs not to screw with you.
They back all of this up with guns and threats of violence, held by unelected thugs. They give you a process to prove your innocence, but the process itself is a punishment, since it is a huge resource drain to go through.
The FBI are the most visible thugs.
Re: FBI Monitored Aretha Franklin for Years, File Shows
#83Pirke Avot 2.3 applies, as it always does: https://www.sefaria.org/Pirkei_Avot.2.3 People have internalized that HR is on the company's side, not theirs, but sometimes their goals are congruent. Everyone should look at government the same way.
If everyone should look at government the same way, then government has failed tremendously and we should stop pushing this farce of "democracy".
Re: FBI Monitored Aretha Franklin for Years, File Shows
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Defined the police" usually means "fund social welfare" with a side of "disarm the beat cops so they learn to deescalate". "Abolish the police" is the message of a much smaller group. And any count of crime surge should also include crimes committed by police under color of law.
It was a stupid chant that resulted in a stupider outcome. It has been fully adopted and distorted by right wing commentators. As the people actually yelling about “defund the police” are poorly organize and have no message, they are drowned out by the people criticizing them, and enabling union action like work to rule stuff in places like NYC. People in high crime areas don’t want to be abused by police. Police nee…
Completely agree. There's a huge swath of moderate "non-sexy" solutions that the public could get behind--in 2020, something like 90% of Americans favored police reforms according to Gallup, which necessarily includes a bunch of Republicans. We could have got some combination of "require more police training", "reorganize internal affairs", "weaken police unions", "end qualified immunity", etc but instead progressives prioritized their personal catharsis to the detriment of everyone, but especially the communities of color who have to suffer the most from the crime surge, who never wanted a decrease of policing in the first place (80% of black Americans opposed de-policing in 2020), and in whose name progressives demanded a reduction in policing.
Re: FBI Monitored Aretha Franklin for Years, File Shows
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
We need public auditing of these organizations. Organization that operate secretly will always provide some refuge for corruption. There are always blind spots for management. If the public has no input, how can we ever trust them?
How do you hold an entity accountable when that entity has the capability to destroy any single individual with no repercussions? Accountability is further complicated by the fact that the entity is political in nature, so the FBI has actual partisan backing through politicians, the court system, and even down to individual jurists. I honestly don't know what the solution is myself.
If you get rid of the above organizations, the local police become the organization with the capability to destroy any single individuals with no repercussions. Though they have few already, the FBI does investigate local law enforcement agencies.
The fact that the head of the FBI is an appointee of an elected official, there is some public accountability through voters if there is enough transparency to inform voters of what is going on.
I suppose the same is true for most local police though. As it stands, we don’t get much transparency. For a democracy to work properly, the public needs to be informed. The stonewalling by law enforcement at all levels prevents the public from holding them accountable.
Re: FBI Monitored Aretha Franklin for Years, File Shows
#86Defund the FBI, CIA, NSA, ATF, and DEA. They've proven themselves to cause more trouble than to solve problems.
I know this is more of an emotional response than a serious proposal, but I'll take the opportunity to point out: Black-and-white thinking leads to very inefficient outcomes. That is, it makes a lot more sense to reign-in, reform, and redirect intelligence and policing agencies than get rid of them. I think we want to work on how to align their interests -- as individual agents, intermediate commanding officers, and…
Gray thinking ideas:
• Down-classify everything by 1 designation. Top Secret / Secure Compartmentalized Information becomes Top Secret. Top Secret becomes Secret. Secret becomes Declassified. (I've heard overclassification decreases trust in government)
• Shorten the maximum secrecy timespan (some information is kept secret 50+ years to avoid political blowback against operations that the public would find inexcusable)
• Shorten the average secrecy timespan (see above)
• Ban ISP's from collecting, retaining, distributing, and selling netflow metadata.
• Ban all government agencies from bypassing fourth amendment by way of purchasing surveillance from private organizations.
Edit: if you're going to downvote someone for brainstorming less extreme ideas (not suggestions/demands) as a response to more extreme ideas, please at least offer criticism of the ideas themselves.
Re: FBI Monitored Aretha Franklin for Years, File Shows
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that was close to the original intent of "defund", as in reallocate funding for policing into different areas (and in some cases, I've heard more specifically splitting up police work into more granular area i.e. responding to mental health incidents vs. domestic abuse vs. a break in). But the "defund" quickly ran away into "remove all funding", which of course is a lot more radical and less palatable for any…
Defund was probably a bad choice of word, and reform a better one ? But if people can only deal with single-word manifestos, then you re bound to misinterpret.
"Reform" is too easy to silently crush. Oodles of police "reforms" have achieved precisely nothing at mitigating the widespread use of violence by police against the people. "Defund" argues that the institution itself is fundamentally broken and that we should be solving many of the problems that police are tasked with today through organizations that don't have the authority to execute people.
Re: FBI Monitored Aretha Franklin for Years, File Shows
#88The FBI is more or less a legalized criminal organization that is funded by U.S. taxpayers, but is unelected and unaccountable to them. This article is from 2013, but I haven’t seen anything to suggest that this behavior has changed: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/08/04/fbi-in... The important part to consider: > The FBI gave its informants permission to break the law at least 5,658 times in a single…
That's just about explicit permission. All kind of shit also happens via implicit permission (nobody does anything about cops doing it and so is normalized) or no permission.
Re: FBI Monitored Aretha Franklin for Years, File Shows
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
Trump is against the FBI because they're investigating him. It's not that deep.
We do know that at least two FBI agents were found to have conspired against him during his first campaign. We also know that an FBI attorney falsified information to get warrants against his campaign advisor. We know that the FBI urged the media to actually censor negative news about his political opponents. It would be difficult to them trust such an organization to them perform fair investigations against you afte…
Two FBI agents conspired against him?
According to who? Trump?
Investigating leads is conspiring against you?
I don’t know the veracity of the claim that the FBI told the media to censor negative news. The media was definitely on guard for being manipulated following the DNC/Podesta email hacking and use of media by Russia in 2016. And so were our counterintelligence agencies. It’s literally their job.
Re: FBI Monitored Aretha Franklin for Years, File Shows
#90The FBI is more or less a legalized criminal organization that is funded by U.S. taxpayers, but is unelected and unaccountable to them. This article is from 2013, but I haven’t seen anything to suggest that this behavior has changed: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/08/04/fbi-in... The important part to consider: > The FBI gave its informants permission to break the law at least 5,658 times in a single…
Governments are basically the mob, except that they figured out that they can exert more control over a longer period of time if they have documents that "constrain" their powers and they offer you a say in some matters. Every year, I pay the US government protection money at a higher rate than the mob demanded (~35% vs ~15%). They mark their territory, control who enters and exits, and demand compliance with their r…
Yup exactly. Our default social contract gives governments a monopoly on violence, of course they’ll use it.