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FBI Is Building a Watchlist That Gives Companies Real Time Updates on Employees
- darpa_escapee 10y agoFBI started out as the Pinkerton agency. They identified and intimidated/killed strikers, workers planning to unionize and anyone that got in the way of business. This isn't surprising.
- rayiner 10y agoThat's not true.
- yareally 10y agoI think you mean the Secret Service started out as the Pinkerton Detective Agency. They became part of the government due in part of protecting the president and investigation into monetary related crime. The FBI came in early 20th century as a need to address more conventional crime that crossed state lines and made it difficult for states to investigate/prosecute (organized crime, kidnapping, bootlegging). While you could say it had a valid reason to exist, J. Edgar Hoover morphed it into something entirely different. Edit: To clarify my hastily typed up message from my phone, the Pinkertons were government contractors and precursor to the Secret Service, but not the same entity. Secret Service did not officially protect the president until the assassination of President McKinley in 1901.
- ubernostrum 10y agoNeither one is true. The Secret Service was initially chartered solely as an anti-counterfeiting task force. The Pinkertons never became part of the government; they were just a handy private army to be deployed by people who'd obtained the good will of the government.
- yareally 10y agoMea Culpa. Should have double checked before typing that out :) Didn't mean to say they were the same thing, just the precursor of the Secret Service and did much of the same work in a contractual role.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- oval-atom 10y agoAnti-Pinkerton Act passed in 1893, denied anyone working for the Pinkertons or similar organizations to work of the United States government or the District of Columbia.
- devoply 10y agoThe message here is clear: Don't protest or you might lose your job. I will say it again, despite being down-voted last time, these are chilling effects on activism in the United States. They prevent democracy from happening. This means democracy is broken and needs fixing. Activism is the only way that egregious problems like racism in the United States got fixed, without activism black people would still be under Jim Crow laws. edit: Okay racism did not get fixed, but it's a definite improvement on Jim Crow Laws. And we obviously we need more activism to fight the institutionalized racism that exists today such as the drug war.
- analogmemory 10y agoIf I lose my job for protesting or activism then fuck that employer. There should be a database of companies that fire people for their off hours activism.
- devoply 10y agoThe point of chilling effects is to dissuade people sitting on the fence. If you can do enough of that only very committed people go out to protest and it's easy to single they out and isolate them from society.
- dec0dedab0de 10y agoit should start with a list of companies that publicly state that their employees are allowed to protest, even if the company disagrees with them.
- gcr 10y agoAbsolutely. When I go on the job market, I will absolutely bias my search toward employers that have a history of activism among the leaders of the country. (Example: Fog Creek Software with Anil Dash as CEO would be my absolute dream place to work.)
- duncan-donuts 10y agoIt's pretty sad we're talking about companies publicly stating they allow employees to protest. What business is it of the company?
- suprgeek 10y agoBeautiful - Go to protest against Trump (or even to document it [1]) - get arrested and charged with "Rioting", "Disturbing the Peace" or my most favorite "Resisting Arrest[2]" - get an Arrest Record - Get fired immediately thanks to RAP BACK - Charges get dropped. Rinse and repeat. Welcome Absolute Fascism. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/jan/24/journalists-charged-felonies-trump-inauguration-unrest https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/jan/24/journalists-ch... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=4&v=92toXdu2KR0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=4&v=92toXdu2KR0
- nickthemagicman 10y agoAnother reason jobs are a legacy system of gaining resources. Drug tests background tests, now this. How easy is it to control people who need a job to survive?
- Spooky23 10y agoThis stuff is scary. My union as a .gov employee didn't understand that it was signing up for something even worse than this. That employer will get an active notification of any arrest (not indictment) for every impacted employee's life, even after separation from service. Worse, the employer can administratively decide that an arrest is of concern and can basically void your appointment to a position.
- randywaterhouse 10y agoWe've already lost when an arrest is equivalent to a conviction. Although, in some ways, we've been here for a while. Maybe less-so for individuals but for corporations, whom the law generally treats with a degree of "individual" rights (IANAL), it's long been that an indictment is worse than a conviction. After an indictment, clients turn away -> revenue flees -> shutters. What's scary is an indictment is, in theory (under fair application of the principles of law), is more severe than a simple arrest. If we're living in a system (US) where a simple arrest results in a database entry which can result in the end of your productive life, we're living in a... [up to the reader to determine the severity] Ultimately, the power of gov't to drop charges after such a consequence (firing) is powerful and unfair to the individual. Indeed.
- drawkbox 10y agoProtesting peacefully is an American right, this will be a list of real patriots. However, this is a bit scary. Corporations have become the brownshirts and we are inching towards a one-party authoritarian system like China it seems. Unfortunately the divide and conquer strategy of the two party system in the US makes people honor party over country and this is a problem. The only solution is to be more independent. "I never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from a friend." -- Thomas Jefferson
- leereeves 10y ago> this will be a list of real patriots. Isn't this is a list of all arrests, not merely protesters?
- hedora 10y agoselect * from arrests where indictment = null Probably also group by citizen id and sort by count. :-)
- thehardsphere 10y agoThe list is of people who underwent a pre-employment biometric background check. So, roughly, anybody who works for a bank, is a public school teacher, acquires a security clearance, or is in the military. The level of "real patriotism" on the list is going to roughly correspond with the "real patriotism" of those groups of people. I don't understand why there's so much fascination with the idea that this is some protester-busting tool. The article merely posits the hypothetical scenario that some people could be punished by their employer, because their employer might get a rap back and they wouldn't be able to tell it was First Amendment activity as opposed to some actual serious crime, because the FBI and local law enforcement is bad at data entry. Somehow people read that and think that the point of the whole system is "corporate fascism stopping the patriotic protesting democracy" when none of the employers actually care about that. Or in other words, an emergent problem in the system that might occur is being assumed to be the central planned feature of it.
- JumpCrisscross 10y agoWe need a public watch list of companies who fire, or in any way discipline, employees on this watch list.
- a3n 10y agoHow will you know, if it's employment at will?
- dragonwriter 10y agoGP said "on", not "because of", so at-will employment doesn't really make it any more difficult to determine.
- leereeves 10y agoOTOH, maybe some people on the list are also bad employees.
- pmorici 10y agoI bet some of the people on the list will have brown hair too.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- leereeves 10y agoThe point being, it would be easy to end up with a witchhunt against a company for firing a couple bad employees who had also been arrested, even if the arrests had nothing to do with their dismissal.
- dragonwriter 10y agoYou mean, just like the original list promotes further punishment of people who are victims of baseless arrests that don't even support prosecution much less conviction?
- 464192002d7fe1c 10y agoThe difference is that the leaders (Linda Sarsour to name one) of things like the womens march are, to borrow a phrase from someone, deplorable people. By contrast, the people you're talking about on the right are properly and quietly marginalized. The right tell the deplorable people on their side to shut up and fuck off home, the left champion them and put them on stage (like the unrepentant child rapist Lena Dunham speaking at the DNC)
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- dang 10y agoOverheated ideological rhetoric is destructive of the kind of discussion we're trying for on HN, and will eventually get your account banned. Please stop posting like this. We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13570249 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13570249 and marked it off-topic.
- 464192002d7fe1c 10y agoIf pointing out that there are people out there celebrating child rapists and women who want to destroy female equality in the united states is a bannable offense on HN, please do so. I see no reason to stop pointing out facts because it makes the hive mind here uncomfortable.
- dang 10y ago"Facts" is what all political trolls call their wares. We've banned this account for trolling. Please don't create accounts to break HN's guidelines with.
- iamthepieman 10y agoThis is why I've always kept up my trade skills and wanted my kids to know a trade they could play without relying on corporate jobs.
- aswanson 10y agoBest course of action possible. The entire post-WW2 educational system in the US is geared towards channeling people into feeding the corporate machine, and not towards financial independence and self-sufficiency. That system has been showing its age for a while now and it's past time to prepare.
- dongslol 10y agoDoes programming count? :)
- kakarot 10y agoAbsolutely.
- linkmotif 10y agoGood use case for Kafka
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- lr4444lr 10y agoI see what you did there. ;-)
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- rdtsc 10y ago> First Amendment rights: filming public officials, attending protests, blocking streets. Is blocking streets a First Amendment right? I heard protestors blocking an exit to a hospital sometime ago. I would think that puts lives in danger. Just wonder what does the law state there. Say a patient in an ambulance dies on the way because of a protest blocking the street. Is there a precedent, what happens then?
- AnthonyMouse 10y agoThe problem with a lot of this is that it's just a pretext. You have laws against blocking an ambulance, and there are legitimate reasons for that. But if what you're really after is to prohibit protesting and the thing being protested is near a hospital so you just go around arresting every protester you can find in the street for blocking an ambulance, that's a different situation.
- rdtsc 10y ago> But if what you're really after is to prohibit protesting and the thing being protested is near a hospital It would seem it would be a good idea to just not organize a protest close to a hospital? Or have a more organized protest that would allow an ambulance to pass...
- itsjohncena 10y agoCan you show examples? This is feeling like a hypothetical you're using to dismiss political speech rather than a genuine concern. I don't doubt it's happened (I can think of a couple of anecdotal examples I've seen in person, as well as plenty of times we let cops through even though we were fully against them), but I also don't think you may have a respect for just how many peaceful protests block roads or buildings in this country every single day without major incidents. As someone else pointed out in this topic: the revolution isn't televised.
- dang 10y agoI appreciate (really, a lot) that you've been commenting civilly. But HN isn't a forum to be used primarily for political or ideological battle. It is for stories and conversations that gratify intellectual curiosity. Those things don't sit well together, because the more powerful forces (political battle) eventually overwhelm the more delicate ones (intellectual curiosity). https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
- Fifer82 10y agoAt the end of the day. American citizens will be the judge. With a booming demographic, you are watching the train pass, soon, you will be on, and then drive that train. Don't fight age, or fear. One day, someone reading this on HackerNews will take control. Our parents sent us to University, but, good lucking fooling them.
- DictumExNihilo 10y agoThere is a group who have proposed a solution to this problem for decades: Shrink the state. Until people stop believing that any effort to do so will result in everyone literally dying in the street, the state will grow. Until people's first impulse towards someone doing something they don't like ceases to be "there ought to be a law", the state will grow. Until people stop demanding that laws must affect the entirety of the country instead of just their state, the state will grow. What sort of government did we start with? "A republic, if you can keep it." according to Ben Franklin. We didn't keep it. Keep it small, keep it close, and recognize that there are limits to the problems a bureaucracy can solve. Be suspicious of all power. Be suspicious of all taxation. A massive government can, and does, wield incredible fortune like a weapon against the population. Shrink the state until politicians are no longer worth buying and it barely matters who holds the reins. Trust your neighbor a lot more and your government a lot less. Or do none of this, but don't ask why nobody told you this could happen. Because we did, and you laughed at us and told us we were juvenile, loathsome, heartless people.
- llukas 10y agoShrink the state = let rich & corporations get loose. You want to replace kind of power that you got influence on and some expectations about public information access with totally "private" power that you got no control about. That is special kind of stupid. Thank you but no thank you.
- ams6110 10y agoThe state is bigger than it's ever been. Meanwhile wealth inequality has risen to historic highs. How's that again?
- drinkjuice 10y agoThat's the result of the state being used as a vehicle for the rich to get richer, not for the state existing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-TydNlj7d0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-TydNlj7d0 "The state" is the one thing people in a democracy at least own on paper. That's not to be trifled with. Besides, just about anything is "bigger than it's ever been", one might as well say there have never been so many people working in non-profits for justice and whatnot, so that must be causing inequality. Last but not least, "big" doesn't mean anything. It's like only looking at lines of code, and not content at all. Even reducing it to "bigger versus smaller government", regardless of where you fall on that, is nonsense.
- dsfyu404ed 10y agoIf this kind of crap actually becomes popular I give it 10yr before people realize that police arrest tons of people for tons of things and a disturbingly large amount if it is just them "mildly" abusing their power and whatever it is eventually gets dropped. This will be especially true when all the (rich, white) college kids who's only brush with the law is being in the wrong place at the wrong time start hitting the job market. Eventually people will hopefully demand that the cops stop acting that way.
- emptybits 10y agoI suppose the self-employed will have a new level of privilege -- an arrest event will remain exactly what it always was and not a loss of livelihood.
- aarontyree 10y agoWe need sweeping data rights legislation and soon. And as long as democracy hijacking government agencies insist on compiling without cause or consent, a publicly maintained list of the developers that build these tools for government needs to be publicly available. A Hague for the digital age.
- ihsw 10y agoIf it's leftist terrorist groups like BLM and Antifa being kettled to be subjugated then I absolutely want to live in that world.
- 467568985476 10y agoMan this alt-right spam has been getting out of hand on HN recently. I hope dang does something about it.
- ihsw 10y agoFor starters, he could issue a statement of neutrality instead of giving into the "diversity" ideologues and H1B pimps. Those two groups are the most dangerous and disruptive. Uber's Travis Kalanick cowed to pressure from weak activists that had no leverage, very sad and I hope more don't give into fear and hatred. We can get through this together.
- drinkjuice 10y agoYou're projecting. When you drool about people who are against fascism being "subjugated", anyone who stands up to you isn't "giving in to fear and hatred", they're showing it the door.
- dang 10y ago> When you drool This is a violation of HN's rules regardless of how wrong someone else is. Please don't do it again.
- drinkjuice 10y agoCan you explain what "it" exactly is?
- dang 10y agoBeing uncivil in general and personally abrasive in particular.
- ibejoeb 10y agowell, I'm starting a company, and everyone who is interested is hired. It's a pretty boring job; there's nothing to do. But you get compensated in real-time rap sheet filings on yourself.
- throwwit 10y agoIt all boils down to money. Departments got a revenue stream from the churn of job applicant pool background checks. Now they're going with the SAAS model. It's a pretty bad ethical conflict of interest; that unfortunately someone without a job will never be able to afford to bring before the courts.
- marcoperaza 10y agoAll other issues aside, I really don't like that arrest records show up on people's background checks. On the other hand, there are very good reasons for the public to know who the government is arresting and why. How else would the public know that the government is abusing its authority? What is the solution?
- Broken_Hippo 10y agoThe best thing I can come up with is a system that protects the arrested's name until after a conviction. Anything released before that should include statistical data - description, race (since that is an issue), location, crime, and so on. I disagree with publishing mugshots for folks that have been found not guilty as well. There is good and bad to all of this, of course, and some of it won't be fixed without better attuned labor protection laws and things of that nature.
- dceddia 10y agoThis quote stuck out: > "People are clean when they first go in, then they get in trouble five years down the road [and] never tell the daycare about this." Interesting that he mentions "daycare," which seems to me like the Congressional-testimony-equivalent of clickbait. It's always easier to justify stopping bad people when you can tie it back to innocents somehow ("children, elderly, and the disabled", as the article mentions). He also uses the word "clean," evoking images of drug addicts - the opposite of clean - and implying that these daycare providers might turn into drug-addicted crazies without their employer ever finding out. But the scarier implication here is that what you do outside work affects your employment. Not just in the sense that posting drunken pictures to Facebook or bitching about your boss on Medium might do, but that the government will actively tell your employer about arrests that may have no bearing on your ability to do your job. What about someone who gets arrested for protesting, or excessive speeding, or being party to a bar fight? Do those things necessarily affect their ability to watch over children, or work at a nursing home, or pilot an airplane? I can only imagine that employers will see the arrest report as an immediate cause for firing, regardless of what the arrest was for. "We can't have people like that working here." It's a scary path to be headed down.
- pizza 10y agoJean Valjean weeps
- sjg007 10y agoLaw would have to change.
- thehardsphere 10y agoMaybe it's because I work in biometrics, but I don't understand what is newsworthy about this. The Rap Back program has been around for years now. The article gratuitously mentions the name "Trump" as an extra scare factor, even though NGI and its various depredations were planned since the Dubya administration (not that it matters whose administration it is; this kind of power expansion happens independently of what party holds power). Yes, it's concerning. But the headline "FBI is building a watchlist that gives companies real time updates on employees" is out of date. Now it should be "FBI built the watchlist five years ago that snitches on teachers and bank employees and nobody complained."
- int_19h 10y agoThe headline is baity, but the article makes a point that this thing is expanding rapidly in terms of number of participating employers. That part is news. And there are certainly implications specifically wrt the Trump administration, and protests against it.
- thehardsphere 10y agoThe implications with the Trump administration are no different than those under the Obama administration, when all of this expanding actually began accelerating as the NGI system was implemented.
- int_19h 10y agoThe potential for abuse is the same, yes. The way this is likely to actually be abused is a whole different ballpark.
- thehardsphere 10y agoHow? The same people are still running the FBI who were running it before the election.
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- anorphirith 10y agoam I the only one who doesn't get people who write stupid titles ? let's read this again: "FBI Is Building a Watchlist" ok they're spending time and money to make a surveillance system. "That Gives Companies Real Time Updates on Employees." and they give that system to "companies" so they can track their own employees ?! ?! WTF
- thehardsphere 10y agoThey don't "give the system" to employers. The system is part of the FBI's main biometric database. Basically, a small set of employers who have been using this database (which is the same database that all fingerprinted criminals are entered into) for background checks, now can subscribe to get notifications from it if you're arrested sometime after your background check was done. Yes, it's a clickbaity title, but essentially sort of correct.
- dkarapetyan 10y agoThis is great. Background checks now have webhooks. What could go wrong?
- bookmarkacc 10y agoI wonder how effective this will be at strike busting. 1. Local police in the pocket of local business arrest protestors 2. RAP BACK arrest record notification and thus grounds for termination 3. Termination 4. Charges dropped
- jakeogh 10y ago"including arrests at protests and charges that do not end up in convictions" I'm not sure what is, but I am sure that secret arrests and secret trials are not the answer. My first thought was to argue due process but typing it out made this contradiction inescapable.
- throw2016 10y agoWe have watched this country destroy other countries one after the other, prop up the main global ideological and financial sponsors of terrorism and then diabolically spend billions of dollars building a surveillance state at home in response while pretending to be the good guy. How can any responsible citizen let their own country do this to other countries, allow a surveillance state to be built in the first place inspite of all the revelations at great personal cost and allow the unencumbered growth of a war mongering military industrial complex at home? The business as usual tones of these discussions in the media and the constant judging of others like China or Russia for authoritarianism reflects a troubling dissonance and denial about the real consequences of our actions both at home and abroad. We are not just destroying these countries, we are killing hundreds of thousands of people, disrupting millions of families for generations, decimating their infrastruture and way of life and putting them back decades. These is the definition of crimes against humanity. Can we really afford to be blase and unconcerned anymore. Anyone can guess the inevitable consequence of trillions of dollars of spend and adding millions of employees co-opted into the surveillance state. Responsible citizens and anyone who believes in freedom, democracy and peace cannot let this slide any longer.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- zorpner 10y agoIt's disappointing, but not surprising, to see this plummeting off the front page. Tech is welcoming fascism with closed eyes and open arms.
- kakarot 10y ago2018: FBI is Building a Watchlist That Gives Companies Real Time Updates on Employee's Social Media and Forum Accounts
- contergan 10y agoI just learned that one of the speakers at that woman's march (which was more of a pro choice march) once kidnapped and tortured a gay man to death, stating "he was a faggot anyway" afterwards. How do you feel about that?
- dang 10y agoI don't know what you're referring to but this genre of weaponized political comment is pure poison on HN. So please don't post like this. We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13570249 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13570249 and marked it off-topic.
- jeffrey-sean 10y agoIf you use social media, I would recommend using an app like Rep'nUp to find any unprofessional Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram posts. Clean up anything you don't want representing you! https://www.repnup.com/ https://www.repnup.com/