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FBI Monitored Aretha Franklin for Years, File Shows
- theandrewbailey 4y agoDefund the FBI, CIA, NSA, ATF, and DEA. They've proven themselves to cause more trouble than to solve problems.
- JacobThreeThree 4y agoThe post-9/11 security state has grown to ridiculous proportions.
- o_1 4y agoThe unelected jackboots of the wealthy. They'll likely never stop.
- jimbob45 4y agoNo need to throw the baby out with the bathwater. They just need more transparency.
- dwater 4y agoIn the past few years bodycams have become ubiquitous, and they haven't reduced misconduct. I wouldn't be surprised if they've increased civil payouts for police misconduct, but I'd rather have my life and health than my survivors get a few million bucks.
- bee_rider 4y agoThe police just turn off their bodycams when they want to do something illegal, it isn't really transparency unless there are serious questions any time the camera is turned off or footage mysteriously "goes missing" from a computer.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- throwaway894345 4y ago
- AaronFriel 4y agoWhich municipalities in the US enacted "defund the police" programs?
- throwaway894345 4y agoHi Aaron, let me quote myself: > Not that we actually defunded them, but we have sharply reduced the quantity of policing (not usually through official policy as much as pressure on police departments to sharply reduce discretionary, proactive policing) which is what 'defund the police' aimed to do
- AaronFriel 4y agoI don't think there's any evidence of that occurring.
- throwaway894345 4y agoThere's plenty of evidence of this occurring. > The leading hypothesis for why these [police shooting protests] increase homicides and total crime is an abrupt change in the quantity of policing activity. In Chicago, the number of police-civilian interactions decreased by almost 90% in the month after the investigation was announced. In Riverside CA, interactions decreased 54%. In St. Louis, self-initiated police activities declined by 46%. This is from a 2020 paper from Harvard’s Roland Fryer and Tanaya Devi: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w27324/w27324.pdf https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w27324/w273... I've read similar in other papers as well, but I can't recall them off the top of my head. Maybe you mean "there isn't evidence that the reduction in policing is caused by 'pressure'", which seems kind of absurd considering the near-decade of nationwide protests. What's the alternative hypothesis? That police around the country spontaneously and abruptly reduced their discretionary policing and it's merely a coincidence that it happened following major protests aimed at reducing the quantity of policing?
- pstuart 4y agoRethink and reform. We still need services that address: * Federal level police (should be policing state/local too). * Intelligence gathering * Cyber security They need more daylight/oversight and a lot more accountability. The DEA can go to hell (legalize all drugs) and the ATF can pound sand (their subjects of interest could be rolled into the FBI). We need a happy medium between the excesses we have today and having none of those needs addressed.
- pGuitar 4y agoAnd they need to stop thinking that doing illegal stuff is ok for authorities... like parallel constructing evidence / evidence laundering....
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- prange 4y ago
- Yahivin 4y agoIt is possible for a person to be right about some things and wrong about other things.
- prange 4y agoI made no comment about it being right or wrong, and I don’t know whether the grandparent is a trump supporter or not. The more interesting question is to consider why Trump would hold this view, especially if you disagree with him on other things. Perhaps you don’t have the same assumptions about the reasons why as he does.
- pjc50 4y agoTrump is against the FBI because they're investigating him. It's not that deep.
- Zamicol 4y agoWe 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?
- NickC25 4y agoGood ideas, and ideas that I support 100%, but in practice it seems to be impossible. IIRC we still haven't gotten a full audit of the Pentagon / DOD, and a majority of their operations are probably a bit more public than the NSA's or other secretive-by-design bureaucracy. How would we be able to audit an organization (in a timely manner) that puts up as many roadblocks as possible? The Fed needs to be audited, too. As well as their staff, starting at the very top. It seems in the government, secrecy and corruption is the name of the game. That's unacceptable and needs to end. The US taxpayer should demand full transparency of all organizations including intelligence services, and the agencies in question should have no choice but to fully comply except in genuine, individual cases of legitimate national security, which would be assessed by an independent reviewer.
- jaywalk 4y agoAh, but the public can't know what they're doing! National security, of course. Just trust them.
- yonaguska 4y agoHow 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.
- ViViDboarder 4y agoIf 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.
- boomboomsubban 4y agoThen we'd merely have around 10 national intelligence agencies doing shit like this, in addition to all the more local operations. It's absurd how large the intelligence community is.
- wmeredith 4y agoIt's a jobs program. See also: the US Military.
- wil421 4y agoI’m afraid if you were to defund some of those, like the DEA and ATF, they would just come after small time, lowest fruit criminals. They have proven they will charge people with dubious crimes. Similar to how people claim the IRS can’t tackle big time cheats and instead focus on auditing everyday people. If you modernize federal drug laws the DEA would lose at lot of its teeth. It’s up to the legislatures to change laws and take power away from federal agencies.
- wmeredith 4y ago> I’m afraid if you were to defund some of those, like the DEA and ATF, they would just come after small time, lowest fruit criminals. That's precisely what would happen. Look at what's become of the IRS. It's been systematically defunded, despite the fact that the government sees a huge return on investment when they spend dollars there. The IRS has stated publicly that they only go after middle and lower-class citizen offenders because they can't afford to investigate and prosecute the big corporations and oligarchs which are where the vast majority of tax fraud takes place (note: not avoidance, fraud). This is pretty clearly by design.
- frellus 4y ago"return on investment" ... you realize how that sounds, right? The good news is with the new "investment" of my tax dollars into the tax and audit arm of the government, they can no go after the top tax dollars AND middle and lower-class citizen "offenders"! Yea! Let's kill the income tax entirely, it's a completely unfair system. Middle and lower class would thrive, and the "big guys" would not notice because none of their real "income" is taxed, it's designed not to be taxed.
- jcadam 4y agoIt looks like the government appropriates more wealth via inflation than the income tax nowadays, anyway.
- tkk23 4y agoWithout an income tax, would the spending power remain at the lower and middle class? The housing market has shown that people are loose with their money and pay any price that they can finance. Likewise, all goods will become more expensive until people can only buy the same things as today. Income tax can be seen as a tax on companies that can't be embezzled. Most people are honest and want to see their full income on documents so a company has to pay the full amount of the taxes. This leaves the lower and middle classes with less money, but it also forces the market to offer the goods for less. The alternative would be taxing the companies directly. People would earn more, but companies would also request more for their goods because they have to pay more taxes. But would the tax payout be the same if companies have an even bigger incentive to hide their profits?
- hackerlight 4y agoAdd ICE in there. They serve no useful purpose.
- jaywalk 4y agoIs this sarcasm?
- micromacrofoot 4y agoNo. ICE was created in 2003 and largely overlaps with existing agencies. It's a bunch of post-9/11 security theater.
- jmull 4y agoI 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 agency-wide -- with ours as citizens.
- anonym29 4y agoGray 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.
- Natsu 4y agoYeah, just removing them wouldn't solve much. But there are other possible reforms, for example, I'd want them to record all interviews (which is currently against policy last I knew) instead of relying on FD-302s. And I'd like their case management system put under the control of an independent agency that will audit for things like missing Woods files, so they can't just go "oops" on stuff like that. And if they delete something, someone else gets to restore it from backup and report to the courts who did the deletion and when according to the audit logs. I'd do similar things with police body cam footage. It should not be under the control of the police and if someone has a habit of never turning theirs on, it should be addressed and the cop reprimanded long before it impacts a case. Same goes for jail footage, as well. So "oops" Epstein's cell camera died just can't be a thing, because it's not under their control at all and they address such things right away, not just when it's a problem.
- mindcrime 4y agoDefund the FBI, CIA, NSA, ATF, and DEA. Not just "defund", but "abolish".
- sgjohnson 4y agoIsn’t the CIA pretty much self-funded? :)
- AustinDev 4y agoRunning guns and drugs is very profitable.
- themitigating 4y agoHow do you know they cause more trouble than they solve? They've solved thousands of missing childen, sexual predators, kidnappings, etc
- theandrewbailey 4y agoFBI targets susceptible people and surrounds them with informants that encourage the target to commit a crime, but somehow failed to take action against the 9/11 hijackers. CIA tortures people overseas. EDIT: CIA also arms militia groups that are against, or later turn on, American interests. NSA has a habit of spying on every American. (Remember Snowden?) ATF enforces all the weird gun laws, like how an AR15 is sometimes a handgun.[2] It also engages in sieges that end up killing kids.[0] [1] DEA is all about the failed war on drugs. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_Ridge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_Ridge [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waco_Siege https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waco_Siege [2] https://www.usacarry.com/ar-pistols/ https://www.usacarry.com/ar-pistols/
- themitigating 4y agoI don't care about examples, you said it's more trouble than good. Prove that
- Jimmc414 4y agohttps://archive.ph/Wc2VX https://archive.ph/Wc2VX
- danschumann 4y agoI have seen enough anime to know, they were monitoring her to see if her spiritual powers would keep developing, like a Jedi or something :D
- DavidAdams 4y agoYou better think. Think about what you're trying to do to me.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- dukeofdoom 4y ago
- stevenwoo 4y agoIt's hard to separate the FBI from J. Edgar Hoover who normalized a lot of these behaviors from the top of the agency at the beginning, so there's always been some ordinary law enforcement and overreach combined in some form.
- lupire 4y agoThe whole LE appararus is designed to go after opponents. That's the whole point. problem appears when "opponents" are chosen wrongly, when the government does not represent the people.
- MonkeyMalarky 4y agoHaving an independent, federal agency that can investigate local and state police is a nice thing though.
- 2devnull 4y agoUntil it’s not?
- wmeredith 4y agoYes? That's a glib statement that applies so widely that it's not really relevant.
- 2devnull 4y agoMy thought about the parent was the same, that it was sort of a truism. So I was trying to probe for what conditions or parameters would make the statement more meaningful, basically some prinicpals to assess how much big brother is the right amount of big brother. We all agree oversight is good sometimes and to some extent. The question is what is that extent.
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- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- potatototoo99 4y agoIf you have nothing to hide... isn't it the default now?
- jaxomlotus 4y ago[flagged]
- HarryHirsch 4y agoPirke Avot 2.3 applies, as it always does: https://www.sefaria.org/Pirkei_Avot.2.3 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.
- waboremo 4y agoIf everyone should look at government the same way, then government has failed tremendously and we should stop pushing this farce of "democracy".
- HarryHirsch 4y agoWhat if the US government was really dominated by a small cadre of elites? One can make a good case for that thesis; it would be terrible if true, but we have to be realistic in our outlook. Someone clever said that politics is the art of what is possible.
- themitigating 4y agoAnd what is your alternative? Because if you don't want to push democracy what are you pushing?
- waboremo 4y agoThere seems to be a misunderstanding here. If we view our governments the same way we do HR as the above comment suggests, as in they have another group controlling their interests over our own, then democracy does not exist within this structure.
- themitigating 4y agoAnd what is the other group ?
- fsociety999 4y agoThe 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-informant-crimes-report/2613305/ 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 year, according to newly disclosed documents that show just how often the nation's top law enforcement agency enlists criminals to help it battle crime. I know this is talking specifically about informants, and you could make a case that that is necessary, but what reason is there to believe that this doesn’t extend to members of the FBI as well? Here is a more recent article about this: https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2021/11/18/fbi-and-other-agencies-paid-informants-548-million-in-recent-years-with-many-committing-authorized-crimes/?sh=20b77bbcf4dd https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2021/11/18/fbi...
- dclowd9901 4y agoIf you could make the case that it’s necessary then what are we even talking about here?
- pclmulqdq 4y agoGovernments 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.
- boomboomsubban 4y agoI was curious what they had after ~1974 so looked at the file, and roughly 200 pages of the 270 total are a 2005 incident where a fan sold/uploaded bootleg recordings of her work. As an aside, it's amusing to see screenshots of webpages complete with ancient online ads that appear to have been printed out then scanned in the report. And another aside, I believe they redacted the soft drink offered to the fan during questioning, which the fan refused. Besides that she played a show with Journey in a venue that supposedly had mob connections in the 80's. I wonder if they ruled her harmless after 74 or a different organization took over/the documents have a different classification.
- themitigating 4y agoHow many people would care that the FBI was monitoring her of they didn't raid Trump
- dvngnt_ 4y agoAF is a private citizen, Trump is an elected official, and the head of the executive branch. I would expect them to always be monitored
- themitigating 4y agoThat's not what my comment said. People are mad because they like Trump, he was investigated by the FBI , therefore anything negative that comes out about the FBI is amplified. It lets Trump supporters pretend it's not about him. The FBI following civil rights activists had been known for years. They tracked MLK for example
- elzbardico 4y agoThe FBI/CIA/NSA complex is the American version of the Soviet KGB. Wall Street is our Politburo, and we split the CPSU into two parties because it gives better optics.
- soared 4y agoYes, every country has intelligence agencies. Aligning them with kgb implies they’re bad guys, which certainly Russian citizens can make the reverse claims. This doesn’t add anything to the discussion and is akin to a Facebook meme post without the image.
- exabrial 4y agoAnd 0 people went to jail for this.
- ravenstine 4y agoI'm not surprised by that fact, but what does surprise me is how neither the author of the article or anyone here has mentioned COINTELPRO. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO It's a safe assumption that the FBI was monitoring any given Black person with influence, and we might as well assume they still are.
- screye 4y agoThe CIA, FBI & Military industrial complex seem to actively work towards their own interests, separate from the democratic will of the citizens of the US. It is hard to view this as anything but the 'deep state'. If the US was not the preeminent leader of the 'free world', American intelligence agencies would be viewed as global terrorist organizations.
- GartzenDeHaes 4y agoMilitary Industrial Media Complex.
- jmyeet 4y agoThis is unsurprising given American history, in particular the history of the FBI. It began as an so the DoJ had investigators in certain cases where they otherwise wouldn't (eg on reservations) but it really began with the Mann Act [1]: > In its original form the act made it a felony to engage in interstate or foreign commerce transport of "any woman or girl for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose". Its primary stated intent was to address prostitution, immorality, and human trafficking, particularly where trafficking was for the purposes of prostitution The reality however was that it was used to prosecute interracial marriage [2]: > Also known as the White-Slave Traffic Act of 1910, the law was invoked over and over again to punish black men for their relationships with white women—affairs that challenged the racial status quo. Rooted in fears of women’s growing mobility and racist characterizations of the sexual appetites of non-white men, the law was designed to protect women against the supposed scourge of “white slavery,” a term used to refer to sex trafficking in the early 20th century. Later there's a dark history of the FBI's involvements with the likes of Martin Luther King Jr, Malcolm-X, the Black Panthers and a bunch of other black leaders and movements. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mann_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mann_Act [2]: https://www.history.com/news/white-slave-mann-act-jack-johnson-pardon https://www.history.com/news/white-slave-mann-act-jack-johns...
- ismokedoinks 4y agoFBI monitoring popular singers is very common historically! I highly recommend this book for an overview: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/651913/the-folk-singers-and-the-bureau-by-aaron-leonard/ https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/651913/the-folk-sin...
- chatterhead 4y agoYes, primarily because of people like Paul Robeson.