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This has been public knowledge for 50 years. The article even says as much: > The history of abuse of mail covers, as the lawmakers note, is a long one. A famo

by kibwen 3y ago

This has been public knowledge for 50 years. The article even says as much: > The history of abuse of mail covers, as the lawmakers note, is a long one. A famous incident occurred in the 1970s, when a 15-year-old girl mistakenly wrote the Socialist Workers Party—a communist organization strongly supportive of Cuba—while researching a school assignment involving the Socialist Labor Party. The teenager was thoroughly investigated by the FBI, with the bureau even sending an agent into her school. The senators note that Church Committee, which was formed in 1975 to investigate US intelligence abuses, uncovered that the Central Intelligence Agency had photographed “the exteriors of over 2 million pieces of mail,” while opening hundreds of thousands of others, belonging to “prominent activists and authors.” There's nothing remotely "conspiracy theory" about this. Next time, just link them the wiki article rather than, bafflingly, trying to allege conspiracy via your throwaway: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee#Opening_mail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee#Opening_mail

dragonwriter 3y ago
> This has been public knowledge for 50 years No, the problems identified 50 years years ago were part of a process which resulted in extensive controls being put in place on the US national security apparatus to prevent the things it discovered from continuing; that those controls in fact changed nothing and things remained exactly the same is, well, if true, not something which has been public knowledge since day one.
- kibwen 3y ago
  > resulted in extensive controls being put in place on the US national security apparatus to prevent the things it discovered from continuing Who told you that? Here's a NYT article from 2013 with the same story: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/04/us/monitoring-of-snail-mail.html https://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/04/us/monitoring-of-snail-ma... It's good to draw awareness to what's going on here, but let's not pretend that this practice isn't trivially verifiable via ten seconds of searching.
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
    > > resulted in extensive controls being put in place on the US national security apparatus to prevent the things it discovered from continuing > Who told you that? The laws, including FISA, adopted shortly after and in response to the Church Committee findings expressly directed at dealing with the abuses identified by the Church Committee.

by kibwen 3y ago

dragonwriter 3y ago

> This has been public knowledge for 50 years No, the problems identified 50 years years ago were part of a process which resulted in extensive controls being put in place on the US national security apparatus to prevent the things it discovered from continuing; that those controls in fact changed nothing and things remained exactly the same is, well, if true, not something which has been public knowledge since day one.

kibwen 3y ago
> resulted in extensive controls being put in place on the US national security apparatus to prevent the things it discovered from continuing Who told you that? Here's a NYT article from 2013 with the same story: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/04/us/monitoring-of-snail-mail.html https://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/04/us/monitoring-of-snail-ma... It's good to draw awareness to what's going on here, but let's not pretend that this practice isn't trivially verifiable via ten seconds of searching.
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  > > resulted in extensive controls being put in place on the US national security apparatus to prevent the things it discovered from continuing > Who told you that? The laws, including FISA, adopted shortly after and in response to the Church Committee findings expressly directed at dealing with the abuses identified by the Church Committee.