Corruption Corner – Page 18

FBI Heroically Saves Us From Yet Another Person It Radicalized

Without the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) who would protect us from the people radicalized by the FBI? Without the heroics of the agency a lot of people might be dead today — killed by a terrorist radicalized by the FBI:

KHALIL ABU RAYYAN was a lonely young man in Detroit, eager to find a wife. Jannah Bride claimed she was a 19-year-old Sunni Muslim whose husband was killed in an airstrike in Syria. The two struck up a romantic connection through online communications.

Now, Rayyan, a 21-year-old Michigan man, is accused by federal prosecutors of supporting the Islamic State.

Documents released Tuesday show, however, that Rayyan was motivated not by religious radicalism but by the desire to impress Bride, who said she wanted to be a martyr.

Jannah Bride, not a real name, was in fact an FBI informant hired to communicate with Rayyan, who first came to the FBI’s attention when he retweeted a video from the Islamic State of people being thrown from buildings. He wrote later on Twitter: “Thanks, brother, that made my day.”

According to the FBI, the agency discovered a radicalized supporter of the Islamic State that was going to perpetrate a terrorist attack. But the attack never happened because the FBI was able to discover the individual ahead of time and intervene.

Put into normal people lingo, the FBI found somebody with neither the motivation or means to perform a terrorist attack. The agency then provided the motivation and eventually the means. If the FBI hadn’t inserted itself into this individual’s life they still wouldn’t have perpetrated a terrorist attack.

I like to say, if it weren’t for the people radicalized by FBI agents there wouldn’t be any terrorists for the FBI to capture. When I first started saying that it was done with a modicum of sarcasm because I assumed the agency did manage to fight some actual crime once in a while. But so many of these FBI created cases exist that they literally fill a book. It’s getting to the point where seems the agency’s only job is dealing with the “terrorists” it creates.

Law Enforcers Caught Abusing A Databases Again

I have a natural aversion to government databases. This may seem ironic coming from a man whose name probably appears in dozens of them but that’s beside the point. Databases for sex offenders, felons, known gang members, and gun owners are always sold as being valuable tools for protecting the public. What is often ignored by proponents of such databases is how easily they can be abused by law enforcers. Denver law enforcers are the latest in a long line of law enforcers busted for abusing government databases for personal gain:

Denver Police officers caught using a confidential database for personal reasons should face stiffer penalties, the city’s independent monitor argued in a report released Tuesday.

The report, which reviewed both the Denver Police and the Denver Sheriff Department’s performance for 2015, found several instances of officers abusing both the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) and it’s state counterpart, the Colorado Crime Information Center (CCIC). Independent Monitor Nicholas Mitchell said in the report that he believes the penalties for those caught aren’t stiff enough to deter further abuse.

[…]

One officer, for example, was found to have used the database to assist an acquaintance who was going through a divorce determine the identity of the man he believed his wife was having an affair with. Then it spiraled out of control, possibly enabling violence from the vengeful ex-husband:

Shortly thereafter, the ex-husband began driving by the man’s house and threatening him. The ex-husband also found and contacted the man’s wife to tell her that the man was having an affair. The ex-husband told the wife that he knew their home address, showed her a picture of the man’s car, and asked her questions about the man to find out what gym he worked out at, what shift he worked, and where he spent his leisure time.

[…]

In another instance, a Denver Police officer who was at a hospital investigating a reported sexual assault made “small talk” with a female employee at the hospital who wasn’t involved in the investigation. The report continues:

At the end of her shift, the female employee returned home and found a voicemail message from the officer on her personal phone. She had not given the officer her phone number, and was upset that he had obtained it (she assumed) by improperly using law enforcement computer systems.

Note the lack of punishments received by officers caught abusing these databases. The first mentioned infraction resulted in a written reprimand and the second resulted in a fine of two days pay in addition to a written reprimand.

There are two major problems here. First, the existence of these databases. Second, the almost complete absence of oversight. These databases hold a tremendous amount of personal information on individuals. That information isn’t anonymized in any way so any officer can bring up the home address, phone number, and other personal information of those entered into the database. No oversight is apparently needed as multiple officers have been able to access the database for unauthorized uses. And no apparent interest in establishing oversight seems to exist since those finally caught abusing the database received no real punishment.

Databases containing personal information are dangerous to begin with. But when you add a complete lack of accountability for those accessing the databases, especially when they’re almost entirely shielded from personal liability, you have a recipe for disaster. Never let yourself be lulled into believing establishing a government database is necessary or in any way a good thing.

Threat Posed By Personally Owned Drones Overblown, Water Is Wet

Last year the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) announced it would be requiring all drone owners to register so their personal information, including home address, could be published for all to see. This requirement was justified under the claim that personally owned drones posed a major threat to other forms of aviation traffic. A lot of people, including myself, called bullshit on that and now research exists backing up our accusation:

That research, shown in a study just published by George Mason University’s Mercatus Center, was based on damage to aircraft from another sort of small, uncrewed aircraft—flying birds.

Much of the fear around drones hitting aircraft has been driven by FAA reports from pilots who have claimed near-misses with small drones. But an investigation last year by the Academy of Model Aeronautics (AMA) found that of the 764 near-miss incidents with drones recorded by the FAA, only 27 of them—3.5 percent—actually were near misses. The rest were just sightings, and those were often sightings that took place when drone operators were following the rules. The FAA also overcounted, including reports where the pilot said explicitly that there was no near miss and some where the flying object wasn’t identified, leading the AMA to accuse the FAA of exaggerating the threat in order to get support for its anti-drone agenda.

So for starters all the “near misses” we’ve read about in the media weren’t near misses. A vast majority of them were mere sightings. But the FAA’s bullshit doesn’t stop there:

There hasn’t yet been an incident in which a drone has struck an aircraft. But bird strikes (and bat strikes) do happen, and there’s a rich data set to work from to understand how often they do. Researchers Eli Dourado and Samuel Hammond reasoned that the chances of a bird strike remain much higher than that of an aircraft hitting a drone because “contrary to sensational media headlines, the skies are crowded not by drones but by fowl.”

The researchers studied 25 years of FAA “wildlife strike” data, reports voluntarily filed by pilots after colliding with birds. The data included over 160,000 reported incidents of collisions with birds, of which only 14,314 caused damage—and 80 percent of that number came from collisions with large or medium-sized birds such as geese and ducks.

Emphasis mine. No drones have struck a plane yet, which means the threat of drones to already existing aviation traffic is still entirely unrealized. Hell, this combined with the fact most reported near misses weren’t near misses, we should actually take a moment to recognize how much of a nonissue personally owned drones have been so far. Drone operators by and large have been very well behaved.

The data on wildlife strikes is also valuable since it indicates that when a drone finally does strike a plane there probably won’t be much damage to the plane. Most personally owned drones are more fragile than the large or medium sized birds that managed to cause damage when colliding with a plane.

What we have here is another example of a government money grab disguised as a crisis. With the FAA’s new rules in place the agency can extract $5 from every registered drone operator and up to $250,000 from operating a drone without being registered. Furthermore, the FAA can up the fees and fines as it sees fit.

The Most Transparent Government In History

Nearly a decade ago Obama was campaigning on a platform of, amongst other things, transparency. After 9/11 the Bush administration went full Orwell (you never go full Orwell) and people were demanding change. Obama promised to deliver that change. But history repeated itself as it so often does. Like every other politician before him, Obama failed to deliver on most of the promises he made. He not only failed to deliver on his promises but he actually expanding what Bush was doing.

Decades will likely pass before we learn the full extent of the current administration’s expansions to the surveillance state. However, bits and pieces are already leaking out. A recent Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request produced a wealth of information on how the current administration has been working to undermine FOIA requests:

The Obama administration has long called itself the most transparent administration in history. But newly released Department of Justice (DOJ) documents show that the White House has actually worked aggressively behind the scenes to scuttle congressional reforms designed to give the public better access to information possessed by the federal government.

The documents were obtained by the Freedom of the Press Foundation, a nonprofit organization that supports journalism in the public interest, which in turn shared them exclusively with VICE News. They were obtained using the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) — the same law Congress was attempting to reform. The group sued the DOJ last December after its FOIA requests went unanswered for more than a year.

The documents confirm longstanding suspicions about the administration’s meddling, and lay bare for the first time how it worked to undermine FOIA reform bills that received overwhelming bipartisan support and were unanimously passed by both the House and Senate in 2014 — yet were never put up for a final vote.

It’s a lengthy article detailing several different ploys made by Obama’s administration in its quest to establish the most opaque government in history.

While the FOIA has revealed a great deal of the State’s dirty laundry it has always been a limited tool. When it was written a number of exemptions were included. Basically, at the judgement of the State, FOIA requests can be denied under several justifications. A FOIA request only reveals what the State is willing to reveal. However, the higher ups in the State have recognized that even with the number of exemptions put in place a lot of embarrassing information is still becoming public. That being the case, it’s not surprising to see the current administration working to add further restrictions on top of a bill that already includes numerous restrictions.

There is a lesson to be learned here. No matter what promises a politician makes up front they will almost invariably go unfulfilled if they win an election. Power seems terrible until you have it. Before becoming president I’m better Obama was being sincere in many of his promises. But when he gained the power he likely realized how good it felt. This is also why reforming the system through the voting process is doomed to fail. Even the most honest individuals can be corrupted with enough power.

Terrorist Plots Aren’t The Only Things The FBI Makes Up

The Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) has a long history of creating terrorists. This practice is so prevalent that there’s a book about it. But terrorist plots aren’t the only thing the FBI makes up. The agency also likes to make up sex-trafficking rings:

In the press, it was a “wide-reaching sex-trafficking operation” run by Somali Muslim gangs who forced “girls as young as 12” to sell sex in Minnesota and Tennessee. In reality, the operation—which led to charges against 30 individuals, sex-trafficking convictions for three, and an eight year legal battle—was a fiction crafted by two troubled teenagers, a member of the FBI’s human-trafficking task force, and an array of overzealous officials. An opinion released this week by the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals shows that federal prosecuters had no evidence whatsoever to support their “child sex trafficking conspiracy” case outside the seriously flawed testimony of two teenagers, one of whom had “been diagnosed as insane and was off her medication.”

“We conclude from our careful review of the trial transcript and record that, if the prosecution proved any sex trafficking at all (and we have serious doubts that it did), then at best it proved two separate, unrelated, and dissimilar sex-trafficking conspiracies, involving different defendants, albeit with the same alleged victim, namely Jane Doe 2,” states the 6th Circuit opinion, written by judges Alice M. Batchelder, Sean F. Cox, and Helene N. White.

At some point you would think the general public would begin asking why the FBI even exists. An agency has been caught time and again fabricating crimes. So one is forced to question whether any of the crimes it has solved were actually real.

We return again to the fact that the supposed system of checks and balances is more accurately described as a circlejerk. If the legislative and judicial branches were a check and balance against the executive branch there would have been investigations into the FBI itself by now. Judges would be throwing out cases on the grounds that the FBI isn’t a credible agency. Senators would be urging their fellows to vote to dissolve the agency. The heads of the FBI would be facing charges and begging oversight committees for mercy. But none of that is happening. Instead the FBI continues to operate as a law enforcement agency and its transgressions are continuously ignored.

Because Punishing The Victim Makes Sense

Hypothetically let’s say a student stole a cell phone from their teacher. The teacher, being an average person and almost entirely ignorant on security, didn’t set a lock code. Because there was no lock code the student was able to log in. After logging in the student found embarrassing pictures of the teacher and sent them to friends.

In this situation would you punish the teacher or the student? Although not setting a lock code on your phone isn’t a wise decision there is no victim involved when somebody is ignorant. There is, however, a victim when a theft occurs. That being the case, I would argue the student should be punished but the teacher should not. Of course, that’s not how things work in our society:

A South Carolina high-school teacher may be charged with contributing to the delinquency of a minor after a student stole her cellphone and distributed partially nude photos from it around the school. Administrators say she should have password-protected the phone.

[…]

One might think that the student would at least face disciplinary action from the school, if not criminal charges of some sort. But thus far, the school has not moved to hold the 16-year-old student accountable at all. Arthur, however, is another story. After teaching in Union County for 13 years, she resigned when district officials gave her the choice to do so immediately or start the firing process.

Interim superintendent David Eubanks told The State that Arthur might also be charged with contributing to the delinquency of a minor. “I think we have a right to privacy, but when we take inappropriate information or pictures, we had best make sure it remains private,” he said.

I would argue that this is the inevitable result of combining zero tolerance policies, a total lack of critical thinking when “it’s for the children”, and having a legal system instead of a justice system.

The only victim here was the teacher because her phone was stolen. But since children saw her nude photos the fact that she was the victim of theft and didn’t send the photos is ignored. To make matters worse, the thief is left unpunished because, well, reasons.

So here we are, continuing to wallow in a society that punishes victims and lets criminals go unscathed.

Brazilian Government Unable To Break WhatsApp’s Encryption, Retaliates By Kidnapping A Facebook Employee

This may be a preview of things to come here. The Brazilian government is a bit peeved that it is unable to bypass WhatsApp’s encryption. Furthermore, it has been unable to convince Facebook, the owner of WhatsApp, to include a backdoor in the software. In what appears to be an act of retaliation the government has decided to harass Facebook by kidnapping one of its employees:

The arrest was made at the request of officials from the state of Sergipe, in Brazil’s north-east. In a statement, the federal police said Facebook/WhatsApp had repeatedly failed to comply with court orders relating to an organized crime and drug-trafficking investigation.

[…]

WhatsApp said in a statement that it was disappointed at the arrest and is unable to provide information it does not have, due to the architecture of its service. “We cooperated to the full extent of our ability in this case and while we respect the important job of law enforcement, we strongly disagree with its decision,” the unit said.

I wish companies would stop including all the nonsense about understanding the important job of law enforcement. Enforcing laws isn’t important. Providing justice to victims is important but that’s not what law enforcers primarily do.

What makes this kidnapping even weirder is that WhatsApp is apparently a separate operational entity from Facebook so the Brazilian government didn’t even kidnap a person who is in any way responsible for the app:

Facebook issued a distinct statement, noting that WhatsApp is operationally separate from the mothership, making the arrest of a Facebook exec “extreme and disproportionate.”

This is what it looks like when a government throws a temper tantrum. Hopefully the Brazilian government will release the poor schmuck it kidnapped. Although it wouldn’t surprise me (OK, it would surprise me a little bit) if it decided to threaten to kill him if Facebook didn’t give in to its demands. Either way, if I were Facebook I’d strongly consider moving all operations out of Brazil. Operating in that country has obviously become a liability.

Due Process Was A Pain In The Ass Anyways

I like to believe that a previous age existed where due process was value. If such an age existed it is obvious long since gone. More and more people seem willing to toss due process aside whenever it negatively impacts their ideological opposites. Throwing out due process is done in many ways. Some of those ways are as blatant as denying people rights based on where they were born. Other ways are more subtle, such as creating a new permit in order to punish an unreleased action:

As it stands, cops who suspect someone of prostitution must actually prove it before arresting them. But that’s a lot of work. So Eau Claire, Wisconsin, officials have a new plan: make non-sexual commercial companionship illegal without the proper paperwork.

To this end, the Eau Claire City Council is considering an ordinance that would require anyone advertising as an escort to get an occupational license from the government.

[…]

But because being an escort does not necessarily mean one is engaged in prostitution, police can’t just go around arresting anyone who advertises as an escort. Not yet, anyway. Ostensibly, cops must still interact with the individual and get them to agree to some sort of sexual activity for a fee. As Eau Claire Assistant City Attorney Douglas Hoffer put it, police are forced to do “intensive investigations” and get their targets to use “explicit language” in order to make charges stick.

Now city officials want to change that. Under their proposed legislation, escorts and escort businesses would have to be licensed by the city and subject to extensive regulations. Any escort operating without a license would be subject to a fine of up to $5,000.

But that’s not all: the proposed law would also punish customers who contract with unlicensed escorts. Hoffner said the idea is to end “demand” for prostitution. Anyone attempting to hire an unlicensed escort could also be charged up to $5,000, as well.

As the article notes, police cannot go after any escort business because many aren’t offering illegal services. This means the police have to effectively create a case with a sting operation or find evidence that a law was broken (but not evidence of a crime being committed since crimes require victims and voluntary prostration involves no victims). When situations like this arise it’s common for the local authorities to create some kind of permit requirement.

With permit requirements in place a police officer can arrest an escort and their customer on the grounds of the escort not having the proper paperwork. It’s a much easier violation to prove than prostitution. In fact the Eau Claire City Attorney admitted to exactly that:

Said Eau Claire City Attorney Stephen Nick: “This is another means, as opposed to actually having evidence of an act of prostitution, pandering, or offering a sexual act for money, so we can follow up” on sex-work suspects.

Cases like this should receive more publicity. It’s not enough for people to only get up in arms over overt violations of due process. People must learn about the more subtle methods as well.

Private Surveillance

Although public surveillance is more frightening to me because the consequences are generally more dire, I also don’t shy away from criticizing private surveillance. This is where I often part company with other libertarians because they often instinctively say private surveillance, because it’s voluntary, is entirely acceptable. Of course this attitude is overly simplistic. First, private surveillance often turns into public surveillance. Second, the market manipulations performed by the State have raised the consequences of private surveillance even when it doesn’t turn into public surveillance.

Consider health insurance. For most people their health insurance is tied to their employment. This practice is a holdover from World War II, where the State manipulated the market in such a way that employers had to find forms of compensation besides pay to attract employees:

There is no good reason for any of this, aside from historical accident. During World War II, federal wage controls prevented employers from wooing workers with higher pay, so companies started offering health insurance as a way around the law. Of course, this form of nonmonetary compensation is still pay. When the war ended, the practice stuck.

I doubt the long term consequences of this marriage were realized by the employers who first used health insurance as a means to attract employees. Fast forward many decades later and we have a relationship so tight that employers are surveilling their employees’ health data:

Employee wellness firms and insurers are working with companies to mine data about the prescription drugs workers use, how they shop, and even whether they vote, to predict their individual health needs and recommend treatments.

Trying to stem rising health-care costs, some companies, including retailer Wal-Mart Stores Inc., are paying firms like Castlight Healthcare Inc. to collect and crunch employee data to identify, for example, which workers are at risk for diabetes, and target them with personalized messages nudging them toward a doctor or services such as weight-loss programs.

One of the downsides of employers providing health insurance is that they front a lot of the costs. Employers, like everybody else, have an interest in keeping their costs down. Now, instead of minding their own business, employers are trying to snoop on their employees’ health care information.

Health care information is something most people see as confidential. It can reveal a lot of potentially embarrassing things about a person such as having a sexually transmitted disease or mental illness. Unless your health is preventing you from working it shouldn’t be the business of your employer and most likely wouldn’t be if your health insurance wasn’t tied to your employment status.

This is why I respect Samuel Edward Konkin III more than most libertarian philosophers. His philosophy, agorism, argue for the death of wage labor. Instead it encourages everybody to be an entrepreneur that contracts directly with others. This is a stark contrast to many libertarian philosophers who seem to encourage wage labor.

The more independent you are the more free you are. By moving away from wage labor an individual becomes more independent and therefore more free. If you’re your own employer then you are free from worries of being surveilled and possibly fired for simply being too expensive to insure.

Rules Are Different For The King’s Men

When the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) breaks into 1,300 computers with a single, vaguely written warrant it’s labeled justice. But when somebody breaks into the FBI’s computers it’s labeled criminal:

A hacker, who wishes to remain anonymous, plans to dump the apparent names, job titles, email addresses and phone numbers of over 20,000 supposed Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) employees, as well as over 9,000 alleged Department of Homeland Security (DHS) employees, Motherboard has learned.

The hacker also claims to have downloaded hundreds of gigabytes of data from a Department of Justice (DOJ) computer, although that data has not been published.

This is something that fascinates me about statism. It’s relies on the belief that humans are inherently bad and that the only solution is to absolve a handful of those humans of any responsibilities for their actions so they can control the rest.

A lot of people are willing to give the FBI a pass in breaking into 1,300 computers because the operation was dealing with combating child pornography. While I detest child pornography I also detest throwing due process out the window whenever it becomes inconvenient. There’s no way the FBI could know that all 1,300 computers it broke into were involved in the child pornography site. Not every visitor to a site is a user. Sometimes people are tricked into visiting a site, sometimes they’re curious if a site is actually as terrible as people are claiming (and often report sites containing illegal content to law enforcers if they find those claims to be true), etc. Due process involves identifying suspects based on evidence and investigating them specifically.

Further compounding the issue is the fact the FBI was knowingly distributing child pornography from its own servers. The agency was quite literally doing the exact same thing it was supposedly trying to stop.

Yet many people are calling what the FBI did justice while labeling what the hacker did as criminal.