You probably already know I think the FBI are a bunch of chucklefucks. My perspective was formed by working with them on a few cybersecurity cases, including one back in the early days of the commercial internet, in which I was paired with an FBI supervisory special agent who thought that America Online was the internet.
The FBI announced that they arrested a white supremacist who was planning to blow up a synagogue. [slate]
You don’t have to play linguistic nihilism against your opponent, when they play it against themselves better and harder than you do.
July 23, the FBI’s director du jour Christopher Wray said that, so far, in 2019, they had arrested over 100 suspects in domestic terrorism cases, and most of them were white supremacy-related.
One of the basic skills of philosophy is to try to combat your own cognitive biases by flipping situations around, i.e.: “putting yourself in the other guys’ shoes” or whatever you want to call it. It’s a skill Americans don’t seem to learn in school, which is why (I believe) we have a population that is ripe for turning into imperialists and believers in various forms of exceptionalism.
Corporatism favors the rights of corporations ahead of those of their customers; right now we’re in the middle of a complex shouting-match regarding what companies like Facebook can decide to provide to marketing partners; are we trusting them too much with our data? Are they going to handle it responsibly? What makes people imagine that companies are not going to immediately have a strategy meeting and ask, “what is the worst thing we can do with our customer data? Because: let’s do that!”
You can be sure as water’s wet – if someone doesn’t tell cops “don’t intrude on people” (You know, like the constitution tried to…) they’re going to explore the grey zones around the people’s rights. And by “grey zones” that means “areas where they can pretend not to understand” or “it looks grey to me.”
By now, the establishment ought to be painfully aware that the FBI/NSA retro-scope is aimed at them, as well. Sometime in the next couple of years I expect a legislative backlash, especially if it keeps being used to take down friends of the high and mighty.
Just lean over there and hit the “rewind” button for a second; take us back to… July 2016.
The retro-scope appears to now be part of the investigative procedure for any incident that has political implications. Because its time-horizon goes about -10 years (with some blurry images back to -20 years) the entire current crop of politicians grew up in a time before retro-scoping existed, so they do not fear the ‘scope, nor do they fully understand it. They will.
I did a google image search for “retroscope” and look at this beauty!