This type of behaviour unfortunately seems to be becoming a trend. While not nearly as bad as a raid, Facebook called out a US county prosecutor for attempting to have a page criticising local officials removed in its last transparency report:
Date: October 2015
Content: A page protesting a county animal control agency.
Request: We received a request from a county prosecutor's office to remove a page opposing a county animal control agency, alleging that the page made threatening comments about the director of the agency and violated laws against menacing.
Result: We reviewed the content and determined that the page did not contain credible threats and therefore did not violate our Community Standards. We took no other action on the page for reasons of the public interest.
One of the commenters indicated that FB took down that page for being "violent in nature" (details not provided) -- not simply for its pro-GMO/Vaccine stance.
Disclaimer: I know noting about this particular case.
It is possible to fool FB into removing a page or some content. One way that is sometimes attempted (with some success) is to spam the comments on the page with objectionable content (hopefully goading other people to respond in kind) or (if it's an open group) join it and do the same. Then have other people report the page.
Also, simple misunderstandings happen. E.g. a post gets removed due to being threatening; in fact the post was just citing a threat allegedly made by an official. This seems to be even more likely to happen if many people report that content as objectionable: thus, people opposed to some organization/idea organize into mobs that report related posts as being objectionable.
This depends on the throughput of spamming that's going on. The throughput can be quite large if there's a significant amount of people cooperating. Also, this means that admins have to spend a nontrivial amount of time on such work on every single day.
The examples I know of are groups of political movements that have a lot of haters, so that might be somewhat of an edge case.
The page in question appears to be back online [1].
I suspect that, when you're dealing with what must amount to tens of millions of reports a day from users, mistakes are made. Thankfully, it seems like this one was corrected.
The current situation surrounding law enforcement in the US is complicated and there are many sides to it. However, I've always been of the opinion that corrupt officials in any government position are a huge thread to society especially in law enforcement since they are highly visible and thus hugely impact how society perceived justice.
Therefore I always held the opinion that punishment for corruption in these positions should be absolutely draconic. On the flip side we should probably also pay more to attract top talent.
I guess my dream of police officers who in their spare time have lively debates about Kant will never come to fruition ;)
I am currently involved in a situation that is comically absurd in its scope of abuse of power. It almost sounds like a movie.
The main person attacking me is a federal level law enforcement officer and politician working in the private sector. He is employed by a shady multi-billionaire who is objectively bad but I can't elaborate why.
All the others involved from the police, prosecutors and Judge are more perpetrating a conspiracy of indifference and incompetence.
This federal law enforcement person harassed my colleagues, lied about me, influenced a Judge and has continued to dedicate a huge amount of resources to me. He made a mistake attacking me, thinking I would be intimidated by him. Instead, his actions did the opposite. I did not break any law and the current charge against me is minor, unrelated and supposed to be dismissed.
Before it was, he had a Judge revoke my $0 bail, set it for $80,000 and sent 5 felony undercover warrant detectives after me and a team of private investigators.
Essentially it started as a dispute between me and some wealthy people, and the federal official got involved because his employer has a financial incentive.
This has been going on for a year and a few days ago, he sent my friend a long email at 11pm at night. Saying all this stuff and that he was dispatching a "team" to come hunt me down. He asked for my address.
I told my friend to send him a copy of my driver's license with my current address on and he did. The federal official is so dumb that he doesn't realize that my friend and I are toying with him. He thinks my friend is working against me but he's just collecting information for me.
I also have all these incriminating tapes, including of the official saying he doesn't want to know about serious criminals involved in exploitation etc. Instead, he is trying to prevent a scandal and so he has viciously attacked me.
Given that there's no identifying information in the comment, I can't see for what reason why sharing this story would be objectionable. If anything, people should be encouraged to share anecdotes of government officials abusing power.
There is nothing that would allow us to track him down, but there is plenty that would allow others who already know parts of this to "verify" claims of his behavior/perception.
The ideal situation that you've described is how the FBI actually works. The FBI is highly selective, requires a bachelors degree minimum (though I hear new hires increasingly have even more higher education), treats misconduct very seriously, and pays professional salaries. You'll notice that most controversies about the FBI concern policies set at the very top, almost never abuses of power or denial of rights.
I agree that we need to similarly professionalize local police forces. I'd rather see it done at the state level to maintain more local, rather than federal, control of policing.
> almost never abuses of power or denial of rights.
Here is the modus operandi of the FBI. They bring a person in for an interview. Two agents interview a person. One agent asks all the questions, while the other keeps a written record of the interview. No audio tapes of the interview are made. At the end of the interview, the official and only record of the interview is the written account prepared by the FBI agent doing the recording.
None of the above is in dispute. Now for the part that you are free to ignore.
The FBI will then interview the same person at a later date, using the same method. They will then comb through the two accounts of the interviews, looking for discrepancies. Amazingly, they will find discrepancies. They will then bring the subject back in, tell the subject that he or she has "lied" to the FBI, a federal offense with non-trivial punishment. The subject will then be "invited" to work off this infraction by becoming an FBI informant.
The FBI does this again and again.
Maybe it's just me, but that's not cricket, my good man.
I've worked with the FBI in the past and this is absolutely not the kind of behavior that I experienced. The FBI agent managed to lose the copy of documents that I put on a CD for him and then later claimed that we never gave them to him and that he never came to pick them up. Luckily there was 3 witnesses to him picking it up and the security camera but still, he was threatening us "for not complying" over it.
Then later when he couldn't figure out how to view the documents and didn't want to read the instructions that were sent with it he demanded that we print everything off on paper and again threatened legal action for "not complying". I wound up hand delivering almost a ream of paper for all of the documents and emails that they subpoenaed. In the end, the biggest mistake made was complying with the order in the first place as they were ordering us to provide documents from third parties for the most part who should have been served with a subpoena directly.
Agreed. I worked for the company that was infamously associated with FBI's 'Virtual Case File' fiasco.
Though I joined a few years after it was already finished, there were many employees still around who had worked on the project.
The reason the project failed was almost entirely the fault of the FBI project managers and other bureaucrats. Huge egos, technical incompetence, and petty politics were the biggest issues. This was coming from talented non-mgmt engineers, too, so i'm pretty confident in the veracity of their claims
Anyway, after working in gov. contracting for a decade, I've come to really believe that most Fed workers are actually pretty bright, but they become so fixated on politics instead of results, they end up doing far worse than their less educated counterparts in the private sector.
The more privileged the agency (i.e. FBI, other Intel agencies, State Department, etc.) the worse the politicking becomes as they are far more insulated from scrutiny and less limited with funding from Congress.
> The ideal situation that you've described is how the FBI actually works.
FBI Agents in their off hours have engaging philosophical debates? I hadn't heard about this. Is this from personal experience, or is this a criticism of the FBI of them being too impractical?
EDIT: This was a legitimate inqury. Is it really so absurd to imagine some FBI agents having Thursday Philosophical Book Club? That some people on HN might have gone to them? If so, it sounded interesting.
I'm not referring to your comment (I thought joke...) about what they talk about in their off time, but about a more professional force with greater discipline and pay.
This may seem overly negative or (internet) contrarian, and I believe yours is a good comment, but these are subject to political forces as much as--or more than--any.
Put your time in (not bankers hours), move when transferred, whoa this is a lot of paperwork, climb the ladder, spend time at HQ and "make friends" at all your stops, go along and get along, now there are kids and spouse/house and schools, do your 20 so you can retire, start new job in security or back to private practice thanks to your well-tended reputation, etc.
Who's gonna stick their neck out anymore? (Besides Snowden.)
of course no one should stick their neck out, In this ungrateful nation, filled with the individualism and everyone looking for their own career enhancement, real whistleblowers get treated very very harshly from Chelsea Manning, to Tim Drake to Ed Snowden.
Whats worse is that the media im talking (CNN,MSNBC,FOX,ABC..Wash Post, NY Times) could have helped argue their case but they dont instead they are fed information from the government and report that as facts, of course this is nothing new, if anyone remembers the NY Times story about Saddam Hussein having WMDs)
Compare to the cost to society of having daft pigs running around shooting people, and generally violating the rights of citizens.
Or maybe I'm still angry from that time I got arrested for cycling on the footpath, or that other time the cops turned my house upside down and stole a $1000 from me and charged me with drug trafficking, all charges for which ended up getting dismissed.
There are real reasons lots of people think the police are barely tolerable. It's high time the police were encouraged to act like professionals, and face the possibility of having their license to operate as an LEO revoked for misconduct rather than the present state of boys-club-protectionism.
I can totally understand you. I lived in a country where things are far worse. False charges don't end up dismissed, people are sentenced to long prison terms, their health fatally undermined, families ruined, etc., etc.
At first I was shocked than situation described in this topic is possible in US. I mean not just the raid against activist, but the level of corruption revealed by ExposeDAT.
But let's face the sad truth: the cost to society of having professional, efficient and corruption-resistant police is unbearable too. At least for large country like US. It's comparable to cost of having professional, efficient and treason-resistant army, counted per one officer/soldier. But you need much more police officers than soldiers. You have to apply very strict selection and certification to ensure only most honest, incorruptible and motivated people are at service. You just won't find enough people, especially in economically depressed regions.
This all doesn't mean we can't or shouldn't improve the situation, of course.
> At least for large country like US. It's comparable to cost of having professional, efficient and treason-resistant army, counted per one officer/soldier. But you need much more police officers than soldiers.
You could certainly argue that there ought to be more policy officers than soldiers, but the military is currently quite a bit larger. The projected number of active duty military members is 1,301,300, with an additional 811,000 in the reserves [1]. The sources for the number of policy officers were around 800,000-900,00. Wikipedia has it pegged at 809,308 for 2008 [2].
In California, a police officer goes through 660 hours of training. A hair stylist/aesthetician goes through 1,600 hours of training before they get licensed....
Maybe when we end the war on drugs, we'll be able to drastically reduce the size of our police forces.
If it weren't for perverse incentives turning every traffic stop into a potential drug hunt, we could move enforcement for minor traffic violations to much cheaper traffic officers without arrest powers.
We could even automate most of it, so the traffic officers don't even have to pull people over except for imminent safety issues.
If we end the war on drugs we'll HAVE to drastically reduce the size of our police forces. We won't be able to pay for them without Byrne funding and asset forfeiture. Let alone the pensions for all the retired police who worked when the drug war was in place.
Which is exactly why the War on Drugs is so contested.
Poll the population, and you'll get about 75% in agreement that it should be wound down or pivoted to a health issue. Even higher stats for the younger generations.
However, you still get half the politicians talking tough on crime, drug punishments, etc. The reason: big campaign contributions from local and federal police agencies, DEA, prison guard unions, and the lawyers and courts that feed off its misery.
I disagree with this statement, mostly because we have various examples in history depicting groups and organizations that were, for all intents and purposes, incorruptible.
The most recent and probably also the most well-known example of this is from the Prohibition era, when a federal law enforcement group referred to as The Untouchables brought down Al Capone and his criminal organization.
Each member of The Untouchables was hand-picked by Eliot Ness, the leader, for having an outstanding track record and extraordinarily strong sense of ethics. The result was a stunning success: Capone was simply unable to bribe, intimidate or otherwise blackmail any of the members. The group was instrumental in having him charged and convicted.
Hand-picked out of the rest of the Bureau, who were corruptible? Okay, so you can hand-pick an excellent team out of the bureau. But how is the bureau as a whole?
If you have to hand pick people who are corruption resistant, it means you have low confidence that a random pick from the larger organization could yield you a corruption resistant candidate.
I could pick one Snowden out of 330 million US Americans. It doesn't mean all 330 million of us are patriotic like he is.
>>If you have to hand pick people who are corruption resistant, it means you have low confidence that a random pick from the larger organization could yield you a corruption resistant candidate.
I'm sorry, but is that not what we are discussing here? The person I was originally responding to said that no organization seems to be fully immune to corruption, and I responded saying that it is possible to form such organizations. You just have to hand-pick each and every individual based on the criteria of "untouchableness."
but how does this approach scale? it might be possible to find 10-20 incorruptible people in a reasonable amount of time. how long will it take to make an agency the size of the fbi, with every employee hand chosen using a super strict criteria?
its not just the agents either. I had a neighbor who was a lawyer and was going to be a legal clerk for the dea. I had to do an interview with an fbi agent, as did all of her family and friends. they already have a process in place to pick trustworthy people, and while I guess it isnt perfect, why would you be so confidant you can do it better?
Right now, they don't see any punishment, so we can be sure they'll cry about how draconian the punishment is if it were say, merely appropriate for the crime.
what is your definition of teeth? is it that much different from what the commenter above called draconic, which seemed like hyperbole imo for the effect. Maybe both of you mean the same thing?
I was surprised when I read this, but only because the sheriff wasn't Joe Arpaio. Certain law enforcement officers apparently receive training in How to Ignore the Constitution and Laws of the State and Country That You Swore to Uphold these days, perhaps in place of the former training for responsible use of firearms. This is unfortunate.
On the other hand, it IS Louisiana, the home of such great statesmen as "Dollar" Bill Jefferson and Ray Nagin, whose service the federal government now honors by providing them with round the clock housing and sustenance.
I'm surprised the judge issued a warrant for this, in light of the Constitutional issues involved here -- but unfortunately I'm not aware of any way to sanction a judge for doing so; the only remedy for a defective warrant is suppression of evidence obtained from it.
Unfortunately, Constitutional protections are only a defense to libel, so the prima facie case can still be made, and the warrant could technically still issue.
The elements of criminal libel in Louisiana are clearly enumerated at http://law.justia.com/codes/louisiana/2006/146/78544.html. If the written article constitutes facts sufficient to allege a violation, then a warrant can issue.
Louisiana, its politics and law enforcement are basically a third world country. It's as corrupt if not more than the city politics and criminal politicians in Chicago and Detroit. Can't say I'm surprised.
It used to be a thing, but at this point there are very few states with criminal defamation laws on the books.
Here is Virginia's
"§ 18.2-417. Slander and libel.
Any person who shall falsely utter and speak, or falsely write and publish, of and concerning any female of chaste character, any words derogatory of such female's character for virtue and chastity, or imputing to such female acts not virtuous and chaste, or who shall falsely utter and speak, or falsely write and publish, of and concerning another person, any words which from their usual construction and common acceptation are construed as insults and tend to violence and breach of the peace or shall use grossly insulting language to any female of good character or reputation, shall be guilty of a Class 3 misdemeanor."
So don't be throwing around the 'ho word about your ex-girlfriend!
That's exactly the kind of stuff that in my opinion the death penalty should be used for.
Edit: if what you are saying is true that's exactly the kind of behaviour that's undermining our entire justice system and faith in the government and the system as a whole.
This sort of rhetoric damages the quality we're hoping for here. Having a civil, substantive discussion about something mostly isn't compatible with advocating death for it.
I disagree, although I personally don't believe in the death penalty. He wasn't advocating vigilantism. American states that have the death penalty do so lawfully, in part as a deterrent.
Perhaps you should have asked him to clarify under what circumstances he would support the death penalty rather than admonishing him.
I don't believe in censoring opinions I don't happen to agree with. I think that is one of the ideas of the original article.
Sometimes there are borderline moderation calls, but this wasn't one. Perhaps it would be helpful to explain why.
HN is not all things. It is a site for civil, substantive discussion on topics of intellectual curiosity. A throwaway line suddenly invoking the death penalty is obviously not that—it's just talking smack on the internet. Maybe a detailed argument would have been different, but I doubt it. Pulling that rabbit out of hat is a stunt.
Not all opinions and contributions are equal. It's seductive to feel that they should be, until you realize that it isn't possible to treat all posts equally: if we did, the inflammatory, reflexive posts would win. That wouldn't just tip the balance—it would be a rout, because the people who prefer reflective, thoughtful discussion would leave. On HN we prefer reflective, thoughtful discussion. It's the rarer and more valuable species.
In a technical biological sense, no doubt all plants are equally valid. But if you want a garden you've got to pull weeds.
It sure was substantive! I'd never thought of the idea of using the death penalty as a punishment for crimes before reading it. And I certainly didn't know what his opinion was on whether a specific crime deserved death, and I was very delighted to hear it, and then imagine the punishment happen. It made me feel good.
In US law, treason is punishable by death. Abusing a government role undermines the legitimacy of gover and so is arguably treason (it isn't under current law, but some like GP believe it should be)
"undermining the legitimacy of gover [sic]" is far too squishy of a reason to execute someone. You need to prove that by killing them, society is better off than if we'd kept them in maximum security for the rest of their natural life.
I'm generally against the death penalty, but I'm definitely open to reconsidering that stance when it comes to willful and egregious nonsense like this.
You've been downvoted to oblivion, probably because you phrased your assertion wrong.
There is a large province of the Philippines called "Davao" which, 20 years ago (more or less), was a haven for terrible, corrupt people. Were you to make the mistake of going there, you would be kidnapped, held for ransom, and executed if your family/friends could not pay. This was pretty much a guarantee. So, more or less, you wouldn't go there.
Enter a man named Rodrigo Duterte. Mayor of the biggest town (also called Davao). He instituted martial law, brought in the military, and started executing police, drug dealers, and local officials who were corrupt.
Today, Davao is one of the safest and nicest regions in the Philippines. His daughter, now the mayor, carries on in his tradition, but since the corruption is largely gone, I don't think she gets around to executing too many government officials.
The country noticed this. In the last 12 months, he was basically drafted against his will to be the president of the Philippines, on the hopes that he would repeat the process on a national level.
He is doing so. He was sworn in sometime in June, and has begun executing the people responsible for corruption in Manila and other northern regions of the country.
Now one can argue all sorts of things in this case. It leaves an unsavory taste in my mouth and those of some very smart people I know. But at some point it ceases to be civil society policing itself, and becomes civil war. We simply hope that the chieftans disband when the civil war is over (Duterte is probably one of the few authoritarians who will actually do so, so I hold out hope).
I don't think the United States has quite reached the level of corruption the Philippines has, but I see it heading that direction. It's best to think what we will do if it goes that far. Maybe today the death penalty for being a corrupt government official is too much, but the status quo penalty of: "get paid leave until it blows over" is, I think, too lax.
Date: October 2015
Content: A page protesting a county animal control agency.
Request: We received a request from a county prosecutor's office to remove a page opposing a county animal control agency, alleging that the page made threatening comments about the director of the agency and violated laws against menacing.
Result: We reviewed the content and determined that the page did not contain credible threats and therefore did not violate our Community Standards. We took no other action on the page for reasons of the public interest.
Source: https://govtrequests.facebook.com/faq/, all the way at the bottom