Yeah, but they stopped doing it a decade ago, honest! The fact that they aren't required to declassify documents from the last decade is just coincidence.
I didn't even think it was a conspiracy theory. Did anyone think that the CIA couldn't ask for a file that the NSA had?
Most self IDed liberals refuse to believe anything like this has happened post Cold War
In Communist China yada yada yada, so on and so forth
But on the other hand as they gather more data, western search engines are getting shittier and shittier, so they're basically increasing the noise with no way of getting a better signal. The promise of targeted algorithms was an empty one. The FBI is also seemingly focused on finding lonely young Muslim men to gaslight and Chinese computer scientists to harass and drive back into the open arms of the Chinese government rather than doing anything about people planning mass shootings. The empire is rotting from the inside and I think the capacity of the state to smash people with the cudgel of its power will eventually find that it said cudgel has turned to mush one day when it smashes against something solid.
The FBI are quite content with fomenting radicalism and setting up pretend terror plots with mentally ill people. It serves several purposes, namely they get to take credit for foiling a terror attack they created, but also they get to learn how to best radicalize people to do horrendous things and not get caught with ties to them.
Some day they will use that on us.
When you're mentally ill and groomed by the FBI, but flake on the day they could incriminate you to play the new WoW expansion
Not to mention the FBI are fucking stupid. The epitome of a chimp with a gun. I remember seeing that documentary about that McDonalds Monopoly bullshit and they had interviews with the actual FBI agent assigned to investigate and you should have listened to the guy talk. He sounded like a dumb frat dude and not the fun himbo kind. It's terrifying how much power these people are handed. (Also, it's very cool to know that Mcdonald's gets the FBI helping them when they're 'stolen from' but calls about domestic violence don't even get a police officer checking it out half the time.)
But yeah, the empire is collapsing and the only thing keeping it alive is the sheer amount of resources being scraped off the backs of the common folk.
calls about domestic violence don't even get a police officer checking it out half the time
40% of the time the offender just investigates himself and finds no wrongdoing anyway
The only thing more jokerfying than this is the people who think that this can be stopped through the legal system. Laws don’t mean jack shit, they will do whatever they want.
And nobody should really expect otherwise anyways. I kind of have to roll my eyes at people who think this type of thing is even worth wasting breath complaining about. A government is always going to surveil, spy, control, etc. It's on activists for doing nothing to resist it.
If someone tells you "the Soviets or Chinese or whoever are so sneaky and dystopian spying on everyone" you can bring it up how it's the same with every government. You can mention these new actions the US govt takes. And new types of surveillance. But beyond that, they're going to implement whatever they want.
I guess most activist orgs know this, because nobody really wastes their time trying to organizationally oppose this stuff on a legal basis. I guess that's not entirely true, but you get my point.
There are plenty of ways to be less surveil-able if it matters to you as an individual (which it should if you're an activist of any sort).
Idk, it's kind of sad how unprepared it seems like orgs are with this stuff (not that I'm even involved with any). Back in the day (i.e. the 19-whatevers), people probably would have taken actual precautions to protect their own privacy and that of their orgs. Nowadays, people are using Google Drive and gmail and US web hosting providers and so on (I'm very guilty of this myself). Like there's barely even an attempt at not providing the US govt with every little detail about our lives. Not sure how much of it is just ignorance or exceptionalism or something.
If you use windows or mac you're also handing out not only a ton of information on whatever you do on it, but also a beachhead to install specialized tools to further track you if you've caught the attention of any agencies.
Well sure the CIA may know everything about me down to what cereal I ate for breakfast this morning, but at least that data's not going to CHINA.
Our government just reauthorized section 702, which allows domestic law enforcement agencies (fbi, etc.) to conduct warrantless search for us citizens in databases created by agencies tasked with prosecuting noncitizens (cia, dhs, ins).
So the noncitizen agencies are using mass surveillance technology and techniques to create a huge database of everything and it’s fine because they don’t have jurisdiction to use it against citizens, then domestic law enforcement is allowed to go searching in it with no warrant due to a legal side door.
FBI 702 searches were used against the January 6 people though, so it’s good. Literally reauthorizing the domestic surveillance state every year because it could be used on political enemies.
To hear the spook watchers talk about it, cia is pissed because there’s an outside chance fbi will get the new toy taken away.
Hey, you! Yeah, you over there! Stop that! What? You won’t? Oh, come on! Boy if I wasn’t over here, I would give you a piece of my mind!
