{"id":17954,"date":"2023-01-24T11:49:23","date_gmt":"2023-01-24T16:49:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/?p=17954"},"modified":"2023-01-24T14:25:32","modified_gmt":"2023-01-24T19:25:32","slug":"davos-damndest-delusion-fbi-as-good-guys","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2023\/01\/24\/davos-damndest-delusion-fbi-as-good-guys\/","title":{"rendered":"Davos\u2019 Damndest Delusion: FBI As Good Guys?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Libertarian Institute, January 24, 2023\"\"<\/a><\/h3>\n

Davos\u2019 Damndest Delusion: FBI As Good Guys?<\/a><\/h1>\n

by James Bovard<\/p>\n

You can judge an audience by how much bullshit they accept from the podium.<\/strong> By that standard, the World Economic Forum attendees in Davos, Switzerland last week were either depraved or craven. Why else would FBI chief Christopher Wray not get hooted down for portraying his agency as \u201cgood guys?\u201d<\/p>\n

Why was the FBI boss even making an appearance at a conference chockful of political weasels, billionaires, and depraved activists like former Vice President Al Gore? Actually, Wray was part of a panel on national security that included luminaries such as Ukrainian Vice-Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko, who could have offered insights from her government\u2019s perpetual failed war against pervasive corruption. Wray boasted that \u201cthe level of collaboration between the private sector and the government, especially the FBI has, I think, made significant strides.\u201d<\/p>\n

A month before Wray\u2019s appearance, Americans learned that \u201ccollaboration\u201d meant the FBI massively censoring Twitter in recent years. As journalist Matt Taibbi revealed, \u201cAs the election approached in 2020, the FBI overwhelmed Twitter with requests, sending spreadsheets with hundreds of accounts.\u201d The official browbeating continued until very recently. In an internal email from November 5, 2022, the FBI\u2019s National Election Command Post sent the FBI San Francisco field office (which dealt directly with Twitter) \u201ca long list of accounts that \u2018may warrant additional action\u2019\u201d\u2014i.e., suppression. The FBI pressured Twitter to torpedo parody accounts that only idiots or federal agents would not recognize as humor. <\/span>Taibbi wrote, \u201cThe master-canine quality of the FBI\u2019s relationship to Twitter comes through in this November 2022 email, in which \u2018FBI San Francisco is notifying you\u2019 it wants action on four accounts.\u201d<\/p>\n

The FBI condemned the TwitterFiles as \u201cconspiracy theorists\u2026feeding the American public misinformation with the sole purpose of attempting to discredit the agency.\u201d<\/strong> But Taibbi and his colleagues didn\u2019t fabricate the emails the FBI sent to Twitter.<\/p>\n

On that Davos panel last week, Wray dramatically placed both hands on his chest and declared, \u201cThe good guys are constrained by the rule of law and international norms. The bad guys aren\u2019t.\u201d But that self-evident truth is tricky to reconcile with the history of FBI surveillance crime sprees.<\/strong><\/p>\n

In October 2001, the Patriot Act gave the FBI a green light to cannibalize the nation\u2019s email with its Carnivore email wiretapping system.\u00a0 <\/span>Carnivore was contained in a black box that the FBI compelled Internet service providers to attach to their operating system. Though Carnivore might be authorized for a single person, Carnivore could automatically impound the email of all the customers using that service. The ACLU\u2019s Barry Steinhardt observed, \u201cCarnivore is roughly equivalent to a wiretap capable of accessing the contents of the conversations of all of the phone company\u2019s customers, with the \u2018assurance\u2019 that the FBI will record only conversations of the specified target.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Patriot Act authorized life sentences in prison for computer hackers who maliciously spread viruses but federal agents were exempt from the law. The FBI created a special program to send emails to individuals to infect their computers with malware that enabled keystroke monitoring and automatic detection of all passwords. Norton, McAfee, and other computer security firms secretly agreed to leave a backdoor for the FBI to exploit with no warning to computer users. James Dempsey of the Center for Democracy and Technology observed, \u201cIn order for the government to seize your diary or read your letters, they have to knock on your door with a search warrant. But [FBI malware] would allow them to seize these without notice.\u201d The FBI also developed malware permitting it to covertly turn on a computer\u2019s camcorder \u201cwithout triggering the light that lets users know it is recording,\u201d as The<\/em> Washington Post<\/i> <\/b>reported in 2013.<\/p>\n

The Patriot Act made it far easier for FBI agents to snatch personal data via National Security Letters (NSLs). These subpoenas compel individuals, businesses, and other institutions to surrender confidential or proprietary information that the FBI claims is related to a national security investigation. NSLs enable the FBI to seize records that reveal \u201cwhere a person makes and spends money, with whom he lives and lived before, how much he gambles, what he buys online, what he pawns and borrows, where he travels, how he invests, what he searches for and reads on the Web, and who telephones or e-mails him at home and at work,\u201d The<\/em> Washington Post <\/i>noted in 2005.<\/p>\n

The number of NSLs increased by a hundredfold after 9\/11. There is no judicial oversight of this power, and each FBI field office is entitled to dictate its own NSLs. Almost every NSL was accompanied by a gag order: Anyone who discloses that their data had been raided by the FBI could be sent to prison for five years.<\/p>\n

By 2006, the FBI was issuing 50,000 NSLs a year. A single NSL can lasso thousands of people\u2019s records, including all the clients of public libraries or book store customers. In 2007, an Inspector General report revealed that more than 10,000 NSLs\u00a0 <\/span>may have violated federal law. Senate Majority Whip Richard Durbin (D-IL), declared that the IG report \u201cconfirms the American people\u2019s worst fears about the Patriot Act.\u201d Rather than arresting FBI agents who brazenly broke the law, FBI chief Robert Mueller created a new FBI Office of Integrity and Compliance.<\/p>\n

But the FBI was just getting warmed up. In 1978, Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to outlaw political spying (such as the FBI had committed) on American citizens. FISA created a secret court to oversee federal surveillance of suspected foreign agents within the U.S., permitting a much more lenient standard for wiretaps than the Constitution permitted for American citizens.<\/p>\n

FISA warrants authorize the FBI to \u201cconduct, simultaneous telephone, microphone, cell phone, e-mail and computer surveillance of the U.S. person target\u2019s home, workplace and vehicles. Similar breadth is accorded the FBI in physical searches of the target\u2019s residence, office, vehicles, computer, safe deposit box and U.S. mails,\u201d a court decision noted. People surveilled under FISA orders rarely learn the feds have been intruding unless they are arrested as a result. And the FISA court rubberstamps 99.9% of all FBI search warrant requests.<\/p>\n

The FISA court \u201ccreated a secret body of law giving the National Security Agency the power to amass vast collections of data on Americans,\u201d The New York Times<\/em> reported in 2013 after Edward Snowden leaked court decisions. The court rubber-stamped FBI requests that bizarrely claimed that the telephone records of all Americans were \u201crelevant\u201d to a terrorism investigation under the Patriot Act, thereby enabling N.S.A. data seizures later denounced by a federal judge as \u201calmost Orwellian.\u201d In 2017, a FISA court decision included a 10-page litany of FBI violations, which \u201cranged from illegally sharing raw intelligence with unauthorized third parties to accessing intercepted attorney-client privileged communications without proper oversight.\u201d<\/p>\n

After the 2016 election, FBI officials devoted themselves to crippling Trump\u2019s presidency with fabricated evidence on Russia collusion. Kevin Clinesmith, a top FBI lawyer, was convicted for falsifying evidence to secure a FISA warrant to unjustifiably target Trump campaign officials. A 2019 Inspector General report concluded that FBI officials made 17 \u201csignificant inaccuracies and omissions\u201d in its application to the FISA court to spy on former Trump advisor Carter Page. The FBI withheld details from the court that would have crippled the credibility of the warrant request.<\/p>\n

In 2021, a FISA court report revealed that the FBI has conducted warrantless searches of a massive data trove compiled by the National Security Agency for \u201cpublic corruption and bribery,\u201d \u201chealth care fraud,\u201d and other targets\u2014including people who notified the FBI of crimes and even repairmen entering FBI offices. Even people who volunteered for the FBI \u201cCitizens Academy\u201d program were illegally tracked by the FBI. In 2019, an FBI agent conducted an unjustified database search \u201cusing the identifiers of about 16,000 people, even though only seven of them had connections to an investigation,\u201d The New York Times<\/em> reported. In 2021, the FBI carried out more than 3 million warrantless searches on U.S. persons, according to data revealed in early 2022.<\/p>\n

Maybe FBI boss Wray believes that the Fourth Amendment\u2019s prohibition of unreasonable warrantless searches doesn\u2019t apply to \u201cgood guys.\u201d The audience in Switzerland might have cheered him for making that assertion. Has the World Economic Forum ever seen a government surveillance scheme that it didn\u2019t like?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Instead of swallowing Wray\u2019s piffle, Americans should heed former FBI chief James Comey. In 2015, Comey told a congressional committee: \u201cYou should not trust me\u2026because you cannot trust people with power.\u201d President Trump followed that advice and fired Comey two years later. But Comey\u2019s point remains a better lodestar for judging the FBI than the hokum currently prevailing in the mainstream media, on Capitol Hill, or at scheming Swiss confabs.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Libertarian Institute, January 24, 2023 Davos\u2019 Damndest Delusion: FBI As Good Guys? by James Bovard You can judge an audience by how much bullshit they accept from the podium. By that standard, the World Economic Forum attendees in Davos, Switzerland last week were either depraved or craven. Why else would FBI chief Christopher Wray not […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":17955,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[904,3526,47,270,3525,3523,3524,342,30,708,734,3522,3521],"class_list":["post-17954","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-aclu","tag-clinesmith","tag-fbi","tag-fisa","tag-foreign-intelligence-surveillance-court","tag-matt-taibbi","tag-national-security-letters","tag-snowden","tag-surveillance","tag-trump","tag-twitter","tag-twitterfiles","tag-world-economic-forum"],"yoast_head":"\nDavos\u2019 Damndest Delusion: FBI As Good Guys? - James Bovard<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"FBI chief Wray claimed FBI were "good guys" and docile audience in Davos WEF did not hoot him down\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2023\/01\/24\/davos-damndest-delusion-fbi-as-good-guys\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Davos\u2019 Damndest Delusion: FBI As Good Guys? 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The Wall Street Journal called Bovard \\\"the roving inspector general of the modern state\\\" and Washington Post columnist George Will called him a \\\"one-man truth squad.\\\" His 1994 book, Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty, received the Free Press Association\u2019s Mencken Award as Book of the Year. His Terrorism & Tyranny won the Lysander Spooner \\\"Best Book on Liberty in 2003\\\" award. He received the Thomas Szasz Award for Civil Liberties work, awarded by the Center for Independent Thought and the Freedom Fund Award from the Firearms Civil Rights Defense Fund of the National Rifle Association. 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The Wall Street Journal called Bovard \"the roving inspector general of the modern state\" and Washington Post columnist George Will called him a \"one-man truth squad.\" His 1994 book, Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty, received the Free Press Association\u2019s Mencken Award as Book of the Year. His Terrorism & Tyranny won the Lysander Spooner \"Best Book on Liberty in 2003\" award. He received the Thomas Szasz Award for Civil Liberties work, awarded by the Center for Independent Thought and the Freedom Fund Award from the Firearms Civil Rights Defense Fund of the National Rifle Association. Bovard\u2019s writings have been publicly denounced by FBI director Louis Freeh, the Secretary of Agriculture, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, the Postmaster General, and the chiefs of the U.S. International Trade Commission, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, as well as by many congressmen and other malcontents.","sameAs":["http:\/\/www.jimbovard.com","https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/jim.bovard","https:\/\/x.com\/jimbovard"],"url":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/author\/admin\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17954","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17954"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17954\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17958,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17954\/revisions\/17958"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17955"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17954"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17954"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17954"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}