blueprint for abuse

[dilletante]

it's been a pretty good year for fans of movie-style conspiracy-thriller plots. no need to go to the theater; just read the headlines! today's favorite: investigative journalist was looking into cia crackdown on investigative journalism just before his mysterious death. such wackiness

Comments

[nakor]

Well, they can't prosecute it, right?

So lets say there has been some small abuse, in small ways. It's probably been caught; if Arnie is stalking his wife with XKeyscore, the office will know. And there are honest people there who need to do something about it---and the organization needs to do something about it to keep those honest people. But we don't see prosecutions for it, and the FISC sure isn't hearing criminal cases.

Logically, therefore, there must be a secret justice system for administrative punishments: fines, work reassignment, maybe at higher levels digging up dirt on you for normal cops to prosecute. That's where I would look: contractors and staff who lose clearances or are prosecuted or divorced for apparently unrelated reasons, but at a rate higher than expected.

[dilletante]

Well, they can't prosecute it, right?

yeah, that takes a lot of the force out of "oh, that would be illegal, of course we aren't doing that," doesn't it?

the organization needs to do something about it to keep those honest people.

i think you meant to use the subjunctive, here. the organization would need to do something about it, to retain honest people. nothing logically requires the organization to make retaining honest people a priority.

in fact, we know it's been bleeding honest people in ridiculously high-profile ways (cf Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden). the institutional response that we know about has been a broad program to detect and punish honesty.

this does not fill me with confidence.

[dilletante]

your response brings up a distinction i'd meant to talk more about, though: abuse in support of institutional vs personal goals.

digging up dirt on a reporter to stop him from writing about james clapper sleeping with his neighbor's wife (i made this up) is abuse in pursuit of personal goals. in general, everybody considers this corrupt.

digging up dirt on a reporter to stop him from writing about james clapper lying to congress about the nsa is abuse in pursuit of institutional goals.

the second one is still corruption, still abuse. our government loves to point it out when other governments pull that shit. i'm not sure it considers it abuse when we do it, though. the dea openly brags about preferentially pursuing people who speak out against the drug war, for instance.

[fennel]

the dea openly brags about preferentially pursuing people who speak out against the drug war, for instance.

Do you have a URL for more on this? Either it's news to me, or it pissed me off enough that I blocked it out.

[artricia]

This was a great read. I read it in triplicate.

[metaphortunate]

Yeah. It's pretty awful.

[oneagain]

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