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FBI Agents Don't Have Email Access
the_bikeman writes "According to CNN, many FBI agents do not have access to an email account, and only 100 of the 2000 New York FBI agents have a Internet-ready mobile phone. Spokeswoman Cathy Milhoan said 'e-mail addresses are still being assigned, adding that the city bureau's 2,000 employees would all have accounts by the end of the year.'"
I have 4 Gmail accounts with 500 invitations left each! How many Get Out Of Jail Free cards can I buy?
Agent.Mulder@gmail.com just doesn't have the bragging rights.
It's clear that the greatest protection our civil rights have is abject incompetence.
-Peter
"FBI agents not having e-mail or Internet access is much too much a pre-9/11 mentality."
Funny, I thought it was a pre-1995 mentality.
This guy's the limit!
I prefer my FBI agents to be out attempting to protect me, not forwarding something to their 10 closest friends so Jesus will bless the kittens that day.
Nuke Gay Whales for Jesus.
all FBI agents are certified in morse code and at least half of them have some training in semaphore
and the next highest placing class out of quantico will be introduced to the fancy new 'telephone' that is rumored that a guy name alexander graham bell has perfected
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
"We just don't have the money, and that is an endless stream of complaints that come from the field," he said.
So let me get this straight, $9 billion goes missing in Iraq, the war has cost US taxpayers about $250 billion so far, oil companies have record profit$, our national debt ceiling was raised to $9 trillion and we can't afford to supply email to the FBI?
What is going on? And, does anyone even care?
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
In a world where secrecy is necessary, what you whisper goes unrecorded, but what you put in an email gets published just when you need it to never have been written down....
With record keeping comes accountability... is it any wonder they don't write things down? Until rather recently, there was no satisfactory manner to keep such communications to mobile devices secure/encrypted. If anyone knows if the govmint is spying on people, the FBI should. Makes you wonder..... ????
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All of the bureau's employees have secure mail accounts for use within that organization. Publicly available accounts, and accounts from which bureau employees can send mail to the public are indeed more complex (think about the tracking they'd require), and would require a lot more than typical corporate non-training when it comes to what they can or should do with that type of communication.
One mis-step in a CC or Reply-All and you could completely torpedo an investigation or a trial. Just look at what one lackluster prosecutor did with some ill-conceived e-mail sent to prospective witnesses during the ongoing 9/11 trial happening right now. This subject is a lot more complicated than meets the eye.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
and only 100 of the 2000 New York FBI agents have a Internet-ready mobile phone.
So? I make my living as a geek, and don't have an internet-ready cell phone.
Why would I pay more, for a service redundant with something I already have, yet with a far lower quality presentation?
When I want to do something online, I'll use a PC. When I want to call someone, I'll use my cell phone. They each serve entirely separate purposes, and as long as my eyes work better scanning large surfaces than a 1.5 inch square, they will continue serving different purposes.
Boo Hoo, our exchange licenses costs to much. Us poor folks at the FBI could not possibly just load up a linux box and postfix. I love the comment that the one senator made about this, our agents need better access to technology.
Clue: It is right under your nose, use it!
Got Code?
Sounds like a nasty mixture of bureaucracy and inefficiency to me. Is there a difference between employees and agents? (do cleaners need email accounts?)
I wonder what their 'secure internal e-mail system' is?
The Ginger Dog
how right my parents were about the FBI when I was a kid. My dad was very high up within Customs and my mom was a GSA IG agent, and all of their friends I knew growing up worked for other federal agencies ranging from the IRS to the DEA. The one thing that all of them had in common was a disdain, bordering on hatred, for the FBI's management. See, the FBI doesn't have its own charter and can expand into whatever it wants, which naturally causes turf wars with other agencies. Customs and the DEA are the two main anti-drug agencies, especially Customs which is the agency responsible for keeping them out of our country on the borders. The FBI would routinely come in and try to to take cases away to build up publicity and then royally fuck up the case, and when you're dealing with wealthy criminals, usually that leads to no conviction, even if there is no technicality, because the lawyers are that good at ripping the FBI a new asshole.
The FBI screwed up on 9-11 because it wants to be the American KGB. It wants to be THE main federal agency and has been jockeying for a foreign intelligence **field work** role. Hello people, that naturally conflicts with the CIA's exclusive jurisdiction there. Didn't stop the FBI's management from refusing to work with the CIA since the CIA has legal jurisdiction over all foreign operations. The FBI has also had problems with management blowing off field agents. The management simply has to go. A top down attack on the FBI management, decentralizing power and putting the bulk of it back into the hands of the lower-level management and field agents is the only solution. From the stories I have heard from the people I know in law enforcement at all levels, the FBI is dominated by middle management hell. The field agents, and the press is quick to point this out with the agents who warned about terrorism but were told to go fuck off by FBI management, and the IT people alike are hamstrung by management that cares more about image than doing its job.
Most importantly, give the agency a clear charter and jurisdiction once and for all. Take terrorism out of most of it too. Let the CIA and NSA deal with terrorists. They don't have the time, the jurisdiction or quite frankly any interest in what non-national security things the people are doing. If there is ever a crackdown on dissent, it'll be done by FBI agents with KGB-level powers, not CIA special ops who tracked down a Jose Padilla and discretely shot him dead like a dog in the streets of NYC.
And if they forgot their password to the account they could just get the Justice Department to subpoena their emails for them...
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If they did get email addresses, would it be just like the way email is in the movies, where the font is 24-point white or yellow lettering that scrolls in real-time across a black background that takes up the entire screen?
This sig, aah-ah, is comin' like a ghost-sig...
Repeat after me, the Web is not the Internet
No kidding... Your point?
I also don't want to read email (which increasingly includes web-like formatting), chat on IRC, or read UseNET on a 1.5 inch screen; And my phone doesn't make the best destination for downloading files via FTP or any P2P; And it takes far too long to enter alphanumeric data to make anything even remotely interactive (ie, ssh) useful on a cellphone.
I suppose getting an RSS feed might prove vaguely useful, but not nearly enough to justify the increased expense - And y'know, with a government that can't seem to spend our tax dollars fast enough, I can't say it really bothers me that the FBI hasn't caught on to yet another way to waste our money.
So, repeat after me - Contextually useless distinctions don't require enumeration.
The CIA, FBI, and any other governmental agency should have efficient, extremely-monitored, very safe email and email systems. It is very important that modern communications are fostered and maintained in governmental activities.
I know from personal experience that government-funded/government-used technical systems are generally either:
1)Ultra-over-engineered to be sure that the system/thing is ultra-safe or ultra-reliable or ultra-accountable
2)Woefully inadequate because the person(s) in the bureaucracy don't have the tech expertise to foster the effort correctly - and yet place massive, uninformed, and inappropriate amounts of pressure on the worker bees to get the job done as per the way the non-tech person thinks it needs to go.
3)Many projects die on the vine because mis-direction (and management that honestly doesn't have the knowledge they need to lead the effort) makes the project wander in the desert for huge periods of time.
4)I could go on...
But in all fairness, governmental technical efforts have many different and sometimes unique pressures on them. The government literally has to have permission from someone to do anything with public systems. The public (rightfully) wants as much transparency and accountability as possible in governmental efforts - which means everything is debated, re-documented, justified, cleared, reviewed, managed, re-managed, scrutinized, over-then-under-funded, micro-managed, and finally finger-pointed-to-somebody-else'd when the project doesn't go right.
Our government cannot (or doesn't know how to) operate as smaller, more agile private businesses work. The pressure and accountability of every move has created a monster of over-administered and over-micro-managed web of forms, functions, procedures, and other things...
What's the solution? Frankly, I don't know. I want my government to be accountable, and I want the government to be "of the people, by the people", but I also want it to be intelligent, well-led, and a great deal less dysfunctional. If only governmental technical tasks could be more agile...
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-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
>> many FBI agents do not have access to an email account
Not true, not true. They have access to many email accounts, they just don't have accounts of their own.
You laugh, but every time I hear people convinced that the FBI/CIA is maintaining a detailed file on them, I just know that there's no way either organization has that kind of manpower to care about them.
Not that I'm thrilled that they seem to be intent on gathering scattershot information when they can (taking pictures of protesters, granting themselves the right to listen in to phone calls). They don't even have time to process the information they have.
Parent is 100% true!
If people had any idea how much burearucratic bullshit that goes on in the FBI, you would have a totally different opinion of them. I find it amazing they are able to do any work at all with all of the political infighting and constant management changes that goes on within the FBI.
If you want to know what really goes on with the FBI, take your local agent out for a drink sometime!
I patented screwing your mom. But it got revoked for "prior art."
Read the article:
"Christine Monaco, a spokeswoman for the FBI in New York, said Monday that all FBI agents can communicate with each other via a secure internal e-mail system, and about 75 percent of the New York office's employees have outside e-mail accounts."
Apparently signatures sent via FAX are legally binding, but signatures sent by e-mail might not be? I know my real estate agent insisted that certain things be sent via FAX for legal reasons...
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
Here's the link from last week: http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/03/13/fbi.computers.a p/
Hell, I'll put up a secure e-mail system for half that! ;)
They have access to my email...
What?
>look at what one lackluster prosecutor did with some ill-conceived e-mail
Jesus H. Armadillo! Are we going to drag our whole government operation down to the level of the least competent person in the organization? I have worked in companies that had the philosophy of creating new restrictions every time some idiot abused or misused some tool or benefit. This served to limit the ability of the competent to actually get things done.
After a while, I got so frustrated that I quit and found a better job. There is a better way to run things: Fire The Morons! This "lackluster prosecutor" has at least seven years of university education and a six-figure salary. Am I wrong to expect competence and accountability? It's not like there's a shortage of lawyers in this country. Fire the fool and hire someone that can follow simple instructions.
The FBI is supposed to have the best and the brightest cops in the country. If they can't be trusted not to send the case file on some mass murderer as an email attachment to the guy's uncle, we're just screwed anyway. If I hear one more time, that we can't get rid of some idiot, because we have all this time and money invested in his training, I'm going to scream. We may have spent a lot of time and money, but it didn't work. Fire The Morons! I guarantee we'll be better off.
Thank you for listening. I'm going to go take my medication now.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
Who the heck cares if they don't have internet ready phones? That's like whing that they don't all have Ipod Nanos!
At what point did you figure out that repeating yourself louder only displayed your lack of fluency in your native tongue? Oh, wait... you apparently never figured that out.
Someone actually competent to speak to customers might have said (reassuring tone) "OK, I've already got your postal address, what I need is an electronic mail address that can recieve electronic mail from the Internet. If your company doesn't have an e-mail system that connects to the Internet, we're going to have to engineer a solution that will connect to your internal mail system, or set up webmail accounts for you that can be checked with a web browser". Then you could go on to explain why this is necessary within the framework of your application, since obviously you are talking to someone who hasn't been brought up to speed by anyone else at either company.
You might actually get something called repeat business if you don't belittle your customers and make them think you are an arrogant technocrat.
You might even find a useful ally within the customer's management hierarchy if you can provide sorely needed information without coming across like a condescending prick.
The OP said that those people were going to use web applications constantly. You are right, the customer always is right, yada yada yada.
But this is almost like buying a card, and when the salesman asks for your driver license, you reply "I don't know what you are talking about". Not "I don't have a license", but "I don't know what in hell is this license".
It is pretty weird.