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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?
"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.
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I'll bet most of us would like an employer who told us
by the end of the year
to get 2000 email accounts set up.
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.
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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>> 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.
Sorry, no. If you don't know by now what email is, you are one out-of-touch individual.
Every advert and TV programme for god knows how long has had a web page attached, and most also have an email address. Every phone-in programme or radio programme I've heard for the last 10 years has had the "ring us on xxx or email on xxx". For the last 5 or more, they've also had "or text us on xxx".
Bad analogy time? OK - failing to know of the existence of email is as bad as failing to know of the existence of mobile phones. They've both been around for about the same length of time. Their very existence stares you in the face every day. To not know about them would require that you are unaware of any new inventions created in the last 10-15 years.
Note that I don't require you to have one, or to be fully conversant with its use, or to know what the latest-and-greatest version is. That's all your technocrat stuff. But simply to know that it exists qualifies you as an active member of Western civilisation. I don't think it's too strong to say that if you're so out of touch with the world today that you've never heard of email, then you are not an active member of society. It indicates that you never talk to other people, never read the papers, never read books, never watch the TV, and never listen to the radio. Society-wise, you could be dead and no-one would notice the difference.
Grab.