FBI Quietly Forms Secretive Net-Surveillance Unit

An anonymous reader writes with this snippet from CNET: "CNET has learned that the FBI has formed a Domestic Communications Assistance Center, which is tasked with developing new electronic surveillance technologies, including intercepting Internet, wireless, and VoIP communications. 'The big question for me is why there isn't more transparency about what's going on?' asks Jennifer Lynch, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group in San Francisco. 'We should know more about the program and what the FBI is doing. Which carriers they're working with — which carriers they're having problems with. They're doing the best they can to avoid being transparent.'"

Comments

Ummm

[globalist]

Just a guess, but maybe they want the unit to remain secretive?

Re:Ummm

[girlintraining]

Just a guess, but maybe they want the unit to remain secretive?

Which is fine when you're conducting foreign intelligence operations. However, the FBI's charter is to investigate private citizens within the United States. Given their track record, I don't think anything they do should be opaque:

They consider anyone who protests the government a terrorist, recently helped bust protesters for terrorism in Chicago -- which in actuality they were busting them for making beer. In their own home. They break federal laws so often that they had to change the laws so the FBI could continue to get convictions -- they still conceal evidence from defense attorneys to this day, and increasingly call such evidence off limits "due to national security". The FBI was instrumental in the passage and current use of the Patriot Act, which prevents citizens from even knowing the evidence presented against them, as the Constitution prescribed. I could go on, but really, I think you get the point: The FBI is one of the most corrupt law enforcement agencies in the world. The United States has the highest incarceration rate of any country worldwide. The Innocence Project routinely finds people who have been sitting 20 or 30 year prison terms for crimes they can prove beyond reasonable doubt they did not commit. The FBI's response has been to open case files and monitor everyone who comes in contact with the project. Anyone who shows the FBI as a corrupt organization quickly finds themselves facing trumped up charges of tax evasion, drugs, or even copyright infringement: Whatever it takes to silence their critics.

I mean, I could go on... it's not hard to find examples of FBI agents engaging in activities that in any other civilized country would be grounds for imprisonment... and that was pre-9/11. Since then, they've enjoyed practically blanket-immunity for civil rights violations, and it shows. Any citizen of this country that thinks the FBI is anything but a bunch of thugs with a huge budget and no ethical constraints is deluding themselves.

Submitted by an Anonymous Reader

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Who is, I suspect, no longer anonymous to the FBI...

Re:Transparency.

[Lynchenstein]

Perhaps translucent is more accurate. Everything they show us is distorted.

Justice Department Budget request

[kb1cvh]

This appears to be the Justice department budget request for the project.

http://www.justice.gov/jmd/2012factsheets/docs/fy12-national-security.pdf

Time to spend more time improving Tor

https://www.torproject.org/

Re:Transparency.

[causality]

Speaking of big questions, I have a small one.

What do they hope to learn from this new super-secret surveillance unit ... that's so very important ... that they can't just get a warrant for?

Why all the secrecy and all the cloak-and-dagger bullshit when you could have the full force (and legitimacy) of a court of law backing you up? What is the need for "new surveillance technologies" when you can present a court order to the ISP and capture everything to and from your suspect at the source?

This sounds more like CIA/NSA territory.