Slashdot Mirror
FBI Edits Mission Statement: Removes Law Enforcement As 'Primary' Purpose
schwit1 writes with news that the FBI has altered their declared primary function from "law enforcement" to "national security." From the article: "Following the 9/11 attacks, the FBI picked up scores of new responsibilities related to terrorism and counterintelligence while maintaining a finite amount of resources. What's not in question is that government agencies tend to benefit in numerous ways when considered critical to national security as opposed to law enforcement. 'If you tie yourself to national security, you get funding and you get exemptions on disclosure cases,' said McClanahan. 'You get all the wonderful arguments about how if you don't get your way, buildings will blow up and the country will be less safe.'"
We are a police state regardless of what the Obamaites would have you think.
And this isn't to say that the right was any better but Bush & Company was a lot more honest about what they were up to. The silence from the left is deafening.
...until the fear mongering military industrial complex bankrupts this country. Rome was not built in a day, but neither did it fall in a day. We are falling now, will we catch it?
Silence is a state of mime.
to ignore FOIA.
If their motto was about "Law enforcement" they'd at least have to put up the pretense that they are not only objectively enforcing the law, but that they are subject to the law as well. 'National Security' however, gives a whole new sense of self interest to their stated motivations. After all, since when has the Committee for State Security in any non-free nation taken any action that was not in its own best political interests? If anything, I applaud this change as it's a better description of their more recent activities.
I suspect they are doing it because they want more "homeland security" funds, and use the mission statement as "evidence" they are multipurpose.
Table-ized A.I.
The law has not been their guideline for a while now and cannot be changed fast enough for creating a successful police-state in th near future anyways. So assigning it a lesser importance compared to their primary goal is entirely rational.
For those still clueless: "National Security" as primary government objective was historically called "Police State". It is also not about the security of the citizens either.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Are the two mutually exclusive? Call me naive, but would it be possible to protect national security within the law?
Actually, don't answer that. They should just change it again to "our primary function is to get more funding" and have done with it.
There's no money in law enforcement anymore but national security agencies get a blank check.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
The degeneration of the federal government is really amazing to watch.
I hesitate to put blame on anyone for it because we're so politically divided and I think everyone is so factional that we can't get past that. If I say X is responsible then people from X camp will automatically defend them or vice versa.
Regardless, there are serious problems here and the country could well trend towards tyranny.
I have even seen editorials in major newspapers calling for a King or the repeal of all sorts of rights past generations risked their lives to protect.
Its really sort of amazing. Its like a different country altogether. I'd expect to see this sort of thing in the developing world... some unstable backwater. But in the US? Really sort of amazing.
I'm not sure what is causing it... I just think its in everyone's interest if we take a few steps back and carefully consider what we are doing to ourselves.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
The two-party gag is merely a ruse
How many governmental agencies are in charge of "National Security" ?
Navy ...
Army
Air Force
Marine
Coast Guard
NSA
CIA
FBI
TBA
How many governmental agencies are in charge of "Law Enforcement" ?
SEC (for financial/security)
DEA (for drugs)
ATF (for guns)
Marshall (for witness protection)
With FBI withdrawing from "Law Enforcement", who is in charge of interstate criminal activities, racketeering, and so on ??
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
OK, This is Mises's revisionism. Rome had corruption among the tribunes, but they also had praetorians killing emperors left and right; they had foederati and mercenaries defending the borders; they had a completely broken tax system which exempted most citizens from above-board taxation, which demanded a spoils-driven empire to merely sustain law and order. Rome also had a sclerotic civil administration that was never equal to the task of operating a vast continental empire, and lacked innovations even the Merovingians and Franks had, such as accounting of state appropriations.
We also have the multi-cultural development of the Roman state, it's long-term tendency towards centralization, it's failure to integrate foreign societies as it did in the Republican era. Gibbon's belief that the rise of Christianity depleted the state of its legitimacy and caused the elite to give up on civic improvement can also be studied with profit.
We also have the reorganization of the Roman state after the partition, and the Byzantine empire, which operated under approximately the same constraints as the Roman Empire, and would stage influence-buying sprees that made the Roman panem et circenses look like a church social, yet it lasted an extra thousand years.
It's also a point of argument wether or not the Roman imperial office actually fell, or merely just reorganized itself as the Catholic Church, which, again, used religion and the narrative of salvation as a replacement for panem.
The fact is that all states, or cultural orders, try to buy the consent of the masses; when they can, they do it with law and order, when they must, they do it with great feats of the state, military triumphs, evidence that whatever else may be wrong, we can beat the crap out of the Alemanni. If the Alemanni are no longer being defeated, worse, they're successfully sacking the city every couple years, the state tries to buy the people's obedience with "freebees." We moderns demand our government send men to the moon, and merely steal the oil of the barbarians and not slaughter them, so we might call that progress.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
You know who else says "if we don't get your way, buildings will blow up and your country will be less safe"? That's right, Hitl... I mean, Al Queda.
the statsi will do raids, and actions against private citizens, and anyone else who is a threat the the State and to the Order.
other countries have gone down this same path
I know, I shouldn't butt in with facts when partisan bickering tries to prove points with made up stories, but I just can't resist...
What really fell Rome was simply the infighting. The last years of the empire are fraught with civil war and competing emperors that pit their legions against each other instead of trying to fend off the invading barbarians that flee from the Huns. That of course has very negative effects on tax incomes (because you can't tax what is destroyed), which in turn means that you lose even more of your military power (since you can't afford it anymore).
Rome existed long centuries after its emperors started to "buy" the love of the masses. Besides, you really think that throwing games for everyone in D.C. could cripple the economy of the US? Then why do you think that games in Rome could cripple that Empire?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
What took you so long? We've known it's a police state for over a decade already. What is wrong with you?
USA is a police state, but USA is *NOT* the only police state.
Many of the so-called "Western Democracies" have turned into police states.
Take United Kingdom, for example.
What has GCHQ been doing for the past few decades ?
And when "The Guardian" newspaper printed the revelation from Edward Snowden files, what did the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom do ?
He threaten the paper with censure.
Let's not forget the contribution of "Great Firewall of UK", aka the "David Cameron Porn Filter" which filtered out many non-porn site, including Slashdot.org
It's also England which has blocked out the Pirate Bay.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
'You get all the wonderful arguments about how if you don't get your way, buildings will blow up and the country will be less safe.'
Isn't it usually the terrorists who make this argument?
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
Even now I have really no idea what role DHS is playing.
NSA deals with high math stuffs
FBI deals with people
DEA deals with drugs
ATF deals with weapons
But what DHS deals with ? Terrorists ?
I think I'm about to puke !
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
And why were mercenaries guarding the frontier?
Mercenaries were guarding the frontiers because they were cheaper than a standing army. Service guaranteed citizenship.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auxilia
Money is a reason why most nations do not have their army guarding their borders but just regular border patrol - civilians. Ie. Another form of mercenaries.
Stop trying to squish entitlements as "The Reason" for fall of Rome. Rome fell for many reasons. To me at least, requiring that Roman legions were 100% citizens of Rome would kind of put a selective pressure where citizens that serves would be less likely to have offspring than the ones that avoided service.
Then there was the advent of cavalry, and later heavy cavalry, that made roman legions quite obsolete. That was one of the most important reasons for fall of Rome.
Anther very important reason was that Romans were not innovators. They were builders. Once they absorbed the knowledge of the Greeks, they didn't really improve upon it. Romans took the best parts of cultures and assimilated it. That alone was death to their empire.
Lots of reasons to choose from. But "entitlements" was certainly not it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_the_Roman_Empire
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_the_Western_Roman_Empire#Civil_wars
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostrogothic_Kingdom#The_Gothic_War_and_end_of_the_Ostrogothic_Kingdom_.28535.E2.80.93554.29
Face it, 9/11 made voters stupid also. Everybody was panicked at the time by terrorists smashing planes, trains, and automobiles into stuff; ricin-laced letters, etc. Civil liberties looked like bygone idealism as obsolete as the Brady Bunch's plaid pants (which by now are back in style). Citizens are fickle and think short term. It's as if they just evolved from apes a few million years ago or something.
Table-ized A.I.
In the last dozen years we have had about two dozen victims of terrorism and 100,000 victims of gun crime. Yet we are devoting so many more resources to terrorism. The main danger of terrorism is causing overreaction. Bin Laden's strategy was to bankrupt the United States and we are helping him succeed.. The main danger of terrorism is causing overreaction. With this, NSA and Iraq he is on the way to success,
but that they are subject to the law as well.
I don't want to start an "is too"/"is not" argument here, but I do have one request of Slashdotters:
Think about what criteria you would use to judge if you're living in an authoritarian police state, if that distinction is important to you, and what you'd do about it if you decide it is. That might be last year, next year, or in a thousand years - you set the criteria. But do think about it - societies that fail to do so do not turn out well.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Responsibility to what, exactly speaking? Foreign conqueror? An abstract concept of a nation? "All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh-water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?" Do you perhaps think a shorter list inspires more loyalty?
So bread is a "freebie" but the blood in my veins is public property? Really? And what's this talk about "my" frontier - I don't own any land, so what's my stake defending your frontier?
The only way it could be my frontier was if I owned a share of the state, but in that case the bread and circuses are not "freebies", they're the dividend I'm entitled to as a shareholder. Or you can go fight the Huns by yourself while I walk away. Choose freely.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
My guess is they are going to start classifying various crimes as terrorist acts. Thus the FBI will still get to go after them but with better funding and the ability to say they are protecting America from "terrorists".
Starting? They're doing it. "Terroristic threatening" is a crime now, and "Weapons of mass destruction" now include grenades and IEDs and the like.
In earlier centuries, the largest part of Roman citizenry was small farmers, who had a living and something to lose. That's what I'd consider basic necessities for a healthy polity.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes