FBI Abused Spy Law 280,000 Times In a Year (theregister.com) 151
The FBI misused surveillance powers granted by Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) over 278,000 times between 2020 and early 2021 to conduct warrantless searches on George Floyd protesters, January 6 Capitol rioters, and donors to a congressional campaign, according to a newly unclassified court opinion. The Register reports: On Friday, the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court made public a heavily redacted April 2022 opinion [PDF] that details hundreds of thousands of violations of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) -- the legislative instrument that allows warrantless snooping. The Feds were found to have abused the spy law in a "persistent and widespread" manner, according to the court, repeatedly failing to adequately justify the need to go through US citizens' communications using a law aimed at foreigners.
The court opinion details FBI queries run on thousands of individuals between 2020 and early 2021. This includes 133 people arrested during the George Floyd protests and more than 19,000 donors to a congressional campaign. In the latter, "the analyst who ran the query advised that the campaign was a target of foreign influence, but NSD determined that only eight identifiers used in the query had sufficient ties to foreign influence activities to comply with the querying standard," the opinion says, referring to the Justice Department's National Security Division (NSD). In other words, there wasn't a strong enough foreign link to fully justify the communications search.
For the Black Lives Matter protests, the division determined that the FBI queries "were not reasonably likely to retrieve foreign intelligence information or evidence of a crime." Again, an overreach of foreign surveillance powers. Additional "significant violations of the querying standard" occurred in searched related to the January 6, 2021 breach of the US Capitol, domestic drug and gang investigations, and domestic terrorism probes, according to the court. It's said that more than 23,000 queries were run on people suspected of storming the Capitol.
The court opinion details FBI queries run on thousands of individuals between 2020 and early 2021. This includes 133 people arrested during the George Floyd protests and more than 19,000 donors to a congressional campaign. In the latter, "the analyst who ran the query advised that the campaign was a target of foreign influence, but NSD determined that only eight identifiers used in the query had sufficient ties to foreign influence activities to comply with the querying standard," the opinion says, referring to the Justice Department's National Security Division (NSD). In other words, there wasn't a strong enough foreign link to fully justify the communications search.
For the Black Lives Matter protests, the division determined that the FBI queries "were not reasonably likely to retrieve foreign intelligence information or evidence of a crime." Again, an overreach of foreign surveillance powers. Additional "significant violations of the querying standard" occurred in searched related to the January 6, 2021 breach of the US Capitol, domestic drug and gang investigations, and domestic terrorism probes, according to the court. It's said that more than 23,000 queries were run on people suspected of storming the Capitol.
That's a low number (Score:3, Informative)
Nothing has changed since Hoover, the overtly Christian racist, was the first head of the FBI. Nothing has changed since he took over in 1924.
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We should go further. We should federalize all police forces because the federal police forces have shown so much restraint. https://thehill.com/opinion/cr... [thehill.com]
I think you overlooked the sarcasm tag.../s
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I think you missed his sarcasm lol.
Re:That's a low number (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:That's a low number (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with Hoover was not his faith or personal opinions, it was that he maintained blackmail files on Americans, particularly political leaders. James Comey demonstrated how that particularly noxious practice has continued.
I assure you, every single alphabet agency in Intelligence/Law Enforcement is keeping files on citizens to a greater extent than ever before. It was Chuck Schumer that said they have "a thousand ways to get back at you" if angered, and that surely entails digging up dirt on you and saving it for a rainy day. The alphabet agencies have become a modern Praetorian Guard.
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The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover: How the FBI Aided and Abetted the Rise of White Christian Nationalism [stanford.edu]
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I think you should reconsider your sources. Fulton Sheen was a Catholic priest at a time when the KKK was actively working against the Catholic Church as well as civil rights. The KKK targeted Catholic Churches in particular because of its support for civil rights in this country, and to claim that Sheen (again, a Catholic priest!) was laundering FBI intel in furtherance of evangelical Christianity is ridiculous. The reason for the current political norms with respect to Christian nationalism is not due
Really? (Score:4, Funny)
So besides weekends, over 1000 times per day?
Must be an oversight.
Just get rid of the FBI at this point (Score:5, Insightful)
There is no reforming this agency, and they aren't even needed. Every state now has their own state level "bureau of investigation" or something similar with state-wide jurisdiction. DHS has all of the FBI's jurisdiction (both ICE and the USSS have national security agents) and more, plus its fusion centers provide efficient means to outsource cases to local and state agencies. There is simply no reason to keep this KGB-like agency around at this point.
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Once a criminal crosses a US state border, it becomes a federal responsibility: It would be nice if federal police concentrated on enforcing federal law, maintaining national databases (eg. NCIC), state information-sharing (Currently an opt-in service with the FBI which the right-wing states don't.), municipal/state internal affairs but the Office of the Chief Examiner was created to detect white-collar crime. Then, J E Hoover converted it into a state-security service similar to the KGB. (See "Red Scare
Wrong on a few points (Score:3)
Wrong. The states cooperate all of the time without federal involvement. A very famous example was the "DC Sniper" case where MD and VA law enforcement formed their own task force, found the perps and settled on prosecuting the perps in VA, despite multiple violations in MD because VA has the death penalty.
Red states actively p
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The FBI was certainly involved in the DC sniper attack. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
The FBI wasn't needed in the DC Sniper Case (Score:2)
There are absolutely no constitutional barriers to having special agents from the VA and MD state governments forming a taskforce where they cooperate across state lines.
Even where the FBI was present here, it wasn't needed because states can extend their authority beyond their borders through cooperation frameworks with their neighbors.
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Your suggestion is obtuse and very short-sighted.
Falling short (Score:2)
The FBI really needs to up their game. If they could just get that figure up to 365,000 they could hit the magic "a thousand times a day" milestone. Unless it happens to be a leap year, of course...
As it is, their "spy law abuses per day" count sits at just under 32 per hour. Pretty impressive, but there's still room to exercise their contempt and paranoia even more with just a bit of effort.
If only someone warned us in 2001 (Score:5, Insightful)
That lone Senator standing against the expansion when it was considered "political suicide" by pundits? Wisconsin Democratic Senator Russ Feingold. A few years later the USA PATRIOT ACT is up for renewal, and some news groups noted the abuses. He stands up, basically says "I told you... I warned you... let's get rid of this expansion of power NOW." He gets a few Democratic and Republican Senators to vote with him, but it passes again. About that time Fox News renews the attacks of him being "soff on terrir!"
Then his next opponent comes in riding that idea. He declares all durty democraps, but especially Russ, AMERICA HATER SOF ON TERRIR!
That's how we got Ron "I say mean things, but always vote for surveillance of the plebes" Johnson as a Senator in Wisconsin.
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If you're talking about the Senate it was 98 to 1... with the 1 being Russ.
If you're talking about the House then it was 357 for 56 against with 10 choosing to not vote.
Of course Republicans went full "democrats are soff on terrir" after that vote. Fox News and the rest of conservative media bleating that as well as, "If you've got nothing to hide you've got nothing to fear." and so on.
To borrow a line from B5 (Score:2)
The FBI is your friend, trust the FBI.
The obvious question is Who are they really working for? We can rule out Democrats, Republicans and the Constitution.
Misleading article content (Score:5, Informative)
The excerpt of the article is pretty specific about naming left wing targets but says nothing about right wing targets except possible innuendo. Tsk tsk. It's almost as though The Register would have you ignore the Durham report.
Ha ha sure (Score:3, Insightful)
Abuse FISA warrant to "take down the Satan Trump"? OK perfectly fine.
Abuse FISA warrant to surveil people who "tried to stage a military coup* to overthrow teh WHOL US GOVerMinT!"? OK perfectly fine.
*armed only with, literally, flagpoles. Sure.
Abuse FISA warrant where Black Lives Matter is concerned? Heinous! We must fix this deeply broken and malignant system!
You guys crack me up.
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To be clear, I find the self-righteous Right just as repugnant - and there used to be a LOT of Evangelical Right Wingers all over. They still control a lot of low level parts of the GOP.
That said, clearly the Left are in the ascendant, they have the vast majority of media and corporations peddling their nonsense, and have thus been empowered to absurdity now. Hilariously, if you talk to them they will INSIST they are 'pretty much the middle of the road politically'.
Right wingers with that sort of arroganc
Such abuses could reasonably be called fraud. (Score:2)
toss those cases out. (Score:2)
I hope that anyone convicted with any of this tainted evidence used in their trial gets their cases thrown out and they walk. If it's thousands of people, good. Maybe that would teach the FBI a lesson.
Better yet, the judge should make an FBI agent personally apologize to each person and give them a big check for their troubles. (yeah right, dreaming now)
Worth it (Score:2)
A powerful state with central organs for cracking down on suspicious people is necessary to protect Democracy® as well to stop Trump.
Re: FBI is massively racist... (Score:1)
Re:FBI is massively racist... (Score:5, Insightful)
Would be interesting to see the following breakdown of searches
- J6 vs George Floyd riots
- Republican vs Democrat
I think everyone knows.
Re:FBI is massively racist... (Score:5, Interesting)
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(George Floyd Protests) By the end of June 2020, at least 14,000 people had been arrested.
(source [wikipedia.org])
Some reports have estimated insurance claims for damages related to the 2020 protests totaled about $2 billion. However, the post is wrong to claim protesters saw no consequences - in fact, over 10,000 protesters were arrested, most for low-level offenses.
(source [usatoday.com]).
Re: FBI is massively racist... (Score:2)
90 to 95% of charges were dropped in the 2020 cases
Sometimes a better approach than prosecuting the little fish is to round them up, ID them, collect their phone IMEIs and trace back up through the network to their leadership. The people caught on the streets are just the useful idiots anyway. And pretty ineffectual without instructions from higher-ups. Why waste a jail cell?
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The FBI's charter goes beyond arresting people and building cases for eventual trial. Particularly in the area of foreign espionage and influence, you can't get some of those people into court. But you can turn up the heat under their host countries or sources of support.
And for the people working in country, sometimes it's more damaging to have an eternal "subject of an ongoing investigation" check-mark on their record than an arrest.
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The Republicans are staunch patriots, all right. Shame they're not our patriots. [nytimes.com]
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Walking around the capitol building with a capitol police escort opening doors for you
Was that before or after they killed one?
Re: FBI is massively racist... (Score:2)
Re: FBI is massively racist... (Score:2)
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I didn't make any such suggestion. No idea how you got that.
I abhor the far right as much as I abhor the far left. And I'm not one to reduce my thinking to 3-word slogans, I find them extremely reductive. Since you ask, I believe all human lives matter, regardless of black/blue/white/yellow.
I also believe all crimes should be prosecuted to the extend of the law. If you try to disrupt the government, there should be a sentence for that. If you destroy private/public property, there should also be a sentence
Re: FBI is massively racist... (Score:4, Insightful)
Let's see. One group trashed a Starbucks or two in Portland, Oregon, while the other tried to subvert democracy. I wonder who the FBI is paying more attention to.
Re: FBI is massively racist... (Score:4, Informative)
Or do you watch so little news that you think only a few Starbucks were trashed and missed the news reports about entire police stations and neighborhoods being overrun throughout the country?
You've been lied to. [independent.co.uk] You should be pissed about that, and you're certainly entitled to an explanation from the people who did the lying, but instead you attack the messenger. Bummer.
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Really?
https://www.seattletimes.com/s... [seattletimes.com]
https://www.washingtonpost.com... [washingtonpost.com]
https://abcnews.go.com/US/seat... [go.com]
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Maybe kill fewer people for no good reason if you don't want them to overrun your workplace, mkay?
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Are you talking about the police or the government?
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For the benefit of those being played at home:
Crime: Passing a counterfeit $20 bill
Inappropriate punishment: Extrajudicial death penalty administered by armed gang members
Expected punishment: Fine and/or imprisonment according to applicable law
Crime: Violently attacking the nation's capitol
Inappropriate punishment: Loitering, or whatever the hell most of those idiot Trumpers were charged with
Expected punishment: Fuck around, find out
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It remains true that they burned down a police station,
Yeeeah, about that. [theguardian.com]
For that matter, is there a reason you trust the cops not to burn down their own building as an agitprop exercise?
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Regarding your link, participation does not mean sole responsibility. He fired his gun at it. Four other people [forbes.com] were indicted for the actual fire, and no one has claimed them to be left wingers that I found after a quick search.
Here [wikipedia.org] is a larger list. Please stop trying to pretend that there wasn't widespread violence from the left during the BLM riots. The "mostly peaceful" excuse is bullshit.
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It comes down to how hard it is to fix. It's easy enough to arrest a few looters -- assuming the police haven't sold out their own moral authority, that is -- and it's easy enough to rebuild a burned-out courthouse or police station or coffee shop.
But it is hard as hell to raise a new Republic from the ashes of an old one.
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Change the channel. Murdoch is lying to you.
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Racist?
OK, I get that FISA is a government overreach, but how is it racist?
Sure, they used to it to spy on George Floyd protesters. But read a little further. They also used it to spy in January 6 protesters, a group that was overwhelmingly white.
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FISA isn't racist any more than a flag is racist. Flags are symbols. FISA is legislation.. If it's used in a racist manner, then the users are racist, like those flying a 'racist' flag.
FISA is such a mess, has been abused and misled so often, it needs to be repealed. This is not possible right now as the ruling parties both employ it to punish their enemies. Enemies they often hold collectively. We, mere citizens, are in deep trouble.
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I agree FISA should be repealed. But not because it's racist, or even that it's used in a racist way by people. There's simply no evidence of that.
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Re: FBI is massively racist... (Score:2)
My main gripe is inaccuracy.
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So, the FBI was motivated by the mob killing a cop? (Actually, 7 people died, 3 of whom were police officers. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/0... [nytimes.com])
Well, that's certainly not a racist motivation, is it! Even in your world, they were motivated by something else besides racism. They didn't go after *all* the people involved in the January 6 insurrection, just those that fought police and stormed into the Capitol.
And I'd suggest that their pursuit of people involved in BLM protests was also motivated by other fact
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https://www.factcheck.org/2021/11/how-many-died-as-a-result-of-capitol-riot/
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Had the terrorist simply obeyed the lawful orders of an officer, they wouldn't have gotten shot, now would they?
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Well, from your statement, you would agree that Babbitt's shooting is justified then. She was breaching a holdfast line that was protecting the nation's lawmakers from a mob who had stormed the Capitol, broken in, all the while assaulting police in the process. At that point the mob's intentions are unambiguously hostile, and if they had made it to lawmakers, there would be a high probability that lives would be in danger.
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But that is something only a cop could get away with.
In the military, if you shot blindly through a door and killed someone who was unarmed in any time except an actual offensive operation, you'd be court-martialed. If you did that as a private citizen, even if someone was trying to break through your door, and you shot blindly through it, you'
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No, I used the words of terrorist sympathizers against them. They're they ones who gloat when a black person is shot and killed by using the same words. This includes people such as Breonna Taylor who was killed by police in her own home when police broke into the wrong house and her boyfriend used his second amendment right to defend them. She was killed, having done absolutely nothing, and
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It is called PTSD and I don't expect you to be familiar with it because you've obviously never faced a hardship.
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Truly amazing watching each and every 'gotcha' they have blow up in their inebriated faces.
Yet they still persist. I suppose even cancer wants to live.
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Why is that nice? It sounds just as bad to me.
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Suppressing lefties? Like giving Hillary Clinton a defensive briefing but opening a full-blown investigation against Donald Trump? Like inflating the number of supposed domestic terror cases to sell that story? Like running 23,000 queries against J6 suspects but an unspecified number of queries that returned a total of 133 people arrested during George Floyd protests?
You might want to check your facts.
Re:FBI (Score:5, Insightful)
You don't get it because you're a right winger. If you grew up (or had people who kept account of such things) in the 70's and 80's you'd see the FBI did stuff that (if they did it right-wing terror groups like the Oathbreakers and Ashamed Toddlers) you would lose your fracking marbles. If you think what happened with those violent jerkoffs in Michigan was "entrapment" then I suggest you go back in time and see what they did to infiltrate left-leaning groups and stoke violence among a couple members as justification to take out the rest. I further suggest you start looking into their treatment of Native Americans if you think they love libs.
The only problem right-wingers have today is that the FBI started using some of the same crap against their terror groups, but only because their less intelligent terror groups were complete idiots that threatened governors and the Feds directly.
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Tell me again what laws Hillary broke?
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Mishandling of classified information, unlawful retention of government records (including classified material), and destruction of most of those. Apparently her and Bill's influence-peddling was legal, though, so I guess she has that?
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So what? Do you mishandle it every day, or are you just an asshole?
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And of course Trump makes any other elected official in the entire history of the USA look like an angel when it comes to mishandling secret info.
Your position is that two wrongs make a right. And you are also equating the equivalent of running a stop sign with driving the wrong way on the freeway while running from the cops. The typical right wing "what about" bullshit response.
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Tell me: What do you think the specific elements of that crime are?
Your position is that since you don't know the law, WHATABOUT.
Senior government officials are often allowed to have classified material at their houses. Hillary Clinton had a SCIF at her house. One of her offenses is that she allowed her maid to access it [inquisitr.com] unsupervised. (That maid didn't have a security clearance.) That's fundamentally different from what Pence did.
It's also different when the president handles classified information, bec
Re:FBI (Score:5, Insightful)
> Like giving Hillary Clinton a defensive briefing but opening a full-blown investigation against Donald Trump?
Wait, is that the same FBI that announced their investigation into Clinton one month before the election?
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Suppressing lefties?
It looks to me like the FBI is pretty apolitical. They investigated Hillary, they investigated Trump. In the abuse at hand they illegally spied on George Floyd protesters (lefties, more or less) and on J6 participants (right-wingers, more or less) and on some congressional donors (don't know if it's left or right; could be either).
I think the cries that "The FBI is suppressing my side!" are confirmation bias at work. Historically, the FBI has most often been abused to suppress the left, but the abuse seem
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I think the cries that "The FBI is suppressing my side!" are confirmation bias at work. Historically, the FBI has most often been abused to suppress the left, but the abuse seems pretty evenhanded these days.
The point you miss is that abuse and suppression exists. This is ground that all political walks should be able to find 100% agreement. The FBI should not be the American Stasi. I do not understand how anyone, let alone progressives, would look the other way.
The FBI will lock you up for giving them a false statement. How is anyone who lied on, embellished, or violated a FISA request not doing time?
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I think the cries that "The FBI is suppressing my side!" are confirmation bias at work. Historically, the FBI has most often been abused to suppress the left, but the abuse seems pretty evenhanded these days.
The point you miss is that abuse and suppression exists.
What makes you think I missed that? Note the bolded text above. How can it be evenhanded if it doesn't exist?
I do not understand how anyone, let alone progressives, would look the other way.
Me neither.
Enforcing rights protects everyone (Score:2)
Caesar said his secret was "divide and conquer". Getting distracted by trying to conclude your side is treated worse only serves the oppressors.
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Re:FBI (Score:4, Insightful)
The FBI investigated the Clintons when they had recordings of foreign government officials discussing how they were sending money to the Clinton foundation.
When the FBI had information that Hillary Clinton'a campaign was the target of Russian election interference, they gave her a defensive briefing and dropped the matter after that. When the FBI had a political dossier they knew was funded by an election campaign, they used that to open a full investigation of Donald Trump's campaign without any corroboration, and then wiretapped Trump's staffers.
There was a blatant double standard, where the FBI deliberately used kid gloves with Clinton because they thought she would be the next president and might conduct reprisals, but they went for Trump's jugular.
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Crossfire Hurricane was not started because of the Steele dossier. That was irrelevant. Remember that the dossier wasn't filed until after Russia had dumped a bunch of DNC docs and 20,000 of Clinton's emails -- the latter apparently a direct result of Trump's public request to hack her email, which clearly proved that Trump was happy to have Russia interfering on his behalf and, IMO, should have been enough on its own to prompt an investigation. But it wasn't enough. What prompted the investigation was Geor
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Trump's public request to hack her email
As a reminder, this is what he said:
Russia, if youâ(TM)re listening, I hope youâ(TM)re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing, I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.
Anybody with two brain cells to rub together knows he was talking about emails from a server that Clinton had already destroyed with BlrachBit. But you are either a moron or a liar.
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Its not even a left right thing, or at least its not exactly a left right thing. I think we have plenty of evidence to suggest the DOJ treats truly progressive candidates / groups / agitators pretty badly right a long side conservative ones.
I think given these revelations and the broader context of what has come out from Snowden and subsequent leaks and reports two things are pretty clear:
1) The argument these people are all responsible dedicated professionals that religiously do everything by-the-book and
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How many queries do you think return zero people?
One query could easily return all 133 people mentioned. But it's very unlikely that it was more than 133 queries, because a query can easily return multiple people.
I'm not 100% sure that J6 protesters were queried more often, but I am well over 99% sure.
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I'm not 100% sure that J6 protesters were queried more often, but I am well over 99% sure.
When you have over 0% evidence of that, let us know.
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I already let you know. I guess you're too dense to have noticed.
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Which bias would that be, exactly?
Against (black) George Floyd protesters, or against (white) January 6 rioters?
Against (liberal) George Floyd protesters, or against (conservative) January 6 rioters?
Seems to me that their abuse of power goes in multiple directions.
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It has nothing to do with funding. Who would you fund that would be in charge of those paidcheck and balances? Who would appointment the people in charge of those checks and balances (it would probably the same people that are already putting corrupt people in charge)...
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That's possible. However, Facebook's lawyers point out that FISA warrants make GDPR compliance impossible. So, maybe there are other reasons. But, this is at least one of them.
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