Charles C.W. Cooke in National Review recently penned a provocative essay that says what some conservative Republicans and progressive Democrats are thinking – dismantle the FBI!
Cooke makes a case that ever since J. Edgar Hoover took over the Bureau of Investigation, the FBI has been “a violent, expansionist, self-aggrandizing, and careless outfit that sits awkwardly within the American constitutional order.” Cooke presents the FBI’s parade of horribles: J. Edgar Hoover presented President Truman with a plan to suspend habeas corpus and put 12,000 Americans into military facilities and prisons at the outbreak of the Korean War. The FBI under Hoover’s leadership tried to convince Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to commit suicide. It helped presidents destroy their enemies and used blackmail to intimidate the FBI’s critics (paranoia fueled from the likely fact that Hoover himself was eminently blackmailable). It doubled down on a macho confrontation with David Koresh, clearly a psychopath, leading to the deaths of 75 people, 17 of them children. We would add to that list a bureau headquarters that actively blocked investigations from the field that could have stopped 9/11. Many have more recent reasons to suspect the FBI is rigging its investigations. In recent years, an FBI lawyer was caught and convicted of presenting altered evidence and lying to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in an effort to hide Carter Page’s service to the CIA. The FBI today has excellent justification to pursue those who invaded and trashed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, and perhaps reason to pursue an investigation of former President Donald Trump’s handling of classified material – but these investigations will always be suspect to millions of Americans because of the FBI’s involvement in partisan forgery and in peddling the Steele Report, which the FBI knew at the time was unreliable. On the other side of the ideological fence, the FBI has employed invasive surveillance techniques to spy on Americans who exercised their First Amendment rights by protesting police misconduct. So Cooke’s cry to dismantle the FBI, once a fringe opinion, is sure to have resonance with many on the right and left. As outrageous as the FBI has been at times, however, we counsel critics remember its value in keeping us safe from terrorists, human traffickers, cyber-criminals and foreign intelligence agents from Russia and China. And make no mistake, Russian and Chinese agents and their subordinated or blackmailed helpers are in America in force and doing great harm to our country. Fighting these threats are some of the most capable and patriotic men and women we’ve ever met. So what to do? Cooke offers a list of potential reforms he had toyed with before deciding to argue for the wholesale dismantlement of the FBI. Cooke’s list is well thought-out and worthy of a second look and of being quoted at length:
We endorse Cooke’s strong list of reforms, to which we propose two of our own.
In looking at the history of the FBI, strong leadership has often come from its field offices. But leadership in the top tiers of the J. Edgar Hoover Building has shown itself to be entrenched with Washington power-seeking and socially enmeshed with media and political circles. If one wants to bring about change, perhaps a good place to start would be to divert resources taken up by HQ and spread them out of Washington and into the field offices. Andrew McCarthy, in a reply to Cooke in National Review, promotes the idea of separating the intelligence function of the FBI from its law enforcement function. This would return the FBI to being an agency dedicated solely to law enforcement. It would create an American version of the UK’s MI-5 for the purpose of counterintelligence. Like MI-5, the new agency would have no police powers (though the creation of a 19th intelligence agency in the U.S. government would undoubtedly bring fresh concerns about surveillance and privacy). Another needed change would be to instill into the culture of headquarters something similar to that of the senior ranks of the U.S. military, which eschews any sign of partisanship. Many generals and admirals will not discuss their political views. Some make it a point of pride not to vote. This may be asking too much of civilian officials, but if an agent is assigned to a team that deals with political crimes, with First Amendment implications that resonate nationally, being an outspoken partisan should be reason enough for an immediate transfer to some other important line of duty. The Federal Department of Innuendo? A witness in the John Durham investigation of the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation testified that the FBI offered former British MI-6 agent Christopher Steele $1 million if he could corroborate the lurid claims in his infamous report.
The FBI had serious doubts about the reliability of Steele and his report while filing four unverified and false applications for surveillance before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. This latest revelation shows that the FBI was so desperate to nail down the facts in the Steele Report, paid for by a rival presidential campaign, that agents were willing to give Steele $1 million to prove something – anything – within it. Furthermore, they did this while presenting this report with a straight face as evidence before the secret FISA Court – again, four times. When you add to this latest revelation the conviction of FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith for forging a document to hide Carter Page’s relationship with the CIA, you can see an FBI that uses criminal investigations to advance an explicitly political agenda. We live in a highly partisan era in which Republicans have one set of scandals to focus on and Democrats have their own. It would be refreshing if Republicans and Democrats would come together to examine the FBI’s actions in detail. The FBI’s interference in a presidential campaign, and therefore the First Amendment rights of every American, casts a shadow on necessary investigations – such as the actions surrounding the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. “This is yet another reason for Congress to pass long-needed bipartisan reform legislation like the Leahy-Lee Amendment on Amicus Curiae and Exculpatory Evidence Reforms, which would add crucial, common-sense privacy and civil liberties protections to sensitive FISA cases," said Bob Goodlatte, senior policy advisor for PPSA and former Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. Facial recognition software is a problem when it doesn’t work. It can conflate the innocent with the guilty if the two have only a passing resemblance. In one test, it identified 27 Members of Congress as arrested criminals. It is also apt to work less well on people of color, leading to false arrests.
But facial recognition is also problem when it does work. One company, Vintra, has software that follows a person camera by camera to track any person he or she may interact with along the way. Another company, Clearview AI, identifies a person and creates an instant digital dossier on him or her with data scrapped from social media platforms. Thus, facial recognition software does more than locate and identify a person. It has the power to map relationships and networks that could be personal, religious, activist, or political. Major Neill Franklin (Ret.) Maryland State Police and Baltimore Police Department, writes that facial recognition software has been used to violate “the constitutionally protected rights of citizens during lawful protest.” False arrests and crackdowns on dissenters and protestors are bound to result when such robust technology is employed by state and local law enforcement agencies with no oversight or governing law. The spread of this technology takes us inch by inch closer to the kind of surveillance state perfected by the People’s Republic of China. It is for all these reasons that PPSA is heartened to see Rep. Ted Lieu join with Reps. Shelia Jackson Lee, Yvette Clark and Jimmy Gomez on Thursday to introduce the Facial Recognition Act of 2022. This bill would place strong limits and prohibitions on the use of facial recognition technology (FRT) in law enforcement. Some of the provisions of this bill would:
The introduction of this bill is the result of more than a year of hard work and fine tuning by Rep. Lieu. This bill deserves widespread recognition and bipartisan support. |
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