Not new allegations, but beginning to be proven:
Recently unsealed records reveal a much more extensive secret relationship than previously known between the FBI and Best Buy’s Geek Squad, including evidence the agency trained company technicians on law-enforcement operational tactics, shared lists of targeted citizens and, to covertly increase surveillance of the public, encouraged searches of computers even when unrelated to a customer’s request for repairs.
To sidestep the U.S. Constitution’s prohibition against warrantless invasions of private property, federal prosecutors and FBI officials have argued that Geek Squad employees accidentally find and report, for example, potential child pornography on customers’ computers without any prodding by the government. Assistant United States Attorney M. Anthony Brown last year labeled allegations of a hidden partnership as “wild speculation.” But more than a dozen summaries of FBI memoranda filed inside Orange County’s Ronald Reagan Federal Courthouse this month in USA v. Mark Rettenmaier contradict the official line.
The FBI would not be trying to conceal a memo to BestBuy workers that they have a legal obligation to report any child porn they come across. It would not even be hiding this if it was regularly debriefing these workers, or paying them rewards for kiddie porn found. All of that would be legal, noble, and it would not jeopardize the program at all. The FBI is concealing this relationship because that informant network is not only being used to uncover child porn, and the other uses would cause real problems if they came to light. I’d love to see the lists of targeted citizens.
What is weird about it is that Domestic Intel used to be a Law Enforcement function, and reserved for high-level investigations – as in a serious crime had to be committed before it would even begin to close in on you. The government didn’t employ dedicated civilian informants as listening posts within the law-abiding civilian world, just to poke around in people’s regular lives looking for anything interesting, and swarm random citizens to get into their lives. They avoided it because they knew the public wouldn’t like it.
Somewhere, the government has begun to grow uneasy with the populace, and now it is employing large numbers of private citizens whose sole purpose is spying on other law abiding citizens, maybe to control them, maybe to blackmail them into the network, I have no idea the underlying rationale. But it seems quite pointless in a normal American’s frame of reference.
Obviously 9/11 gave the legislative impetus, but I have wondered if the underlying motivation was the emergence of the internet. The internet probably seemed like a great idea. Move all data transfer onto an accessible digital network, and then spook-dom could access anything, anytime they wanted.
But once it took off, suddenly people didn’t need the mainstream media. Dialogs couldn’t be controlled, messages couldn’t be disseminated in a controlled fashion, and the popular information outlets could barely even be identified in real time, let alone controlled. Millions of weaponized autists could spontaneously amass and change the course of history overnight from basements across America, just by exposing truths the government would previously have been able to hide. As these truths emerged, new information outlets run by unknown commodities could amass impressive audiences quickly, leaving the old media’s influence washed away by a tsunami of regular citizens who just happened to care.
In short, uncontrollable movements could emerge overnight, and threatened the entire established infrastructure.
That is the only reason I could see that domestic intel would be amassing these disturbing networks of informers in the civilian world, targeting normal citizens, and risking the good will the public would normally have for the Domestic Federal Law Enforcement apparatus.
Spread r/K Theory, because the movement has just begun
