The FBI's massive list of informants?

[Jagos]

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And because some people don't like RT:

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There's a lot in this and it's just better to go into the long list of details on the FBI, the Patriot Act, and how they use the leverage from it to create their informant system. Without further ado.

In order to cut down on the length of this post, I'll focus first on the Secret Patriot Act that is currently causing controversy. The FBI is in private, tracking people and their motions through cellphone use. Because of FISA, a set of Amendments which allow the wiretapping of Americans, the Feds are allowed access into personal data without the person's knowledge:

"The House and Senate should not be taking up this bill, which effectively guarantees immunity for telecom companies alleged to have participated in the President’s illegal program, and which fails to protect the privacy of law-abiding Americans at home."

Provisions of FISA are here.

It should also be noted that the Feds are known for cheating and having to retake an open book test that is much easier

Last time the test was given for the DIOG, things didn’t go so well. In fact, a scandal developed. The Justice Department’s Inspector General last year found that a number of employees cheated on the open-book test on the DIOG. Some agents passed around the answers. Some finished in such short time it was obvious they cheated. Some folks got in trouble.

This time agents, analysts and other employees are going to take a test focusing just the revisions made on the DIOG. It will be much shorter.

These are the people who are to uphold American civil liberties. They cheat on tests, lie about their involvement in crimes, and push for making their jobs ever easier. In regards the subject, it should be noted that the Department of Justice, under Obama as well as Bush Jr, has been pushing very hard recently to continue these powers. The sunset did not set on the Patriot Act, and there has been few mainstream reports on the focus on the debt crisis while ignoring the issue of FISA being extended.

So, we see that the law is established in causing them to be to have leverage in "enlisting" the informants for ongoing criminal investigations.

Ever since 9/11, civil liberties have been curtailed exactly as terrorists could want. The FBI has been used to focus on the Arab world in way to subvert terrorism. However, they've been working on preventing their own bomb plots:

But it may also just as easily be the case that the FBI -- as they've done many times in the past -- found some very young, impressionable, disaffected, hapless, aimless, inept loner; created a plot it then persuaded/manipulated/entrapped him to join, essentially turning him into a Terrorist; and then patted itself on the back once it arrested him for having thwarted a "Terrorist plot" which, from start to finish, was entirely the FBI's own concoction. Having stopped a plot which it itself manufactured, the FBI then publicly touts -- and an uncritical media amplifies -- its "success" to the world, thus proving both that domestic Terrorism from Muslims is a serious threat and the Government's vast surveillance powers -- current and future new ones -- are necessary.

Mohamed Osman Mohamud isn't the only victim of this entrapment. Farooque Ahmed had the same thing occur to him:

Authorities say the public was never in danger because their agents had been monitoring the man's activities throughout the conception and planning of the attacks.

Then there's the arms dealer that was given a missile in 2009. In a fit of irony, Some mosques reported the informant... Right to the FBI. This now brings us to the informant list.

Ever since 9/11, counterterrorism has been the FBI's No. 1 priority, consuming the lion's share of its budget—$3.3 billion, compared to $2.6 billion for organized crime—and much of the attention of field agents and a massive, nationwide network of informants. After years of emphasizing informant recruiting as a key task for its agents, the bureau now maintains a roster of 15,000 spies—many of them tasked, as Hussain was, with infiltrating Muslim communities in the United States. In addition, for every informant officially listed in the bureau's records, there are as many as three unofficial ones, according to one former high-level FBI official, known in bureau parlance as "hip pockets."

Moving on with the reading here, it details how the FBI uses informants to discredit or undermine civil rights groups, protestors and even organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan. The FBI's main targets aren't the sleeper cells, but the lone wolves. It's the people that would carry out an attack without a financial base. But as shown above, it's highly questionable if these people could really cause harm to any American industry without the FBI's assistance. In effect, they are providing the means to cause these crimes, the financial support, the weapons, and the connections. All to people that may not do anything even though they're disgruntled.

What disturbs me about this as I read the stories and followed all of the research is that all of this means our civil liberties are in great peril. Allowing the government to spy on you, not being able to trust someone, and allowing the government to entrap people puts people at risk of never believing government officials. It actively undermines our democratic process. The government gives you the means to find you guilty in a court? All because of suspicions of terrorism? How is this different from the McCarthy scare? From persecutions based on race, creed, or religion? The odds of a terrorist attack occuring are 1: 4 million. You are more likely to get into a car accident, than get hit by a nuclear bomb.

The lives of a great many civilians are at risk because of the laws passed. There are a number of people who might not like how America is run. But should the FBI investigate these "lone wolves" and give them the means to commit crimes?

That seems to be more a perversion of justice than actually seeking it out.