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Justice Dept. charges former Minnesota FBI agent with leaking secret document to news outlet
A former Minneapolis FBI agent who sought to expose what he called "systemic biases" within the bureau has been charged after allegedly leaking secret documents to a national news reporter, according to federal criminal charges filed in Minnesota this week.
The charges, filed by prosecutors for the Justice Department's National Security Division, are the first to come in Minnesota since Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced a broad crackdown on government leaks last year.
A two-page felony information, a charging document that typically signals an imminent guilty plea, outlines two counts filed against Terry James Albury of unlawfully disclosing and retaining national defense information.
Albury is alleged to have unlawfully disclosed classified information between February 2016 and January 31, 2017. The Intercept published a series of stories, The FBI's Secret Rules, on January 31, 2017:
The FBI Gives Itself Lots of Rope to Pull in Informants
Over two previous presidential administrations, the FBI, enabled by complacent congressional oversight in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, has transformed itself from a criminal law enforcement organization into an intelligence-gathering operation whose methods are more similar to those of the CIA and NSA. With 35,000 employees and more than 15,000 informants, today's FBI is an intelligence agency without a historical peer in the United States.
Recruiting and managing informants, known in the FBI's parlance as "confidential human sources," is one of the most crucial ways in which the bureau gathers intelligence. Confidential FBI documents obtained exclusively by The Intercept reveal for the first time how the bureau approaches those tasks — including its use of a number of tactics that raise concerns about the civil liberties of those being targeted for recruitment.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday March 29 2018, @06:20PM (3 children)
Exactly. It was a textbook example of how government and the uniparty that controls it subverts and suppresses legitimate democratic protest. Personally, I think that is going to be quite counterproductive.
It does make an ironclad argument for the Second Amendment, though. If those Occupy protesters had all been carrying assault rifles I suspect the police would have behaved much differently. I recall when the Tea Party guys did that many of us scoffed and decried it, but nobody did mess with them the way they messed with Occupy later.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday March 29 2018, @07:18PM (2 children)
This is one reason you'll never see me doing the usual left-wing anti-gun stuff. I hate the fucking things, but I'm bright enough to understand why they're needed. All the "you wouldn't stand a chance against an M1 Abrams" types are forgetting something: asymmetrical warfare is a bitch, it's arguably the US military's weak point, and there ain't no insurgency like a homegrown insurgency. At the very worst, if the .gov and .mil turn against we the people, we the people can make it so they'll have virtually nothing worth ruling left.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Thursday March 29 2018, @07:41PM (1 child)
Back in my grassroots political days my best friend and I started Shooting Liberally. We'd go to the West Side Gun Range in Manhattan. We got a sizeable group of 30 people. The best shot was a woman who had lived on a kibbutz in Israel and had been trained by the Israel Defense Force.
I don't fetishize guns. I would never run around saying, "Molon labe!", but I enjoy shooting and strongly believe citizens must have the right to keep and bear arms. Every other right ultimately depends on the citizenry's ability to physically defend them.
And I completely agree with you about insurgency. Government shills do like to say how pitiful an AR-15 is against an Apache helicopter, and they're right on a toe-to-toe basis. But they'd quickly find out how counterproductive it is to drop napalm on suburban Seattle, or to roll tanks through Philadelphia. It's one thing to ask a grunt to wipe out a village in some place he's never heard of, but another thing entirely to order him to wipe out his friends and family on the ground.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 29 2018, @11:33PM
Resupply bases, maintenance depots, and forward operating bases are all relatively squishy targets. If you can get close enough to shoot at them, or deliver some explosives by land, projectile, or air, you can severely hamper their abilities in any operating area, since all the heavy equipment requires constant resupply of fuel and ammunition to remain combat ready. Otherwise those 'insects' can just roll right over you and bite you to death.
Autonomous vehicles may tip that balance if the opposition has sufficient manufacturing/control in politically solid regions to begin rooting the others out while remaining secure themselves. This is where the real concern should lie, especially for Americans, since this polarization by party helps make it clearer which groups are 'true believers' for a particular cause and paves the way to hand picking the holdouts necessary to perform the sort of domestic attacks or purges certain groups feel is necessary to the America they believe in.