[throwaway13337]

That was a very interesting read.

The gist of it is that Comey went to great lengths to make sure warrantless wiretapping wouldn't be considered legal. And when he failed to do so, he resigned.

What happened to him since then?

[mercer]

It would be ironic if at some point he was wiretapped and blackmailed into toeing the party line (where 'the party line' is 'they', and 'them', clearly).

On a more serious note though: it strikes me that in our time of 'total information awareness' the ability to blackmail people in powerful positions is a significant flaw in our system, much more so compared to the past.

Has any research been or anything worthwhile been written about this (potential) problem? I mean, we know people have been blackmailed or that attempts have been made, so the question is how common this actually is.

Despite my internal knee-jerk 'this sounds tinfoil-hatty', I can't think of anything keeping intelligence agencies from wielding massive hidden power in this way. Or would it just have come to light much more often if that were the case?

[grandalf]

I think he came to the belief that there was legal justification for conducting mass surveillance in secret... in other words that the AG didn't need to sign off on it for it to be an appropriate tool.

If the AG had signed for it, then we'd have probably seen the supreme court weigh in on it. But since he didn't, the program continued behind closed doors and grew massively. I believe now there is a rolling 60 day archive of nearly all worldwide communications and metadata (and longer rolling archives for select subsets). It's incredibly impressive tech but quite scary.