All these goof-ups by the FBI don't paint a pretty picture about the agency at all and I'm surprised some news agency isn't up in arms about their funding and incompetence like they are with the teachers' unions.
Its founding principle was that there are baddies out there who need a special force of investigators who have powers far exceeding the regular police and who collect dossiers on suspicious citizens rather than simply waiting for crimes to occur and then investigating.
In a certain sense, they aren't being incompetent, they're doing exactly what they were designed to do. The problem isn't the execution, it's the mandate.
I have no problem with the mandate. It's the clear lack of competence in intelligence gathering that bothers me. Who honestly considers anything said on reddit to be of any significant value to state security matters? They might as well throw a dart on some board and make decisions that way if they are so desperate as to use postings from reddit.
Do you mean the agency founded by J. Edgar Hoover?
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/J._Edgar_Hoov...
Its founding principle was that there are baddies out there who need a special force of investigators who have powers far exceeding the regular police and who collect dossiers on suspicious citizens rather than simply waiting for crimes to occur and then investigating.
In a certain sense, they aren't being incompetent, they're doing exactly what they were designed to do. The problem isn't the execution, it's the mandate.
Here's another tidbit:
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/COINTELPRO