The accused is accused of violating federal law, so it's normal that a federal agency would make the arrest. FBI seems to make more sense than DEA or ATF, no?
It’s not that the agency is wrong; it’s that the agency would do it. This is the agency that since J Edgar Hoover has very carefully rebuilt its reputation and is very guarded in it. This act is entirely reminiscent of the political corruption of the FBI of old. That regression, that fast, is frightening.
ICE being shady is by many people accepted, the DEA, ATF even. But the FBI has built itself a pretty strong reputation of integrity and professionalism, and resistance to political pressure and corruption. In some ways I at least viewed it as a firewall in law enforcement against this sort of stuff.
ICE, ATF, and CBP has always been the house for the dregs of federal LEO. It is for the people that fail to get into anything else.
FBI is prestigious because they get the most qualified tyrants, who are smart enough to lie and deceive in ways that are airtight enough that those at ICE take the heat. The surprising thing here isn't the fact that they did it, but that they didn't do the normal way of digging or manufacturing something else to pin on the judge.
US Marshalls IIRC is also the hardest to get into. If I recall they have like one day a year they accept applications and they all (only certain # accepted) get filled within seconds. (I'm probably embellishing but not by much).
For most of its life the FBI has been a hand of the federal government to quell dissent, this new perspective on the FBI being professional and non-partisan is pretty new.
This might be the largest problem with the US government, most of what we used to take for granted isn't really enshrined in law anywhere, it was mostly a gentlemen's agreement that "you just don't do that, it's ungentlemanly" and not really law or anything enforceable.
The fact you can just fire the whole federal government (yes, i understand the probation thing) and there's *nothing* that blocks it is just completely bonkers to me. All you really needed was a bad actor that had no respect for the norms, because there's no real consequence to breaking them.
>The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
You can't just arrest someone for nothing. You need probable cause. The question is whether a judge going about their day, doing nothing illegal, is probable cause. It's very likely not.
I wonder if it's not that people are getting dumber or less able to hold attention; rather, that everyone is being more exposed to lowest common denominator material because of efficient distribution.
Reader's Digest was always there on the shelf at the store and was very commercially successful. Most people who consumed more advanced content ignored it.
Of course! It's easy to forget he was a guard at one of America's most notorious concentration camps, Guantanamo Bay. It's foolish to think of him only as a Fox News personality.
Do you have any evidence for this at all? That they are automatically awarded? We can discuss the low bar that O's seemingly have for earning some awards, but there is no reason to misrepresent the process. And I know at least one person that was awarded a Bronze Star without the V, even thought the award was for a specific valiant action they took, it's tough to say without reading the award or being there.
While anecdotal, every single O3 and higher in my company received one after our OEF rotation, despite spending their entire time on KAF and not at COPs or FOBs.
Here's an excerpt from the Military Times describing changes to awarding criteria:
"The policy changes also seek to tighten the criteria for awarding the Bronze Star specifically, a combat award that can be presented without a “V,” and often was throughout the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, for “meritorious” performance.
And here's some details about Pete's own awards:
"The first Bronze Star was awarded to Mr. Hegseth for his assignment in Iraq as a rifle platoon leader in Iraq from September 2005 to July 2006. The citation noted his “professionalism and commitment to excellence” while he was with the 101st Airborne Division. He received the second Bronze Star in 2012 after serving as a counterinsurgency instructor in Afghanistan."
I think that's a strawman about my use of the word "automatic"; my point is that it's not indicative of anything special as they were awarded without needing a qualifying event like you'd see with a V device, silver star, LoM, MoH, etc.
Him denigrating fellow soldiers and being grossly unqualified to even communicate properly in his role are also concerns, but somewhat off-topic.
It is not a strawman, you literally said the awards are automatic, which is untrue on it's face. The vast majority of HN users are not veterans, and likely would not know that what you said is untrue.
Typing a comment isn't the same as providing a source; I've provided two that support my claim. You're welcome to try again, but it's too early for bad faith arguments so you won't get any more replies.
You literally misrepresented the truth then provided 2 articles, neither of which backed up you original claim. All because you evidently don't like someone. The only claim I made is that the awards are not automatic, which we both know is true.
Regardless, my source that Bronze Stars are not automatically awarded is AR 600–8–22.
> Prior to 7 January 2016, awards may be made to recognize single acts of merit or meritorious service.
Which corroborates my other claim - including the timing - about the tightening of criteria? Dang. That's wild. Good thing you have a source that you didn't link or apparently read.
What are you talking about? your original statement was that they were awarded automatically, now you are talking about the standards for awarding it, which implies it is not actually automatic. I said In my original response that we could discuss the standards, but your statement that they are automatic for O3-O4 is just plain false. Your sources do nothing to back up your original claim, in fact, they do quite the opposite. No level of snark will make your assertion correct. There is a reason why your original response was flagged, which I had no part in.
My point was that he served in Iraq and has more "real" experience than being a prison guard. This doesn't mean he has enough experience to run the DoD of course, but I wanted to add that because it's misrepresenting a vet who served a deployment.
I think that by now it's pretty clear that facebook isn't free and that the price of using facebook is actually pretty high, it's just abstracted away so that most people don't realize the cost and/or don't attribute that cost to facebook when they should.
It's too bad that this is being downvoted - swiftymon is trying to provide some context. It's useful to the discussion and well sourced. I'd love to read counterarguments rather than have this fade away :)
Because their claim is false and unsupported by their quote. It is absolutely unauthorized for government employees to conduct discussions like this on services like Signal. It's not even allowed for CUI level discussions, and war planning pushes into Secret and TS territory very quickly.
Organizational discussions means things like, for a standard fed on a TDY with others, "Meet in the lobby at 0700 so we can drive to the site for the meeting at 0800." Not "So we're going to use ... to attack ... at ...", which is almost certainly Secret or TS once aggregated.
swiftymon created an account just to post a lie. That comment absolutely should be downvoted, with or without rebuttals. This isn't about disagreement.
You disagree over opinions. Should Signal be an appropriate system for discussing classified data? I'd say no, you might say yes, we disagree and debate.
Legally, is Signal an appropriate system for discussing classified data? No. Unless you believe in alternative facts, there is no point to disagree on, it's just a fact that it is not legally an appropriate system for what they did.
And then swiftymon lied and used "evidence" to bolster their lie that didn't even agree with their lie.
You assert things strongly, but you are not an arbiter of truth about data classification in the federal government - this is certainly an area where discussion can be had and where becoming more informed increases the quality of discussion. Interestingly enough, many of the people in charge of data classification in the federal government were on said Signal thread!
I could assert that you're lying, etc - as you're effectively committing the same sin as the poster who originally got downvoted - but that wouldn't be having a conversation; it'd be a rude refusal to tolerate a conversation. I encourage you to assume good intent and engage instead of hurling accusations at people - even if they're new accounts.
TFA article discusses how officials have long used Signal for routine logistics, contrasting that with the national defense plans being discussed in a group chat with a journalist
Science includes activities outside reading papers that slightly disagree, such as testing hypotheses with experiments; hence my comment that the former isn't science in a nutshell. It describes research quite well, which one can argue is a subset of scientific activity.
Significantly more than Trump Social has and that "company" is "worth" billions on paper
ATProtocol is going to break the hold billionaires have over social media by leveling the playing field via a common
and shared social graph. Having a single account for all apps removes the inherent lockin from network effect
I think their history of breaches indicates that they are slow to learn from thier mistakes made in securing their customer's PII and as a result I am obtaining my cellular service from a competitor.
Though that competitor has also suffered data breaches, moving to another service makes no logical sense to me since it seems that none of them have a deep commitment to data security since the cost of noncompliance is too low. If meaningful penalties were mandated, something that is unlikely to happen in the current anti-consumer, deregulatory environment, then it would make sense to switch to a provider that has a strong commitment. Otherwise you might as well stay with your current provider.
T-Mobile did get hit annually between 2017-2020 making it appear to a casual observer that perhaps they were just selling the data with their low prices serving as a loss leader and making up the difference by selling everything that they could scrape from customer services annually.
It's a cynical take, I know. It keeps me from switching though.
