Wen Ho Lee, Robert Hanssen, screwed-up lab tests, failure to detect
Aldrich Ames, missing handguns, Waco, Ruby Ridge...the portrait of a
dysfunctional agency, right?
Far from it, from what I can see. Some of the examples are marginally
silly, some are due to pressures from bureaucrats, some are things
which virtually no organization on earth could have detected.
I'm not a particular friend of the FBI, as the Seattle and Portland
offices will probably acknowledge, but I seen no particular _decline_
in quality such as the article Matt Gaylor posted suggests.
The spotlight is much brighter today, there are many more reporting
outlets. And the Net magnifies conspiracy theories. (I believe Waco
was mishandled badly--the preacher should have just been picked up by
the local Sheriff or arrested on one of his many trips into town or
walks along his fence. And I believe Ruby Ridge was an example of a
barricade situation which didn' t need to happen. The crime of
selling a long gun with a barrel one quarter of an inch too short was
both a set up (to induce cooperation by Randy Weaver) and shouldn't
have been a crime in the first place. These are mistakes, not
evidence of a Bureau that has become incompetent or malevolent.)
The Wen Ho Lee case is much more mysterious. Maybe he _was_ a Chinese
spy...certainly China is an emerging superpower with the willingness
to recruit spies. We do it, the Russians do it, the French and
Germans do it, why not the Chinese?
What about missing weapons? Well, large organizations lose all kinds
of things. Including guns. Big deal.
Hanssen? The Sovs knew that recruiting agents within the FBI's
counter-spy division was the equivalent of recruiting agents at Los
Alamos in the 1940s. Did the FBI miss some warning signs? Probably.
Did Jim Bamford miss some warning signs? Yep. (Bamford was a friend
of Hanssen's.)
How about the bad lab results? Sure. Shit happens.
But, all in all, I see no particular evidence that the FBI is in a
state of moral or professional collapse. I think I'd rather have been
working for Louis Freeh these past 10 years than a weirdo like J.
Edgar Hoover and his queen Tolson.
(I had and still have profound disagreement with Freeh and Jim
Kellstrom (spelling? I used to know his name, but it escapes me right
now) over things like Clipper, key escrow, and no knock raids, but I
thought they were competent, professional, and intelligent
adversaries. They never knew who I was, obviously, but we were in the
same competency league. In my opinion, of course.)
Thinking of the FBI as Keystone Kops is dangerous, which is why I am
writing this note.
--Tim May
--
Timothy C. May [EMAIL PROTECTED]Corralitos, California
Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon
Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go
Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns
