kontextmaschine:

I have been rolling my eyes at a lot of the “ICE will be the spearpoint of the new Trumpian reich” stuff coming out of the left recently but this… is actually something worth keeping an eye on.

“The Government” is not a monolithic whole but a semi-integrated collection of squabbling feifdoms and “The FBI is the agency in charge of federal domestic policing/repression” is a descriptive statement, not a normative one. At various points in American history the equivalent role’s been filled by the US Marshals, the US Postal Inspection Service, Treasury Department agents - the Secret Service and “revenuers” presaging the modern BATF. For a while in the Gilded Age it was the Pinkerton National Detective Agency acting directly under leading capitalists with the government cut out of the loop entirely.

The FBI’s 20th century preeminence was not foreordained but a consequence of bureaucratic maneuvering in reaction to specific moments and events – the anarchist wave of the early 1900s; WWI; the First Red Scare; Prohibition; the early automobile-era motorized bandit gangs; the Kansas City Massacre (before which the FBI didn’t carry guns or make arrests); WWII; the rise of Hollywood (and J. Edgar Hoover’s cooption of same); the Second Red Scare; COINTELPRO; RFK’s anti-Mafia crusade and the wrap-up of white ethnic urban machine politics; Cold War cocaine ‘80s Miami; the 1993 Waco seige (starting as a backfired ATF attempt at profile-raising and positioning in the face of Clinton-era budget trimming).

And now, with the FBI and the old-line three letter agencies at loggerheads with the elected executive and his party in Congress, a young upstart agency known for its enthusiastic loyalty to said executive, in the middle of a massive staffing-up, bids to expand its capabilities and portfolio…

that’s exactly the scenario under which things might change

On the occasion of news that the Post Office has been running “covert operations” programs tracking social media