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I think it speaks more to the fear Obama et al have of information exploits such as those embarked upon by Manning and Swartz.

The government has a lot of classified information they'd like to keep that way, and computers are a technology that civilians currently have more practical power over than governments. Compare civilian vs. governmental computer skills to, say, ballistic firepower. This is a fact, regardless of where your personal preferences are for the line to be drawn for government privacy, classification, etc.




It has nothing whatsoever to do with Obama, or Bush, or even Clinton. It's an arrangement that has existed for decades.

Read "The Hacker Crackdown" by Bruce Sterling for the background on this:

http://www.mit.edu/hacker/hacker.html


"The United States Secret Service is responsible for maintaining the integrity of the nation's financial infrastructure and payment systems. As a part of this mission, the Secret Service constantly implements and evaluates prevention and response measures to guard against electronic crimes as well as other computer related fraud. The Secret Service derives its authority to investigate specified criminal violations from Title 18 of the United States Code, Section 3056."

The scope of this is enormous, the SS webpage gives the following examples:

"Criminal investigations can be international in scope. These investigations include: counterfeiting of U.S. currency (to include coins); counterfeiting of foreign currency (occurring domestically); identity crimes such as access device fraud, identity theft, false identification fraud, bank fraud and check fraud; telemarketing fraud; telecommunications fraud (cellular and hard wire); computer fraud; fraud targeting automated payment systems and teller machines; direct deposit fraud; investigations of forgery, uttering, alterations, false impersonations or false claims involving U.S. Treasury Checks, U.S. Saving Bonds, U.S. Treasury Notes, Bonds and Bills; electronic funds transfer (EFT) including Treasury disbursements and fraud within the Treasury payment systems; Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation investigations; Farm Credit Administration violations; and fictitious or fraudulent commercial instruments and foreign securities. "

From: http://www.secretservice.gov/criminal.shtml


> The scope of this is enormous, the SS webpage gives the following examples

If this wasn't assigned to USSS to investigate it would simply be assigned to some other component of the DOJ.

You might claim instead that the government shouldn't have the purview to investigate "computer crime" at all, but computers have become far too important for that to be realistic. It might be better instead to explicitly disclaim some areas as barred from Federal investigation due to the risk to civil liberties, but even that would be a hard slog in today's America I think.


If this wasn't assigned to USSS to investigate it would simply be assigned to some other component of the DOJ.

To be sure, the SS isn't part of Justice, it's in the DHS, and part of Treasury before that. Maybe it could be seen as a problem that it's not under Justice.


Is there any precedent to bar certain types of criminal investigations due to civil liberty concerns? I can imagine implementing stricter requirements but I'm at a loss completely barring certain investigations.


Is there any precedent to bar certain types of criminal investigations due to civil liberty concerns?

The 2nd Amendment open-carry situation in many states comes to mind. Most (western) countries would hogtie three ways from Sunday for you walking around with a holster just-because.

While I'm not a big gun guy, I've long thought the online community could take a few lessons from the NRA in beating back government past a larger boundary. Case in point: online media distribution could be left as a business problem for copyright interests rather than getting the FBI involved (let alone the Secret Service).


The closest I've seen is legislation that is worded to the effect "notwithstanding any other provisions of this section, this does not give the Department of Foo the authority to prosecute crimes covered under (b) above where the estimated damage is less than $5,000".

Basically it's a "we told you to do this generic thing, but that doesn't mean this is included in that".


That is "as close to" as an apple is close to an orange. Yes there are legislative carve outs for a myriad of reasons. I am suggesting that a complete bar against criminal investigations due to civil rights concerns is not one of them.




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