zlacker

1:

The 14th amendment significantly expanded the reach of constitutional protections, primarily to require all government to comply.

2:

Did Congress pass a law authorizing the FBI to snoop on social media and use private companies to censor speach? No? Then by what authority was the FBI doing this?

The root of the FBIs authority is in law passed by Congress.

>>tomoha+(OP)
The FBIs authority like many other law enforcement agencies is unfortunately only based on what they are caught doing. Now this is more complicated than it seems because for the longest time, decades, they never even fired an agent for any reason.

There is no real oversight at an investigation or agent level since the FBI does not police itself. Few other agencies have the ability to review the FBI and the DOJ often fails to do this as well, they are all part of the same family.

Congress has oversight but that is more of an institutional oversight and not down to the agents themselves.

And it's basically a fact that all law enforcement is slow or almost never holds itself accountable for anything. This is even more true with a quasi international intelligence agency that the FBI has become.

The FBI has always had a unique role in the U.S., and it is disturbing to see corruption hiding behind the political division.

The left historically had many problems with the FBI. The history there is clear. The FBI had historically been a conservative type of institution and was often well regarded by the right. This seems to have flipped lately and I wish people could put all of that to the side and take a rational view of information released even in the Twitter files and things like the MLK Tapes podcast.