John Oliver explores how sting operations give the government the "limitless ability to deceive"

I had a coworker who lived with his uncle. Prior to that his uncle used to have a room mate like a year before, where that room mate robbed a store or a bank, and killed somebody (it’s been over a decade). Anyway, due to this robber’s act, a multitude of people including my coworker (who never interacted with the robber) and his uncle (who hasn’t been in contact with said robber for a year) had their literal lives turned upside down. Law enforcement ransacked their homes, confiscated all their laptops, computers, phones, seized any open cash and family heirlooms, and froze their bank accounts. It took my coworker six months for his assets to be unfrozen but he never got his computers or phone back. It was a hellish couple of months trying to get back on his feet. Along with that, their landlord sued the uncle for damages to his home. Anyway, John Oliver also covered Civil Forfeiture, please check that out.

Watch the show. It’s so eye opening and terrifying. It seems to me that police has too much money. They need cuts in their budget.

The FBI and NYPD basically providing the money, contacts and skills to pull off a terrorist plot, to 3 people with no intentions of being terrorists, just so they can do a media stunt, is actually insane.

" Land of the Free"!? I glad I don't live it that Orwellian nightmare

Nice to see that shit being called out. Where I am they love to do stings on prostitution but call it human trafficking even though pretty clear they going after low hanging fruit of career prostitutes and spa places and likely getting their knobs rubbed on taxpayer dime. The local press loves it because of the sex angle so they their b-roll and never seem to actually follow up on how many “victims” were rescued. But as Reddit has taught me, there are a lot of people that eat that shit up as fact based on a headline alone and don’t question it further so clearly it works to pretend to be doing their job with stings.

If you don’t watch John Oliver, you’re missing out. Better hard hitting journalism than 60 Minutes.

The FBI special- make up a fake extreme group, recruit and slowly convert some idiot and get him to agree to blowing something up then arrest him and be like “Look we foiled a domestic terrorism plot” no mention of “it was a plot we created and we recruited this guy to be involved”

Years ago a Florida police officer sent mailers to everyone with warrants saying they won free Disney tickets with a date and address of an abandoned strip mall store. As soon as anyone went in, they had ID checked and were arrested.

Does John Oliver believe he’s being stung? Stinged?