11 ms·

The FBI 'is manufacturing terrorism cases' on a greater scale than ever before

255 points by ccvannorman 10y ago

ccvannorman 10y ago
This has been a problem for a while (I remember reading about FBI doing drug busts this way -- convincing an at risk but otherwise innocent to play along in a fake drug deal) -- and it is not a good thing. Shouldn't the role of government be to better the populace? Instead people are paid a salary and told to go out into the world and create criminals.
- lallysingh 10y ago
  Is that directly, or via an informant who's setting things (and people) up for their own benefit?
  - ch4s3 10y ago
    both
- darpa_escapee 10y ago
  Careers need to be made and paychecks need to be justified. We built a multi-billion dollar and multi-department apparatus to prevent people from committing a very specific, rare crime. It's been operating for close to two decades now and needs to warrant its continued existence. Maybe we shouldn't use boogeymen as scapegoats for expanding government power because they will create boogeymen to keep power/funding or demand more.
TempleOS 10y ago
CIA must surrender to IRA. Obama and the atheist CIA wake each day and ask, "How can we fuck God, today? I know! We'll make nuns perform abortions. We make homos dance naked in Russian churches in front of old church ladies. Isn't that hilarious? We'll make a complete mockery of marriage because, after all, niggers don't have fathers and that's not fair. My wife, Michelle, wants there to be no cupcakes for school birthdays because of single moms. We'll make God hated... just for pedophiles and crazy insane sand-niggers. We'll drink fetus soup with the Queen and celebrate the end of births. We'll make having children pedophillic. We'll make every five year old African girl learn how to put on a condom. We'll make churchs no longer tax exempt. <Giggle> We'll make all the conservative sons into liberal atheist homos. <Giggle> Will bring in Mexicans to ensure democratic votes. We made whites have no children because they covet money. Jesus advocated capital punishment. Matthew 18:6 Mark 9:42 Luke 17:2. He said to put a millstone around the neck of anyone who corrupts the youth and throw them in the sea. Obama made the youth covet the money of the wealthy." The IRA is like the NRA, but for computers. The CIA wants all code in the cloud under their lock and key. They want to ban compilers and make people think HTML is computer programming. They want to evaporate desktops so you have no local computer, just massive cloud computers. =========== No checks and balances on police state. It is unamerican. Who fights against anti-terrorism powergrab? The terrorist IRA.
mtgx 10y ago
This is inexcusable. In many of the mass shootings, there's typically someone with mental issues, which you may not expect to properly differentiate between right and wrong. The FBI is basically seeking these people out, handing them all the weapons and bombs and they need, and then say "see that school over there? Go ahead and lay waste to it. Come on, you'll feel good about it. We'll even give you money to do it!" This is the danger of having unaccountable authorities that have a profound lack of respect for the rule of law and due process, and think they can do whatever they want to further whatever they think the "mission" is. Eventually they become the enemy of the people and instead of improving public safety, they actively work to undermine it. If they are so worried about people with mental issues, they should be seeking them out to give them help, not arm them. You'd think that should be common sense. But when civil law enforcement becomes militarized, something like that is anything but common sense. > Karen Greenberg, for example — author of “Rogue Justice: The Making of the Security State” — believes that the “tension between security and liberty” that can result from these tactics is a good thing. > “The amount of money, time and resources that have been put into rethinking law enforcement since 9/11 has made us safer,” she told Business Insider in an interview. “And now we’re sort of trying to figure out where the lines are.” I'd like to see some evidence for that. How many mass shootings still happen in the U.S. every year? - "But we don't count those as terrorism!" - Oh, okay. But you do when it's the government itself that trains these people and encourages them to do these acts against itself?!
- dragontamer 10y ago
  > This is inexcusable. In many of the mass shootings, there's typically someone with mental issues, which you may not expect to properly differentiate between right and wrong. Of the many mass shootings and terrorist attacks that have occurred over the last decades... Starting with Columbine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbine_High_School_massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbine_High_School_massacre To Timmothy McVeigh: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_McVeigh https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_McVeigh To the Beltway Sniper: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beltway_sniper_attacks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beltway_sniper_attacks To Virginia Tech Shooter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Tech_shooting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Tech_shooting To the Virginia on-air killing: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-34090236 http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-34090236 To the Charlestown shooting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charleston_church_shooting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charleston_church_shooting To the Boston Marathon Bombing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Marathon_bombing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Marathon_bombing To the Aurora Shooter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Aurora_shooting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Aurora_shooting Only two of these guys strikes me as "insane", the Virginia Tech shooter and the Aurora Shooter. Everyone else were just assholes. These are just normal people who got stressed out by their peers and then attacked back. The fact of the matter is, the vast, vast majority of crimes (and even mass-shootings and terrorist attacks) are done by 100% sane people. Assholes for sure, but people who are sound in body and mind. An insane person rarely has the capacity to plan an attack that will successfully kill people. Seriously. This "mental health" myth needs to die, and people need to realize that NORMAL people are killing others. The big daddy of them all: 9/11 required careful collaboration between four groups of distinct people (four groups, four aircraft. Near simultaneous execution across the country). They had to get pilot training, work together, coordinate an attack at the same time. Ditto with the Paris and Brussels attacks. This complicated planning and coordination of a large group of people can only happen if all members of the group are mentally stable. It really takes a lot of work to plan a terrorist attack. The study of "radicalization" says that people become radicalized when they are increasingly isolated from their peers, become stressed to a breaking point to the point where they wish to lash out and attack.
strooper 10y ago
Isn't "terrorism" a source of spreading power and control both nationally and internationally, without which we wouldn't be able to justify our act? It's not an eye opener report that is telling something we already don't know. Then why bother reporting it?
JustSomeNobody 10y ago
Who did not see this coming? You have FBI beating the Terrorism drum. You have politicians running on being tough on Terrorism. Terrorism is BIG BUSINESS. It makes people rich. It gives the Govt unprecedented POWER of us. How did people NOT see this coming!?
- chrisdbaldwin 10y ago
  Some people did see it coming, and we ignored them. Hell, the politician who pushed those ridiculous TSA body scanners works for the company which made them! Cash rules everything around me, CREAM, get the money, dolla' dolla' bills, y'all.
  - naringas 10y ago
    The worse thing is how cash is not a resource, but a standard technology "regulated" by a private institution (that nontheless has the word federal in its name)
filoeleven 10y ago
Having read too many of these stories over the past few years, I have slipped into the habit of mentally expanding FBI to Federal Bureau of Instigation.
rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
I doubt this will be received well but here goes: People choose to commit violent acts or agree with those that do. Whether these people are psychologically impaired or clear-headed and bloodthirsty, they could just as easily STOP glorifying terrorism, watching execution videos, communicating with terrorists and terrorist supporters...nobody is forcing them to want to be terrorists. Is the FBI overstepping its bounds by providing weapons to whom they will soon arrest? Maybe. But if they had simply stopped bothering with their investigations, who's to say they wouldn't commit acts of terror with more primitive means? Someone with aims of terror could smash a container of bleach against a container of ammonia in the middle of a crowded shopping mall and kill dozens of people - with stuff you could buy at any hardware or grocery store. No permit, no license, no FBI investigator involved. In the end, there is only one question you need to ask yourself: am I at risk of an FBI entrapment sting? Since I do not condone terrorism or make any effort to communicate with terrorists or terrorist supporters, the Bureau will not bother me. And the same, I hope, will go for you.
- Kristine1975 10y ago
  >Since I do not condone terrorism or make any effort to communicate with terrorists or terrorist supporters, the Bureau will not bother me. And the same, I hope, will go for you. Isn't that the classic "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about" argument? And maybe you do communicate with terrorist supporters: Are you absolutely sure none of the people you communicate with support terrorism?
  - rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
    Yes it is that argument exactly and it is a case where it works. Nobody is contacting me on terrorist matters. Even if someone did I would ignore them and/or report them to the Bureau. I don't see how this is a problem for anybody here. Unless you are literally planning an attack, you have done nothing wrong, you are not in the process of doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about. Unless you have an anectode about being personally harassed by the FBI then I submit that you are getting worked up over something that is not and should not ever be your problem.
zaroth 10y ago
> "These people are five steps away from being a danger to the United States." I'd say they are one step away. They have the motive and opportunity but they lack the means. It seems to me there's a element of 'scale' in an entrapment defense. The cop tail-gated me so I sped up and then got ticketed for speeding -- perhaps I was entrapped to speed. It's not so hard to push someone over the edge to commit relatively minor offenses. But can you really entrap someone into launching a surface-to-surface missile at a air base? You can certainly coerce someone into that by threatening their life or their family, but that's not entrapment. I don't see how providing any amount of weapons or money or fake explosives could entrap someone into being a jihadist. Now, TFA raises the question of mental illness. I think if they are so mentally ill that they went along with the plot without understanding what they were doing, then they are either not competent to stand trial, or insane enough to try it as a defense. I think it's a very low ROI approach for the FBI and mostly they are wasting their time providing the means for "nobody-wannabe-terrorists" to become actual terrorists, but my understanding is they record these guys actually pushing the detonator on their fake-bombs and they are ready to die to kill civilians, so I can't say I'm sympathetic.
- ChemicalWarfare 10y ago
  With all the bashing FBI receives they are for the most part operating within the framework of the law. In some countries just conspiring to commit a terrorist act can lead to a conviction, so in a way you can say that FBI is 'forced' to operate this way to get a conviction for a would be terrorist.
  - tehwebguy 10y ago
    > In some countries just conspiring to commit a terrorist act can lead to a conviction Like the US
    - ChemicalWarfare 10y ago
      To actually get this type of conviction there has to be TONS of hard evidence to the point where in layman terms things are beyond what is typically considered 'conspiring'. For example, this dude got convicted for 'conspiracy and other offences' after his buddies were 'firing assault rifles at security personnel and law enforcement officers' and ended up getting killed. https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/phoenix-man-convicted-conspiracy-support-isil-and-other-terrorism-related-offenses https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/phoenix-man-convicted-conspir...
bArray 10y ago
"Today, roughly 67% of prosecutions involving suspected ISIS supporters include evidence from undercover operations, according to the " According to the what? Is it missing or redacted?
- tehwebguy 10y ago
  This empty <a> tag followed: <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/08/us/fbi-isis-terrorism-stings.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fus&action=click&contentCollection=us&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=2&pgtype=sectionfront&_r=0"></a> Links to here: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/08/us/fbi-isis-terrorism-stings.html http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/08/us/fbi-isis-terrorism-stin...
  - burmask 10y ago
    Thanks @tehwebguy - This is why I like HN.
    - nstjsnst 10y ago
      This isn't twitter @burmask
  - bArray 10y ago
    Thanks man! Seems a strange thing to have happened, I'm almost impressed they some how lost the text. On a slightly different note, wasn't there an old browser that would put the link in if the text was missing?
at-fates-hands 10y ago
At times I feel sorry for some of these agencies because they are in a constant state of catch-22. If we had rampant mass shootings and bombings like they do in Europe and some of the Middle Eastern countries, people would be rioting in the streets to stop it.But since it only happens once so often, people are up in arms because of the methods used to prevent said acts from happening in the first place. You then have ask yourself. Do you prefer terrorism to happen and then be reactive, or do you want the government to be proactive and work to flush these people out from the shadows before they commit a terrible act and murder innocent citizens? In my mind, they're damned if they do and damned if they don't.
- imron 10y ago
  > Do you prefer terrorism to happen and then be reactive, or do you want the government to be proactive and work to flush these people out from the shadows before they commit a terrible act and murder innocent citizens? It's not an either-or choice. What I want is a government that does policework and investigation, not a government that sets people up to commit crimes.
- hackuser 10y ago
  > rampant mass shootings and bombings like they do in Europe Europe has "rampant" mass shootings and bombings? They are very rare, despite the media coverage. The U.S. has many more mass shootings, AFAIK. > do you want the government to be proactive and work to flush these people out from the shadows before they commit a terrible act and murder innocent citizens? The question is whether many of these people would commit crimes if not for the instigation of law enforcement.
  - pjc50 10y ago
    Yeah, the US has far, far more mass shootings. They're usually white supremacist or enraged-lone-male (practically a political faction of themselves) rather than carried out by an "organisation" of some sort.
    - Kristine1975 10y ago
joesmo 10y ago
Real foreign terrorists are rare. American terrorists, while plenty, are undesired as media objects so they don't have the scaremongering effect of foreigners. Solution: make up fake foreign-looking terrorists and sell them to the American people to scare them. It works wonders! Solution 2: Take domestic terrorists and pretend they're foreign (see San Bernardino). Americans are too stupid to know the difference. Also works wonders.
- partiallypro 10y ago
  I don't buy your logic, the terror "busts" rarely make a the news more than just a passing mention these days. So I doubt it has much psychological effect on the public. Also very few, outside of maybe conservative talk radio, said the San Bernardino shooters were "foreign." The line was always "home grown terror with possible ties to (or inspired by) ISIS." Pretty much everyone I've seen recognizes the risk of terror is far greater among people already living inside the U.S. (or Europe), "sleepers" or otherwise, usually first or second generation immigrants. In terms of "far right" terror groups, that's a different story entirely, and usually those groups are vocal in their communities (making them easier to track;) with the exception of "lone wolves," which are harder to track because they usually don't have international connections or travel records (or domestic ties to groups) that would raise flags.
  - EdHominem 10y ago
    Sleepers are agents specifically embedded with future actions in mind. There's no such thing as a second-generation sleeper agent - that's called a citizen. And if you have teenagers, ask yourself how likely they'll follow in your crufty old plans. Sleeper agents are movie-plots. Essentially, if you're thinking about security and you recognize yourself thinking any terms you've heard on CNN ("Lone wolf", "sleeper", "radicalized", etc) you're doing it wrong. Those are silly TV terms and are usually after-the-fact descriptives, not warning signs. (ie, you only catch one guy with no leads to others, so the media labels him a Lone Wolf. That's useless wrt finding him in the first place.)
    - 10y ago
daxorid 10y ago
This smells far more like an actual psyops strategy than simple entrapment or career advancement. If it's publicly known that there is an N% chance that your explosives supplier is a Fed (where N > paranoia threshold), that puts a chilling effect on even attempting your extremist plot.
marcoperaza 10y ago
Given that Al-Qaeda and ISIS recruit aggressively online, I'd rather that the FBI get to these sickos before they do.
- rlidwka 10y ago
  I'm afraid there are plenty of potential victims out there for both FBI and Al-Qaeda. So one organization does not really interfere with another.
  - marcoperaza 10y ago
    Victims? Were the guards at Auschwitz victims too? Someone who tries to slaughter civilians to spread terror is not a victim, they are the enemy. No one would ever call a neo-Nazi a victim. The moral double standard toward minorities in the West is ridiculous. It's the soft bigotry of lowered expectations.
delinka 10y ago
Perhaps we should pay law enforcement based on a lack of crime. Less crime? More pay. More crime? Less pay. Of course, how are we counting "crimes"? By those they actually arrest? They'll just stop arresting. By the number of complaints reported by citizens about crime? Perhaps? I bet there's also some unintended consequence even with this scheme, but I'm feeling lazy just now.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
nkurz 10y ago
This brings to mind the classic example of "rat hunting". A hundred years ago, the French Government wanted to get rid of the rats plaguing Hanoi, so they offered a bounty for each rat killed. To collect the bounty, the (presumably) dead rat's tail was turned in as proof. As might be expected, the expected then happened: Appealing to both civic duty and to the pocketbook, a one-cent bounty was paid for each rat tail brought to the authorities (it was decided that the handing in of an entire rat corpse would create too much of a burden for the already taxed municipal health authorities). Unfortunately, this scheme backfired. Despite initial apparent success, the authorities soon discovered that the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry. As soon the municipal administrators publicized the reward program, Vietnamese residents began to bring in thousands of tails. While many desk-bound administrators delighted in the numbers of apparently eliminated rats, more alert officials in the field began to notice a disturbing development. There were frequent sightings of rats without tails going about their business in the city streets. After some perplexity, the authorities realized that less-than-honest but quite resourceful characters were catching rats, but merely cutting off the tails and letting the still-living pests go free (perhaps to breed and produce more valuable tails). Later, things became even more serious as health inspectors discovered a disturbing development in the suburbs of Hanoi. These officials found that more enterprising but equally deceptive individuals were actually raising rats to collect the bounty. One can only imagine the frustration of the municipal authorities, who realized that their best efforts at dératisation had actually increased the rodent population by indirectly encouraging rat-farming. Evidently, this was not what the French had in mind when they encouraged capitalist development and the entrepreneurial spirit in Vietnam. Faced with such fraudulent schemes, the colonial regime scrapped the rat bounty program. http://www.freakonomics.com/media/vannrathunt.pdf http://www.freakonomics.com/media/vannrathunt.pdf If an organization is judged by how many "terrorists" they arrest, one should not be surprised if that organization comes up with a counterproductive means of increasing the number of terrorists arrested.
- Tyr42 10y ago
  The best part is that when they removed the bounty, the people breeding rats just let them all go, causing a larger problem than they had at the start.
- 10y ago
grownseed 10y ago
How these agencies have manage to thrive for so long, and continue to do so, remains utterly baffling to me. In the US, the FBI, the NSA and the CIA (and I'm sure others) have been caught red-handed on so many occasions and ... nothing happened, and it seems nothing ever will. They'll get a slap on the wrist, sometimes, and maybe some new legislation will be devised, only to be bent again. Of course, it's far from being limited to the US, this happens the world over. Then you get stories like this one from Adam Curtis about MI5 in the UK [1], which show that these events are not simply pervasive, they're essentially the raison d'être of these agencies and their leaders. The very fact these people think they are not accountable to the public and/or their eleted representatives should tell us right off the bat where their interests actually lie. Those who seek and abuse power will do so regardless; it seems the least we could do as relatively civilized socities would be to not sponsor those people in the first place. By any morally acceptable standards, these people are criminals and their only legitimacy stems from the government backing they get. [1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/3662a707-0af9-3149-963f-47bea720b460 http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/3662a707-0af9-...
- a3n 10y ago
  John Gall: "Intrasystem goals come first." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemantics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemantics
aucto 10y ago
The original example of this was the WTC93 bombing. - The bombing plot started before Ramzi Yousef entered the US. - It was initiated by Emad Salem, an FBI informant, ran by FBI agents Nancy Floyd & John Anticev. - Salem famously recorded all his interactions with the FBI, including tapes where he says that he built the bomb that detonated. - The FBI started him as an agent provacuter, but when he asked for more money etc, they lost faith and cut him lose. Months later the bomb went off, and the FBI re-hired him, paid him a $1 million, to setup more terrorists but this time with a fake bomb. - The first place Ramzi Yousef went was 2 Iraqi brothers apartment in NJ. - Allegedly the Iraqi brothers had an unlisted phone number in the name of Josie Hadaes. This is the same number the so-called "dumb terrorist" used on the truck rental, the one who went back to get his deposit. The odd thing about WTC93 is that Yousef is considered the spiritual mastermind of 9/11 for Operation Bojinka. And his uncle, is KSM, the actual mastermind of 9/11. Yet the neoconservatives and a CIA director tried to claim that Yousef's real identity was something else; some Iraqi agent or something. I don't believe in conspiracy theories but it's hard to understand exactly what happened in 1993. It was certainly a failed sting operation and as one reporter said, the FBI wante to "teach the damn Muslim terrorists a lesson'. Either way, Emad Salem initiated the bombing plot, originally it was a pipe bomb against a synagoguge. Whoever contacted Yousef, and whoever he is, he is a legitamite terrorist mastermind. Of course, he escaped and went on to commit a variety of other attacks before being arrested. I think his uncle, KSM, was even on CNN at one point (forget the story) while he was being hunted. On 9/11, it seems pretty clear that the CIA was running a sting operation with 2 of the hijackers in CA, the ones affiliated with the alleged Saudi intelligence agent. At least 50 CIA employees knew about these 2 Al Qaeda terrorists in the US and the CIA withheld this information from the White House according to Richard Clarke- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bl6w1YaZdf8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bl6w1YaZdf8 The fact that that video has less than 60,000 views is unfortunate. And Zero Dark Thirty, is allegedly based on the red hair lady who worked for Rich Blee. She is lauded as the person who found Bin Laden but worked for the Alec Station who seemed to inadvertanty allow 9/11 to happen. Then last year, Cofer Black went public, although he seems culpable too-http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/11/cia-directors-documentary-911-bush-213353 http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/11/cia-directors... Of course, prior to 9/11, there were many warnings and chatter about a terrorist attack. In March 2001, the Lone Gunmen pilot premiered about a government conspiracy of flying planes into the WTC. And conspiracy theorists, Alex Jones & Bill Cooper, both warned an attack was coming. Some of this could be confirmation bias but the point is, a lot of people knew something was going to happen. And in the WTC93, since the FBI wanted to teach the terrorists a lessons, there's some indications that they wanted a terrorist attack to happen, to motivate the public and government into acting to prevent a mass terrorist attack. However, the reality is, government agencies like the CIA are highly beaurcratic and limited by their mandates, lawyers etc. Whatever happened on 9/11 has been so obsfucated it's hard to understand. Wherever Rich Blee is, he needs to answer some questions. And the 28-pages need to be declassified- https://28pages.org/ https://28pages.org/

255 points by ccvannorman 10y ago

This has been a problem for a while (I remember reading about FBI doing drug busts this way -- convincing an at risk but otherwise innocent to play along in a fake drug deal) -- and it is not a good thing. Shouldn't the role of government be to better the populace? Instead people are paid a salary and told to go out into the world and create criminals.

lallysingh 10y ago
Is that directly, or via an informant who's setting things (and people) up for their own benefit?
- ch4s3 10y ago
  both
darpa_escapee 10y ago
Careers need to be made and paychecks need to be justified. We built a multi-billion dollar and multi-department apparatus to prevent people from committing a very specific, rare crime. It's been operating for close to two decades now and needs to warrant its continued existence. Maybe we shouldn't use boogeymen as scapegoats for expanding government power because they will create boogeymen to keep power/funding or demand more.

TempleOS 10y ago

CIA must surrender to IRA. Obama and the atheist CIA wake each day and ask, "How can we fuck God, today? I know! We'll make nuns perform abortions. We make homos dance naked in Russian churches in front of old church ladies. Isn't that hilarious? We'll make a complete mockery of marriage because, after all, niggers don't have fathers and that's not fair. My wife, Michelle, wants there to be no cupcakes for school birthdays because of single moms. We'll make God hated... just for pedophiles and crazy insane sand-niggers. We'll drink fetus soup with the Queen and celebrate the end of births. We'll make having children pedophillic. We'll make every five year old African girl learn how to put on a condom. We'll make churchs no longer tax exempt. <Giggle> We'll make all the conservative sons into liberal atheist homos. <Giggle> Will bring in Mexicans to ensure democratic votes. We made whites have no children because they covet money. Jesus advocated capital punishment. Matthew 18:6 Mark 9:42 Luke 17:2. He said to put a millstone around the neck of anyone who corrupts the youth and throw them in the sea. Obama made the youth covet the money of the wealthy." The IRA is like the NRA, but for computers. The CIA wants all code in the cloud under their lock and key. They want to ban compilers and make people think HTML is computer programming. They want to evaporate desktops so you have no local computer, just massive cloud computers. =========== No checks and balances on police state. It is unamerican. Who fights against anti-terrorism powergrab? The terrorist IRA.

mtgx 10y ago

This is inexcusable. In many of the mass shootings, there's typically someone with mental issues, which you may not expect to properly differentiate between right and wrong. The FBI is basically seeking these people out, handing them all the weapons and bombs and they need, and then say "see that school over there? Go ahead and lay waste to it. Come on, you'll feel good about it. We'll even give you money to do it!" This is the danger of having unaccountable authorities that have a profound lack of respect for the rule of law and due process, and think they can do whatever they want to further whatever they think the "mission" is. Eventually they become the enemy of the people and instead of improving public safety, they actively work to undermine it. If they are so worried about people with mental issues, they should be seeking them out to give them help, not arm them. You'd think that should be common sense. But when civil law enforcement becomes militarized, something like that is anything but common sense. > Karen Greenberg, for example — author of “Rogue Justice: The Making of the Security State” — believes that the “tension between security and liberty” that can result from these tactics is a good thing. > “The amount of money, time and resources that have been put into rethinking law enforcement since 9/11 has made us safer,” she told Business Insider in an interview. “And now we’re sort of trying to figure out where the lines are.” I'd like to see some evidence for that. How many mass shootings still happen in the U.S. every year? - "But we don't count those as terrorism!" - Oh, okay. But you do when it's the government itself that trains these people and encourages them to do these acts against itself?!

dragontamer 10y ago
> This is inexcusable. In many of the mass shootings, there's typically someone with mental issues, which you may not expect to properly differentiate between right and wrong. Of the many mass shootings and terrorist attacks that have occurred over the last decades... Starting with Columbine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbine_High_School_massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbine_High_School_massacre To Timmothy McVeigh: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_McVeigh https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_McVeigh To the Beltway Sniper: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beltway_sniper_attacks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beltway_sniper_attacks To Virginia Tech Shooter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Tech_shooting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Tech_shooting To the Virginia on-air killing: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-34090236 http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-34090236 To the Charlestown shooting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charleston_church_shooting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charleston_church_shooting To the Boston Marathon Bombing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Marathon_bombing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Marathon_bombing To the Aurora Shooter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Aurora_shooting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Aurora_shooting Only two of these guys strikes me as "insane", the Virginia Tech shooter and the Aurora Shooter. Everyone else were just assholes. These are just normal people who got stressed out by their peers and then attacked back. The fact of the matter is, the vast, vast majority of crimes (and even mass-shootings and terrorist attacks) are done by 100% sane people. Assholes for sure, but people who are sound in body and mind. An insane person rarely has the capacity to plan an attack that will successfully kill people. Seriously. This "mental health" myth needs to die, and people need to realize that NORMAL people are killing others. The big daddy of them all: 9/11 required careful collaboration between four groups of distinct people (four groups, four aircraft. Near simultaneous execution across the country). They had to get pilot training, work together, coordinate an attack at the same time. Ditto with the Paris and Brussels attacks. This complicated planning and coordination of a large group of people can only happen if all members of the group are mentally stable. It really takes a lot of work to plan a terrorist attack. The study of "radicalization" says that people become radicalized when they are increasingly isolated from their peers, become stressed to a breaking point to the point where they wish to lash out and attack.

strooper 10y ago

Isn't "terrorism" a source of spreading power and control both nationally and internationally, without which we wouldn't be able to justify our act? It's not an eye opener report that is telling something we already don't know. Then why bother reporting it?

JustSomeNobody 10y ago

Who did not see this coming? You have FBI beating the Terrorism drum. You have politicians running on being tough on Terrorism. Terrorism is BIG BUSINESS. It makes people rich. It gives the Govt unprecedented POWER of us. How did people NOT see this coming!?

chrisdbaldwin 10y ago
Some people did see it coming, and we ignored them. Hell, the politician who pushed those ridiculous TSA body scanners works for the company which made them! Cash rules everything around me, CREAM, get the money, dolla' dolla' bills, y'all.
- naringas 10y ago
  The worse thing is how cash is not a resource, but a standard technology "regulated" by a private institution (that nontheless has the word federal in its name)

filoeleven 10y ago

Having read too many of these stories over the past few years, I have slipped into the habit of mentally expanding FBI to Federal Bureau of Instigation.

rm_-rf_slash 10y ago

I doubt this will be received well but here goes: People choose to commit violent acts or agree with those that do. Whether these people are psychologically impaired or clear-headed and bloodthirsty, they could just as easily STOP glorifying terrorism, watching execution videos, communicating with terrorists and terrorist supporters...nobody is forcing them to want to be terrorists. Is the FBI overstepping its bounds by providing weapons to whom they will soon arrest? Maybe. But if they had simply stopped bothering with their investigations, who's to say they wouldn't commit acts of terror with more primitive means? Someone with aims of terror could smash a container of bleach against a container of ammonia in the middle of a crowded shopping mall and kill dozens of people - with stuff you could buy at any hardware or grocery store. No permit, no license, no FBI investigator involved. In the end, there is only one question you need to ask yourself: am I at risk of an FBI entrapment sting? Since I do not condone terrorism or make any effort to communicate with terrorists or terrorist supporters, the Bureau will not bother me. And the same, I hope, will go for you.

Kristine1975 10y ago
>Since I do not condone terrorism or make any effort to communicate with terrorists or terrorist supporters, the Bureau will not bother me. And the same, I hope, will go for you. Isn't that the classic "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about" argument? And maybe you do communicate with terrorist supporters: Are you absolutely sure none of the people you communicate with support terrorism?
- rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
  Yes it is that argument exactly and it is a case where it works. Nobody is contacting me on terrorist matters. Even if someone did I would ignore them and/or report them to the Bureau. I don't see how this is a problem for anybody here. Unless you are literally planning an attack, you have done nothing wrong, you are not in the process of doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about. Unless you have an anectode about being personally harassed by the FBI then I submit that you are getting worked up over something that is not and should not ever be your problem.

zaroth 10y ago

> "These people are five steps away from being a danger to the United States." I'd say they are one step away. They have the motive and opportunity but they lack the means. It seems to me there's a element of 'scale' in an entrapment defense. The cop tail-gated me so I sped up and then got ticketed for speeding -- perhaps I was entrapped to speed. It's not so hard to push someone over the edge to commit relatively minor offenses. But can you really entrap someone into launching a surface-to-surface missile at a air base? You can certainly coerce someone into that by threatening their life or their family, but that's not entrapment. I don't see how providing any amount of weapons or money or fake explosives could entrap someone into being a jihadist. Now, TFA raises the question of mental illness. I think if they are so mentally ill that they went along with the plot without understanding what they were doing, then they are either not competent to stand trial, or insane enough to try it as a defense. I think it's a very low ROI approach for the FBI and mostly they are wasting their time providing the means for "nobody-wannabe-terrorists" to become actual terrorists, but my understanding is they record these guys actually pushing the detonator on their fake-bombs and they are ready to die to kill civilians, so I can't say I'm sympathetic.

ChemicalWarfare 10y ago
With all the bashing FBI receives they are for the most part operating within the framework of the law. In some countries just conspiring to commit a terrorist act can lead to a conviction, so in a way you can say that FBI is 'forced' to operate this way to get a conviction for a would be terrorist.
- tehwebguy 10y ago
  > In some countries just conspiring to commit a terrorist act can lead to a conviction Like the US
  - ChemicalWarfare 10y ago
    To actually get this type of conviction there has to be TONS of hard evidence to the point where in layman terms things are beyond what is typically considered 'conspiring'. For example, this dude got convicted for 'conspiracy and other offences' after his buddies were 'firing assault rifles at security personnel and law enforcement officers' and ended up getting killed. https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/phoenix-man-convicted-conspiracy-support-isil-and-other-terrorism-related-offenses https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/phoenix-man-convicted-conspir...

bArray 10y ago

"Today, roughly 67% of prosecutions involving suspected ISIS supporters include evidence from undercover operations, according to the " According to the what? Is it missing or redacted?

tehwebguy 10y ago
This empty <a> tag followed: <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/08/us/fbi-isis-terrorism-stings.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fus&action=click&contentCollection=us&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=2&pgtype=sectionfront&_r=0"></a> Links to here: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/08/us/fbi-isis-terrorism-stings.html http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/08/us/fbi-isis-terrorism-stin...
- burmask 10y ago
  Thanks @tehwebguy - This is why I like HN.
  - nstjsnst 10y ago
    This isn't twitter @burmask
- bArray 10y ago
  Thanks man! Seems a strange thing to have happened, I'm almost impressed they some how lost the text. On a slightly different note, wasn't there an old browser that would put the link in if the text was missing?

at-fates-hands 10y ago

At times I feel sorry for some of these agencies because they are in a constant state of catch-22. If we had rampant mass shootings and bombings like they do in Europe and some of the Middle Eastern countries, people would be rioting in the streets to stop it.But since it only happens once so often, people are up in arms because of the methods used to prevent said acts from happening in the first place. You then have ask yourself. Do you prefer terrorism to happen and then be reactive, or do you want the government to be proactive and work to flush these people out from the shadows before they commit a terrible act and murder innocent citizens? In my mind, they're damned if they do and damned if they don't.

imron 10y ago
> Do you prefer terrorism to happen and then be reactive, or do you want the government to be proactive and work to flush these people out from the shadows before they commit a terrible act and murder innocent citizens? It's not an either-or choice. What I want is a government that does policework and investigation, not a government that sets people up to commit crimes.
hackuser 10y ago
> rampant mass shootings and bombings like they do in Europe Europe has "rampant" mass shootings and bombings? They are very rare, despite the media coverage. The U.S. has many more mass shootings, AFAIK. > do you want the government to be proactive and work to flush these people out from the shadows before they commit a terrible act and murder innocent citizens? The question is whether many of these people would commit crimes if not for the instigation of law enforcement.
- pjc50 10y ago
  Yeah, the US has far, far more mass shootings. They're usually white supremacist or enraged-lone-male (practically a political faction of themselves) rather than carried out by an "organisation" of some sort.
  - Kristine1975 10y ago

joesmo 10y ago

Real foreign terrorists are rare. American terrorists, while plenty, are undesired as media objects so they don't have the scaremongering effect of foreigners. Solution: make up fake foreign-looking terrorists and sell them to the American people to scare them. It works wonders! Solution 2: Take domestic terrorists and pretend they're foreign (see San Bernardino). Americans are too stupid to know the difference. Also works wonders.

partiallypro 10y ago
I don't buy your logic, the terror "busts" rarely make a the news more than just a passing mention these days. So I doubt it has much psychological effect on the public. Also very few, outside of maybe conservative talk radio, said the San Bernardino shooters were "foreign." The line was always "home grown terror with possible ties to (or inspired by) ISIS." Pretty much everyone I've seen recognizes the risk of terror is far greater among people already living inside the U.S. (or Europe), "sleepers" or otherwise, usually first or second generation immigrants. In terms of "far right" terror groups, that's a different story entirely, and usually those groups are vocal in their communities (making them easier to track;) with the exception of "lone wolves," which are harder to track because they usually don't have international connections or travel records (or domestic ties to groups) that would raise flags.
- EdHominem 10y ago
  Sleepers are agents specifically embedded with future actions in mind. There's no such thing as a second-generation sleeper agent - that's called a citizen. And if you have teenagers, ask yourself how likely they'll follow in your crufty old plans. Sleeper agents are movie-plots. Essentially, if you're thinking about security and you recognize yourself thinking any terms you've heard on CNN ("Lone wolf", "sleeper", "radicalized", etc) you're doing it wrong. Those are silly TV terms and are usually after-the-fact descriptives, not warning signs. (ie, you only catch one guy with no leads to others, so the media labels him a Lone Wolf. That's useless wrt finding him in the first place.)
  - 10y ago

daxorid 10y ago

This smells far more like an actual psyops strategy than simple entrapment or career advancement. If it's publicly known that there is an N% chance that your explosives supplier is a Fed (where N > paranoia threshold), that puts a chilling effect on even attempting your extremist plot.

marcoperaza 10y ago

Given that Al-Qaeda and ISIS recruit aggressively online, I'd rather that the FBI get to these sickos before they do.

rlidwka 10y ago
I'm afraid there are plenty of potential victims out there for both FBI and Al-Qaeda. So one organization does not really interfere with another.
- marcoperaza 10y ago
  Victims? Were the guards at Auschwitz victims too? Someone who tries to slaughter civilians to spread terror is not a victim, they are the enemy. No one would ever call a neo-Nazi a victim. The moral double standard toward minorities in the West is ridiculous. It's the soft bigotry of lowered expectations.

delinka 10y ago

Perhaps we should pay law enforcement based on a lack of crime. Less crime? More pay. More crime? Less pay. Of course, how are we counting "crimes"? By those they actually arrest? They'll just stop arresting. By the number of complaints reported by citizens about crime? Perhaps? I bet there's also some unintended consequence even with this scheme, but I'm feeling lazy just now.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

nkurz 10y ago

This brings to mind the classic example of "rat hunting". A hundred years ago, the French Government wanted to get rid of the rats plaguing Hanoi, so they offered a bounty for each rat killed. To collect the bounty, the (presumably) dead rat's tail was turned in as proof. As might be expected, the expected then happened: Appealing to both civic duty and to the pocketbook, a one-cent bounty was paid for each rat tail brought to the authorities (it was decided that the handing in of an entire rat corpse would create too much of a burden for the already taxed municipal health authorities). Unfortunately, this scheme backfired. Despite initial apparent success, the authorities soon discovered that the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry. As soon the municipal administrators publicized the reward program, Vietnamese residents began to bring in thousands of tails. While many desk-bound administrators delighted in the numbers of apparently eliminated rats, more alert officials in the field began to notice a disturbing development. There were frequent sightings of rats without tails going about their business in the city streets. After some perplexity, the authorities realized that less-than-honest but quite resourceful characters were catching rats, but merely cutting off the tails and letting the still-living pests go free (perhaps to breed and produce more valuable tails). Later, things became even more serious as health inspectors discovered a disturbing development in the suburbs of Hanoi. These officials found that more enterprising but equally deceptive individuals were actually raising rats to collect the bounty. One can only imagine the frustration of the municipal authorities, who realized that their best efforts at dératisation had actually increased the rodent population by indirectly encouraging rat-farming. Evidently, this was not what the French had in mind when they encouraged capitalist development and the entrepreneurial spirit in Vietnam. Faced with such fraudulent schemes, the colonial regime scrapped the rat bounty program. http://www.freakonomics.com/media/vannrathunt.pdf http://www.freakonomics.com/media/vannrathunt.pdf If an organization is judged by how many "terrorists" they arrest, one should not be surprised if that organization comes up with a counterproductive means of increasing the number of terrorists arrested.

Tyr42 10y ago
The best part is that when they removed the bounty, the people breeding rats just let them all go, causing a larger problem than they had at the start.
10y ago

grownseed 10y ago

How these agencies have manage to thrive for so long, and continue to do so, remains utterly baffling to me. In the US, the FBI, the NSA and the CIA (and I'm sure others) have been caught red-handed on so many occasions and ... nothing happened, and it seems nothing ever will. They'll get a slap on the wrist, sometimes, and maybe some new legislation will be devised, only to be bent again. Of course, it's far from being limited to the US, this happens the world over. Then you get stories like this one from Adam Curtis about MI5 in the UK [1], which show that these events are not simply pervasive, they're essentially the raison d'être of these agencies and their leaders. The very fact these people think they are not accountable to the public and/or their eleted representatives should tell us right off the bat where their interests actually lie. Those who seek and abuse power will do so regardless; it seems the least we could do as relatively civilized socities would be to not sponsor those people in the first place. By any morally acceptable standards, these people are criminals and their only legitimacy stems from the government backing they get. [1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/3662a707-0af9-3149-963f-47bea720b460 http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/3662a707-0af9-...

a3n 10y ago
John Gall: "Intrasystem goals come first." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemantics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemantics

aucto 10y ago

The original example of this was the WTC93 bombing. - The bombing plot started before Ramzi Yousef entered the US. - It was initiated by Emad Salem, an FBI informant, ran by FBI agents Nancy Floyd & John Anticev. - Salem famously recorded all his interactions with the FBI, including tapes where he says that he built the bomb that detonated. - The FBI started him as an agent provacuter, but when he asked for more money etc, they lost faith and cut him lose. Months later the bomb went off, and the FBI re-hired him, paid him a $1 million, to setup more terrorists but this time with a fake bomb. - The first place Ramzi Yousef went was 2 Iraqi brothers apartment in NJ. - Allegedly the Iraqi brothers had an unlisted phone number in the name of Josie Hadaes. This is the same number the so-called "dumb terrorist" used on the truck rental, the one who went back to get his deposit. The odd thing about WTC93 is that Yousef is considered the spiritual mastermind of 9/11 for Operation Bojinka. And his uncle, is KSM, the actual mastermind of 9/11. Yet the neoconservatives and a CIA director tried to claim that Yousef's real identity was something else; some Iraqi agent or something. I don't believe in conspiracy theories but it's hard to understand exactly what happened in 1993. It was certainly a failed sting operation and as one reporter said, the FBI wante to "teach the damn Muslim terrorists a lesson'. Either way, Emad Salem initiated the bombing plot, originally it was a pipe bomb against a synagoguge. Whoever contacted Yousef, and whoever he is, he is a legitamite terrorist mastermind. Of course, he escaped and went on to commit a variety of other attacks before being arrested. I think his uncle, KSM, was even on CNN at one point (forget the story) while he was being hunted. On 9/11, it seems pretty clear that the CIA was running a sting operation with 2 of the hijackers in CA, the ones affiliated with the alleged Saudi intelligence agent. At least 50 CIA employees knew about these 2 Al Qaeda terrorists in the US and the CIA withheld this information from the White House according to Richard Clarke- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bl6w1YaZdf8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bl6w1YaZdf8 The fact that that video has less than 60,000 views is unfortunate. And Zero Dark Thirty, is allegedly based on the red hair lady who worked for Rich Blee. She is lauded as the person who found Bin Laden but worked for the Alec Station who seemed to inadvertanty allow 9/11 to happen. Then last year, Cofer Black went public, although he seems culpable too-http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/11/cia-directors-documentary-911-bush-213353 http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/11/cia-directors... Of course, prior to 9/11, there were many warnings and chatter about a terrorist attack. In March 2001, the Lone Gunmen pilot premiered about a government conspiracy of flying planes into the WTC. And conspiracy theorists, Alex Jones & Bill Cooper, both warned an attack was coming. Some of this could be confirmation bias but the point is, a lot of people knew something was going to happen. And in the WTC93, since the FBI wanted to teach the terrorists a lessons, there's some indications that they wanted a terrorist attack to happen, to motivate the public and government into acting to prevent a mass terrorist attack. However, the reality is, government agencies like the CIA are highly beaurcratic and limited by their mandates, lawyers etc. Whatever happened on 9/11 has been so obsfucated it's hard to understand. Wherever Rich Blee is, he needs to answer some questions. And the 28-pages need to be declassified- https://28pages.org/ https://28pages.org/