5 ms·

So literally everyone so much as reading 8chan/pol is on a watchlist, right? And what about the people posting they are about to “go kill as many brown people a

by zaroth 7y ago

So literally everyone so much as reading 8chan/pol is on a watchlist, right? And what about the people posting they are about to “go kill as many brown people as they can find and they plan on being dead by the end of the day?” It’s a felony terroristic threat. How about we just arrest everyone posting terroristic threats before they can do this kind of damage? 8Chan, or whatever public forum these discussions are occurring on. I keep reading about blimps watching us 24/7, license plate readers tracking everywhere we drive. Either these terrorists have the best opsec imaginable, or the FBI agents watching the site should consider a new line of work. A guy like the El Paso shooter driving 9 hours to that city should have been stopped for a “broken tail light” long before he got to his destination. I find it nearly incomprehensible that the attacker was entirely unknown to the FBI, that they didn’t flag the manifesto, know who posted it, and have the means to know he was, at that very moment, on a long road-trip toward the border. I don’t personally know how long ahead of the attack the manifesto was posted, or if it was the attacker’s first post. Perhaps those details would mitigate somewhat my exasperation that this attack wasn’t foiled, but I suspect otherwise. EDIT: According to the NYT it was posted 19 minutes before the first 911 call came in. But Newsweek says an hour and a half.

codesushi42 7y ago
How is this realistic? How do you know he wasn't using Tor?
- closeparen 7y ago
  People who post threats via Tor tend to get caught for being the only plausible suspect using Tor at the time of the threat.
kpU8efre7r 7y ago
>I keep reading about blimps watching us 24/7, license plate readers tracking everywhere we drive. It's almost as if this "surveillance state" you all imagine doesn't exist. There are checks in place and warrants needed for this. If you see something illegal online you could report it to the FBI perhaps?
- brigandish 7y ago
  The ability to see something and stop it is not the same as the desire to see something and stop it.
  - kennywinker 7y ago
    The ability to collect something and the ability to see it are two different things. Just because data about this guy may have been snarfed up, doesn’t mean anybody looked at it.
- Alex3917 7y ago
  > It's almost as if this "surveillance state" you all imagine doesn't exist. How do you imagine that billing for EZ Pass and license plate scanners works?
  - NikkiA 7y ago
    EZ-Pass is RFID based, it doesn't use license plate scanning but a transponder you have to have in your car (typically it's affixed to the windshield, but it doesn't need be)
    - kwesthaus 7y ago
      I've spoken to the Chef Technology Manager and the Chief Executive Director of E-ZPass for some research I did with their system [0] and confirmed that it is not 100% reliant solely on the transponders, and that they do use license plate readers as well. [0] https://github.com/kwesthaus/ez-sniff https://github.com/kwesthaus/ez-sniff
    - bmurphy1976 7y ago
      How do you think they bill you when you drive through the system without a transponder?
- api 7y ago
  The data is gathered but it's so much that any signal is drowned in noise. You either spend billions investigating hundreds of thousands of idiots spewing shit on the Internet or you miss "that one." There is no middle really.
Sevii 7y ago
The US police aren't that organized or technologically advanced. If these shootings keep up though, we may end up building out the infrastructure to catch these people based on their online posts.
save_ferris 7y ago
NYT's "The Daily" podcast discussed this a little over a year ago in response to the Parkland shooting, and I found it to be quite insightful. I believe it was this episode, but I could be wrong[0]. A major factor impeding law enforcement is the sheer number of people posting violent threats on social media. I can't remember the statistic, but they mentioned that the US justice system basically wouldn't be able to effectively process everyone in a timely manner that posted indications of violent activity on social media, it's just too frequent. It's easy to look back after a shooting and ask why law enforcement failed to see the warnings, but it's much harder to predict looking into the future. Simply posting angry threats on social media doesn't meet the threshold of committing a crime, but perception around that could be changing. Another major issue is that this isn't a mental health issue, despite how it's characterized by politicians and the media. Deeply angry young men aren't mentally ill by any classical definition of mental illness; they're just really angry. They don't necessarily exhibit traits of schizophrenia or bipolar disorder; they're driven by hatred and anger, and that's just not something mental health professionals are equipped to diffuse. 0: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/23/podcasts/the-daily/gun-access-mentally-ill.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/23/podcasts/the-daily/gun-ac...
- chkaloon 7y ago
  They don't need to process all of them, just a relatively small number of public examples.
  - belorn 7y ago
    Sweden has a reality TV show whit that very premise and it is called trollhunters. They choose a hate comment and then proceed to locate and confront the author. When done they also sometimes help the target of the hate, by example helping them filling a police report. The show is followed with vigilantist justice as the people they locate usually end up receiving a lot of harassment from the public, and the benefit of making examples of people has not had any effect in decreasing hate messages online. An interesting side note is that when you actually go after hate messages online, the gender stereotype of young male start to melt and you get a new stereotype. It is people with a lot of free time and who feel ignored by society. A typical example is thus middle age women. However turning that hate towards going on a killing spree is unlikely for a middle age woman even if they say things like "someone should go down there and kill everyone", so there is a high rate of noise-to-massacre.
denkmoon 7y ago
Would you expect the FBI to investigate every moronic shitpost on every social media outlet? I think you're setting the bar too high. That's a lot of effort, a lot of resources, for something that can be solved in other ways (ie. controlled access to devices with the potential for mass murder).
dinofacedude 7y ago
>So literally everyone so much as reading 8chan/pol is on a watchlist, right? Well, crap. When I heard the news I decided to pay 8chan a visit (never really been there before) to see how they took the news(not surprisingly, not well). I really hope I am not on a list because of this.
- solveit 7y ago
  >When I heard the news I decided to pay 8chan a visit You and a million others. You'll be fine.
- londons_explore 7y ago
  On the plus side, you've been removed from the list of people who haven't ever visited 8chan
faissaloo 7y ago
There simply aren't enough FBI agents let alone competent ones. If you go to /sudo/ right now you can see Codemonkey's post on a report they received which was given to them as a scan of a print of a screenshot of a threat they wanted to investigate and it took an entire week for them to send it over by which point the post was long gone.

by zaroth 7y ago

codesushi42 7y ago

How is this realistic? How do you know he wasn't using Tor?

closeparen 7y ago
People who post threats via Tor tend to get caught for being the only plausible suspect using Tor at the time of the threat.

kpU8efre7r 7y ago

>I keep reading about blimps watching us 24/7, license plate readers tracking everywhere we drive. It's almost as if this "surveillance state" you all imagine doesn't exist. There are checks in place and warrants needed for this. If you see something illegal online you could report it to the FBI perhaps?

brigandish 7y ago
The ability to see something and stop it is not the same as the desire to see something and stop it.
- kennywinker 7y ago
  The ability to collect something and the ability to see it are two different things. Just because data about this guy may have been snarfed up, doesn’t mean anybody looked at it.
Alex3917 7y ago
> It's almost as if this "surveillance state" you all imagine doesn't exist. How do you imagine that billing for EZ Pass and license plate scanners works?
- NikkiA 7y ago
  EZ-Pass is RFID based, it doesn't use license plate scanning but a transponder you have to have in your car (typically it's affixed to the windshield, but it doesn't need be)
  - kwesthaus 7y ago
    I've spoken to the Chef Technology Manager and the Chief Executive Director of E-ZPass for some research I did with their system [0] and confirmed that it is not 100% reliant solely on the transponders, and that they do use license plate readers as well. [0] https://github.com/kwesthaus/ez-sniff https://github.com/kwesthaus/ez-sniff
  - bmurphy1976 7y ago
    How do you think they bill you when you drive through the system without a transponder?
api 7y ago
The data is gathered but it's so much that any signal is drowned in noise. You either spend billions investigating hundreds of thousands of idiots spewing shit on the Internet or you miss "that one." There is no middle really.

Sevii 7y ago

The US police aren't that organized or technologically advanced. If these shootings keep up though, we may end up building out the infrastructure to catch these people based on their online posts.

save_ferris 7y ago

NYT's "The Daily" podcast discussed this a little over a year ago in response to the Parkland shooting, and I found it to be quite insightful. I believe it was this episode, but I could be wrong[0]. A major factor impeding law enforcement is the sheer number of people posting violent threats on social media. I can't remember the statistic, but they mentioned that the US justice system basically wouldn't be able to effectively process everyone in a timely manner that posted indications of violent activity on social media, it's just too frequent. It's easy to look back after a shooting and ask why law enforcement failed to see the warnings, but it's much harder to predict looking into the future. Simply posting angry threats on social media doesn't meet the threshold of committing a crime, but perception around that could be changing. Another major issue is that this isn't a mental health issue, despite how it's characterized by politicians and the media. Deeply angry young men aren't mentally ill by any classical definition of mental illness; they're just really angry. They don't necessarily exhibit traits of schizophrenia or bipolar disorder; they're driven by hatred and anger, and that's just not something mental health professionals are equipped to diffuse. 0: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/23/podcasts/the-daily/gun-access-mentally-ill.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/23/podcasts/the-daily/gun-ac...

chkaloon 7y ago
They don't need to process all of them, just a relatively small number of public examples.
- belorn 7y ago
  Sweden has a reality TV show whit that very premise and it is called trollhunters. They choose a hate comment and then proceed to locate and confront the author. When done they also sometimes help the target of the hate, by example helping them filling a police report. The show is followed with vigilantist justice as the people they locate usually end up receiving a lot of harassment from the public, and the benefit of making examples of people has not had any effect in decreasing hate messages online. An interesting side note is that when you actually go after hate messages online, the gender stereotype of young male start to melt and you get a new stereotype. It is people with a lot of free time and who feel ignored by society. A typical example is thus middle age women. However turning that hate towards going on a killing spree is unlikely for a middle age woman even if they say things like "someone should go down there and kill everyone", so there is a high rate of noise-to-massacre.

denkmoon 7y ago

Would you expect the FBI to investigate every moronic shitpost on every social media outlet? I think you're setting the bar too high. That's a lot of effort, a lot of resources, for something that can be solved in other ways (ie. controlled access to devices with the potential for mass murder).

dinofacedude 7y ago

>So literally everyone so much as reading 8chan/pol is on a watchlist, right? Well, crap. When I heard the news I decided to pay 8chan a visit (never really been there before) to see how they took the news(not surprisingly, not well). I really hope I am not on a list because of this.

solveit 7y ago
>When I heard the news I decided to pay 8chan a visit You and a million others. You'll be fine.
londons_explore 7y ago
On the plus side, you've been removed from the list of people who haven't ever visited 8chan

faissaloo 7y ago

There simply aren't enough FBI agents let alone competent ones. If you go to /sudo/ right now you can see Codemonkey's post on a report they received which was given to them as a scan of a print of a screenshot of a threat they wanted to investigate and it took an entire week for them to send it over by which point the post was long gone.