3 ms·
> Billy, an American of European heritage, who had knowledge of Arabic and could approach potential terror targets online, had great potential value to the FBI.
by roywiggins 7y ago
> Billy, an American of European heritage, who had knowledge of Arabic and could approach potential terror targets online, had great potential value to the FBI.
I get that the FBI was to struggling to recruit and train Arabic speakers for its programs post-9/11, but recruiting random Americans with self-taught Arabic to cosplay as cyber FBI agents does not speak well of them.
This is of a piece with stuff the FBI and DEA has done routinely in the "war on drugs," so I don't doubt it at all, but it's still a nasty way to work. It's not like they were turning an Al Queda recruit into a mole, this guy was running a whole constellation of fake accounts etc, basically doing stuff the FBI could and should be doing itself and not outsourcing to "informants".
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- barry-cotter 7y agoYou wouldn’t be surprised at all if Russian intelligence sent an asset to their deaths or killed them themselves. Why would you expect anything better from the CIA or the organization that was responsible for burning 76 US civilians to death at Waco, or killing a mother holding her child at Ruby Ridge? There are no good people working in intelligence, only bad people on your side and bad peoples working on the other side.
- roywiggins 7y agoWho said I was surprised? The CIA by my reading actually often does better by its collaborators than the FBI and has a certain sense of honor-among-spies that the FBI doesn't when it comes to this sort of stuff. FBI and CIA have both done awful things but they are different organizations with different MOs.