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First thought when I see the headline is another case of the FBI "catching" a bomber that they gave the bomb to. Read the article and the complaint and it's th

First thought when I see the headline is another case of the FBI "catching" a bomber that they gave the bomb to. Read the article and the complaint and it's the FBI grooming another useful idiot while patting themselves on the back. I'm just picturing this kid with his hand drawn crayon maps of the AWS buildings and talking bout "70% of the internet" and "oligarchy". Funny but sad.

darig 5y ago
We need an FBFBII to add some checks and balances to the system.
olliej 5y ago
Not quite - this time it seems like the person was already stating they were planning to blow up the data centers. Slightly different from the other FBI idiocies which are closer to "this person said they hate amazon, lets radicalize them until they want a bomb"
- ALittleLight 5y ago
  Maybe I'm misreading the criminal complaint but it seems like he says something like "If I had cancer I'd drive a truck into their data center and blow it up" and the FBI informants encouraged him and offered the bombs.
gtirloni 5y ago
How was that grooming? He already had all the plans and was after the explosives. Someone just contacted the FBI and got him arrested. Do you see any evidence the FBI told him he should bomb those buildings and then arrested him for it?
- ALittleLight 5y ago
  I think it's pretty likely the FBI convinced him to attempt to carry out this attack, to the extent that he did. For one, that's pretty much the standard FBI tactic - convince the mentally unwell to agree to something criminal and then arrest them for it. For another, the criminal complaint linked in the article kind of suggests this. https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/20612508-pendley-bleepingcomputer-complaint https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/20612508-pendley-ble... Read points 18-21 especially though the whole thing is interesting. The guy starts by saying if he had cancer he'd drive a truck into these data centers and hope it would blow up 70% of the internet. The FBI guys then follow up with him "So are you going to do it yet", "Have you picked a target yet", and "I have some bombs you can use" (not exact quotes but approximate). When he drives out to take a look at the site they arrest him. Maybe this guy would've gone on to commit the same crime on his own. Maybe he would've connected with real terrorists who would've motivated him the same way the FBI did. I doubt it though - this is the FBI's retelling and we can kind of see hints of manipulation. Plus, the FBI arrests way more of these bombers than "get through". Is that because the FBI are hypervigilant and super effective, or because they are growing their own terrorists and arresting them?
  - llamataboot 5y ago
    Pretty standard - sometimes even provide the technical know-how and the materials along with the urging
  - WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
    I strongly doubt he could have pulled off the Amazon incident he was envisioning. However, before the FBI inserted itself into his life, our twitwit gave strong, consistent messaging that harm needed to be done and that it was his patriotic duty to facilitate it. It appears that drumpounding rhetoric, about his America being in imminent danger, heavily shaped his thinking. Those messages were translating into drives to escalate his behavior in a harmful way. Given no changes, some sort of violent action seems an unsurprising outcome.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
sitkack 5y ago
If we know someone is going to commit a crime like this, shouldn't we just go talk to them and say, "hey, I know you are frustrated, I have scheduled some time with someone to talk about it" A thousand years from now I sure hope we aren't setting up dumb traps for the people that need help.
- WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
  I'm reposting a quote from our guy "But even if I only have a handful of fellow patriots standing beside me, I will happily die a young man knowing that I didn’t allow the evils in this world to continue unjustly treating my fellow Americans so disrespectfully." There are many, many heads in the US, experiencing the same sort of concerns that this guy did. With whom should we have conversations and how should those conversations go?
  - shard972 5y ago
    nah they are probs racist
  - h0l0cube 5y ago
    > There are many, many heads in the US, experiencing the same sort of concerns that this guy did. With whom should we have conversations and how should those conversations go? All of them. And not just via government, or the non-existent mental health authorities, but neighbours, acquaintances, and passers-by. Increase social welfare spending, sure, but also, people should be kinder, more empathetic, and look out for one-another. This could be as simple as striking up conversations with strangers, or people outside our wealth bubble. It could mean volunteering for a charity. We're all complicit in the propagation of bad ideas, and the decline in community, and we can't always lean on systems to fix it for us.
    - goodlinks 5y ago
      Agree so much! having billions of individual intelligences running around with the ability to kill each other is actually hard to manage. Change management is what makes organisations work, great processes or systems are just a bonus.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
My take is - for once - the FBI didn't handcraft a terror threat out of a twit who'd otherwise do nothing of note. Our twit seems to have been earnestly trying to puzzle out how to do harm - and been clear about why (he believes) harm needs to be done. Using the screen name Dionysus, he posted on MyMilitia.com, a forum dedicated to organizing militia groups, about his plan to “conduct a little experiment” in 2021. “I’m not a dumbass suicide bomber,” Pendley wrote. “But even if I only have a handful of fellow patriots standing beside me, I will happily die a young man knowing that I didn’t allow the evils in this world to continue unjustly treating my fellow Americans so disrespectfully.” Our twit also claims to have been part of the Jan 6 insurrection. On January 11, 2021, he told an associate on Facebook that he went to the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C. on January 6, 2021, made it to the platform where he interacted with police officers but did not enter the building. He told another associate on Facebook that he had taken a piece of glass from a window at the building.* ref: https://conandaily.com/2021/04/09/seth-aaron-pendley-biography-13-things-about-wichita-falls-texas-man/ https://conandaily.com/2021/04/09/seth-aaron-pendley-biograp...
- jl2718 5y ago
  This in a world where it was fashionable for celebrities to perform mock assassinations of the President. You’re suggesting a world where a person’s thoughts can be used as evidence of their criminality. Perhaps there was more to this case, but this is what you write as convincing to you. Thoughts and words. And the same people that would imprison a wrong-thinker of the opposing political tribe, are protesting against police mistreatment of chronic violent criminals. Somehow I’m unconvinced of your sincerity. But I understand it. Thoughts are dangerous. Thoughts spread faster than any disease, and the infected can’t ever be cured. They start movements and religions and wars. When asked who was the most evil person ever, it’s never a mindless antisocial killer, it’s always a person who beguiled a nation to fall in love with their thoughts. But I think this is a symptom of leisure. Perhaps you’ve never realized how little regard some people have for your life. There would be no speech, no argument, no justification, no anger, no reason, no ideology, no remorse, maybe just a little bit of amusement at how easy it was. And this is thousands of times more likely that any harm to come of some idiot lone wolf extremist of any ideology.
BoiledCabbage 5y ago
> Read the article and the complaint and it's the FBI grooming another useful idiot while patting themselves on the back. I'm just picturing this kid with his hand drawn crayon maps of the AWS buildings and talking bout "70% of the internet" and "oligarchy". Funny but sad. It's still incredible how in this country, even more so after what's happened recently (not to mention all of the events stretching back through the 1990s) that domestic terroristic threats are lightly and jokingly brushed off by so many in society, while any other form of terrorism is asked to be dealt with with the full brunt of the law. It's incredible to watch. Someone with a specific plot to blow up a complex of buildings, goes and purchases materials to do it, and it's laughed off with a crayon joke... The double standards of this country.

darig 5y ago

We need an FBFBII to add some checks and balances to the system.

olliej 5y ago

Not quite - this time it seems like the person was already stating they were planning to blow up the data centers. Slightly different from the other FBI idiocies which are closer to "this person said they hate amazon, lets radicalize them until they want a bomb"

ALittleLight 5y ago
Maybe I'm misreading the criminal complaint but it seems like he says something like "If I had cancer I'd drive a truck into their data center and blow it up" and the FBI informants encouraged him and offered the bombs.

gtirloni 5y ago

How was that grooming? He already had all the plans and was after the explosives. Someone just contacted the FBI and got him arrested. Do you see any evidence the FBI told him he should bomb those buildings and then arrested him for it?

ALittleLight 5y ago
I think it's pretty likely the FBI convinced him to attempt to carry out this attack, to the extent that he did. For one, that's pretty much the standard FBI tactic - convince the mentally unwell to agree to something criminal and then arrest them for it. For another, the criminal complaint linked in the article kind of suggests this. https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/20612508-pendley-bleepingcomputer-complaint https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/20612508-pendley-ble... Read points 18-21 especially though the whole thing is interesting. The guy starts by saying if he had cancer he'd drive a truck into these data centers and hope it would blow up 70% of the internet. The FBI guys then follow up with him "So are you going to do it yet", "Have you picked a target yet", and "I have some bombs you can use" (not exact quotes but approximate). When he drives out to take a look at the site they arrest him. Maybe this guy would've gone on to commit the same crime on his own. Maybe he would've connected with real terrorists who would've motivated him the same way the FBI did. I doubt it though - this is the FBI's retelling and we can kind of see hints of manipulation. Plus, the FBI arrests way more of these bombers than "get through". Is that because the FBI are hypervigilant and super effective, or because they are growing their own terrorists and arresting them?
- llamataboot 5y ago
  Pretty standard - sometimes even provide the technical know-how and the materials along with the urging
- WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
  I strongly doubt he could have pulled off the Amazon incident he was envisioning. However, before the FBI inserted itself into his life, our twitwit gave strong, consistent messaging that harm needed to be done and that it was his patriotic duty to facilitate it. It appears that drumpounding rhetoric, about his America being in imminent danger, heavily shaped his thinking. Those messages were translating into drives to escalate his behavior in a harmful way. Given no changes, some sort of violent action seems an unsurprising outcome.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]

sitkack 5y ago

If we know someone is going to commit a crime like this, shouldn't we just go talk to them and say, "hey, I know you are frustrated, I have scheduled some time with someone to talk about it" A thousand years from now I sure hope we aren't setting up dumb traps for the people that need help.

WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
I'm reposting a quote from our guy "But even if I only have a handful of fellow patriots standing beside me, I will happily die a young man knowing that I didn’t allow the evils in this world to continue unjustly treating my fellow Americans so disrespectfully." There are many, many heads in the US, experiencing the same sort of concerns that this guy did. With whom should we have conversations and how should those conversations go?
- shard972 5y ago
  nah they are probs racist
- h0l0cube 5y ago
  > There are many, many heads in the US, experiencing the same sort of concerns that this guy did. With whom should we have conversations and how should those conversations go? All of them. And not just via government, or the non-existent mental health authorities, but neighbours, acquaintances, and passers-by. Increase social welfare spending, sure, but also, people should be kinder, more empathetic, and look out for one-another. This could be as simple as striking up conversations with strangers, or people outside our wealth bubble. It could mean volunteering for a charity. We're all complicit in the propagation of bad ideas, and the decline in community, and we can't always lean on systems to fix it for us.
  - goodlinks 5y ago
    Agree so much! having billions of individual intelligences running around with the ability to kill each other is actually hard to manage. Change management is what makes organisations work, great processes or systems are just a bonus.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

WarOnPrivacy 5y ago

My take is - for once - the FBI didn't handcraft a terror threat out of a twit who'd otherwise do nothing of note. Our twit seems to have been earnestly trying to puzzle out how to do harm - and been clear about why (he believes) harm needs to be done. Using the screen name Dionysus, he posted on MyMilitia.com, a forum dedicated to organizing militia groups, about his plan to “conduct a little experiment” in 2021. “I’m not a dumbass suicide bomber,” Pendley wrote. “But even if I only have a handful of fellow patriots standing beside me, I will happily die a young man knowing that I didn’t allow the evils in this world to continue unjustly treating my fellow Americans so disrespectfully.” Our twit also claims to have been part of the Jan 6 insurrection. On January 11, 2021, he told an associate on Facebook that he went to the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C. on January 6, 2021, made it to the platform where he interacted with police officers but did not enter the building. He told another associate on Facebook that he had taken a piece of glass from a window at the building.* ref: https://conandaily.com/2021/04/09/seth-aaron-pendley-biography-13-things-about-wichita-falls-texas-man/ https://conandaily.com/2021/04/09/seth-aaron-pendley-biograp...

jl2718 5y ago
This in a world where it was fashionable for celebrities to perform mock assassinations of the President. You’re suggesting a world where a person’s thoughts can be used as evidence of their criminality. Perhaps there was more to this case, but this is what you write as convincing to you. Thoughts and words. And the same people that would imprison a wrong-thinker of the opposing political tribe, are protesting against police mistreatment of chronic violent criminals. Somehow I’m unconvinced of your sincerity. But I understand it. Thoughts are dangerous. Thoughts spread faster than any disease, and the infected can’t ever be cured. They start movements and religions and wars. When asked who was the most evil person ever, it’s never a mindless antisocial killer, it’s always a person who beguiled a nation to fall in love with their thoughts. But I think this is a symptom of leisure. Perhaps you’ve never realized how little regard some people have for your life. There would be no speech, no argument, no justification, no anger, no reason, no ideology, no remorse, maybe just a little bit of amusement at how easy it was. And this is thousands of times more likely that any harm to come of some idiot lone wolf extremist of any ideology.

BoiledCabbage 5y ago

> Read the article and the complaint and it's the FBI grooming another useful idiot while patting themselves on the back. I'm just picturing this kid with his hand drawn crayon maps of the AWS buildings and talking bout "70% of the internet" and "oligarchy". Funny but sad. It's still incredible how in this country, even more so after what's happened recently (not to mention all of the events stretching back through the 1990s) that domestic terroristic threats are lightly and jokingly brushed off by so many in society, while any other form of terrorism is asked to be dealt with with the full brunt of the law. It's incredible to watch. Someone with a specific plot to blow up a complex of buildings, goes and purchases materials to do it, and it's laughed off with a crayon joke... The double standards of this country.