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And not one of these people identified the Boston pair before they blew up the Marathon. Yes, the FBI interviewed the older brother but never followed up. If yo

And not one of these people identified the Boston pair before they blew up the Marathon. Yes, the FBI interviewed the older brother but never followed up. If you can't catch the amateur "terrorists" how will you catch the pros?

srl 14y ago
I resent (and reject the need for) the growth of the "security" apparatus as much as (almost) anybody else, but it's worth pointing out that what works for catching the "pros" is quite different from what works for catching amateurs. Pros are capable of inflicting greater damage, and are therefore a greater threat in that respect, but tend to organize in order to get access to larger resources. That means there's a larger target to "hit" when probing for information, and it makes picking up on plots much easier. An amateur can't inflict as much damage, but can do so practically undetected, and there's really not much that can be done about it AFAIK. Thought experiment: suppose you wanted to kill as many people and cause as much chaos as you could. How would you go about it? And how easy would it be for the security apparatus to catch you? Would you be able to, evading capture, perform another attack a week later? How long could you go on? It's really quite fortunate that the sort of people who want to do large amounts of violence, are exactly the sort of people who tend not be very good at it.
- 6d0debc071 14y ago
  > Thought experiment: suppose you wanted to kill as many people and cause as much chaos as you could. How would you go about it? I was about to answer this and then realised how stupid it would be to give people ideas on how to kill vast numbers of people with off the shelf equipment. I will say that it doesn't seem like a hard problem to me, and I can see ways you could achieve rates in the hundreds of people a month. > And how easy would it be for the security apparatus to catch you? Pretty much impossible beforehand. Depending on what one did and where, it wouldn't necessarily be that hard. Some of the ideas I had seem long-term viable though - the sort of thing you could repeat with little chance of getting caught. > Would you be able to, evading capture, perform another attack a week later? How long could you go on? Some currently vulnerable infrastructure would probably harden over time but I've put like five seconds thought into this, I'm sure there are other things that one could do as well. And even if the number of deaths might not be huge - 20 people here, 20 people there, maybe a few hundred with a higher concentration target - the fact that you could strike many targets at once, and how difficult it would be to secure against you.... I think you could do very significant damage. The fear you'd induce in people, every day knowing that, for instance, if their kids go to school, maybe they never come home again. Or if they go shopping, or.... It's a horrible thing to think about. If that sort of crap was going on, and the police weren't catching this guy, I'm not sure I could bring myself to send my daughter out in public even knowing that statistically the risk per person would still be very low. I'm not sure that people could get used to the idea that every month a few hundred of them were going to die. Maybe we'd just learn to live with it but it'd require a major shift in how we reacted to visible risks.
  - dragonsky 14y ago
    I'm certain that people would get used to it. They seem to live with the fact that every month hundreds of people are killed and maimed in car accidents. The British got on fairly well during the Irish Troubles, with the fact that the IRA was fairly effective at striking against English targets. You seem to forget that people have a very strong urge to believe that "it won't happen to me".
    - 6d0debc071 14y ago
      Well, that's true and I agree with you on the numbers thing - 125 people died in England during the troubles, after which the UK government effectively threw the towel in, and people generally seem to believe that they have some sort of control over their risks in the case of driving. ~ 194 people a month die from car accidents in the UK - which you could be competitive with. I'm not sure at the moment that they'd respond the same way to a continual and chaotic threat of a higher magnitude than the troubles though. I'm not saying that I think they wouldn't get over it, mind. I'm just not sure that there's enough data to choose one way or the other. It seems to me, if you could get a bunch of people to copy you - (and the first order of business if you just wanted to cause as much damage as possible would probably be anonymously mass mailing a guide that let other people do it too) - that a closer analogue would be somewhere like Mexico. But even there the killings aren't precisely random.
- uptown 14y ago
  "The federal government added the name of the dead Boston Marathon bombing suspect to a terrorist database 18 months before the deadly explosions, U.S. officials told The Associated Press on Wednesday." http://bigstory.ap.org/article/officials-dead-bomber-name-terrorism-database http://bigstory.ap.org/article/officials-dead-bomber-name-te...
  - wisty 14y ago
    > About a year ago, there were some 745,000 people listed in the database. Wow. Suspected terrorists outnumber the Army and Marines, put together!
futhey 14y ago
I'm not arguing that it's not broken, but a majority of these people deal with foreign intelligence. Very little domestic terrorism is classified above secret (It needs to be the most accessible to decision makers and local/state governments).
bennyg 14y ago
How many people were caught and not publicized? I think it's fairly impressive, all things considered, that after two IEDs went off in a crowded civilian area, only 3 people died. And that in less than a week, those responsible were killed or apprehended. Now, I'm not pushing for a surveillance state at all. I hate everything about that notion, and I believe that what we have now is plenty adequate - if not overkill - for doing the job that needs to be done to protect our own civilians. Again, all that said, America is in a much better place when it comes to domestic "terrorism" if you will (that connotation sucks, but they were terrorizing the populous after all) than say Syria or other countries.
- magic_haze 14y ago
  What incentive does a department have to hide an attack they helped prevent? Publicizing it, on the other hand, brings massive clout and more bargaining power when it comes to budgets. Look at Canada's recent announcement, for example. Why would the US government be any different?
  - rosser 14y ago
    What incentive does a department have to hide an attack they helped prevent? Operational security. Announcing that you've foiled a Bad Guy plot lets the bad guys know you're onto them. More to the point, it gives them valuable, actionable information on what parts of their operation you've likely compromised. See also: the Coventry Blitz. Granted, that motive implies a much higher level of coordination between these agencies than TFA suggests exists, but it's among the reasons for these folks to keep mum about having done their job.
- rdtsc 14y ago
  > How many people were caught and not publicized? I can see two conflicting issues here. One is the need for the agencies to justify their existence. If they exist to stop terrorists, and they feel there is public scrutiny of their budgets, they should publicize the hell out of every capture. "See, we are doing useful work, look! we captured these people red-handed with bombs about to go off!". The other one is not giving away their methods, procedures and tactics by keeping it a secret who they captured. Say NSA is wiretapping everyone and someone calls their cousin and asks them to buy 2 tons of fertilizer and a detonator. Ok, now they are on a blacklist. But arresting them right there and then is a pretty sure giveaway of the surveillance capabilities and a lesson for other perhaps more real and dangerous bad guys to learn. Now actually there is a third, and more disturbing issue at hand. And that is agencies going and conjuring terrorists where there are none. Think about it, their budgets, salaries and bonuses are based on capturing terrorists. If there are no terrorists, should we be surprised if they start "creating" them? Take the example of Craig Monteilh, FBI informant that joins a mosque in Irvine, CA then goes ahead and starts recruiting radicals. "Recruiting" was more like inciting hatred. Eventually he was reported to FBI (oh the irony!), FBI was sued but lawsuit was thrown out based on "secrecy" claims. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_Center_of_Irvine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_Center_of_Irvine Then there is a case where they caught "terrorists" about to blow a bridge up in Ohio. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/brandon-l-baxter http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/brandon-l-baxter All the details of it seems shady. There is a gray area between entrapment and undercover operations and I think with right type of people (read those who are mentally unstable) it doesn't take much effort to entrap them and still stay outside the legal definition of the word. The point being that at some point we should not be surprised if agencies with hundred million dollar budgets that are told to look for terrorists (and remember according to the post 9/11 propaganda they are _everywhere_) will go start making terrorists were they are none.
coldcode 14y ago
Also this enormous government investment not only failed to catch the two bombers, but the same government fails to invest much at all in industrial inspection, which resulted in 14 deaths and half a town blown up in West, where the industrial plant had a quarter kiloton of potential explosives. Seems like a misplaced ratio of investment.

srl 14y ago

I resent (and reject the need for) the growth of the "security" apparatus as much as (almost) anybody else, but it's worth pointing out that what works for catching the "pros" is quite different from what works for catching amateurs. Pros are capable of inflicting greater damage, and are therefore a greater threat in that respect, but tend to organize in order to get access to larger resources. That means there's a larger target to "hit" when probing for information, and it makes picking up on plots much easier. An amateur can't inflict as much damage, but can do so practically undetected, and there's really not much that can be done about it AFAIK. Thought experiment: suppose you wanted to kill as many people and cause as much chaos as you could. How would you go about it? And how easy would it be for the security apparatus to catch you? Would you be able to, evading capture, perform another attack a week later? How long could you go on? It's really quite fortunate that the sort of people who want to do large amounts of violence, are exactly the sort of people who tend not be very good at it.

6d0debc071 14y ago
> Thought experiment: suppose you wanted to kill as many people and cause as much chaos as you could. How would you go about it? I was about to answer this and then realised how stupid it would be to give people ideas on how to kill vast numbers of people with off the shelf equipment. I will say that it doesn't seem like a hard problem to me, and I can see ways you could achieve rates in the hundreds of people a month. > And how easy would it be for the security apparatus to catch you? Pretty much impossible beforehand. Depending on what one did and where, it wouldn't necessarily be that hard. Some of the ideas I had seem long-term viable though - the sort of thing you could repeat with little chance of getting caught. > Would you be able to, evading capture, perform another attack a week later? How long could you go on? Some currently vulnerable infrastructure would probably harden over time but I've put like five seconds thought into this, I'm sure there are other things that one could do as well. And even if the number of deaths might not be huge - 20 people here, 20 people there, maybe a few hundred with a higher concentration target - the fact that you could strike many targets at once, and how difficult it would be to secure against you.... I think you could do very significant damage. The fear you'd induce in people, every day knowing that, for instance, if their kids go to school, maybe they never come home again. Or if they go shopping, or.... It's a horrible thing to think about. If that sort of crap was going on, and the police weren't catching this guy, I'm not sure I could bring myself to send my daughter out in public even knowing that statistically the risk per person would still be very low. I'm not sure that people could get used to the idea that every month a few hundred of them were going to die. Maybe we'd just learn to live with it but it'd require a major shift in how we reacted to visible risks.
- dragonsky 14y ago
  I'm certain that people would get used to it. They seem to live with the fact that every month hundreds of people are killed and maimed in car accidents. The British got on fairly well during the Irish Troubles, with the fact that the IRA was fairly effective at striking against English targets. You seem to forget that people have a very strong urge to believe that "it won't happen to me".
  - 6d0debc071 14y ago
    Well, that's true and I agree with you on the numbers thing - 125 people died in England during the troubles, after which the UK government effectively threw the towel in, and people generally seem to believe that they have some sort of control over their risks in the case of driving. ~ 194 people a month die from car accidents in the UK - which you could be competitive with. I'm not sure at the moment that they'd respond the same way to a continual and chaotic threat of a higher magnitude than the troubles though. I'm not saying that I think they wouldn't get over it, mind. I'm just not sure that there's enough data to choose one way or the other. It seems to me, if you could get a bunch of people to copy you - (and the first order of business if you just wanted to cause as much damage as possible would probably be anonymously mass mailing a guide that let other people do it too) - that a closer analogue would be somewhere like Mexico. But even there the killings aren't precisely random.
uptown 14y ago
"The federal government added the name of the dead Boston Marathon bombing suspect to a terrorist database 18 months before the deadly explosions, U.S. officials told The Associated Press on Wednesday." http://bigstory.ap.org/article/officials-dead-bomber-name-terrorism-database http://bigstory.ap.org/article/officials-dead-bomber-name-te...
- wisty 14y ago
  > About a year ago, there were some 745,000 people listed in the database. Wow. Suspected terrorists outnumber the Army and Marines, put together!

futhey 14y ago

I'm not arguing that it's not broken, but a majority of these people deal with foreign intelligence. Very little domestic terrorism is classified above secret (It needs to be the most accessible to decision makers and local/state governments).

bennyg 14y ago

How many people were caught and not publicized? I think it's fairly impressive, all things considered, that after two IEDs went off in a crowded civilian area, only 3 people died. And that in less than a week, those responsible were killed or apprehended. Now, I'm not pushing for a surveillance state at all. I hate everything about that notion, and I believe that what we have now is plenty adequate - if not overkill - for doing the job that needs to be done to protect our own civilians. Again, all that said, America is in a much better place when it comes to domestic "terrorism" if you will (that connotation sucks, but they were terrorizing the populous after all) than say Syria or other countries.

magic_haze 14y ago
What incentive does a department have to hide an attack they helped prevent? Publicizing it, on the other hand, brings massive clout and more bargaining power when it comes to budgets. Look at Canada's recent announcement, for example. Why would the US government be any different?
- rosser 14y ago
  What incentive does a department have to hide an attack they helped prevent? Operational security. Announcing that you've foiled a Bad Guy plot lets the bad guys know you're onto them. More to the point, it gives them valuable, actionable information on what parts of their operation you've likely compromised. See also: the Coventry Blitz. Granted, that motive implies a much higher level of coordination between these agencies than TFA suggests exists, but it's among the reasons for these folks to keep mum about having done their job.
rdtsc 14y ago
> How many people were caught and not publicized? I can see two conflicting issues here. One is the need for the agencies to justify their existence. If they exist to stop terrorists, and they feel there is public scrutiny of their budgets, they should publicize the hell out of every capture. "See, we are doing useful work, look! we captured these people red-handed with bombs about to go off!". The other one is not giving away their methods, procedures and tactics by keeping it a secret who they captured. Say NSA is wiretapping everyone and someone calls their cousin and asks them to buy 2 tons of fertilizer and a detonator. Ok, now they are on a blacklist. But arresting them right there and then is a pretty sure giveaway of the surveillance capabilities and a lesson for other perhaps more real and dangerous bad guys to learn. Now actually there is a third, and more disturbing issue at hand. And that is agencies going and conjuring terrorists where there are none. Think about it, their budgets, salaries and bonuses are based on capturing terrorists. If there are no terrorists, should we be surprised if they start "creating" them? Take the example of Craig Monteilh, FBI informant that joins a mosque in Irvine, CA then goes ahead and starts recruiting radicals. "Recruiting" was more like inciting hatred. Eventually he was reported to FBI (oh the irony!), FBI was sued but lawsuit was thrown out based on "secrecy" claims. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_Center_of_Irvine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_Center_of_Irvine Then there is a case where they caught "terrorists" about to blow a bridge up in Ohio. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/brandon-l-baxter http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/brandon-l-baxter All the details of it seems shady. There is a gray area between entrapment and undercover operations and I think with right type of people (read those who are mentally unstable) it doesn't take much effort to entrap them and still stay outside the legal definition of the word. The point being that at some point we should not be surprised if agencies with hundred million dollar budgets that are told to look for terrorists (and remember according to the post 9/11 propaganda they are _everywhere_) will go start making terrorists were they are none.

coldcode 14y ago

Also this enormous government investment not only failed to catch the two bombers, but the same government fails to invest much at all in industrial inspection, which resulted in 14 deaths and half a town blown up in West, where the industrial plant had a quarter kiloton of potential explosives. Seems like a misplaced ratio of investment.