I don't think that the FBI is quite as bad of an actor as the article tries to make them out to be for various reasons, mostly covered by other posts here. What

I don't think that the FBI is quite as bad of an actor as the article tries to make them out to be for various reasons, mostly covered by other posts here. What I do think is that the FBI and other government agencies have a fine line to balance with these things. On the one hand, we constantly push for them to catch terrorists before they act via standard, good police work - which mostly involves tips and confidential informants, just like this case. We criticize them when they use over-broad mass electronic surveillance to try and find the terrorists, and we criticize them some more when they fail to catch actual terrorist before they act. I'm all for criticizing them when they screw up or overreach, but if you want them to do their job, they need some room to work. This is what that work looks like - maintaining networks of informants at the fringes of the broad movement, constantly listening and following up on any signs of anyone who might want to take action, and aggressively pursuing those who do have a desire to take action. If these guys have some genuine desire to take violent action, shouldn't we get to them before somebody else does? On the other hand, the process of maintaining informants in a movement can be rather alienating to the movement as a whole. I've been into guns as hobby for a while, and every now and then, I've heard second-hand accounts of people who show up at various gun club events and start asking rather pointed questions about how to do illegal things. I don't know if it's true, if they're really government informants, or how often it actually happens, but the very idea and plausibility of it leaves a rather bad taste in peoples' mouths. It tends to make think the Government sees us as the enemy, to make us think of ourselves more as a group in opposition to them, then just a bunch of ordinary Americans exercising a constitutional right in a harmless way. I can't help but think that many Muslims experience the same thing and feel the same way about it. If we really want to fix these problems long-term, shouldn't we be working to integrate Muslims into mainstream America, and send them the message that they're welcome here, and we're happy to have them as productive members of society? I don't know that much about this particular investigation, but it sounds like it may be a touch further than we'd like to be along the lines of pursuing too aggressively. Not enough that I'd want to see things changed too drastically - this guy sounds like he's at least some level of bad actor. Maybe they should look further towards getting these guys mental help and medication, rather than multi-decade prison sentences? Or maybe he was already too far gone for that type of help even before the FBI got to him. I would be interested to hear the opinions of some members of the area Muslim community. At least ones not coordinated by reporters trying to push an agenda, or grandstanding civil rights activists more interested in their own prominence than what the community actually feels. Not that I'm likely to get that.