FBI informant infiltrates mosque, gets reported as terrorist by members. | Hacker News Reader

FBI informant infiltrates mosque, gets reported as terrorist by members.

washingtonpost.com

38 pointsphreeza24 comments

Entrapping impressionable people who otherwise have no history of terrorism, let alone a criminal record, has become the go-to weapon for the FBI. Virtually all other terrorism-related arrests made in this country since 9/11 have been made using this tactic.

Serves the FBI right for A) Ruining innocent people's lives, and B) Screwing over the very community that they claim to be partners with.

In the case of the recent Oregon terrorist, supposedly he was trying (and failing) to get into contact with terrorists because he wanted to 'go radical.' The FBI (supposedly) just stepped in pretending to be terrorists and provided him with the rope to hang himself.

I still think that there is a moral line that is crossed here though. One of my co-workers mentioned it like this:

  If someone was a threat to himself or others, they would be sent to the 
  psych ward and medicated. If someone is a threat to masses of people,
  the FBI tries to help them make an attempt at killing people, then send
  them to jail for it.

When someone is still at the 'talking' stage, even when they seem to have made up their mind, it becomes morally ambiguous to help them attempt to commit a crime, then arrest them for attempting to commit that crime.

If you know, or at least strongly suspect, that someone is an FBI informant/provocateur, what are you doing to do - call the FBI? In that crappy situation, I think their choice of getting a restraining order sounds like the best they could do. At the very least it forces jurisdictional conflicts between the FBI and the local authorities.

Anyone know how other groups have handled this historically?

>If you know, or at least strongly suspect, that someone is an FBI informant/provocateur, what are you doing to do - call the FBI?

Why not?

Boot him of the premises.

Haven't all of the homegrown terrorism prosecutions involved a highly zealous FBI informant/provocateur?

Seems like it, except for cases like the Ft. Hood shootings where the guy actually executed his planned attack.

BTW, why does the US constitution protect religion per se? Isn't free speech enough?

It is mostly a clause to keep something like the Church of England (head of state is head of church) from happening in the USA.

Well, free speech alone could also theoretically be enough to cover freedom of the press, assembly, and right to petition, but I'd rather have my rights spelled out explicitly so no court decision can take them from me.

The Bill of Rights does NOT spell out your rights for you. Your rights include EVERYTHING that the Constitution does not explicitly give to the state. The Bill of Rights is just an example listing of rights that the founders felt were most important for a free society.

Yes, but that doesn't stop the government from taking away rights (See: Plessy v. Ferguson/Brown v. Board of Education, Loving v. Virginia [was needed to stop abridgment of rights], DADT and DOMA, for example.)

Just because it was always supposed to work that way, doesn't mean it actually does work that way. In practice there's approximately nothing that can't be eventually related back to interstate commerce.

I would prefer the courts respect the 9th and 10th amendment, reverse a bunch of rulings on the "Commerce Clause", and try to remember what limited government really is.

RE: the 9th, I think more precision is needed-it's still too easy for a court to reject certain things as "not rights."

I think there should be an amendment that in essence makes it unconstitutional to ban any action which does not negatively affect another human being, with maybe a bit more specificity on what "negatively affect" means. But the anti-drug lobby will never let that pass, and the RIAA/MPAA might have problems with it too. (And it should be clear that it only refers to people, NOT corporations or organizations. They should have rights, but not the same rights as individuals-look at what the S.C. did to campaign financing.)

The problem with the 9th amendment is that it's far too vague. Without specific regulation, the court will always move in the direction of taking away rights.

I still believe enumeration should be reserved for the federal and state governments. If it isn't listed in the constitution, then they should not have control. The problem is that courts have used the commerce clause to give the gov everything.

That'd be the ideal, yes, but I highly doubt the court'll change what they're doing without something on the scale of a constitutional amendment.

So the first amendment reads: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. I think mostly the framers just wanted to make religion explicit since it was then a contentious issue and always will be.

So there might be things that might become illegal in general but not illegal within the context of religion?

Why make exceptions in this way?

You're taking this too literally. Remember, the Bill of Rights was a political compromise to get more people to vote in favor the US Constitution.

The US was, and is, a deeply religious country, and a significant number of people who emigrated to the then-colonies did so in part or in whole to escape religious persecution from their homeland. While freedom of speech probably encompasses freedom of worship, the extra explicitness was added just to reinforce that the concern was being addressed.

And, to be perfectly honest, I have full confidence that any lawyer worth his salt could argue that religious belief is not speech, per se, but rather bluh bluh bluh and therefore not covered. At the very least, without that explicit clause you could probably create a state church and have other religions be second-class citizens, as long as they are tolerated to a certain extent. By explicitly forbidding a state church, they prevent the first-among-equals conundrum from becoming institutional.

One-page, text-only version: http://pastebin.com/zAysvHcw

The FBI sound like a bunch of dicks.

I read the article, but the HN headline is just priceless.

I know its frowned upon here, but I though this was just too good. The original headline didn't do it justice, so I changed it...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com