FBI says white supremacists plotted attack on US power grid | Hacker News Reader

FBI says white supremacists plotted attack on US power grid

nbcbayarea.com

30 points80mph27 comments

Title makes it sound as if a whole organized group of neonazis were found with explosives and a bunch of other action-movie equipment,...

...and then goes on to explain most of the stuff was "planned" by a 17yo kid in a chatroom.

Does that matter though?

At 17 years old I was quite capable of planning and executing something like this, I don't think the age of the person matters all that much when it comes to destruction teenagers are quite creative even when they don't have access to weapons and explosives.

Besides that there are apparently at least three others involved in this plot. Radicalization at a young age is what drives a lot of the terrorist activity world wide, I don't see why white supremacists should get a free pass. If this guy had been brown and/or a Muslim there likely would be lots of people yelling for his head.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev was only 19 when he bombed the Boston marathon.

People say stupid things on the internet all the time though. Flipping out over every dramatic teenager is what the FBI is going to have to do to prevent another bombing. Whether that makes sense is a different question.

This one looks to be a bit further along than just talking in chat rooms. At the same time, the FBI is not exactly known for being 100% truthful all the time and has been known to actively push these plots along to the point where they became real enough that something had to be done about it. That's not kind of thing that will help them in the longer run.

People need to understand whatever they write online can have repercussions. That you get away with saying stupid things on the internet is irrelevant.

Criminal youth, including underaged, are organizing online to perform criminal acts. This is just one of the examples of that. I don't know how the FBI does it, but the Dutch police have to work with the following (compatible with ECHR):

"In the Netherlands we have the so called Tallon criterium. A person cannot be enticed by the investigating officer to perform a criminal act or omission other than he or she had already planned to do. A foreign police officer who is deployed for infiltration has to meet high standards (knowledge and skills). The check is undertaken by the national public prosecutor." [1]

[1] https://www.ejn-crimjust.europa.eu/ejn/EJN_FichesBelgesResul...

Are they planning to hold the Boston marathon inside a substation? Is electricity the target of modern neo-Nazi ideology?

The article makes them sound stupid and they probably deserve some police attention. But their plot doesn't sound racially charged. The article makes a big point of calling them Nazis, which is the same brand of stupidity as making a big deal about some criminals being brown and/or Muslim. It probably isn't relevant.

By 2020 journalism logic, Discord servers filled with idiots are kristallnacht.

I cannot understand why people believe anything on the internet anymore. How much money must the advertisers be burning before getting their first customer?

Going by the FBI's history, the kid likely suffers from some kind of mental issue and the FBI were every other person in the chat room convincing him to attack while providing explosives.

Yah that part of how the FBI handles these situations has always made me really upset. The FBI's main task should be isolating an unstable kid from interacting with disturbing chat rooms and first see if the kid's mentality will fizzles out after some time away from it. Instead they basically nurture the messed up mentality of the kid and until they can go ahead with charging the kid while it likely could've been prevented if the messed up mentality wasn't nurtured.

I'll wait for the affidavits in this case before commenting further, but the FBI has learned something in the last 60 years. The last set of affidavits I read was the reverse of O'Brien and Smith in 1984[1]: the FBI resources kept reminding the suspects they were supposedly from Hamas, and asked the suspects open-endedly what projects they could help with, rather than prompting specifically.

[1] TL;DR if a member of the Inner Party asks if you are willing to kill innocents and throw acid in children's faces, please don't say "yes".

>but the FBI has learned something in the last 60 years.

They have learned to entrap people without legally being considered entrapment. Not what I'd consider a good skill for them to have.

> Title makes it sound as if a whole organized group of neonazis

Not a neo-nazi but there was also Giangiacomo Feltrinelli. From the wiki page [1]:

> Giangiacomo Feltrinelli (Italian: [dʒanˈdʒaːkomo feltriˈnɛlli]; 19 June 1926 – 14 March 1972) was an influential Italian publisher and businessman active following the Second World War. He founded a vast library of documents mainly in the history of international labor and socialist movements. He became a left-wing activist preceding Italy's Years of Lead.

> On 15 March 1972, Feltrinelli was found dead at the foot of the pylon of a high-voltage power-line at Segrate, near Milan, apparently killed by his own explosives while on an operation with other GAP members.[26] Some 8,000 people attended Feltrinelli's funeral.

The Feltrinelli bookstores are one of the first things I enter when I get to an Italian city.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giangiacomo_Feltrinelli#Gueril...

And what make syou think a 17 year old could have done harm? He managed to convince 3 others, at least, to go along with the plan.

Parkland, Florida: 17 people killed by a 19 year old.

Charleston Church: 9 people killed by a 21 year old.

(It would be easier to refute your point if the US bothered to define and then count mass killings, but for some reason they don't)

This reads like all the other "white supremacist" plots. A group of FBI agents, working overtime to convince a mentally ill, unstable, or young and impressionable person to carry out an attack he would not be able to otherwise execute on his own.

In a just country, where the rule of law applies, this would easily be classified as entrapment.

How did you get that? One of his plans was to shoot rifle rounds at powerstations, should be kinda easy to do?

Investigation started when canadian guy was stopped at the border, he was going to visit this "crazy teen" and had nazi and white supremacist images on his phone.

Tell that to the 168 people killed in the Oklahoma City bombing.

Oh, I don't doubt that the FBI get up to their share of shenanigans. But that doesn't mean that there aren't real people who really hate other people for reasons of ethnicity, religion, skin tone, sexuality etc. Nor does it mean that those people sometimes decide to make their hatred concrete through the medium of dead people.

It's a bit ironic to cite the Oklahoma City bombing, as it was motivated by retaliation for the Ruby Ridge and Waco incidents, two examples of federal law enforcement "shenanigans" that resulted in a lot of dead civilians. Maybe those sorts of sting operations do more harm than good?

The most bizarre case is "Ruby Ridge". ATF Officers tricked a poor unstable man to saw off a shot gun less than 18 inches. With that charge setup - ATF proceed to execute his wife and son. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_Ridge

You're skipping over more than a few intervening events, there.

For inclusion and equality, could we please remove "white" from the title? The "American supremacist teen" works well and is inline with current guidelines, correct?

I don’t get it. What’s wrong with saying “white supremacists” when they use Nazi signs?

It appears to just be an unfunny joke about diversity & inclusivity initiatives.

"White supremacist" is just a media/propaganda term. Nobody calls themselves that. And not all National Socialists are white, although in the US I suppose most are.

does anybody remember when we used to troll the FBI and Chris Hansen on yahoo chat, IRC and stickam?

that stuff was hilarious

man, what changed! how are kids falling for this stuff?

The affidavit says the Ohio teen put Nazi flags in his room, but his mother told him to take them down.

Looks like less a plot, and more a teenager mouthing off.

"the Ohio teen put Nazi flags in his room, but his mother told him to take them down."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com