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Comment by WalterGR | Hacker News Reader

If they were indeed upending terrorist plots once a year I could maybe understand.

Do they not? I feel like I read about the FBI foiling plans to blow up this or that multiple times a year.

For example this, which happened in the past month: "FBI arrest man over alleged Amazon centre bomb plot" (https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56719618)

"He believed that there were 24 buildings that 'run 70% of the internet', including services used by the CIA and FBI, according to a conversation detailed in the criminal complaint against him."

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The FBI approached him and offered to help him carry out the plot so they could arrest him. Would he have actually blown up anything if they hadn’t entrapped him? Who knows.

What I do know is it’s not worth surrendering my liberties for.

That's just one of many examples. As my previous comment suggests, I'm replying to a very specific part of the parent comment.

"FBI says man killed in Missouri wanted to bomb hospital amid coronavirus epidemic"

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/fbi-says-man-killed-mis...

You should look more into the many other examples too then because a lot more of them are... well let's say the authorities are more directly involved than I can accept for a use of the word "foiled."

Yeah, the pattern is always the same:

1. Reach out to some young, impressionable, and vaguely angry kid.

2. Radicalize him, then convince him to carry out some plot.

3. Arrest him when he starts to go through with it.

4. Hold a press conference about how you foiled yet another terrorist plot.

5. GOTO 1

Offering to sell someone C4 who is seeking explosives for a concrete plan, and then arresting him after he purchases (which is what happened) is not anywhere close to entrapment.

But anyway I agree that a few arrests a year like this are not worth the surveillance.

I agree not entrapment, but certainly suspicious how the fbi always seems to every 3 months or so, somehow miraculously save us all from a plot they created...I mean "helped" .... i.e. selling whatever to whoever on camera to make a bust...

Seems they need to justify their budget request(s); truly what better way then to show everyone why their needed with another 9/11 reference of doom and horror to scare the masses in to compliance.

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