The FBI again thwarts its own Terror plot | Hacker News Reader

The FBI again thwarts its own Terror plot

politics.salon.com

72 pointsyread24 comments

It seemed like a good article, and I was enjoying it for all 15 seconds I was able to read it before a f#*+^ing Flash popover made it completely unreadable on my iPad, with no way to get the article back. Does nobody do QA for these sites?

I usually try the Readability bookmarklet when that happens:

http://www.readability.com/bookmarklets

In quite a few other countries this sort of activity is simply illegal.

It's called entrapment.

Entrapment is illegal here too. The FBI, in order to strengthen its case against that exact defense, -always- gives the "suspect" multiple opportunities to stop himself.

Of course, if the suspect does stop, the FBI then tries to get him to continue, or finds another gull.

It's pretty gross.

God forbid that one day they mess up the 'caught you at the last moment' bit and one of these succeeds. I wonder how the FBI will respond then.

The FBI should concentrate on real issues, rather than to attempt to fabricate them.

I understand that thoughtcrime is not punishable, it looks as though they are trying to bridge that gap by aiding the 'suspect' (word used loosely here) in every way imaginable.

It makes me wonder if that means that since the FBI goes to great extremes to get these guys to become even more radical than the already were if that means the FBI is actively aiding terrorism and could be prosecuted for that through some other branch of government. Means, opportunity, those are important bits used to convict people and it looks as though these people had none of them but the FBI helpfully supplied them as well as direction.

At face value it looks as if the FBI has more reason to be indicted here than the actual perp.

I see the suicide bombers and other idiots as much as victims of their handlers as they are obvious criminals, these young people could presumably have been turned in a much more positive way but instead the FBI decided to bring out the worst in them.

Pointless, ultimately wasteful and distracting the attention from real issues.

> one day they mess up the 'caught you at the last moment' bid and one of these succeeds

I doubt the FBI would provide any of them with real weapons and ammunition. I hope, at least.

> Pointless, ultimately wasteful and distracting the attention from real issues.

As much as I agree this is hardly the most effective way to deal with the AFAIK non-existent problem, it provides one deterring factor: any would-be terrorist has to think twice whether the helpful recruiter is really what he/she claims to be or an undercover FBI agent.

The poor misguided soul who would fall for such a trap should, instead, be given professional counseling on more constructive ways to deal with frustration and extremist feelings.

> I doubt the FBI would provide any of them with real weapons and ammunition. I hope, at least.

If that's true then 'Your honour, the weapons were non-functional, I already knew that' would be a pretty good defense.

> The poor misguided soul who would fall for such a trap should, instead, be given professional counseling on more constructive ways to deal with frustration and extremist feelings.

Exactly. If the FBI has such a foolproof method of detecting radicals they should use that knowledge in a constructive way, rather than to push those individuals into a position where they will hate the country even more.

There is a This American Life episode about this with two stories about this FBI strategy. The weapons provided in both cases were inert.

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/387/a...

http://www.fbi.gov/newyork/press-releases/2010/nyfo101810.ht...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemant_Lakhani

Well, I'm really happy they managed to convict him to no less than 47 years in prison, I'm sure that the United States is much safer now.

For an encore they ought to lock up everybody else, that way you can be sure that you've caught all the terrorists too.

>I wonder how the FBI will respond then.

Like they did after 9/11, by begging for more power.

More fun would be if the "suspect" reports it to the local police, who end up running a sting operation on what only later they find out is the FBI.

(Which happened in an episode of the TV show "Benson." I feel old now. :) )

On the other hand, this activity makes it difficult for would-be terrorists from organizing, because any prospect would suspect that the recruiter was an FBI agent.

Perhaps, but the article mentions that it is the FBI themselves who are doing the organizing, seeking out people who had not necessarily taken any initiative to do anything.

I think you misread what I said because your comment doesn't make sense in response to it. I just said that the FBI is publicly acting like terrorist organizers, making an actual terrorist organizer indistinguishable from an FBI agent.

Flagged as off-topic for HN.

I would think that issues of entrapment and the idea of attacking buildings using explosive filled remote controlled planes would be of suitable interest to the hacker community.

Press the button, move on

Commenting that you flagged is just like replying with "+1!"

indeed it fails the "no politics" rule. Still, it's an important discussion the US should have with itself: whether such threats would be real without law enforcement encouraging extremists. Unaccountable law enforcement is bad for business, and, thus, it becomes a topic of interest for the small businesses.

There's exactly zero discussion about the relevance of the story to HN community here (small business or otherwise), there are plenty of websites to discuss politics for those who want to. Let's not make this one of them.

Every upvote for this article is someone who disagrees. You don't have to stand on a soapbox each time you click on "flag"

Former Senior BBC Mideast Correspondent Alan Hart says on air that Israeli Mossad did 9/11:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDsW4DyyZvU

Links need to fade in down-voted comments. As is, the contrast makes them more prominent.

It is faded, but it needs to fade more.

Only if you click on it [link], then it gets faded because it's been visited.

HN uses a <font> tag in the source, which is overridden by the css for links. I reckon a <span> tag with inline css would work better.

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