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Comment by xvector | Hacker News Reader

When will we call this domestic terrorism?

Ideally we'd wait until we have evidence of who did it and what their motivations are, rather than just jumping to whichever conclusion fits our existing biases.

You mean like this?

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/three-men-plead-guilty-conspi...

Three Men Plead Guilty to Conspiring to Provide Material Support to a Plot to Attack Power Grids in the United States

Domestic Terrorism Plot was in Furtherance of White Supremacist Ideology

Sure are an awful lot of coincidences. Guess we’ll never know.

Those men were arrested so they couldn't have carried out this plot.

Conspiring to carry out a terrorist act and getting caught is morally (and perhaps legally) indistinguishable from successfully carrying it out.

I meant they are not responsible for the Washington outage

I see. I misunderstood.

On the other hand, we don't live in an ideal world. If it is terrorism, then the perpetrators have an interest in avoiding capture so there's probabilities of false negatives as well as false positives.

We know that people who espouse terrorism not only fantasize but produce instructional materials on this sort of thing, so we should admit admit it as a possibility and try to estimate the probability of it being a factor here.

Normally a terrorist group claims responsibility and makes demands. Vandals generally don’t. Call it what you like, but it’s unknown who is responsible.

> Normally a terrorist group claims responsibility and makes demands

Making-demand (AKA hostage-taking) terrorism was mostly a phenomenon of the 1970s and 1980s, mostly in the form of flight hijackings, and was usually carried out by state-affiliated terrorists, who had an objective to negotiate for prisoner releases.

The violence/fear-as-the-objective type of terrorism has been the predominant since the Oklahoma City bombing onwards to the Salafist terrorism of the last few decades and through to the current spate of white-supremacist motivated terror attacks (i.e. Buffalo). There was quite a bit of this sort of terrorism going on in the US prior to the Civil Rights movement, too, but we didn't have the word "terrorism" to apply to things like lynchings.

Claiming responsibility is not useful for domestic terrorists as they can then be easily captured compared to those who reside in hostile states. Also, claiming responsibility also has the effect of reducing panic and confusion, which is the opposite of what these groups want to accomplish. Timothy McVeigh didn't claim responsibility for the Oklahoma City bombings. He was tracked down (despite his use of aliases to rent the truck) by FBI agents:

https://www.fbi.gov/news/podcasts/inside-the-fbi-oklahoma-ci...

The incident in north Carolina was labelled as such. It's definitely wrong to call this just vandalism.

While I can sympathize with people suggesting these initial reports shouldn't overreach, I agree that it seems like a stretch to call attacking infrastructure 'vandalism' - it seems qualitatively different than throwing a rock through a window, somehow. But of course labeling it domestic terrorism doesn't explain who did it, or why.

The article posted above actually devotes two whole paragraphs to speculating about this, but the reality is that because CNN doesn't know the motives of the perpetrators, it would be irresponsible to name them terrorists. As internet blowhards who know literally nothing about the story, and hold ourselves to no standards at all, we can go ahead and call it terrorism though. Damn terrorists!

While I agree that's what it is, I don't get upset that it's not plastered as such in headlines.

I think the first time most Americans heard much or cared about terrorism was 9/11. The word has -very- strong emotional attachment - hatred, fear, anger, sadness, etc. In the interest of not causing nationwide panic, I can understand why they're just calling it vandalism.

Others may say we -should- be panicking, and I can't necessarily disagree, only explaining one possible reason media is hesitant to use that word.

What’s really scary is that Mylar balloon clusters, like the ones at party stores or grocery stores, released at strategic spots at the same time, would take it all down. You can’t possibly guard against that or a few drones with cheap space blankets. Real nightmare fuel.

usually with terrorism there is an claim of responsibility, and an expression of aggrieviation. to my knowledge, no public display of responsible whos, and whys, have occured

> usually with terrorism there is an claim of responsibility

"In the past two decades, fewer than half of all terrorist attacks have been either claimed by their perpetrators or convincingly attributed by governments to specific terrorist groups."

https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2019/02/01/why-do-t... (http://archive.today/mL4OE)

these are not always public, and are often not passed on to public when direct contact to actual is made.

--also the definition of terroism has been applied with a broader brush over the recent years [perhaps 10 years?]

> also the definition of terroism has been applied with a broader brush over the recent years [perhaps 10 years?]

What's your source for this? Events classified as "terrorist incidents" per year in the U.S. regularly exceeded 100 in the 1970s, but haven't exceeded 65 in 10 years ending 2017.¹

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_the_United_States

> I think the first time most Americans heard much or cared about terrorism was 9/11.

Not at all. During my lifetime, the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the Oklahoma City bombing, and the Unabomber's arrest were all prominent enough for me to remember when they happened. I still remember hearing my grandmother express concern about the Michigan Militia when she saw a belligerent guy wearing camo pants.

I'll add to that, the Atlanta Olympics bombing.

Good example, but for whatever reason I don't remember that as vividly.

Don't forget The Weather Underground back in the late 60s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather_Underground

Oh, I'm not that old.

Neither am I, so I'm really confused on your point. Are you saying you know nothing about anything that happened before your time?

Oh, I thought I made that clear:

> all prominent enough for me to remember when they happened

I listed pre-9/11 examples of terrorism that I remember happening.

I think we need more information before we can proclaim it terrorism with certainty. If it was say teenagers with guns or something, that is probably not terrorism, that's stupidity. But I do think it wasn't an accident and was likely planned, attempted to stew disorder. But the world is complicated, people do things to try to blame the other side. There is actual right wing accelerationism, but we need a little more evidence before we can confidently say what this is in headlines.

I think you meant to reply up-thread. My comment didn't touch on the recent vandalism/sabotage/attacks.

So, I remember these events(vaguely), but not a lot of talk of terrorism specifically. Do you happen to recall if the media specifically labeled them terrorists at the time?

The 1993 WTC bombing was definitely labelled terrorism. I remember it as a bit of a shock, that Americans didn't realize people in the Middle East were really pissed at us about something. Oklahoma City was quickly labelled terrorism, many originally assumed it was Mid-East in origin again and were shocked that it was domestic terrorists. I don't remember the Unabomber incident much, but I do remember there was much attention given to his manifesto.

Also, there were many airplane hijackings in the 1970s. I don’t remember if they were called terrorism, though.

“Terrorism” is just the 21st century rebranding of the 20th century’s “anarchism”. People used “anarchism” and “anarchist” frequently during the 20th century.

Anarchism has an actual political meaning, with lots of literature.

Terrorism isn't a consistent ideological position. People don't openly advocate for what they self describe as terrorist states, terrorist literature and philosophy, terrorist thinkers and political party. There's no terrorist bookstore, but here in SF I can go down to Haight St and find an anarchist bookstore ...

On the other hand I think terrorist is an appropriate description for a Timothy McVeigh or a Kaczynski. I would say those are more violent than most 19th-20th century political anarchists.

> People used “anarchism” and “anarchist” frequently during the 20th century.

Though anarchism was pretty much dead by the end of WWII, I think now they're just called Republicans.

When we find out who did it and their motives. To be terrorism they need to want to create political change via attacks on civilians.

Until we know who did it, and why, we can speculate and assume, but you can't know for sure.

For example they might just like causing trouble, that's bad obviously, but it's not terrorism.

Is causing trouble not really terrorism? What if the scale changes from 14,00 to someone taking down key pieces of the power grid and NYC goes without power for a day? If this happened in my neighborhood I’d want the authority in charge to absolutely treat this or any attack on infrastructure as terrorism.

Causing trouble could just be vandalism or wanton destruction of property. Terrorism requires more than just destruction of property[0].

[0] https://www.fbi.gov/file-repository/fbi-dhs-domestic-terrori...

Terrorism doesn't have much to do with outcomes. If i accidentally flew a plane into the twin towers while drunk, it's not terrorism. It's a lot of things, but not terrorism.

If i was homer simpson and caused a nuclear incident due to negligence, it's still not terrorism.

> Is causing trouble not really terrorism?

Correct.

> What if the scale changes from 14,00 to someone taking down key pieces of the power grid

Still not terrorism.

> I’d want the authority in charge to absolutely treat this or any attack on infrastructure as terrorism.

Sure, but only until they determine what it really is.

Terrorism is hard to define exactly, but some required elements are that it be an attack on civilians (an attack on military or police is never terrorism). And it must have a goal of some kind, they must want to change something, by making people scared of another attack.

If you attack people because you hate them, that's not terrorism unless your goal is to change some law or reality (for example make them scared to leave their homes). If you just attack out of hatred it's bad, but it's not terrorism.

In Canada the Federal government is quick to call truckers terrorists, but reluctant to call left wing activists destroying and threatening oil and gas developments or road infrastructures over climate change and environmental issues.

Jan 6ths got the T word thrown around.

Perhaps it can be viewed as a word used to selectively threats to the powerful or their narrative.

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