Hacker News Reader

Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

I was definitely confused by this article at first, thinking it was some silly guide for law enforcement which can't tell the difference between criminals and LARPers...??

But no -- it's actually about terrorists and criminals trying to claim in court that their criminal planning wasn't that at all, but just LARPing:

> For example, after Kaleb Franks was arrested in October 2020 for plotting to abduct Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, he told the FBI he and his compatriots were only LARPing. Franks later pled guilty and testified that this was a lie.

So this document is for investigators to ensure they have a specific framework for being able to collect the appropriate evidence to use in court that prevents a defendent from using a LARPing defense.

Which actually makes a tremendous amount of sense. When armed militia members claim all of their organizing/preparation is just recreational, and totally unlinked to violence that members do eventually commit, it's important to have delineated standards to be able to refute that.

View on HN

It isn't just courts, these are for police officers in general, they say it near the top "which may be helpful to both law enforcement and prosecutors if suspects of targeted violence claim they were playacting".

These standards will likely make officers go after more genuine LARPers than before. These tips are very problematic if police officers start to follow them, for example:

> Role players will not discuss law enforcement concerns on social media or provide guidance to each other if confronted by an officer. Also, they will have no demonstrated interest in criminal cases involving claims of LARP.

If police officers are going after LARPers then LARPers will start to talk about what to do in those cases.

> The foremost distinction between LARPers and violent extremists is that genuine role players will not care whether others are watching. They may even embrace third-party observation, such as nonplayer characters or a general audience. After all, LARP is a performance.

Lots of people are embarrassed to do things in public, a police officer coming across some people LARPing in private shouldn't be cause for investigation.

> These standards will likely make officers go after more genuine LARPers than before. These tips are very problematic if police officers start to follow them.

It sounds like it might be a dangerous time to LARP about and plan terrorist acts. That could be very problematic for those who enjoy that as a recreational hobby. But in some ways there's a precedent for it with flying. Lots of people used to love to LARP about taking a bomb on a plane and that recreational activity has been significantly curtailed. Maybe we're heading for a world where it's no longer safe to plan the kidnapping of state or national government officials and then practice the steps necessary to carry it out, and where we can no longer joke about a bomb look-alike device that we want to take on airplanes.

I have been interested in planning a bank heist (but obviously not following through). It's sort of the same motivation for lockpicking, LARPing, or even homesteading- an exploration of the criminal world, the fantasy of being a Ocean's 11/Clooney type, the (admittedly, likely false) comfort of being able to make a difference if fascists/Russia/China invaded and took over. I have never given this much thought, as I've assumed this counts as conspiracy to commit a crime or similar.

So, counter to your (ironic?) point, I think the existence of this article will make me more likely to explore this avenue- I have a reference for what I would need to do to avoid crossing the line. And counter to what I suspect may be your actual point, I think it is totally reasonable to want to do things like this.

I guess your best bet would be to have someone design a fictional bank to rob.

Yeah, if people who want to LARP as bank robbers could be paired with people who want to LARP as bankers, tellers, and cops, that could be an answer to the incipient commercial real-estate crisis. Just a matter of getting the right people in the same room together.

I would pay money for this, but probably not as much as it would cost (assuming that people who want to LARP as bankers/tellers and can't get those jobs don't really exist).

Perhaps, after the AI singularity, it will become trendy for us all to LARP our former jobs for amusement.

...bank robber?

After the 'happy ending' version of a singularity, nobody will care if you were a bank robber in your previous life.

I would also love to do this, but the closest we'll probably get for a long time is some VR heist game (Payday 2 had a VR mode that was alright, but it comes with all of Payday's unrealism, which is sort of the wrong kind of unrealism for me). It's in that category of "wait for the Holodeck" things.

Not live action - but a lot of this goes on in GTA roleplay servers - you can watch it on Twitch, for example https://twitch.tv/uhsnow

> Lots of people used to love to LARP about taking a bomb on a plane

Really?

He’s making fun of the absurdity of the parent comment

The examples were absurd. Take lockpicking hobby as an example and it's a different picture.

Was there a bombing plane map in Counter Strike? I vaguely remember a not so popular hostage map from way back the day...

I agree with the top post that the title confused me. But reading the article I came away with a very different take than you. This person is trying to define the difference between LARPing and being terrorist. That may be obvious to someone who knows LARPers, but not everyone does.

I really don't think that the police are going to be a problem for people in fantasy gear, cosplaying, or re-enacting a historical battle. I have never heard of it. But LARPing shouldn't be an excuse for people who want to don real tactical gear and weapons and plan mayhem.

> I really don't think that the police are going to be a problem for people in fantasy gear, cosplaying, or re-enacting a historical battle. I have never heard of it.

But now with these guidelines police has a reason to go after them. Something like: "I just followed these guidelines, it says you are showing terrorist signs and aren't real LARPers".

They didn't do that before, but guidelines like these changes behavior and can easily make things worse.

You're being histrionic. Nobody is coming for your LotR LARP group.

These guidelines are literally an attempt to distinguish actual terrorists from people who insist on pretending to be terrorists. It's as much good faith as you can hope for from the government, considering the domain.

None of this applies to you even if you're in the park wearing full Orc battlegear, are belligerent, drunk in public, and urinate on the arresting officer.

Here's how low the bar is:

> Among violent extremists, there may be online discussions about and guidance in using LARP as an excuse during encounters with law enforcement,

Actual LARPers don't need to be reminded to tell cops that they're LARPing. The bar is that fucking low. They'll even accept lorebooks and stats sheets as proof.

What motivation do they have to do this? Are you talking about, like, Civil War re-enactors? Pretty sure the police aren't going to roll up on some dudes in wigs and toy bayonets in a park. Those people usually get permits for that kind of thing anyways.

If you're part of a group with a manifesto, ordering weapons and explosives and doing practice drills to take down the US government, then yeah... it's highly likely that the feds are going to pay attention.

> If you're part of a group with a manifesto, ordering weapons and explosives and doing practice drills to take down the US government, then yeah... it's highly likely that the feds are going to pay attention.

And in those cases the "I was just LARPing" defense already doesn't work. This document will not help catch criminals since in clear cases they are already caught, all it does is raise more suspicion against genuine LARPing.

>: will not help catch criminals since in clear cases they are already caught

??? Yea, I can tell you've never actually worked around any real life investigations before.

The difficulty with any real life situation is in a large enough group there will be some portion of the 'fakers' that are actually really motivated to commit illegal actions.

Even online this issue occurs with forms that mock the stupidity of other groups, flat earthers being a great example. If left unchecked a forum can turn from satire to true believers.

The article acknowledges the possibility of people LARPing in a more contemporary context.

I find this plausible, too: I can imagine groups of people getting together recreationally and fantasizing about how they're going to overthrow the fascist mayor, or kill all the Jews, or whatever else. With their real guns and tactical gear, because those look cool. With a badass logo, maybe with some skulls in it. But with no intention of ever actually acting out those fantasies.

Up until the point when they do something that crosses a line.

eg: see youtube's Flattened Earth - The Glorious LARP (2021)

Conspiracy Theory Historic Reenactment Metal Band Flattened Earth is Satire

See, for example, KAOS (Killing as an Organized Sport), also known as Killer or Assassin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassin_(game)).

It’s a multiplayer game in which players LARP as assassins out to kill targets that they receive secretly at the start of the game.

The game has rules that describe how to simulate various forms of weapons and tactics (e.g. using a rolled-up sheet of paper as a dagger), and the rules are intended to help make it clear to observers that it’s just a game in which no actual crimes are intended, but it still involves people behaving in ways that could be misinterpreted.

I played it some at VCU in the late 1970s. It was fun.

> But LARPing shouldn't be an excuse for people who want to don real tactical gear and weapons and plan mayhem.

Just saw a video talking a bit facetiously about this. The question is, "What's the difference between Paintball and LARPing?"

Dressing up and using made-up names and speaking specialized terminology and engaging in make-believe combat...

They decided there is no difference. (This could just as easily be airsoft or paint markers for regular guns, to be clear.)

At the end of the day there is no clear boundary between simulation for fun and for practice, the real question is what are you simulating. If some people were playing paintball in an accurate mockup of a government building, with one team taking up the positions of government guards and persons of interest, I don't think it's absurd to view that with some suspicion, particularly if there are other reasons to suspect it is more than just a game.

I'd say paintball is like fencing. The actions are real, but the consequences are minimized by the equipment.

I don't know much about LARPing but I have the impression that the actions there aren't real, just people saying things like "I strike at thee", "I parry and riposte" while pantomiming in slow motion.

Wouldn't it be easy to tell a fencing duel from a LARP swordfight?

FWIW, compared to real sword fights, fencing (as practiced in the Olympics et.al.) isn’t generally considered to be “real”. Points scored from tapping toes, foils which bend unrealistically, artificially constrained movements, one winner when both stabbed each other milliseconds apart…

But to your point, yes, most amateur sports could be boiled down to a form of LARPing given enough twisting.

Serious LARP'rs make their own swords and chainmail .. the difference between a fencing duel and a LARP swordfight is the shear size of the blades and the weight of the chainmail. *

eg: https://greycompany.com.au/

Now billed as "Historical Re-enactment focusing on the Dark Ages and Medieval times" and has been swinging swords and building trebuchets since ~ 1980(ish) at least.

* Varies, of course, by LARP groups

This isn't "seek out LARPers". This is "how do I distinguish a group of people in the woods running around in camo as LARPers or violent extremists". They found the people first.

Stop and frisk isn't "seek out black people", they found the person first and then identified him as black and that means he is a risk and needs to be stopped and frisked.

I don't really see the difference.

I didn't interpret the article as "investigate LARPers to make sure they're not domestic terrorists" so I don't really understand your take. Stop and Frisk has obvious racist origins, but the process starts with you suspecting someone of a crime and using that as a foot in the door. This seems the opposite guidance of "before you spend too much time investigating a group, try to build the case that they're not LARPing". Like the whole preface is that terrorists are trying to evade justice by saying it was all a game. Stop and Frisk wasn't created because people carrying weapons and committing crimes were pretending to be minorities so cops wouldn't be suspicious.

Don't worry, the cops are not going to take away your robe and wizard hat.

But if you're playing pretend with real weapons, you deserve scrutiny, regardless of your ideology.

This: Guns are not toys, and if you are using guns as toys, don't be surprised if you get grilled.

You're looking at this from an assumption-of-LARPing.

Imagine an FBI agent looking at evidence of Timothy McVeigh at a gun show in 1994. He's selling a flare gun he claims can 'shoot down an ATF helicopter' and ATF hats with bullet holes in them.

When interviewed without charge, imagine McVeigh claims that it's part of his LARPing activities.

What standards would you suggest that agent applies, in order to avoid a false negative?

Your example just proves that this document doesn't hold water, he did that in public and didn't care about people seeing what he did, so the document would suggest he was LARPing for real.

I don't see how this document would help find criminals and help free innocents. It seems to give way too rigid guidelines that will be misused by many officers.

He wasn't practicing building pipe bombs in public.

By the rubric this document suggests, McVeigh would have satisfied 0 / 10 LARPing signals in Table 1.

Your scenario was:

> Imagine an FBI agent looking at evidence of Timothy McVeigh at a gun show in 1994. He's selling a flare gun he claims can 'shoot down an ATF helicopter' and ATF hats with bullet holes in them.

Not "Imagine an FBI agent looking at Timothy McVeigh building pipe bombs in private". I don't see how this document would have helped stop McVeigh.

Clueless FBI agent today is looking at a stack of next-McVeigh-claiming-LARP + 5 LARP/military RP groups.

Maybe this doc helps them sort the wheat from the chaff, because the agent doesn't actually know anything about LARP groups.

> assumption-of-LARPing.

And this seems accurate as the ratio of larping to terrorism is probably millions to one.

Thousands of people larp every day in the US. Terrorism is fairly rare with maybe a few events per year.

I think this might expose (again) the wrong-headed assumptions of law-enforcement for how common terrorism is. It’s rare, but in order to justify the military-industrial investment behind it, we need to be told that we are under constant threat. That terrorism is everywhere, always.

“Terrorism is fairly rare”

The only people who make that claim are terrorists.

Not only is this a weird generalization, but it doesn't even make sense. Why would a terrorist want to downplay the frequency of terror incidents? That defeats the entire purpose of trying to, you know, inspire terror.

It always seemed that terrorists are stupid and irrational in their attempts to achieve their goals, fortunately for society.

So maybe this is another case of terrorists just being stupid.

Or I expect that GP had some sort of brain fart, disagreed with my statement, and typed the first version of “nuh uh” they came up with.

I’m fairly certain I’m not a terrorist and I made the statement. Therefore; I think your conclusion is false.

I made the statement because according to statista [0] there were only 149 terrorist acts in North America from 2007-2022.

That seems fairly rare to me.

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/489581/terrorist-attacks...

Another way to phrase that first sentence is "assumption of innocence". And while random commentators on the internet are not obligated to honor it, law enforcement is supposed to.

This document is seemingly targeted on the investigation phase, before a charge has been filed, to distinguish what characteristics legitimate LARPing may have vs militia claims-of-LARPing.

Presumption of innocence does not extend to the initiation of an investigation, but comes into play with increasingly invasive methods (and ultimately, charges).

US law enforcement is empowered to initiate duck investigations on things that quack pretty liberally.

Yea, this entire thread really tells me that most people on HN have absolutely zero experience with the investigation phase of law enforcement.

If your in some group that reenacts pointing weapons at each other, or coming up with idea on how to blow up buildings and you have someone overhear this and report it, law enforcement themselves have no idea if you're the real thing our not (statistically, no your not, but investigators deal with outliers all day every day). If there is some kind of audio or video evidence saying something actionable (even though it may be pretend) and that gets in front of a judge, expect a warrant to get issued to tap into just about every part of your life.

Really? I don't think due process and law enforcement have anything to do with one another. Law enforcement arrests people on made up laws all the time just because they are doing something the law enforcement officer doesn't like, there is no consideration of presumption of innocence. Law enforcement's job is to enforce "the law" as they interpenetrate it -unlike civilians where "ignorance of the law is not an excuse" in law enforcement they certainly an go with ignorance of the law as long as the judge thinks it's "reasonable". Let's not forget the police have been embedding themselves in peaceful protest groups for the last 100 years.

>And while random commentators on the internet are not obligated to honor it, law enforcement is supposed to.

This is not the standard actually applied to law enforcement in the US. You can be convicted of nothing other than resisting arrest. Resisting arrest for what? Literally does not matter.

Also if you are arrested and found innocent, you are not compensated in any way for that arrest, which was clearly wrongful. Police in general are simply exempt from unlawful detention, except in cases of a well connected individual.

>Also if you are arrested and found innocent, you are not compensated in any way for that arrest, which was clearly wrongful.

Not only that, there are likely fees and fines.

Assumption of innocence is for the court. The prosecution and law enforcement are not supposed to assume innocence, they are supposed to do everything in their legal power to prove guilt. There are things they can't do without reasonable suspicion, or probable cause, but these are vastly lower thresholds.

To add a counterpoint, that specific example is really a poor choice to get the point across. It’s been established (https://www.insider.com/kidnapping-conspiracy-whitmer-fbi-in...) that the Whitmer plot was run by the FBI itself, in a way having agents LARPing as terrorists.

Also, I would hope the real LARPing community can feel safe enough to share tips on what to do if they run into police while running around the woods with foam swords.

Nothing has been "established" except that a number of those involved got convicted. It's silly to think the FBI can force people to commit crimes they had no desire to commit.

Blackmail, lying, misinformation, manipulation, and gaslighting: the tools of an undercover FBI agent.

Such things have always been a part of law enforcement repertoire.

When the FBI was engaging in such "entrapment" against Muslim Americans after 9/11, you would never hear the right-wing complaining, but now of course that their own are turning out to be the perps and the targets, suddenly they want to act like they are against law enforcement over-reach and malfeasance. Except of course when the victim is Black, and then they switch back to not caring.

At the end of the day, a good person can't be convinced to engage in terrorism or violence of any kind, whether politically or religiously motivated. The notion that people who wanted to kidnap someone--for the stupidest and most ignoble of reasons--are "victims" here is lacks any moral credibility or seriousness.

And what's more, it's whiny, weak, and hypocritical. If you ask those criminals (that's all they are) or their supporters whether they think masculinity is in decline and under attack in America, they'd probably launch into a whole spiel of grievances, yet when it push comes to shove, those guys wanted to be absolved for responsibility for their actions and for the corruption of their own hearts and minds. Not manly at all. No integrity.

> At the end of the day, a good person can't be convinced to engage in terrorism or violence of any kind

This implies that only full pacifists can be good persons. Because for everyone else, there is a situation in which they will engage in violence, and all you have to do is fool them into thinking they're in that situation.

Instead of morally corrupting someone, all you have to do is fool them about what the facts are.

And that is a lot easier, and it's what the FBI in fact does. From police work, they know exactly the type who can be convinced to not only confess whatever you like, but come to believe it too. The world is full of people with little faith in their own perception, memory or understanding of reality, and they are not any more likely to be principled pacifists than anyone else.

Wait, this is a right vs left wing issue in USA? Explains the very low quality and very tribal discussions here. I thought this was about privacy and government overreach and in those threads the discussions are much better, but apparently all of that goes out the window when you add tribal conflicts...

Republicans endorse political violence when it’s targeted against their political opponents - the plot to kidnap and execute the Michigan governor was “just a joke” (the perpetrators have been convicted and are currently incarcerated).

And seems like Democrats endorse police overreach when it is targeted against their political opponents, since it is them who are all over this thread saying basically "nothing to hide, nothing to fear". I wonder where all of those are in the typical police threads? ACAB except when cops did something I like, then it is "trust the cops to interpret this correctly!"?

Politics is tiring for that reason, most people lose their rational thinking ability when that gets involved, and to an outsider all of it just looks like insanity.

Maybe the real world is a complex place where you have bad actors that need stopped, and in some cases those bad actors are also the police.

If you're trying to reduce any real world situation to a binary set of choices, you're almost always going to be incorrect. When I was a teenager I was working in a shop and a number of people around there had more radical views on the government. A few of them commonly got together and did what we'd consider LARPing now (this was 90s). One of them seems to have more a more violent anti-government take over the others. Wasn't long before the FBI was down there arresting him and he eventually served a healthy sentence over his actions.

Unfortunately Google has become a memory hole on older news like this, and I can no longer remember his name to find any articles on this.

The “police overreach” you are protesting is that a paramilitary group was not allowed to kidnap and execute a governor.

The overreach in question is that the police were allowed to arrest and prosecute those people in full accordance with the law.

When conservatives are used to feeling privileged, equality feels like oppression.

Right back atcha

Yeah, I don't see a clear case for either party having more privilege. Democrats have more control over academia, news media, and tech companies. Republicans are the typical party of the 1%, win elections without the popular vote, and often have status quo bias on their side. This makes sense; we should expect both sides to have equal power because, well, duh. That's what lets them be 'both sides' instead of the libertarians and socialists.

Just like terrorism, if the person saying "Let's kidnap a government official" is an FBI agent but you didn't know, you still decided to conspire with that idea. The reason the bar for entrapment is so high is that the societal expectation is that you WON'T DO A BAD THING, even if 30 CIA agents all offer to sleep with you or give you a billion dollars or prepare everything for you and you just have to sign a sheet of paper.

You probably shouldn't conspire to kidnap someone, regardless of who came up with the idea first. You are expected to just not engage with the guy suggesting it.

^ this reads like a terrorist supporter still trying to justify their support of terrorism.

They’ve already been convicted, they’re in jail and will be for a few more years.

You lost, get over it.

Friendly reminder that the three-letter agencies are very well embedded in every single "subversive" organizing community in the U.S., be it "left" or "right-wing."

Not perhaps always, but I've seen the term "LARPing" used in a more tongue-in-cheek and disparaging way. Might be part of it some times.

"Did you hear what Jim has planned?"

-"Oh he's just LARPing"

The blatant lying that law enforcement has to deal with on a daily basis is uderappreciated.

The US has a legal system that permits a defendant to say many things, like "My buddies and I were participating in a fantasy scenario where we plotted in detail and collected supplies to kidnap the governor of our state... but it was just a game. Like those other people who play games!"

Good for the authors in making an effort to clearly distinguish between protected speech and non-protected conspiracy to commit a crime.

> The US has a legal system that permits a defendant to say many things, like "My buddies and I were participating in a fantasy scenario where we plotted in detail and collected supplies to kidnap the governor of our state... but it was just a game. Like those other people who play games!"

You can even get acquitted for it because it turned out that the FBI was the dungeon master all along: https://chicago.suntimes.com/columnists/2022/4/13/23023950/m...

5 guilty convictions, 4 guilty pleas, and 5 not guilty verdicts seems like a balanced justice system? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gretchen_Whitmer_kidnapping_...

Conspiracy plots are hard to prosecute, because who-did-what-when-with-what-intent is complex.

Which is why our founders had the good sense to bake jury trials right into the constitution. The focus on law enforcement, who in this particular case, were themselves involved in the "LARPing" to large extent, is bizarre.

The purpose of the criminal justice system isn't to punish every single unruly act. It's to match punishments with the actual crimes committed. It's bizarre to see Hacker News blindly cheering on this document, although, understandably it's because most people probably don't personally like those defendants.

So.. of course it becomes the focus of the top comment.

I'm cheering it on because I remember the Secret Service's ignorant CFAA fumbling in the 90s.

To be clear, law enforcement can also lie during the course of investigations, etc. Pretty much all the way up to the stand.

I'm not opining whether that's a good rule or not, just wanted to be clear that this is also a rule within the US legal system.

The blatant lying from law enforcement that the citizenry has to deal with on a daily basis is underappreciated.

The US has a legal system that permits a police office to say anything, but a citizen must not lie to a police officer.

The Miranda warning is not a good sign - it reminds the citizen that the government can and will use anything a citizen says for its own purposes.

That's a weird way of looking at the Fifth Amendment.

You have the right to say nothing.

Yes, but I would prefer not to exercise that in court, it would be better if the government behaved itself towards its citizens. You also have the constitutional right to a speedy trial, but in practice that doesn't look hot either.

> citizenry has to deal with on a daily basis

Sounds like a hyperbolic statement. Most citizens may be more likely to say that they do not have to deal with people who commit crime and lie to them on a daily basis unless you are in a very rough neighbourhood with very little law enforcement.

People who are policing do have to deal with this daily, however there is a change that the police could potentially form some kind of a sampling bias on new encounters with average looking citizens after dealing with so many lying criminals on a daily basis.

A colleague (non-white, of course) in a former workplace would not pull off the Interstate in certain areas of the nation because they didn't trust police. No, they were not paranoid, only regularly cautious, they were from South America.

I'm a white US native and I do the exact same. I made sure I had enough gas to get through Alabama (at exactly the speed limit) without stopping because of the stories I've heard, and those aren't even "that bad" when it comes to bad interactions with police.

Look up civil asset forfeiture. It's legalized theft.

In that context, the table they describe is a disaster.

If a group of actual LARPers doesn't want spectators, isn't part of a larger LARPing community, doesn't have rules/character sheets, is concerned about law enforcement (!) then they look like terrorists, based on this guidance.

The problem is that they've commingled a handful of objective facts with a handful of mental states and motives that are only known to the individuals.

The only reliable factor is if they are using live weapons and ammunition. Sadly, law enforcement is likely incapable of using that single, obvious factor to judge the legality of what is otherwise creative expression, and therefore leans into the pseudo-forensics provided here.

I arrived at the same conclusion, but I had to re-read it to be sure, because it doesnt exactly flow that well, particularly at the first third or so.

And there I was, assuming someone else sees all those militia types and tacticools as LARPing out their war heroism and combat fantasies as adults, only with real weapons instead of wooden ones.

That being said, my wooden "E-11 replica" is still around at my uncles place, 30 odd years later.

> When armed militia members claim all of their organizing/preparation is just recreational, and totally unlinked to violence that members do eventually commit, it's important to have delineated standards to be able to refute that.

I think the delineation between the members to that eventually commit violence and the ones who can successfully use the "LARPing" defense is whether or not they committed any crimes. It's pretty simple to me. This sounds, to me, a lot more like a guide on how to convict people who committed no crimes associated with the criminals who did.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com