Australian Federal Police would repeat undercover operation on autistic teenager | Hacker News Reader

Australian Federal Police would repeat undercover operation on autistic teenager

abc.net.au

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Not a particularly uncommon story though this is a particularly extreme version of it. There's been several times here in the US where a person was arrested for a plot where every single other person they ever talked to was a Fed, left to their own devices they'd never have the means or push to carry out the plot but the government found someone with sympathies and made sure they had the push and means to get a big enough case out of them.

On a meta side though I'm not sure this is really HN news other than I guess the fact it mostly took place over Discord.

This was a 13 year old child whose own family had gone to the police for guidance.

The police is the last place you'd ever want to go for seeking guidance on mental health issues. I wonder why the family chose such a place.

I agree in a disillusioned way. The police should be able to better handle people with mental issues. Which is why it's good when there's a spotlight on it.

Tragic! First responders should be some of the best equipped to deal with mental health issues, as by nature of the job they will be exposed! I'd bet more police cases involve "mental health" than "guns," but I doubt their training reflects this.

Because he wanted to shoot up a school

First of all, let's get the facts straight. It's the police that gave him the idea.

> An undercover operative who went in and instead of trying to assist the child… whose actions actively radicalised a 13-year-old boy with autism when the family had come to him for help, who put ideas of becoming a sniper and a suicide bomber,

It's sick behavior, taking advantage of a mentally ill child for career gain. The same goes for anyone suggesting it was the right call.

Second of all, what the child wanted is no reason for taking him to the police instead of proper medical professionals. The police aren't incentivized to cure mental health issues. It's quite the opposite, as this whole saga shows.

> First of all, let's get the facts straight. It's the police that gave him the idea.

The obsession with violence, desire to do harm, and specific plan to take actions to effect that harm all predate his interactions with the police.

> Thomas, an NDIS recipient with an IQ of 71, was first reported to police by Victoria’s Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) and then by his parents because of his fixation with Islamic State, which included him accessing extremist material online and making threats to other students. Why Australian police are being accused of further radicalising an autistic 13-year-old boy – video

>On 17 April 2021, his parents went to a police station and asked for help because Thomas was watching Islamic State-related videos on his computer and had asked his mother to buy bomb-making ingredients such as sulphur and acetone.

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/feb/03/austr...

>"He had [a] long-standing fixation on ISIS. He had expressed a desire to carry out a violent act. He expressed the desire to carry out a school shooting. He was researching material on how to build a bomb, he was engaging with like-minded individuals," the deputy commissioner said.

Even every other mitigating circumstance aside, he was 13.

I'm glad to hear that the Australian court system took the right tack with this case, though. As an American, I'm aware of far too many instances where law enforcement entrapped and then threw the book at a teenager. Grown men and women who treat youths like this should be profoundly ashamed of themselves. Just to build a career? Monsters.

It's disgusting how the same system that exploits vulnerable children for career growth also constantly invokes the "think of the children" fallacy in an attempt to promote invasive mass surveillance and deny the public access to secure encryption technologies.

Autistic fixations of this type shouldn't be exploited by monsters like this. This is completely ghastly behavior by the law enforcement involved.

The FBI did the same thing:

https://abc7chicago.com/adel-daoud-sentence-terrorism-doud-p...

> It included an undercover officer targeting the boy online and telling him he would make a good sniper or suicide bomber.

LOL they tried to feed him the Uncle Ted pill

Many such cases!

Though the blame here is on the parents, kid has an IQ of 70, autism, and is just left alone on discord? That's never going to go well. Someone is going to use him as a pawn in something, if he's lucky it'll only be something dumb like cc fraud.

That leads to an interesting question. Sure this kid is what, 13? What happens when he is a young adult, 20 years old? You can't make an IQ test for allowing access to the internet, a license as it were.

I don't know what the solution is but I do think that the current system of 'everyone has access to everything' isn't viable because people _do_ get groomed into doing dumb shit and they _will_ be exploited by superior and more organised forces who are quite adept at constructing a complex system from multiple pieces.

Frankly speaking the only winning move is not to play. Or just to post cat pictures.

Though I have to say blaming the internet isn't entirely fair. I've seen real-life grooming take place and it's very insidious. It generally prays on the desire of naturally helpful nice people to be helpful and to disregard the true nature of the person/thing they're actually helping.

My gut feeling is that almost every (perhaps exactly every) solution will have worse properties than the current. Putting a centralized group in charge of access to communication and information seems like something that is bound to go poorly, almost surely more poorly than the one in a million risky outcomes like this.

I'd agree there should be no centralized group in charge of access to communication and information, however for individuals who are unable to care for themselves due low IQ and/or mental illness and who are already living with parents/care takers, those people watching over them should be responsible for monitoring that person's use of the internet and keeping them safe from scammers, abusers, kiwi farms, and police departments who would exploit them the same way they're responsible for keeping them from running out into traffic and burning the house down. In this case, the kid's parents failed in their responsibility to keep their child safe from online threats who (this time) happened to be the police.

We don't need a new system to keep people who are a danger to themselves and others off the internet, we just need the caretakers who are already responsible for them to understand the importance of not neglecting the online activity of those under their care.

The solution is for culture to adapt. This is the role folk tales once played - carrying the knowledge of various different kinds of danger.

Unfortunately the culture is adapting the other way and becoming about keeping everyone as online as possible because that maximises their exposure to advertising and commercial pressure.

The fact it exposes them to 24/7 predatory behaviour is... well, it is 24/7 predatory behaviour.

The damage being done here is significant.

But yes, there do need to be some modern folk tales told to kids, something like The Brothers Grimm but featuring discord groomers and furry pedophiles instead of trolls and orks.

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