Comment by noahc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by noahc | Hacker News Reader

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No.

What about 1Gb fiber connection makes one a terrorist?

What about buying Uranium off Amazon[1] makes one a terrorist?

What about starting an organization that promotes technology in the Midwest, a typically rural and industrial location, in need of new sectors makes one a terrorist?

The point is that we need to be more nuanced in our approach and show restraint. There are a lot of people with crazy ideas, however, doing things differently or having eclectic hobbies or dreams isn't what makes someone a terrorist.

What do we prefer?

We prefer freedom, liberty, and privacy to live our lives according to our own desires. Our desire for real safety is there, but security theater is ineffective. We can not prevent all terrorism, we can not prevent all harm. It is the cost of the freedom, liberty and privacy and one that we should be willing to pay. These are not absolutes, and trade offs can certainly be made. But today, we have traded too much freedom, liberty, and privacy for a false sense of security.

This is what we prefer: real safety balanced with real freedom, liberty and privacy.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Images-SI-Inc-Uranium-Ore/dp/B000796XX...

Nobody said they were terrorists, just that all of those factors combined ranked them higher to have the potential to commit a serious crime.

The point of FBI agents contacting people and reaching out is to get a human perspective on their situation, to be able to put in their file things that raw stats cannot show. Yes, purchasing uranium outside of an academic setting is a red flag.

How do you propose we achieve "real safety"?

> "There are a lot of people with crazy ideas, however, doing things differently or having eclectic hobbies or dreams isn't what makes someone a terrorist."

Then what does mark someone as a potential terrorist? Remember you must PREVENT crimes, not just punish people who commit crimes. Nobody was arrested or even felt like they were about to be arrested, it was a friendly and optional meeting to feel out their intentions.

There is a huge amount of variables that must be considered to identify someone with the potential to cause harm to society and commit terrorism. Usually that individual keeps quiet and is halfway good about preventing law enforcement from finding out. A face-to-face conversation allows an FBI agent to gauge the situation and hopefully figure out what that individual or organizations true motives are. If they are an energy startup, then fine, no problem, that's was the point of the meeting. Now there are 300+ million more people that the FBI has to make sure doesn't decide to start blowing up citizens, public officials, or organizations.

A quick google search shows the details of Homes for Hackers covered in the likes of Forbes, Wired, CNN and so on.

Traveling Nuker's site links to coverage on Yahoo Finance and SPN. A Google search points to numerous videos where the founders outline what they're working on.

It's not like these guys were trying to stay under the radar. Spending 10 minutes searching on Google would have made it obvious they aren't terrorist.

Something they did raised a red flag with the FBI. They got a friendly chat from an agent. I don't know hardly anything about their situation, what kind of things they've done on the internet, or what the red flag was. It seems like the situation was handled professional by all parties involved and I wanted to voice my opinion that not everyone has jumped on the anti-government bandwagon.

I think the point is that it's not unreasonable for any sort of red-flagging system (whether data-mining or someone's gut) to have a false positive in this instance, because odds are pretty good that's what this is. If you're the FBI, the confluence of Uranium purchasing, in-depth info gathering on nuclear facilities and watch-words like "hacker"[1] and "nuke" probably should raise eyebrows. The reality is that this is the sort of situation that we'd expect to trigger a false positive even in the most competent and well-run agency.

False positives are frustrating and time-wasting, but the reality is when you're trying to find something as infrequent and stealthy as terror cells, you're going to have a lot more false positives than actual hits. We have to trade off false positives against the risk of false negatives (not detecting actual terrorists), and so long as competent police-work confines the impact of the false positives to these sorts of quick and semi-intrusive visits it's not that bad. Obviously if the FBI screws up and ends up with an intrusive and wasteful investigation here that's a problem.

[1] - I'm aware we're trying to reclaim the word, but it still has a certain evil connotation in the public mind.

The problem is that, especially in recent years, law enforcement doesn't act in a manner that reflects that idea. They hold on to false positives quite strongly and often ignore evidence contrary to their already determined judgements. When you mix in the significant militarization of law enforcement, you get a very scary worldview.

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