Post: #1

Instead of looking for active terrorists, the FBI continues to spend taxpayer money on this bullshit. Techdirt sums it up nicely here:

"The details are familiar: random guy with no actual connection to terrorists, and no actual way to build a connection with terrorists, is taken in by an FBI undercover agent who works with him to build a "bomb" that was never a bomb. In other words, there was no plot. There was no bomb. There was just a bunch of undercover agents playing dressup, and one Joe Schmo who thought it was all real."

It's a real shame the majority of Americans aren't aware of (and don't really care about) these shams and the vast taxpayer resources being allocated to such bullshit work.

But hey, as long as the FBI can claim "Victory" at the end of the day and continue to justify to Congress each year its need for vast resources and increasing surveillance power. [/quote]

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/201302...eats.shtml

Quote:FBI 'Stops' Yet Another Of Its Own Terrorist Threats
from the playing-dress-up dept

Well, there they go again. We've talked a bunch about how the FBI has gotten really good at stopping its own terrorist plots and they've gone and done it again. Right here in the San Francisco Bay Area, the FBI has gleefully announced how they've stopped an attempt to bomb a Bank of America building in Oakland. The details are familiar: random guy with no actual connection to terrorists, and no actual way to build a connection with terrorists, is taken in by an FBI undercover agent who works with him to build a "bomb" that was never a bomb. In other words, there was no plot. There was no bomb. There was just a bunch of undercover agents playing dressup, and one Joe Schmo who thought it was all real. Maybe next time, the FBI can turn it into a reality TV show on Spike. Ralph Garmin as... a fake terrorist. I'd watch it.

This all comes just a week after On the Media profiled a new book called Terror Factory: Inside the FBI's Manufactured War On Terrorism. That book appears to collect a bunch of these stories, talking about how this is a major effort in the FBI these days: making up fake terrorist plots in order to stop people they themselves convinced to take part in the "plots" and then generate big headlines around them:

The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI's Manufactured War on Terror shows how the FBI has, under the guise of engaging in counterterrorism since 9/11, built a network of more than 15,000 informants whose primary purpose is to infiltrate Muslim communities to create and facilitate phony terrorist plots so that the bureau can then claim victory in the war on terror.

Think of just how many resources are wasted in entrapping random people, rather than stopping real crime. I don't see how this makes us any safer at all. Frankly, it makes me a lot more terrified.

Post: #2

It used to be that you had to keep your citizens scared via reports like this so they would let you go to war, but now Americans are so distracted with their iPads that they don't even care.

Post: #3

"We've always been at war with Oceania".

Post: #4

The article is so slanted however that I couldn't get past the two first paragraphs, even though the facts might be correct.

Post: #5

What sickens me is that most of these useful idiots for the FBI would probably never have actually tried to commit a crime if the FBI agent had not contacted them, pretended to be exactly in agreement, and then encouraged them to escalate by being seemingly willing and able to provide a bomb. It's an indisputable fact of human behavior that a group will "go farther" than an individual would who was acting alone. The supposed 'terrorist' is bing convinced by the agent's apparent agreement and help that what he is doing is the right thing, and to actually do it, when if the agent had not sought him out and gained his trust by agreeing and amplifying, the situation would have likely remained just another guy on the Internet with an opinion.

Post: #6

Isn't this the very definition of entrapment?