dagblog - Comments for "Several shot at San Diego County synagogue; police detain man for questioning"

Here's the current FBI

artappraiser — Thu, 09 May 2019 18:20:00 +0000

Here's the current FBI program revealed in one case, an 18 yr. old American white guy with a Christian name in Arlington,Texas with no apparent link to terror groups just pled guilty to recruiting on the internet for a Pakistani terrorist organization. Undercover FBI agents pose as facilitators willing to help others join. They talk up people on "social media". Some 18 year old types talk with others on the internet, notice someones saying they want to join. Connects that person with the undercover FBI guy, gets charged with recruiting.

Arlington man pleads guilty to recruiting for Pakistan-based terrorist organization

Here's the DOJ press release

old story with picture

North Texas 18-year-old charged with supporting terrorist group

I can find nothing, zero, zip, about the person who actually wanted to join the group. Was he an undercover agent wanting to entrap, too? Just from another country?

Does that spell keeping this country safe or what?

I don't see much difference with what a lot of 18 year olds in 1968 were up to. Not all of them ended up bombing. There's got to be a better way than to use this amount of manpower on this type of thing:

The FBI and its Joint Terrorism Task Force members, including the Arlington Police Department, the Fort Worth Police Department, the Tarrant County Sheriff’s Office, the Naval Criminal Investigation Service, Homeland Security Investigations, and the Texas Department of Public Safety conducted the investigation, the release said.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Jay Weimer prosecuted the case with the assistance of Bridget Behling, an attorney with the National Security Division’s Counterterrorism Section, the release said.

Jack Shafer @ Politico.com

artappraiser — Thu, 02 May 2019 15:21:53 +0000

In reply to WaPo is headlining the

Jack Shafer @ Politico.com reports how New Zealand just flipped big time for censoring even the mention of hate speech by white supremacists, voluntarily, and opines against it, summing up: Drop the blinders, New Zealand. You can’t stop a threat you have blinded yourself from seeing.

So protest groups can simply

rmrd0000 — Wed, 01 May 2019 01:39:55 +0000

In reply to I suggested at the start of

So protest groups can simply expect the government to crap on them?

If true, it should be the norm for some Progressives to doubt the veracity of the government when it claimed that the Black Panthers were the most dangerous terrorist group in the country.

I think there is more internet searching going on to detect threats.

I suggested at the start of

artappraiser — Tue, 30 Apr 2019 17:14:12 +0000

In reply to So you have no problem with

I suggested at the start of this discussion that maybe it might be better to get tough on AR-15's than to have the FBI try to infiltrate angry hate-speech groups to prevent violent acting out. Precisely because the history of results is quite spotty, sometimes very ugly, like with the Black Panthers.

The idea of gathering intel on groups that practice hate speech by infiltrating them in hopes of getting warnings on them acting out violently is not great.

If they really want to do great damage, they find ways to get around it.

While regulating access to major weapons seems to help prevention more. But I am not sure.

What I do know is that we do not have a bunch of brilliant rocket scientists working the intel beat for the FBI. It's not like the movies, they are not geniuses who can predict individual human behavior within a hate group.

9/11 intel operation was a mess. They claim they prevented the Millenium Plot. Did they really? Or Ruby Ridge, Oklahoma City bombing by Tim McVeigh, Waco seige standoff...how did those turn out as far as protecting the public? Or DC shooters?

And just plain lying and making up shit to look like they are doing something. I read this piece about a Gitmo prisoner at The New Yorker the other day

Guantánamo’s Darkest Secret

The U.S. military prison’s leadership considered Mohamedou Salahi to be its highest-value detainee. But his guard suspected otherwise.

It was very very clear from that story that Salahi knows nothing useful, never knew anything useful and was never going to be involved in acting violently. They just make shit up.

There's no brilliant genius at the top able to say: it's stupid to infiltrate and do ops within the Black Panthers but smart to do so with the KKK. They are always just very faulty human beings.

Going after and prosecuting perps after they act out is more of a science. Prediction is not, playing head games with them inside their groups is not.

So you have no problem with

rmrd0000 — Tue, 30 Apr 2019 15:29:12 +0000

In reply to So were you unhappy about

So you have no problem with government sanctioned assassination of American citizens?

Edit to add:

They saw no difference between the Black Panthers and Martin Luther King Jr.

Perp's family put out a

artappraiser — Tue, 30 Apr 2019 04:25:12 +0000

In reply to Several shot at San Diego County synagogue; police detain man for questioning

Perp's family put out a statement that says his actions are a great shame to them and that he is now a part of the history of evil perpetrated on Jewish people for centuries and that how our son was attracted to such darkness is a terrifying mystery to us...It's short, read the whole thing:

Statement from the family of John T. Earnest. The Earnest Family does not anticipate giving any more public statements on this matter until after the criminal case is resolved. Please direct all inquiries to their attorney, Earll M. Pott at (619) 239-8131. pic.twitter.com/81662R7Egy
— Klinedinst PC (@klinedinstlaw) April 29, 2019

For example Is this symbolic

artappraiser — Tue, 30 Apr 2019 04:18:56 +0000

In reply to The Black Panther Party was

For example Is this symbolic hate speech or a real threat of real violence?

chants like "The Revolution has come, it's time to pick up the gun. Off the pigs!",[50] helped create the Panthers' reputation as a violent organization. ~ Wikipedia entry on Black Panther Party

I actually remember seeing people chant that one. How is a low-paid not-a-mind-reading-rocket-scientist, law enforcement officer supposed to know at the time this kind of speech is just starting to gain traction?

Would you support law enforcement checking out and surveilling the activity of everyone in the Charlottesville march that chanted Jews will not replace us or not? There is actually no hint of threat of physical action in those words. Or just the ones that got into actual physical altercations that are actually against the law?

It's an interesting post

ocean-kat — Tue, 30 Apr 2019 04:14:25 +0000

In reply to I don't agree that's the

It's an interesting post about your view of how ubiquitous the support for violence was at that time. I think I've already acknowledged that. But it really doesn't address my point. You see, while not actively involved I was alive and aware, I am a very left leaning liberal, and I didn't support violent bombings especially when people were killed. Still don't. You have a choice here. You can change your comment to , "Very few on the left was a fan of infiltrating the Weathermen or Black Panthers with the pretext of investigating violent crimes." I really don't know how many supported violence though I'm sure there was some debate and disagreement. Or you can change it to "Oceankat and Oceankat alone on the left was a fan of infiltrating the Weathermen or Black Panthers with the pretext of investigating violent crimes" That seems unlikely, I'm sure it was more than just me. But it's simply inaccurate to say, "nobody on the left was a fan of infiltrating the Weathermen or Black Panthers with the pretext of investigating violent crimes."

So were you unhappy about

artappraiser — Tue, 30 Apr 2019 03:27:14 +0000

In reply to The Black Panther Party was

So were you unhappy about them infiltrating the KKK as well? Because that bigger picture is what I am talking about here: surveillance by law enforcement of groups angry about society in order to prevent violent action.If you want them to surveil all the white suprematist kids on 8 chan, next up could be a black separatist online group.

I don't agree that's the

artappraiser — Tue, 30 Apr 2019 03:16:25 +0000

In reply to Since we have freedom of hate

I don't agree that's the correct way to describe what happened, I was basically "there" and part of it all. So many of us used hate speech, hardened SDS and naive high schoolers both and everyone in the "movement' inbetween. I.E., we called Johnson and Nixon baby killers, we called cops "pigs", we talked about revolution and "taking it to the streets", we didn't think twice about throwing stones in response to tear gas, most speakers at protests were full of passionate anger and hate at the government, we thought of those who tore apart the 68 Democratic convention as heroes and compatriots, we went to meetings where we watched films on how wonderful the Vietcong's fight was against our pig government, we sold Red Star Express on the street corner that called for the overthrow of government to support those meetings, we thought an honor to get arrested at a protest. Etc.

Things grew worse and worse after Kent State. It was AFTER THAT, when nothing changed but got worse with the surveillance, that some of the more radical types like the Weathermen turned to a higher level of violence and more secretive planning.

I started at UW Madison a year after the bombing of Sterling Hall. And truth be told, a year after that, no one I knew was glad that Fassnacht was killed and 3 other injured, but neither was anyone I knew unhappy about the strike at Dow Chemical. It was more like "collateral damage". I dare say some out of state freshman I knew chose UW precisely because that was where the action was, that was where the bombing happened. The majority hated those geeks with their crewcuts across the campus researching weaponry and they hated us back.

Had I been there contemporaneous with the 4 bombers, they sound just like some of the guys I went on dates with a couple years later. They weren't that odd, they were common enough types that did it. And therefore I could have useful intel if I was being surveilled.

You have to infiltrate to get intel about planning of possible actions, they have to spy, that's just the way preventive action with angry groups works. The majority in them are not given to planning violent action but those planning violent action usually hang with a much larger sympathetic crowd.

Just the same thing these days, when jihadi types end up hanging with and talking with a much larger radically conservative Islamic population that isn't planning violence, like a mosque with a Wahhabi imam. They are all just hating, some end up violent. You can either surveil or you can limit the kinds of weaponry available. Those are your choices for prevention.

Prosecuting after the fact isn't preventive action.

But doing all this, this is where you end up with the problem of entrapment, the infiltrators basically inciting violence. And eventually if not checked, a state like the GDR, where everyone is watching everyone else...