Yet, millions of dollars were being poured into "Fusion Centers", efforts to coordinate activities between intelligence agencies and local law enforcement: what were they doing? Turns out they were busy monitoring Occupy Boston, same as Fusion Centers across the country: http://www.justiceonline.org/unaware_of_tsarnaev_warnings
They always ask for more surveillance funding/powers, yet they never have a good answer when it comes to what they do when they're granted such powers.
I sympathize with the goal of not giving law enforcement more surveillance powers, but I wonder how valid the anecdotal "connecting the dots" stories of law enforcement failures are.
For example, it's conceivable that law enforcement or intelligence agencies regularly get a huge volume of urgent tips, 90% of which are totally incorrect or useless, and that they nonetheless manage to stop 95% of super-bad acts like terror attacks. Then the public hears about the 5% that they don't stop, and especially hears about the 0.5%, say, where a probably-unreliable tip was not successfully used to prevent a super-bad act.
In order to argue convincingly that agencies are actually bad at using the powers or information that they already have, we would probably want to know a lot more about base rates (and about thwarted or deterred crimes).
Edit: This comment downthread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25579252 just before mine makes a somewhat similar point (although I was emphasizing the idea that we should want more data for this argument, while the other comment emphasizes the idea that there are more fundamental or important grounds on which to oppose expansions of surveillance powers).
The problem (luckily!) is, that the thing they are trying to detect happens extremely rare. And when you try to detect rare events, even if your methods are 99.9% accurate you will drown in false positives.
I once did the maths on facial recognition tech which was meant to recognize terrorists at Berlin main station. With the known number of commuters there and an accuracy of 99.9% (which is extremely optimistic) they would have over 600 false positives per terrorist if I remember correctly. The system they had installed there however wont even reach 80%...
Imagine you have an alarm that rings twice every day, and is real and serious only once a year. How likely are you to react in time?
I think this is the fundamental problem with the "we need more data and more rights"-strategy of most police and law enforcement.
I am convinced what they actually need is more personel with a good education.
Edit: what this kind of data is better at recognizing are broad movements in society like demonstrations, protests and such things.
> Edit: what this kind of data is better at recognizing are broad movements in society like demonstrations, protests and such things.
Yes, this is their real purpose. They're not rolling out these wide ranging systems at extraordinary expense when they're at all unsure they will actually solve the problem they're trying to solve.
2017: "more than 70 percent of the time, undercover Department of Homeland Security investigators were able to get through TSA checkpoints with mock knives, guns, and explosives.
Just two years ago, testing found a 95 percent failure rate."
>They always ask for more surveillance funding/powers, yet they never have a good answer when it comes to what they do when they're granted such powers.
Their remit is to protect the state, not you. Occupy movements / class consciousness pose a real threat to the state and therefore is of far higher concern than some lunatics bombing some plebs doing a marathon.
If Warner's girlfriend had told them he was planning to use the bomb to take out a major node in their mass surveillance infrastructure one imagines they might have pursued the investigation a little further.
Makes me wonder if most of the "give us more surveillance power" claim is nothing more than a convenient excuse surveillance apparatus give to "excuse" their lack of result.(and sometimes failures) Probably starting somewhere from the bottom/middle managers excuse, then that excuse being used by above manager, rinse and repeat to the top. Then politician with different incentive(voter satisfaction) granting that power just for their own game.
"oh if you just gave us the power by unshackling us from regulation, we could've done better! I promise, it's not related to our lack of efficiency or ingenuity!"
The only war you’re really good at fighting is the last one.
I don’t know much about the Fusion Centers, but post-9/11, the failure of intelligence and law enforcement to communicate was regarded as a major reason why the plot was never uncovered. In totality, there was a lot of signs something was coming but different organizations had different pieces so nobody could see the “big picture”.
So I’m just wondering if the focus on Fusion Centers and not on intelligence from foreign powers is just our gov’t “skating after the puck” instead of “skating where the puck will be”.
The military and security services have deployed vast, illegal domestic spying networks, on the basis that if USians give up their privacy, they will be able to exchange it for safety.
Here we see that not only is that untrue, but also that even with tips they can't seem to get basic, non-surveillance policework right.
Remind me again why we tolerate these abuses in the name of safety? We and they now know they aren't being used for safety, if indeed that was even possible.
What else could and will these massive surveillance powers be used for?
It is important to keep in mind that when security is working, you don't see any evidence of it. We don't actually know how many terrorist attacks have been stopped by this surveillance. It may well be a lot. It wouldn't surprise me at all to learn that many have been. Which is why it's so important that we do not ground criticisms of surveillance in arguments about efficacy. Surveillance is effective, or at least, it can be. Surveillance is wrong because it concentrates too much power in the hands of the government.
We don't actually know how many terrorist attacks have been stopped by this surveillance. It may well be a lot.
Actually, we do, because the FBI issues press releases when they succeed.
Here's a relevant paper from an FBI study of "lone offender terrorism" [1]
This guy fits the profile - white, some college, no major criminal history, not employed, marijuana user.
Which the FBI does. "Kenyan National Indicted For Conspiring To Hijack Aircraft On Behalf Of The Al Qaeda-Affiliated Terrorist Organization Al Shabaab.
Cholo Abdi Abdullah Obtained Pilot Training and Researched How to Hijack Aircraft in Order to Conduct a 9/11-Style Attack at the Direction of al Shabaab."[1]
Here's the FBI's list of terrorism-related press releases.[2]
Domestic surveillance is going to tell you about Americans on American soil. Are you proposing that people in this category are getting quietly disappeared? To my knowledge we have to either charge these people with terrorism (definitely news), or wait until they’re abroad and do a drone strike (not viable with an imminent attack in the US). And the latter strategy was a huge deal the one time it’s known to have been done intentionally (al-Awlaki).
> To my knowledge we have to either charge these people with terrorism (definitely news), or wait until they’re abroad and do a drone strike (not viable with an imminent attack in the US).
Your knowledge is incorrect.
Insofar as a person is an enemy combatant in law, they can be militarily detained without charges regardless of where they are caught and what their citizenship is (and, if they are charged and tried, it can be by military commission), see, Ex Part Quirin, 317 US 1 (1942), concerning exactly this question with regard to German saboteurs in WWII, two of which were US citizens and all of whom were captured on US soil.
Also, insofar as they are enemy combatants, they may be engaged by the military with force anywhere in the world, regardless of citizenship and location. It would be silly if the military couldn't fight active enemies when they were in US territory but had to wait for them to leave, regardless of citizenship (for one thing, that would have made fighting the Civil War difficult for the Union.)
A familiar situation to anyone who worked in a large organization of any kind. What’s really needed on the ground and what gets funded by the top are often only tangentially related.
He had no criminal record and it appears the only complaint against him was an uncorroborated and non-specific accusation from the girlfriend that he talked about bombs a lot, and a similarly vague concern from her attorney.
The police seem to have done what they could. We don’t want to live in a country where that would be enough evidence to invade and search his property without consent.
(incidentally, I believe this is the first time I have encountered the name “Throckmorton” in real life)
> The police seem to have done what they could. We don’t want to live in a country where that would be enough evidence to invade and search his property without consent.
We need accountability. We are entitled to it. We are entitled to asking law enforcement to demonstrate the actual need for the tools they are given and the latitude we allow them, not a landgrab during a moral panic. Currently, we seem to have none of that.
Search warrants are not intended to be difficult to obtain, but there must be some reasonable basis for the search. A close associate of the person in question with information regarding illicit activity on the property in question is probably sufficient cause, but IANAL. It is likely the police treated this as a frivolous complaint. There have been cases that were clearly bunk that were followed up with excessive zeal because of questionable reasons and just as many valid ones have probably been ignored.
> (incidentally, I believe this is the first time I have encountered the name “Throckmorton” in real life)
Weakly related fact: Throckmorton St. is a major thoroughfare in Fort Worth, Texas named for James Webb Throckmorton and 100 Throckmorton St. was once headquarters for Tandy Corporation -- Radio Shack.
> Search warrants are not intended to be difficult to obtain, but there must be some reasonable basis for the search. A close associate of the person in question with information regarding illicit activity on the property in question is probably sufficient cause, but IANAL.
You can't be serious. Think about this for 2 seconds. Tips to the police from "close associates" are probably the ones that are in most need of corroboration prior to a search, to ensure that police powers aren't being abused.
> Tips to the police from "close associates" are probably the ones that are in most need of corroboration prior to a search, to ensure that police powers aren't being abused.
It is clear neither of us are interested in search warrants being issued on glorified hearsay. Let me be more explicit that it is the responsibility of law enforcement to ascertain the trustworthiness of an unsubstantiated claim and to determine whether or not it is worth going forward or if they need to gather more evidence, or if the entire thing is just nonsense. No judge in their right mind should be approving search warrants on the basis of hearsay and the evidence gathered would almost certainly be ejected at trial as originating from an invalid search if the sole evidence presented for the warrant was, "This person who claimed that they were so-and-so's girlfriend said he was building bombs." See: Aguilar v. Texas, 378 U.S. 108 (1964).
In this specific situation, the woman's attorney reached out to law enforcement after being alarmed at statements she had made to him. Local law enforcement met with both the woman and the attorney at various times and both appear to have expressed strong concerns about what the terrorist was doing. At one point the woman appears to have explicitly stated that bombs were being made. The attorney is on the report as having stated that the terrorist, "knows what he is doing and is capable of making a bomb." This attorney seems to have extensive local connections and had also represented the terrorist in a previous civil matter.
I think this is sufficient grounds for a search warrant, if the local authorities really wanted the warrant. This isn't a criminal trial nor a writ of assistance, we only need a preponderance of the evidence here and it could and should have been narrowly tailored to only target the RV. I think that local law enforcement thought this was a nothingburger. They did their basic due diligence -- they ran some background checks and they came up clean. They tried to establish contact with the terrorist on a voluntary basis and were rebuffed. They then basically seem to have dropped the matter. The attorney seems to imply as such:
> He disputes that he told police they couldn't search the RV.
> "I have no memory of that whatsoever," Throckmorton said of MNPD's claim that said they could not inspect the RV. "I didn’t represent him anymore. He wasn’t an active client. I'm not a criminal defense attorney."
Yeah I don’t want to live in the country you’re describing. It’s better to have the odd bomb go off than the police snooping around based on mere allegations.
They certainly could have done more within the law. The FBI has been successful at snaring people who were merely thinking of committing terrorism, through elaborate sting operations.
You're very, very, very unlikely to be killed by terrorism in the US. Since 1995, fewer than 3,500 people have died from terrorist attacks. More people than that died from COVID19 yesterday alone.
How is your hypothetical related to the facts before? The poster above was showing that more people die from Covid each day than have died from terrorism in a decade.
Also, I would say that the disease would still be a bigger problem than the terrorism even in your scenario. Unknown diseases have unknown effects, and generally scale exponentially. Terrorism is not going to see an exponential explosion.
> We have to solve this kind of problem at the human level.
As technology accelerates, it's going to become easier and easier for a crazy person to inflict massive damage. With a knife, you can only kill a few people. With a gun, you can only kill a few dozen people. With a bomb, you can only kill a few hundred people.
Eventually, the only way to solve this problem will be mass surveillance.
Yeah it's the classic damned if you do damn if you didn't scenario.
I remember reading news about an old Indian man in America who was reported to be 'snooping around' by some concerned neighbors and then since he didn't understand English and comply with the police officers ended up in a hospital paraplegic (1). People condemned the police for being too harsh and making mountain out of a molehill situation.
> We don’t want to live in a country where that would be enough evidence to invade and search his property without consent.
It might make sense to switch this to "should be", as innocent people's privacy gets invaded by unlawful search and seizure all the time. Between civil forfeiture, DUI checkpoints, stop and frisk, etc, America is a country in which invasion of privacy under the guise of searching for nonexistent malicious intent happens very frequently.
It's all the more interesting that it happens so frequently without any evidence at all, and yet was not acted upon with actual evidence. Almost as if there was a bias modifying police behavior. You'll note, Anthony Warner was white.
Pull the other one - if his name sounded foreign, or if he had been black, they would have been there with a swat team, and he would have been shot on sight.
As to invade and search without consent... you just get a midnight court to rubberstamp your no-knock raid. There’s your consent.
Maybe you didn’t notice the extensive protests about bias in policing in the US this year. The police do a hell of a lot more over a hell of a lot less - it just depends on your socioeconomic background and skin colour.
How often do calls about potential bombers result in police shootings? If your comment is in earnest, I think you'd be relieved to know that it's very rare, regardless of the ethnicity of the people who are being searched/detained/arrested (feel free to ignore my comment if you were just going for hyperbolic cynicism)
I remember the HN post about Marak Squirs getting arrested for homemade explosives going off in his apartment and AFAIK the police didn't killed him.
>I was making a list, but if you really need a list, then you’ve not been following the news
Wouldn't Ahmed Mohamed be a counterexample, not an example? He has a "foreign sounding" name and there were no deaths or nighttime SWAT raids as a result of the bogus bomb threat his teacher called in.
>Ever hear of a woman called Breonna?
If you're referring to Breonna Taylor, I don't think she was accused of building bombs and no-knock warrants are an entirely different issue IMO from warrantless searches resulting from bomb threats.
From perusing the wikipedia list of unsuccessful terrorist attacks [1], I didn't notice a single alleged bombmaker who was killed by police. Including many who were foreign-born and who were of African-American or Middle Eastern descent.
Sure, but that's not normality, no one wants that to be standard police response. The whole point of the recent protests is to get real protections for all people, regardless of race or nationaloty, not to strip white Americans of theirs.
I don’t know, I think if white Americans were subjected to the same experiences as non-white Americans, then perhaps police reform would become an important topic for white Americans.
Unfortunately, that seems to be the only way to get people to care. No one cares about the treatment of prisoners and the abuse of law enforcement until it affects them. It’s sad, really. Videos don’t convince people because “everyone has an agenda” and they’re “isolated incidents”.[a]
[a]: Not actual quotes; they’re paraphrased from what I’ve heard previously
I once took a uber at night (near San Diego) and I got a really strong serial killed vibe. I kept doing small talk, while being very scared, in hope that this was not going to end up with me and my gf killed. A mindhunter’s ed kamp vibe. At the end of the ride I told that to my gf and she told me she felt the same way. We were pretty shook and we thought about alerting the FBI or smthg, but a vibe didn’t feel like a strong enough intel.
> Officers saw his RV behind the house, but the vehicle was fenced off and police were unable to see inside of it, the report said.
> "They saw no evidence of a crime and had no authority to enter his home or fenced property," Aaron said of officers' unsuccessful attempt to make contact with Warner or look inside the RV.
> Later that day, Aaron said, "the FBI reported back that they checked their holdings and found no records on Warner at all."
What was the reasonable course of action here? They didn’t see anything suspicious, no prior records. Anything more would be overstepping their authority, no?
I mean, they could have at least asked him, “we heard you’re making a bomb, is that true?” Sure, he may have said “of course not”, but they didn’t even talk to him so we don’t know.
He was a shut-in. He was nearing the end of his life. He transferred his house to a woman for $0. He had no obvious political ideology. He loved his pets dearly – all of whom had died. And at the end of it, no one was hurt but himself and some infrastructure.
The idea that this could have been prevented by police is simply mistaken. There was nothing to be done. Fertilizer and whatever else goes into a bomb is readily acquirable, and he did lots of yard work so it probably didn't even seem suspicious for him to purchase the ingredients (possibly over a period of years).
The song he played during the bombing was "Downtown" by Petula Clark. It's a happy song whose lyrics basically talk about going downtown to escape loneliness.
His song choice and the fact that he made efforts to evacuate the area lead me to a similar conclusion. He was lost in nihilism, had no reason to live, and wanted to go out with a bang. Obviously not meaning to excuse his actions -- only to explain them.
That song is not at all detectable on the video we have from just before the blast. I don't know if the cop who said he heard it was mistaken or lying, but it's been really weird to watch the media run with the story when it's clearly false.
On a less 'well, actually' note, I want to take up one other thing you wrote: that nothing could've been done to prevent this. And I agree: within the context of the status quo, it appears that nothing could have been done to stop this man from loading up his RV with homemade explosives and blowing up a chunk of Nashville.
But, I think we (collectively, as a society) owe it to each other to think about what we can do to reduce social isolation. This is attenuated by the pandemic where we are caring for each other by isolating ourselves from each other. However, we're at least halfway through this thing. What can we do on the other side to ameliorate chronic isolation of other people, especially elderly folks?
I'm not asking you for answers. Just asking folks who read this to think about it.
This is really confusing... the ex-girlfriend and Warner had the same attorney? Who was both calling the police on behalf of the woman and telling them Warner was a threat, and then stating on his behalf that he didn't agree to any searches? I don't see how this would have not have been a serious conflict of interest that would have required the lawyer to stop representing either or both parties.
>Throckmorton told The Tennessean while he represented Warner in a civil matter several years ago, Warner was no longer a client of his in August 2019. He disputes that he told police they couldn't search the RV.
>"I have no memory of that whatsoever," Throckmorton said of MNPD's claim that said they could not inspect the RV. "I didn’t represent him anymore. He wasn’t an active client. I'm not a criminal defense attorney."
Worst case, the PD might be making an excuse (either now or at the time of the original report) for why they didn't follow up properly.
> “The R.V., which has been identified by state and federal officials as the one that exploded in downtown Nashville, injuring three and disrupting telecommunications in the region”
> They saw no evidence of a crime and had no authority to enter his home or fenced property
They did their due diligence and couldn’t do anything more. Are we supposed to live in such a police state where a single warning would be enough to ruin your life?
I think the implication is that the ‘bad guys’ maybe shouldn’t actually be the ‘bad guys’. Our nation spends an obscene amount of money on the war on drugs. I’m not advocating for mass legalization of everything imaginable but maybe we should lay off a little bit? I mean do we need fully armored militias chasing down pot dealers? It seems like resources are tied up in drugs and stuff like this maybe doesn’t get as much attention because of that.
That’s how our system works today, how it has worked for a long time, and how it should continue to work. The Fourth Amendment calls for “probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation”. If someone says they personally witnessed another person building a bomb in their car, that is more than enough grounds for a search warrant.
This isn't some random call to the police, this is from a person who was in the house, who witnessed the bomb being made and then reported this to the police.
The list of things that the ATF considers to be "explosives" excludes a lot of things that are capable of going boom. Playing with explosives that you can legally make at home isn't an unheard of past time (even chemistry kits for kids used to include some crazy shit 30+ years ago. They don't any more, but I think that's more due to lawsuit aversion than legality)
If he was just mixing tannerite in a relatively safe context he wouldn't have been breaking any laws.
Um, hello, 911? I believe my neighbor vorticalbox is making a bomb. Better go have a look inside his house. I also heard he is hoarding illegal weapons and ammunition, so you should be prepared for a fight.
Search warrants have been issued, and indeed mass murder by the ATF, has been conducted on about that much before. Most people have no idea how appallingly low the barrier to obtaining a search warrant is.
Yet, millions of dollars were being poured into "Fusion Centers", efforts to coordinate activities between intelligence agencies and local law enforcement: what were they doing? Turns out they were busy monitoring Occupy Boston, same as Fusion Centers across the country: http://www.justiceonline.org/unaware_of_tsarnaev_warnings
They always ask for more surveillance funding/powers, yet they never have a good answer when it comes to what they do when they're granted such powers.