It's hard to know what to make of this as without the [DELETED] portions, as there's no evidence of government agencies being involved. I'm not sure why Occupy were not informed of such a plot though? Perhaps the FBI didn't think it was credible?
The part that worries me even more than the death threats was the classification of the Occupy movement as 'terrorist activity'. This opens them up to a whole catalogue of surveillance methods and methods of detention, and is a good illustration of terrorism powers being extended and misused for domestic dissent.
This misuse of the label 'terrorist' highlights the danger of employing extra-legal means to attack your enemies in other countries, it undermines the rule of law everywhere, and weakens the accountability of all law enforcement agencies. Assassination, torture, rendition, and detention without trial are all normalised now in the US for terrorists. The definition of an enemy for the state always includes some of its citizens, so you end up with scope creep where formerly completely illegal and unthinkable acts are considered normal, just because the word terrorism has been used in conjunction with a person or organisation.
Terrorist is todays communist, or yesteryears fascist, eugenicist, jap, negro, etc. Blanket arbitrary term to apply to dissenters you want to control and treat inhumanely, and society doesn't judge you for it because they are the "enemy" or "other". It incites an emotional response in people that let those holding the pen get away with way more than they should.
The most likely candidate to me seems some fringe right-wing types flapping their mouths in an internet forum. I've heard plenty of people at that end of the spectrum averring that the Occupy movement was some sort of Marxist 5th column under orders from Obama, or variants on that theme. Right-wing fringe thinkers like to fantasize about putting their guns to patriotic use in much the same way that leftist fringe thinkers like to fantasize about general strikes and establishment of a dictatorship of the proletariat.
My guess is that the FBI was monitoring the person(s) floating these ideas but didn't consider them a credible threat.
I've done some research before upvoting this. I thought whowhatwhy.com would be some kind of conspiracy site, but they just do investigative journalism. They are usually featured in Salon.com.
Eh, I'm with you right down to the point in the article where they start talking about this company Craft International who trained law enforcement snipers, and oh by the way were also at the Boston Marathon carrying backpacks with "markings resembling what was seen on an exploded backpack image released by the FBI."
Insinuating something both totally unrelated and highly conspiratorial is not how good investigative journalism works, and unfortunately that sort of slant takes away from my ability to fairly judge the facts of the piece.
That said, to be clear, I do appreciate the research you put in, and thanks for being thoughtful in your upvotes - just thought I'd offer that part of the article as a counterpoint.
> nobody is going to shoot you and your friends in the head for marching around
and
> They won't even point firehoses at you, or sic dogs on you. You are freer than Americans have been at virtually any other point in our country's history
Interesting :-) But I still do think it's a good idea for all of us to cool off before we jump to any conclusions based on things posted by new members with links to websites few of us had heard about before, even if these websites are not just conspiracy sites.
There is a lot of anger going around in here these days - and rightfully so - but it also attracts more radical comments with less convincing comparisons to totalitarian police states and it attracts a lot of hatred against Americans.
Just look at some of the comments to this post or the post yesterday about a girl who was jailed when ABC enforcement thought she bought a beer or the post a couple of days ago about a dog that was killed while its owner was arrested for filming a police raid.
The US is a big country, and we will be able to hear these stories every day if we want to. Right now, a lot of people really want to see stories that "demonstrate" that America is a police state. It kind of suits our mood.
Well that definitely justifies upvoting a speculative conspiracy theory to the front page of Hacker News.
Given that the US is literally Nazi Germany, it's 100% believable that the FBI would murder protesters.
I wish the sheeple could see the US for what it really is: literally Nazi Germany. People like us here on HN and reddit understand what's really going on, unlike the sheeple.
"An identified [DELETED] as of October planned to engage in sniper attacks against protestors (sic) in Houston, Texas if deemed necessary.
[DELETED] planned to gather intelligence against the leaders of the protest groups and obtain photographs, then formulate a plan to kill the leadership via suppressed sniper rifles.
...
This [DELETED] identified the exploitation of the Occupy Movement by [LENGTHY DELETION] interested in developing a long-term plan to kill local Occupy leaders via sniper fire."
Ah, if only there was as much diligence paid to this sort of thing as to file sharing and drug enforcement and server seizures. I guess the common man isn't as important, you know?
Hey, fellow techies--this is something you should be really concerned about. Selective enforcement of the most crucial laws (don't murder, conduct attacks, etc.) is really horribly bad for business.
These documents by themselves do not show any government complicity in a plot to kill Occupy leaders, as this article strives to imply. This was a criminal investigation into people that were allegedly talking about doing this.
As to why the targets of this investigation weren't arrested, in order to be arrested for conspiracy to commit a crime, you have to actually take a step toward executing the conspiracy. Planning or talking about it is not enough for an arrest. The FBI receives alot of information, much of it from criminals trying to save themselves, that turns out to be neither actionable nor credible. This appears to be an investigation that simply didn't go anywhere.
The question is who is [DELETED] and what would their motive be?
Killing Occupy "leaders" seems like the absolute worst way to make the Occupy problem go away. Can you even imagine the outrage?
The only way it could possibly be successful is by making it clear that if you protest you will be killed, and I like to think we're still pretty damn far from complete totalitarianism.
As always, it would come down to marketing. The secret would be to ensure that the sniper(s) appear to be lone wolves, rather than law enforcement agents. Any protests or occupations could then reasonably be split up on "safety" grounds, and at the same time the Occupy leaders would have to stay out of the public limelight for their own "safety".
The question is, why haven't [DELETED] been thrown in prison for many years? Especially after those gamers got long sentences for posting a "jk" comment in a chat room.
this just seems to indicate that the FBI was aware of a plot, by SOMEONE, to attack Occupy protestors. nowhere in the documents do I see information that the FBI itself made this plan and it would make a lot of sense if the FBI was tracking potential violence against protestors...
The use of the phrase ‘if deemed necessary,’ sounds like it was some kind of official organization that was doing the planning.” In other words, the “identified [DELETED” mentioned in the Houston FBI document may have been some other agency with jurisdiction in the area, which was calculatedly making plans to kill Occupy activists.
When the FBI is aware of planned terrorism against average Americans, it goes in with guns blazing and parades the bad guys out on TV to show how they foiled the terrorist plot (even if it's the FBI's own plot). In this case they identified someone who was apparently making real plans, but did nothing.
I'm going to cling on to hope that there is some kind of context missing here, because taking that paragraph at face value is terrifying.
(Example of context I hope is missing would be text like ... "In the event that members of the Occupy Movement have obtained a nuclear weapon and are threatening to detonate it ...")
Nah, probably not. Who cares about the shooting of some homeless and some damn hippies, right?
Edit: Folks, the country I grew up in and my ancestors fought for knew of a potential assassination attempt on innocent civilians, and apparently didn't care enough to warn the cops standing watch.
If it were an individual or group of terrorists planning to detonate bombs against the public, there would have been a raid and arrests and a big media show. But instead, the FBI knew that someone "planned to engage in sniper attacks" but did nothing? How could this be anything but a terrorist plot? The kind the FBI love to be seen foiling?
To my knowledge, actions against occupy-movements in the US generally didn't involve "repression of dissent" but rather "repression of wild camping where it is extremely inconvenient for everyone else".
Not everything they did was totally appropriate, but on the other hand it's really hard to dissolve such a camp without anyone getting hurt. The US certainly handled that better than Turkey.
"Under most U.S. laws, for a person to be convicted of conspiracy not only must he or she agree to commit a crime, but at least one of the conspirators must commit an overt act (the actus reus) in furtherance of the crime."
Does anyone know if the FBI could have arrested them on conspiracy to commit murder?
So, here is the common law/generic multistate answer (and what would have been chargeable in my old state):
If someone asked someone else to help them kill occupy leaders, this would have been solicitation (and the crime would be completed whether they said yes or no).
If they both agreed, and then committed some overt act in furtherance, it would be conspiracy. The overt act does not have to be related to the target offense of the conspiracy, just in furtherance. IE if you are being charged with conspiracy to commit murder, the overt act does not need to be "buying a gun". It could be "stealing money from an old lady that was later used to buy a gun".
Here, it just says "they planned to obtain intelligence, and then formulate a plan to kill people".
If they really just planned to have a plan, that doesn't seem like a conspiracy to commit murder, unless they all had really agreed to commit murder, and were still working out the details.
It's not really clear.
The FBI response: "... if the FBI was aware of credible and specific information involving a murder plot, law enforcement would have responded with appropriate action."
Maybe the FBI was just using some discretion. Afterall, they're not supposed to be the dept of pre-crime.
It's interesting news for sure, but using this to bash the FBI seems especially one-sided.
Had the actors in this story been different, I think the reaction would be different. Had LulzSec planned to attack some company but never did, and then they all went to prison for that, but it turns out it was just a bunch of people trying to impress each other with grand ideas, where would we stand on that story?
Doesn't the Army have contingency plans for everything? I recall there was some hubbub a little while ago when people discovered the Army has contingency plans on invading Canada or something like that.
Are you talking about War Plan Red? If so then it's not new: the plan was created in the 1920s and 1930s, and was declassified in 1974. It did cause some hubbub then.
But fear not! Canada had a counter to the plan, called Defence Scheme No. 1. The plan was to launch a surprise counter-invasion of several cities near the border (Seattle, Portland, Minneapolis, and Albany) then to wait for reinforcements from England.
Except no one ever told England that Canada would expect reinforcements in this situation, nor verified that they would be willing to provide them.
Cities like Halifax and Winnipeg are far more vital to Canadian industry than any of the American cities: without them, Eastern Canada would be cut off from Western Canada by rail (cutting off grain supply) and from the Atlantic by sea. It would effectively lay siege of all of Ontario and Quebec.
| Asked whether he was concerned that, if what he
| was saying was correct, it meant the FBI had not
| warned local police about a possible terrorist act
| being planned in his city, he said, “No. You’d
| have to ask the Houston FBI about that.”
Even if he were mad / concerned about it, he probably would not make a public comment to that effect. There are politics to consider here seeing as the HPD still needs to co-exist with the FBI and hopefully 'play nice' together.
To me it looks like the plan was if the protesters turned violent and attempted to burn down buildings, kill people, and go after whoever these [redacted] were there to protect, those [redacted] were going to respond lawfully with the necessary force?
First Edward Snowden and the whole PRISM thing and now this. What the hell is happening to the US government? I gotta say it doesn't look very bright from overseas
Warning: this comment gets very silly, because I think the story here is actually a very silly one, and can only be understood with a sense of humor. Yes, I'm gonna go against my hippie liberal leanings and say this story is probably mostly harmless. I believe that the plan to "engage in sniper attacks against protestors (sic) in Houston, Texas if deemed necessary" was formulated for the contingency when Occupy threatened to undermine government authority altogether, plunging the United States into anarchy. Because we know what happens next: a coup, followed by fragmentation into various regional governments, which in turn become subsumed in a race war as patriot groups and groups of parasitic degenerates battle to define the foundations on which civilization is rebuilt.
This is not an uncommon fantasy. Most people who are into guns are content to enjoy them for sport, as objects, and for limited self-defense scenarios, but a few like to have one or more elaborate fantasies for every exotic gun they own in which that gun becomes eminently practical. So some guy works for a police department that has some suppressed sniper rifles (thanks, War on Terror!) and naturally gets to thinking about the heroic ways he could use them to save the world by averting a horrible catastrophe. He knows it's all bullshit, but it's still a potent fantasy enabler.
It's no different from when you think about your hot sister-in-law, and you're thinking, "Oooh, yeah, she's so goddamned hot, I would just... wait, I would never do that to my brother. Well, supposing my brother died in a car accident. I would totally bend... wait, that would destroy my marriage. Okay, so my wife and my brother are in a car together on one of those dangerous mountain roads in South America, and it goes careening off a cliff... no, a bus containing everyone in my family except my sister-in-law goes careening off a cliff on the way to Lake Titicaca, and then we would console each other, and then, ooooh, yeah, so hot."
Except instead of a bus accident, you have Occupy undermining government authority, and instead of your hot sister in law, you have hot, hot, sexy firearms. Boom-chicka wow. I mean, it's never going to happen, but let's face it, you're only ever going to get the old familiar, and you get that, what, once a year? If all the stars align correctly, that is. And at your age, it takes a little more than the old familiar to get you remotely excited anyway. Your fantasies are all you have left. Put one such dreamer in a police department, and I'm sure some weird contingency plans get drawn up.
I think it can be used for organizing people for protests, too. Of course when you make it "public" you risk being infiltrated, and the FBI knowing your plans, but at least they won't know who you are - unlike doing the same thing over Facebook or e-mail or whatnot - so they can't arrest you before you even go to the protests, like they've done to some Occupy leaders.
grey-area|12 years ago
The part that worries me even more than the death threats was the classification of the Occupy movement as 'terrorist activity'. This opens them up to a whole catalogue of surveillance methods and methods of detention, and is a good illustration of terrorism powers being extended and misused for domestic dissent.
This misuse of the label 'terrorist' highlights the danger of employing extra-legal means to attack your enemies in other countries, it undermines the rule of law everywhere, and weakens the accountability of all law enforcement agencies. Assassination, torture, rendition, and detention without trial are all normalised now in the US for terrorists. The definition of an enemy for the state always includes some of its citizens, so you end up with scope creep where formerly completely illegal and unthinkable acts are considered normal, just because the word terrorism has been used in conjunction with a person or organisation.
zanny|12 years ago
anigbrowl|12 years ago
My guess is that the FBI was monitoring the person(s) floating these ideas but didn't consider them a credible threat.
drunkenmasta|12 years ago
gasull|12 years ago
http://www.salon.com/topic/whowhatwhy/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russ_Baker
Also, it's known that the FBI coordinated the crackdown on Occupy:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/29/fbi-coor...
sbisker|12 years ago
Insinuating something both totally unrelated and highly conspiratorial is not how good investigative journalism works, and unfortunately that sort of slant takes away from my ability to fairly judge the facts of the piece.
That said, to be clear, I do appreciate the research you put in, and thanks for being thoughtful in your upvotes - just thought I'd offer that part of the article as a counterpoint.
brymaster|12 years ago
tptacek just told us [1]:
> nobody is going to shoot you and your friends in the head for marching around
and
> They won't even point firehoses at you, or sic dogs on you. You are freer than Americans have been at virtually any other point in our country's history
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5987208
flexie|12 years ago
There is a lot of anger going around in here these days - and rightfully so - but it also attracts more radical comments with less convincing comparisons to totalitarian police states and it attracts a lot of hatred against Americans.
Just look at some of the comments to this post or the post yesterday about a girl who was jailed when ABC enforcement thought she bought a beer or the post a couple of days ago about a dog that was killed while its owner was arrested for filming a police raid.
The US is a big country, and we will be able to hear these stories every day if we want to. Right now, a lot of people really want to see stories that "demonstrate" that America is a police state. It kind of suits our mood.
cjambassador318|12 years ago
Given that the US is literally Nazi Germany, it's 100% believable that the FBI would murder protesters.
I wish the sheeple could see the US for what it really is: literally Nazi Germany. People like us here on HN and reddit understand what's really going on, unlike the sheeple.
thenewkid|12 years ago
"An identified [DELETED] as of October planned to engage in sniper attacks against protestors (sic) in Houston, Texas if deemed necessary.
[DELETED] planned to gather intelligence against the leaders of the protest groups and obtain photographs, then formulate a plan to kill the leadership via suppressed sniper rifles.
...
This [DELETED] identified the exploitation of the Occupy Movement by [LENGTHY DELETION] interested in developing a long-term plan to kill local Occupy leaders via sniper fire."
angersock|12 years ago
Hey, fellow techies--this is something you should be really concerned about. Selective enforcement of the most crucial laws (don't murder, conduct attacks, etc.) is really horribly bad for business.
pekk|12 years ago
Mandatum|12 years ago
[deleted]
downandout|12 years ago
As to why the targets of this investigation weren't arrested, in order to be arrested for conspiracy to commit a crime, you have to actually take a step toward executing the conspiracy. Planning or talking about it is not enough for an arrest. The FBI receives alot of information, much of it from criminals trying to save themselves, that turns out to be neither actionable nor credible. This appears to be an investigation that simply didn't go anywhere.
tlrobinson|12 years ago
Killing Occupy "leaders" seems like the absolute worst way to make the Occupy problem go away. Can you even imagine the outrage?
The only way it could possibly be successful is by making it clear that if you protest you will be killed, and I like to think we're still pretty damn far from complete totalitarianism.
de_dave|12 years ago
leke|12 years ago
Semiapies|12 years ago
iSnow|12 years ago
munin|12 years ago
gasull|12 years ago
The use of the phrase ‘if deemed necessary,’ sounds like it was some kind of official organization that was doing the planning.” In other words, the “identified [DELETED” mentioned in the Houston FBI document may have been some other agency with jurisdiction in the area, which was calculatedly making plans to kill Occupy activists.
jcromartie|12 years ago
zmmmmm|12 years ago
(Example of context I hope is missing would be text like ... "In the event that members of the Occupy Movement have obtained a nuclear weapon and are threatening to detonate it ...")
angersock|12 years ago
Edit: Folks, the country I grew up in and my ancestors fought for knew of a potential assassination attempt on innocent civilians, and apparently didn't care enough to warn the cops standing watch.
Forgive me a little fucking gallows humor.
angersock|12 years ago
The HPD on the scene seemed pretty chill most of the time, but still. Goddamn.
cinquemb|12 years ago
tzs|12 years ago
Googling shows it is suddenly back, often with errors (e.g., InfoWars reports it as the FBI had a plan to kill OWS people).
jcromartie|12 years ago
If it were an individual or group of terrorists planning to detonate bombs against the public, there would have been a raid and arrests and a big media show. But instead, the FBI knew that someone "planned to engage in sniper attacks" but did nothing? How could this be anything but a terrorist plot? The kind the FBI love to be seen foiling?
lifeguard|12 years ago
http://s3.amazonaws.com/dk-production/images/14030/large/Occ...
bayesianhorse|12 years ago
Not everything they did was totally appropriate, but on the other hand it's really hard to dissolve such a camp without anyone getting hurt. The US certainly handled that better than Turkey.
mehwoot|12 years ago
archgoon|12 years ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_%28crime%29#United_...
"Under most U.S. laws, for a person to be convicted of conspiracy not only must he or she agree to commit a crime, but at least one of the conspirators must commit an overt act (the actus reus) in furtherance of the crime."
Does anyone know if the FBI could have arrested them on conspiracy to commit murder?
DannyBee|12 years ago
So, here is the common law/generic multistate answer (and what would have been chargeable in my old state):
If someone asked someone else to help them kill occupy leaders, this would have been solicitation (and the crime would be completed whether they said yes or no).
If they both agreed, and then committed some overt act in furtherance, it would be conspiracy. The overt act does not have to be related to the target offense of the conspiracy, just in furtherance. IE if you are being charged with conspiracy to commit murder, the overt act does not need to be "buying a gun". It could be "stealing money from an old lady that was later used to buy a gun".
Here, it just says "they planned to obtain intelligence, and then formulate a plan to kill people".
If they really just planned to have a plan, that doesn't seem like a conspiracy to commit murder, unless they all had really agreed to commit murder, and were still working out the details. It's not really clear.
pstuart|12 years ago
Appropriate to whom?
logn|12 years ago
It's interesting news for sure, but using this to bash the FBI seems especially one-sided.
Had the actors in this story been different, I think the reaction would be different. Had LulzSec planned to attack some company but never did, and then they all went to prison for that, but it turns out it was just a bunch of people trying to impress each other with grand ideas, where would we stand on that story?
orthecreedence|12 years ago
Oddly enough, a lot of sites hosting this release are down. Hmm.
sliverstorm|12 years ago
a-priori|12 years ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Plan_Red
But fear not! Canada had a counter to the plan, called Defence Scheme No. 1. The plan was to launch a surprise counter-invasion of several cities near the border (Seattle, Portland, Minneapolis, and Albany) then to wait for reinforcements from England.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defence_Scheme_No._1
Except no one ever told England that Canada would expect reinforcements in this situation, nor verified that they would be willing to provide them.
Cities like Halifax and Winnipeg are far more vital to Canadian industry than any of the American cities: without them, Eastern Canada would be cut off from Western Canada by rail (cutting off grain supply) and from the Atlantic by sea. It would effectively lay siege of all of Ontario and Quebec.
pyre|12 years ago
unknown|12 years ago
[deleted]
unknown|12 years ago
[deleted]
powertower|12 years ago
EthanHeilman|12 years ago
talhof8|12 years ago
dkarl|12 years ago
This is not an uncommon fantasy. Most people who are into guns are content to enjoy them for sport, as objects, and for limited self-defense scenarios, but a few like to have one or more elaborate fantasies for every exotic gun they own in which that gun becomes eminently practical. So some guy works for a police department that has some suppressed sniper rifles (thanks, War on Terror!) and naturally gets to thinking about the heroic ways he could use them to save the world by averting a horrible catastrophe. He knows it's all bullshit, but it's still a potent fantasy enabler.
It's no different from when you think about your hot sister-in-law, and you're thinking, "Oooh, yeah, she's so goddamned hot, I would just... wait, I would never do that to my brother. Well, supposing my brother died in a car accident. I would totally bend... wait, that would destroy my marriage. Okay, so my wife and my brother are in a car together on one of those dangerous mountain roads in South America, and it goes careening off a cliff... no, a bus containing everyone in my family except my sister-in-law goes careening off a cliff on the way to Lake Titicaca, and then we would console each other, and then, ooooh, yeah, so hot."
Except instead of a bus accident, you have Occupy undermining government authority, and instead of your hot sister in law, you have hot, hot, sexy firearms. Boom-chicka wow. I mean, it's never going to happen, but let's face it, you're only ever going to get the old familiar, and you get that, what, once a year? If all the stars align correctly, that is. And at your age, it takes a little more than the old familiar to get you remotely excited anyway. Your fantasies are all you have left. Put one such dreamer in a police department, and I'm sure some weird contingency plans get drawn up.
gmoore|12 years ago
You were right the post being silly......
walid|12 years ago
Stealth-|12 years ago
kimlelly|12 years ago
That's where RetroShare comes in: http://retroshare.sourceforge.net/
It's:
1. Decentralized (real p2p, no central servers)
2. Encrypted communication
3. Easier to set up than encrypted email: Install -> Exchange "certificates" -> Done.
IMO, it's currently the best way to communicate.
mtgx|12 years ago
andyhmltn|12 years ago