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.
As Wikipedia says: "At its peak of popularity, eugenics was supported by a wide variety of prominent people, including Winston Churchill, Margaret Sanger, Marie Stopes, H. G. Wells, Norman Haire, Havelock Ellis, Theodore Roosevelt, George Bernard Shaw, John Maynard Keynes, John Harvey Kellogg, Linus Pauling and Sidney Webb. Its most infamous proponent and practitioner was, however, Adolf Hitler who praised and incorporated eugenic ideas in Mein Kampf and emulated Eugenic legislation for the sterilization of "defectives" that had been pioneered in the United States." — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics#Supporters_and_critic...
My guess is that the FBI was monitoring the person(s) floating these ideas but didn't consider them a credible threat.
And yet, the "establishment of a dictatorship of the proletariat" in the history of communism's spread, without a single exception, has been accomplished at the barrel of a gun, with extraordinarily bloody results.
And then there's the starvation purges of entire regions of huge populations of people.
Oh, those wily leftist fringe thinkers and their peaceful ideas!
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...
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.
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
Given that tptacek is a shill for the US government and the US is literally Nazi Germany, it's safe to ignore tptacek.
Please continue to make valuable contributions to this community, brymaster.
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.
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.
0. throwaway HN id
1. unwarranted extreme historical references
2. use of the word "sheeple" on a superior tone referencing the HN and reddit crowds as some kind of "elite" that knows better than the other 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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
(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 ...")
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.
Definitely not the US government which is literally worse than Nazi Germany.
Sheeple need to wake up.
Also lol: Engineer, coder, and all around cheerful human being.
The HPD on the scene seemed pretty chill most of the time, but still. Goddamn.
Googling shows it is suddenly back, often with errors (e.g., InfoWars reports it as the FBI had a plan to kill OWS people).
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?
http://s3.amazonaws.com/dk-production/images/14030/large/Occ...
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.
How standards have eroded. Next time, we'll cling to "the US does better than Egypt"
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?
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.
Appropriate to whom?
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?
Oddly enough, a lot of sites hosting this release are down. Hmm.
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.
| 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.”
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.
You were right the post being silly......
Meanwhile, we have no idea what this plan is contingent on. The U.S. military made contingency plans for a hostile invasion of Canada, for goodness' sake.
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.