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.
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...
"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.
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
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.
STOP USING THE WORD "SHEEPLE"!
It makes you look like the most mediocre revolutionary that has ever walked the earth.
There are MUCH better terms (no, i'm not going to give them to you, you need to do some research) for the people you have issues with, and your interests would be better served in engaging them in debate rather than quoting XKCD (http://xkcd.com/1013/).
I'm assuming you've never known anyone go through that. It's a personal tragedy, not an intellectual issue.
And there goes my karma down in 3,2,1,...
And yes, it was very much an accepted area of thought and research in academia from the late 1800s to the end of the second world war. It wasn't until it became associated with Nazi Germany that the idea became taboo.
the sheeple
Yeah, nice try tptacek. Continue the psyops
:)
Some sort of idiotic form of hyperbolic satire from reddit which does nothing but cause strife and shut down discussion. I thought this guy was hellbanned yesterday.
What a twist!
Also, I'm old.
The problem is: there's no good words to use, because they've been co-opted by political positions and value judgements. "Baby" indicates you're anti-abortion, "foetus" indicates you're pro-abortion. I went for pregnancy, because that implies the "potential to be a baby".
"Terminate" has the same problem. What are the alternatives? "Abort" is pretty much taken by the pro-lifers. It's such an emotive issue that in the UK, where there is no broad based political movement that wishes to outlaw it, medical professionals don't even have a word for it. They have words for specific procedures like EPRC, and as far as I can tell they change those terms every couple of years. And of course, the terminology is the same whether the pregnancy is still ongoing or not.
I can understand why someone would be driven to mock them.
The "War on Terror" is absurd because it's stateless and doesn't describe any one single group of people. It's a war on a very loose set of behaviors.
The average person thinks "War on Terror" and they support it because they have the people who brought down the Twin Towers in mind. Whereas people in the NSA, CIA, FBI, police stations across the country, etc, are thinking Occupy Wall Street, PETA, etc.
Social structures do things, and are amenable to institutional analysis. This allows us to act without omniscience. Institutional analysis allows one to analyze institutions independently of individuals; replace all the people, and you may nevertheless expect similar outcomes. Thus we can perform institutional analysis on governments, corporations, mafias, economies, consumers, managers, startups, etc.
If this weren't the case, humans wouldn't form institutions in the first place.
We Brits know this well, as we referred to the IRA terrorists, while many Americans and Irish called them freedom fighters, while funding them.
Perhaps consider this when Nelson Mandela dies. A man who for years was considered a terrorist, but is now almost universally considered a freedom fighter.
Note: I have mode no moral judgement about either the IRA or Nelson Mandela.
The falseness is this is in the application of morality labels. "Terrorist" implies something wrong and evil. Freedom Fighter implies nobility. Both are people using violence to achieve political aims. Much like the US does. Which means many world wide have every right to consider the US a terrorist state, since that terror is by a democratically elected government.
But yes, terrorism does mean something; just the way the word is used a lot, kinda doesn't... but this doesn't change what is terrorism and what is not. Even if someone where to argue that the ends justify the means, it would not change what those means are.
Because making such a plan is protected by the First Amendment. Carrying it out is not.
A charge of conspiracy requires at least two conspirants and an overt act.
Do remember that a police officer who threatened to kill the First Lady still has his job.
I won't, though, because I'm not that much of a dick. And I'd rather allow the First Amendment Center do the talking for me, since I'm not a trained lawyer.
So saying 'the US government is doing X, and I think it's acting illegally because Y' - fine. But 'the US government is doing X and this will end badly because governments always oppress citizens' (an argument that has appeared here a lot lately) isn't fine, because it rests on a false premise.
"The first recorded incident in America occurred in 1766:
Captain William Smith was tarred, feathered, and dumped
into the harbor of Norfolk, Virginia, by a mob that
included the town's Mayor."[0]
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarring_and_feathering
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Tea_Party
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sons_of_Liberty
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaspée_Affair
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Marion
[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubana_de_Aviación_Flight_455
Typically this results in attacks on civilians instead of attacking enemy soldiers (who have been trained to handle fear). Other typical traits: using weapons that creates visible damage, injures etc
The sets of freedom fighters and terrorists might intercept but neither is a subset of the other.
First, without context or a link to the source the report is meaningless. The documents that are cited in this report make no such characterization. Second, these two organizations are huge. It's entirely possible that someon in the FBI wrote a report describing the Occupy folks as potential terrorists - I can easily believe that occurred. That's not the same as the entire organization or even its leadership holding that position.
Context matters a lot, and so do primary sources. This sort of political free-association that you seem to enjoy quickly ends up in conspiracy-theory territory because it's not falsifiable. This is why it's so hard to talk to people who buy into UFO conspiracies; possibility is continually treated as probability, and eventually it starts to look to them like everything revolves around an attempt to conceal Aliens Among Us. You can't talk them out of it, because that's just sort of thing a PsyOps operative would do, right?
Do you remember the shitstorm in 2009 when DHS came up with a report on 'rightwing extremism'? That was a fairly dry and dispassionate overview of one type of possible domestic terrorism (http://www.fas.org/irp/eprint/rightwing.pdf), but to look at the reaction in the blogosphere you'd think the Obama administration was about to carry out the bloodiest purge since Stalin. Forgive me if I don't give random extrapolations based on a single word a great deal of weight.
Here is the ~~100 page document obtained from the FBI through FOIA request detailing activities conducted by the Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/549516-fbi-spy-files...
Most items in the documents indicate that people associated the Occupy movement are the primary focus of investigations. Ironically, at lease one of the incidents named "terrorism" by FBI agents is a report of pretty minor violence directed at Occupy protesters (a Drano bomb). It doesn't give the appearance that field agents spam the word terrorism as much as their press spokesperson counterparts. I suspect many field agents are just as tired of the word as I am.
So here is your context. There is a large group of groups within State and local law enforcement agencies named "Joint Terrorism Task Force" (JTTF), which has money, and other resources; and a broad mandate and expanded authority, which spends its time spying on and policing what are obviously peaceful groups of citizens protesting social and political issues. It stores its reports in a database under a heading named "counterterrorism".
The whole thing smells too much like a better organized and better funded version of the COINTELPRO program under Hoover's FBI, which I would expect was begun in a similar manner and spirit.
/Facepalm
Most of the documents in here consist of observations that OWS events were peaceful and harmless, or that where there was violence it was the exception and was rejected by most protestors.You're complaining about a JTTF coming to the conclusion that this or that OWS event is a false positive, because the JTTF has 'terrorism' in its name.
This is like arguing that doctors consider everyone to be sick because they are trained to be on the lookout for disease. I can't have a serious conversation with you if you think this way.
I agree that this is not something to be outraged about, but it is something to be watchful of and to be called out - government agencies should not refer to peaceful or even violent protesters as terrorists, and our laws should not distinguish between terrorists and other suspects in terms of the rights we give them. In this particular case I agree we need more evidence to say anything meaningful, but there are plenty of examples of misuse of powers given to our states to deal with terrorists for other purposes.
Context matters a lot, and so do primary sources. This sort of political free-association that you seem to enjoy quickly ends up in conspiracy-theory territory because it's not falsifiable.
That is mostly my objection to the use of the label terrorist - the meaning of the term has been stretched to encompass so many acts (from giving money, to riots, to bombing a market), and the judgement calls required to choose between freedom-fighter and terrorist are so subjective, that use of the term limits the horizons of any debate to a narrow exchange of slogans. It is similar to the epithet traitor when applied to Edward Snowden. It's simply a way to shut down debate without further thought, and classify others as in a group you could never parley with or understand.
What's interesting about both the Snowden case and terrorism when it comes to the US is that in both cases the government sees some acts as good, and others as bad a priori, when in character they are exactly the same. This administration leaks classified secrets all the time, but those are good leaks, whereas Snowden's leaks to journalists are bad leaks. Obama stood in the former jail cell of a terrorist at the weekend and contemplated freedom and the terrorist's struggle to end Apartheid.
These issues are complex and shouldn't be reduced to sound-bites or slogans, and the label of terrorist is particularly dangerous in the west at present as it has been used to justify ignoring our laws on human rights, privacy, and justice for whole swathes of people. As soon as you are associated (even a few degrees removed) from activity deemed terrorist, your rights no longer exist. That's extremely dangerous.
You mean "potential terrorists."
And, I for one am fine with people in government speculating and planning. There is a vast difference in research and study, speculation and planning. After all, all it would take is a few OWS people to go blow up a bank or something to escalate the entire matter. Sure, it's just a few members, a splinter group, but then what do you do. Ignore the entire movement? Did the cover of OWS help them achieve some other goal, or did OWS unwittingly help them escalate the matter further.
None of this is to lay blame to OWS, but maybe something like this should have been considered, so when bad things do happen, we are more prepared.
And it's all speculation. But the minute you start holding to account speculation at the same level you hold official policy, you start serious restricting our ability to plan.
I'd hope that our government has plans on how to invade Canada should the need arise. I hope that need never arises, but I'd rather have the plan and not need it then need it and not have it.
There is a vast difference in planning something, and intending to follow through (which is always why the conspiracy laws are not just applied for planning, otherwise thriller writers the world over would be in jail).
> and the judgement calls required to choose between freedom-fighter and terrorist are so subjective
People are fond of reminding us that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom-fighter. They forget that for that statement to be true, that freedom-fighter must also be a terrorist.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12...
Somehow, Canada seems to manage not to hyperventilate about it.
Some Occupy people could be potential terrorists too - if they wanted to use violence against peaceful citizens to achieve their political goals. Reports from Occupy protests show that at least some in the movement are not reluctant to use violence - throwing rocks, bottles, improvised incendiary and explosive devices, etc. If they ever employed such tactics against a civilian target for a political goal, it would be an act of terrorism.
1. The FBI does not see public assassination of Occupy participants itself as terrorism
2. The FBI does not see public assassination of Occupy participants by whoever was planning it as terrorism
4. The FBI was watching whoever made these plans but since he did nothing it came to nothing.
etc. etc.
Also, when arguing if something is in a particular spirit, it's appropriate to discuss emotions and principles.
This is basically what happened:
A: That seems dangerously close to eugenics, in that it's weeding out people with bad genes.
B: Oh yeah? If you distorted your view by listening to crying moms who agree with me (and not similar weepers on the other side), you'd agree with me.
Me: Argument from emotion.
Eugenics is relatively easy to judge: you can get all the facts. Individual decisions are always harder: you don't know the full circumstance. I'm not saying that their aren't abortions made for obscene reasons (terminating girls is an obvious example), but not all are.
Someone saying: "Don't hit me, please" is also an argument from emotion.
When defending the liberty of unsavory characters, I usually write of my native England. Not this week, alas. In the state of Texas, a 19-year-old man named Justin Carter sits in prison, ruthlessly stripped of his freedom for making an offensive joke. After a Facebook friend with whom he played video games described him as “crazy” and “messed up in the head,” Carter replied — sarcastically, one imagines — “Oh yeah, I’m real messed up in the head, I’m going to go shoot up a school full of kids and eat their still, beating hearts.” He added “lol” and “jk” for good measure. For this he was arrested by Austin police, charged with making a “terroristic threat,” and thrown into prison. He may languish there until the start of the next decade. http://www.nationalreview.com/article/352432/free-justin-car...
I imagine half the male population of the US could be jailed for making similar remarks at some stage in their life.
If you give police special powers against terrorists, gradually all suspects will be considered a terrorist, because it's just easier that way. Recently a 19 year old boy has been jailed for years for one sarcastic comment, in the name of fighting terror.
We do indeed have a plan to invade Canada. We've had it since the 1920s.
So yes. The Government should plan, and I'd be disturbed if they didn't.
My wife is Canadian. My children are Canadian. I live there for 10 years. I'm not hoping that the government is planning to invade Canada. However, I hope they've planned it out, just in case.
Maybe that "in case" is a part of defending ourselves, or nullifying an aggressive act.
No, I don't hope they have active plans to invade Canada. However, if we needed to enter Canada to stop something bad from happening, I hope they wouldn't be making things up on the spot.