FBI “on the ball” (not) about “domestic terrorism”?
[Note: Declan later distributed this note to the politech list, which generated a couple of interesting emails in response. -Thomas]
Declan,
On October 19th, 2002 a message calling for “an explicit and direct attack upon the war machine” involving monkey wrenching type activities and/or disruptive “civil disobedience” aimed at various corporate institutions) and potentially Department of Defense facilities) was posted to Infoshop News. The posting itself had no specific information about any actual planned activities, it simply called on the movement as a whole to engage in them, starting on December 15th.
http://www.infoshop.org/inews/stories.php?story=02/10/19/8397714
At a guess, with little effort, I could find literally dozens of postings in a similar vein.
On December 4th, 2002 (a full month and a half later), the FBI’s Awareness of National Security Issues and Response (ANSIR) program posted an email advisory about this posting… perhaps in response to some repostings of it elsewhere three weeks later.
Note the utter and complete lack of any substantive postings on Infoshop in response to this posting prior to the email advisory being circulated - in fact, a post criticizing it for a conflict with another call to action on a separate topic was made on November 25th. In fact, no substantial traffic was posted in response to this prior to the Tom Paine article calling attention to the FBI warning on December 16th, and most of the postings subsequent to that dismiss it as a the product of an “agent provacateur”.
http://www.tompaine.com/feature.cfm/ID/6918
Does a single individual have the capability to provoke a national alarm? (apparently, yes) Does the FBI do any serious level of threat evaluation before distributing alerts? (apparently no) Exactly what value does highlighting such a post have for security professionals? (none that I can see)
Regards,
Thomas Leavitt
