Trevor Aaronson

Wow. This describes how FBI has essentially manufactured terror plots using a bunch of idiots, informants, and perverse incentives.

Essentially, most terrorism cases in the US from 2002-now (especially 2002-2016) have been essentially started by tips or other intelligence, then FBI-directed informants working with the "terrorists" to articulate and develop terror plots specifically for the purpose of prosecution. In most cases, the "terrorists" are losers who would be incapable of doing anything serious on their own, although it's possible some of them would "shoot up a bunch of people with a rifle" or something instead of the "blowing up the Sears Tower" plots the FBI informants directed them into. It was almost comical how incompetent most of the "terrorists" are -- incapable of buying weapons on their own, and often homeless or poor to the extent that their main goal is scamming the "real terrorist" (FBI informant) for small amounts of money.

The biggest problems with this policy are that mostly it is done under the cover of "FBI community outreach", playing into fears that any contact with the FBI or other law enforcement could lead to bad things. In some cases, they managed to drive even pretty decent people who would work with FBI overtly into prosecution by trying to blackmail them (in order to force covert vs. overt cooperation to entrap others), which is pretty unconscionable. In addition to driving a wedge between FBI/USG and the muslim community, they also seem to the majority of the time be pushing people who would likely never have done anything serious into very high end conspiracies and resulting prosecutions/convictions. There is maybe an argument that they do some good by making the US a very dangerous place for actual terrorists to operate (by making it likely everyone is an FBI informant or that the risk of informants is so high to block any collaboration, forcing overseas links which can themselves be monitored), but it definitely seems like the damage caused by the FBI informant program is greater than any benefits. I'm not sure what the correct level of anti-terrorism stings throughout the US is, but it's definitely less than we have now, and should be much more focused on credible threats who have taken much more overt actions.

A lot of this seems to come from the incentive structures for FBI agents (forced to "produce results", independent of base rate of terrorism -- even in environments where there is no actual terrorism, they are expected to show investigations and prosecutions) as well as for informants (paid well for entrapping people). The ability of FBI to use immigration violations and other things to apply pressure for collaboration is another issue.

Ironically, these manufactured plots are then used to justify more funding/continued investigations by pointing at a high level of terrorism!

Sadly, the FBI's focus on counterterrorism also led to a decline in FBI's more traditional investigations -- public corruption, organized crime, etc. -- which has actually decreased security as well.… (mehr)