FBI Document: [DELETED] had "plan to kill local Occupy leaders via sniper fire"

http://whowhatwhy.com/2013/06/27/fbi-document-deleted-plots-to-kill-occupy-leaders-if-deemed-necessary/

by thenewkid • 13 years ago

308 145 13 years ago

whowhatwhy.com

angersock6• 13 years ago

Well fuck. I was there.

The HPD on the scene seemed pretty chill most of the time, but still. Goddamn.

thenewkid• 13 years ago

This is shocking stuff.

"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."

angersock6• 13 years ago

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.

pekk• 13 years ago

It's not news because it cannot really be blamed on Obama or "the liberals".

angersock6• 13 years ago

Now, now, let's be constructive. Party politics is how they keep the people too divided to change things.

zmmmmm• 13 years ago

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 ...")

angersock6• 13 years ago

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.

Forgive me a little fucking gallows humor.

cjambassador3184• 13 years ago

Who cares about shooting some homeless and some damn hippies?

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.

munin• 13 years ago

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...

gasull3• 13 years ago

FTA:

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.

furyofantares• 13 years ago

That reads like pure speculation

jcromartie7• 13 years ago

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.

Stealth-• 13 years ago

Page is down :(

orthecreedence• 13 years ago

Mirror (site is down): http://12160.info/forum/topics/released-fbi-documents-reveal...

Oddly enough, a lot of sites hosting this release are down. Hmm.

archgoon• 13 years ago

Huh. I looked up conspiracy laws in the US:

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• 13 years ago

Need more details.

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.

cinquemb• 13 years ago

I'm getting a 500, so here's the cached version: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http:/...

gasull3• 13 years ago

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.

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...

cjambassador3184• 13 years ago

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.

reala• 13 years ago

The documents don't say that the FBI was planning this. They say a third party was. The FBI redacted who that third party was. I'm wondering why there haven't beeny any arrests yet.

untog• 13 years ago

I'm assuming that the people downvoting this need a "woosh". At least, I hope so.

nnq• 13 years ago

    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

I'd say "gg, man!", but I don't fully get what's your game. But I'll upvote you just for good humor :)

brymaster2• 13 years ago

But how can this be true?!

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

saraid2166• 13 years ago

I didn't see a listing of Occupiers shot in the head. Could you link me to that, please?

cjambassador3184• 13 years ago

Well everyone that's not a sheeple knows that tptacek is a shill for the government.

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.

sbisker• 13 years ago

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.

flexie• 13 years ago

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.

pstuart• 13 years ago

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."

Appropriate to whom?

pyre• 13 years ago

  | 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.

lifeguard• 13 years ago

Totally integrated corporate-state repression of dissent

http://s3.amazonaws.com/dk-production/images/14030/large/Occ...

bayesianhorse• 13 years ago

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.

iSnow2• 13 years ago

The US certainly handled that better than Turkey.

How standards have eroded. Next time, we'll cling to "the US does better than Egypt"

jcromartie7• 13 years ago

So, police agent provocateurs providing knowledge and material support (to do things like blockade the port of Houston) is just about kicking out inconvenient campers?

tlrobinson• 13 years ago

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.

de_dave• 13 years ago

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".

iSnow2• 13 years ago

Well I am more concerned about other aspects of this plot than its chances of reaching its goal.

leke• 13 years ago

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.

duiker101• 13 years ago

I think the question should be in first instance, why did those gamers got long sentences for posting a "jk" comment in a chat room?

Semiapies• 13 years ago

You don't need complete totalitarianism for that - straightforward authoritarianism works just fine.

grey-area3• 13 years ago

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.

zanny• 13 years ago

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.

smsm429• 13 years ago

There's a pretty big gap between dissent and blowing people up on the streets. So let's not engage in false equivalency.

davidjohnstone• 13 years ago

Slightly tangential, but I'm pretty sure eugenicists were never thought of in the same way as communists et al. In the US, eugenics was an important idea in the Progressive Era of the late nineteenth/early twentieth century, and while it wasn't universally liked (the Catholic church being a notable opponent), it did have broad social approval and at least a few countries practiced eugenics in some form. This all changed with Hitler and World War II, and now eugenics is another idea sidelined to the dustbin of history. (For now?)

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...

anigbrowl8• 13 years ago

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.

mtgx2• 13 years ago

But they were calling the Occupy people potential terrorists...not the right-wingers who might've wanted to assassinate their leaders. Strange, isn't it?

throwit1979• 13 years ago

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.

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!

drunkenmasta• 13 years ago

Interesting that a story like this should come out when groups are planning to protest over the NSA. Coincidence?

sliverstorm• 13 years ago

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.

a-priori2• 13 years ago

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.

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.

tzs• 13 years ago

This was widely discussed in December 2012 when it was actually news.

Googling shows it is suddenly back, often with errors (e.g., InfoWars reports it as the FBI had a plan to kill OWS people).

mehwoot• 13 years ago

Does anybody honestly think if this was a government agency doing it that this document would have just been Freedom of Information released?

kimlelly• 13 years ago

[DELETED] planned to gather intelligence against the leaders of the protest groups

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.

mtgx2• 13 years ago

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.

andyhmltn• 13 years ago

Please stop spamming this comment around. We get it, it's a cool app but that doesn't give you free reign to spam it.

downandout• 13 years ago

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.

logn• 13 years ago

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?

jcromartie7• 13 years ago

This is immensely troubling.

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?

talhof8• 13 years ago

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

dkarl2• 13 years ago

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.

gmoore• 13 years ago

Really? Government plans to kill people is the same thing as you thinking your sister-in-law is hot??

You were right the post being silly......

dkarl2• 13 years ago

Sorry, I just can't get excited about a "plot" that never went beyond the stage of fantasy. When it was revealed that the FBI had a habit of finding nutty losers with terrorist fantasies, encouraging them in their planning, promising to provide them with explosives, and then "stopping" them and marking it up as an averted terrorist attack (and putting the poor saps in prison for years) everyone knew it was ridiculous. This is pretty much the same thing. Fantasy is a long way from reality. (Is there any unhappy fourteen year old who hasn't dreamed of offing a few of his teachers and classmates?) I really don't care if some weirdos in the Houston PD have daydreams of heroically saving civilization from Communists or crypto-Islamists or patchouli-scented reptilian overlords or whoever they thought Occupy was. Their only real crime (as opposed to fantasy crime) was not being able to tell the difference between a document that belongs in the "/Users/HoustonPopo/MelGibsonFanfic" folder and a document that belongs in the "/Users/HoustonPopo/ContingencyPlans" folder. Sounds like a good reason for internal disciplinary action, but not for FBI intervention.

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.

EthanHeilman• 13 years ago

Next [DELETED] will attempt to assassinate to president of the internet. see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Starfish_and_the_Spider

powertower• 13 years ago

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?

walid• 13 years ago

This is unbelievable!

FBI Document: [DELETED] had "plan to kill local Occupy leaders via sniper fire"

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