The FBI announced that they arrested a white supremacist who was planning to blow up a synagogue. [slate]
Of course I am in favor of arresting people who make plans like that; that is unacceptable antisocial behavior. But when I start reading between the lines, as I often do when the FBI says anything, it’s another “dipshit trap.” That’s when FBI agents pretend to be jihadis or drug dealers or hit men or whatever, and troll someone on facebook into meeting with them and then cuff them and take them away.
[source]
According to the Denver Post, 27-year-old Richard Holzer described himself to federal agents as a skinhead and former member of the Ku Klux Klan. The agents said in the documents that they had arrested Holzer in a motel room as he was examining what he thought to be functioning pipe bombs that were prepared for him by federal agents. He had also brought a knife and mask into the room, according to the documents.
The “knife and mask” bit is also interesting to me. Lots of people carry knives and there’s nothing wrong with a knife. Was this guy wearing a tactical(tm) fiberglass katana with nazi logos on his back, or did he have a Leatherman Tool? I worry about this sort of description because if a cop wanted to, they could describe my truck as a “rolling arsenal” if they happen to catch me taking a roll of blades to/from the shop for polishing. Holy shit, what kind of man carries 6 sushi chef’s knives at once?! And we should be skeptical enough of FBI reports to wonder what a “mask” is, too. After all, they’ve decided in some situations that a hoodie is a “mask” if you’re at a protest, etc.
Either way, it is not acceptable to be meeting strangers in hotel rooms so they can give or sell you pipe bombs to set off in a synagogue. My mind boggles at the level of stupid that it takes, to make such an arrangement. Yet, people fall for this sort of thing all the time; we constantly find accounts of someone who went to a hotel to meet some sexy minor and wound up in cuffs, or someone who went to hire a “hit man” and was arrested. Its as though these criminals don’t get out much, or watch enough television to get to the meeting 12 hours early and stake out the FBI. What’s really crazy, to me, is that most of these white supremacists will have at least heard of Ruby Ridge and might know that whole tragic affair was the result of an FBI sting operation gone horribly wrong – the point being: “FBI sting operation.”
The white supremacist made a full showing of his white supremacist plumage on Facebook:
The FBI agents began communicating with Holzer through Facebook on Sept. 28, according to court filings. Evidence of his violent beliefs piled up: photos of him with weapons, Mein Kampf, and other white supremacist symbols; participation in aggressively anti-Semitic online chats; a swastika armband; messages expressing support for the Holocaust; a video of him holding a machete and asking: “may the gods be with me for what I must do.”
That is the tactical(tm) insurgent’s equivalent of going on Jackass. I know I’m a cynic but I’d be assuming that everyone on the chat but me was FBI agents. It is public knowledge, and has been for a long time, that Facebook is backdoored to hell and gone by the surveillance state; by definition it is the last place you want to go to plan your insurrection. Why not wear a hoodie mask with a target printed on the back, while you’re at it?
It’s necessary to sweep up these dipshits, but doing so is not going to change the landscape in the slightest. Any dangerous would-be terrorist/insurgent/freedom fighter will have done their research already. Whether they are democracy advocates in Hong Kong or regressive counter-evolutionary white supremacists in the US. The big problem, I learned back when I used to talk to FBI people, is the smart white supremacists who have read The Turner Diaries – which, to me, makes about as much sense as planning your revolution by reading The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress: when we get to the part of the plan where we start threatening to drop rocks down the gravity well, we’re going to have to re-think things a bit. The Turner Diaries gets some things right and most things wrong (apparently it ends in a grand guignol suicide bombing of the pentagon with a nuclear weapon) [adl] i.e.: it’s hardly a credible roadmap. The guys who have read The Turner Diaries are a few notches up the bell curve from the rest; they’ve gotten exposed to the idea of cellular structure for organizations, the need for secure (private and hard to detect) communications, and the idea that the FBI is going to troll you on Facebook.
The law enforcement/police state crowd are mostly worried about “lone wolf” attackers. As they should be: it’s really hard to suborn and penetrate an “organization” of one. They use tools like Palantir and backdoors into social media, to try to detect people who are trying to form cells. Frankly, it strikes me as trying to re-implement Millenium Challenge 2000 [stderr] at a social level. By the way, there’s a (brief) career opportunity there: social media noise generator – someone who asymmetrically fuzzes the social graphs created by Palantir.
Anyhow, I’m happy to see that the FBI is “on the job” and is trimming some of the low-hanging fruit off of the white supremacist tree of bad apples. But I’m only happy – I’m not thrilled. It’s only a start. For one thing, the upper reaches of the federal government could generously be described as a “white supremacist conspiracy” – and they have nuclear weapons.
Back in the day, I had an idea that I shared with a few friends and we all agreed not to talk about: “the jihadi pen-pal project.” You can imagine how, if you had a list of conference attendees’ email addresses from a big security conference, and the email addresses of a few ISIS spokespeople, you could create a great big graph-explosion of friendly outreach with a few short emails. Don’t do it. Really, I mean it.
I have not read The Turner Diaries and now I am thinking maybe I ought to, to review their tradecraft. I never understood why anyone thought that book was a worthwhile manual for revolution; a serious revolutionary would study what the CIA teaches at the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation [wik] – go learn how the Mossad and CIA do it. Not that they’re impressively competent – it seems to me that the main ingredient is a willingness to engage in off-the-chart cruelty. Which, when I look at Jeff Sessions’ smiling mug, above, I sometimes think I could do.
Having a lot of money to throw around helps a lot too.
Didn’t you use to oppose surveillance, backdoors, breaches of privacy? Are you “happy to see that the FBI is ‘on the job’” when they target white supremacists and simultaneously also dissatisfied with the same surveillance tools existing and being used against different groups of people that you sympathize with? Or is it that you support the existence of some specific surveillance tools (Facebook backdoors?) while simultaneously disproving the existence of other surveillance programs and tools that target something else like, for example, phone calls or e-mails?
@Andreas
I can’t speak for Marcus, but I interpreted that as “Well, since they’re going to be spying on us anyway, at least this time they actually focused on the right target.”
Yeah, it seems almost an axiom that most of the people who get caught doing this sort of thing are first-class idiots. The ones who are both evil and smart (eg. the Unibomber) seem to be both rare and extremely difficult to catch.
There’s an open question that I think everyone has always wondered: might it be possible that there are plenty of murderers who are smart enough that their murders are never detected? Or, contrariwise, maybe it’s the case that one of the results of being intelligent is realizing that antisocial criminality is a bad idea? (I’m talking about antisocial criminality to distinguish crimes like murder and terrorism from crimes like theft, which obviously lots of smart people commit and get away with all the time, particularly those in high positions.)
It doesn’t sound as if the FBI had to do any fancy covert ops to catch this guy — it sounds as if he was practically putting up a billboard.
I think the hardest part of being a cop these days has to be the nearly endless litany of:
“Oh, tee hee, Ilied I’m not 21 I’m 14”
“Fuck off, cop”
“So.. you wanna meet up and buy some C4?”
“Fuck off, cop”
that fills up their days. I have no evidence, but I assume there’s a lot of tedious conversations about sex and Islam that end abruptly with “Fuck off, cop” because it turns out that not everyone online is a complete simpleton.
LykeX @#3
This attitude makes sense.
That being said, I wouldn’t publicly say something like this. Token cases like this one, where FBI uses spying systems for something beneficial, are bound to get used as excuses and justification for why American government agencies should keep on with their spying programs.* “Look, we caught this one guy who was planning something bad. This means the spying program is a success, this means we should keep on monitoring everybody’s online behavior.” I disapprove of FBI actions in general, this is why I won’t publicly say “this one time FBI did a good job.”
—
*I know that government agencies will keep on with spying anyway. They don’t give a shit about human rights or privacy. Still, I’d rather prefer them not to acquire public support thanks to token cases where spying systems are used for furthering public good.
I worked in the library during college, and I remember running across a copy of The Turner Diaries. I had heard about it being some racist favorite, so I flipped through it and read a paragraph or two.
It was really bad. The segment I remember had some federal agent, backed up by a group of incredibly racist caricatured African Americans wielding baseball bats. They were going door-to-door collecting guns. :/
Aside from that, I’m rather surprised the Feds picked up a white supremacist.
… a serious revolutionary would study what the CIA teaches at the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation …
Much of that would require learning Spanish – something no real Red-Blooded White American Patriot® would ever do!
Andreas Avester@#2, and others:
Didn’t you use to oppose surveillance, backdoors, breaches of privacy? Are you “happy to see that the FBI is ‘on the job’” when they target white supremacists and simultaneously also dissatisfied with the same surveillance tools existing and being used against different groups of people that you sympathize with? Or is it that you support the existence of some specific surveillance tools (Facebook backdoors?) while simultaneously disproving the existence of other surveillance programs and tools that target something else like, for example, phone calls or e-mails?
How I feel is more complicated than I could describe casually, so I didn’t. Sorry about that.
I don’t believe that systems like the FBI and NSA have built work very well, if at all, for the purpose for which they are allegedly built. I throw the “allegedly” in there because I don’t think these people are stupid so it’s quite possible that they are saying it’s for counter-terrorism but really they realize it’s for something else. I think that they either know that they are building a retro-scope, or they’re just full of money and are willing to try anything in spite of wiser people’s advice that it won’t work.
Another way of seeing it is that the FBI has defined “works” as “whatever we do” – that way, whatever they do, works! That may be what’s going on.
So, I oppose backdooring and monitoring because I know it won’t work proactively and it’s just a waste of money and time. But I acknowledge that it will catch the occasional dipshit and I guess that if the FBI weeds those dipshits out of the terrorism gene pool, then they’re applying a basic selection pressure on terrorists that will result in slightly better terrorists. I’m not being facetious, there – that’s exactly what happened with hackers and cybercrime; they professionalized really fast and now they pretty much can own any system that they want. (Partially due to the aforementioned backdoors in everything)
I oppose it but I know it’s going to happen because the security state are a bunch of idiots and liars and they will not and never have listened when someone tells them that spending a few billion dollars is a waste of money.
Let me throw out another point: in general the sort of “cultivate a dipshit” strategy the FBI uses is HUMINT (human intelligence) not a technological problem at all. Back in around WWI, Yardley’s American Black Chamber used the same tricks: find malcontents and approach them saying you were a German spy and ask them if they wanted to make some extra pocket change. If they say “sure” you hang them. Meanwhile the effective spies actually gain cover for their operations, within all the noise of the dipshits being cultivated. A review of the success-rate of the KGB against US counterintelligence in the cold war would score things as approximately KGB: 100, USA: 0. They were in everybody and owned all the things including stealing the Manhattan Project’s research in real time via multiple paths (that way they could be sure they were not getting disinformed!) Of course none of this strategic intelligence operations stuff applies to Facebook – that is strictly for amateurs – which is really my point. The oblique reference (I realize now I was being obscure) to Millennium Challenge 2000 in my OP was a nod to this theory – remember, Van Riper had an enthusiastic team of creative but not particularly technical people engaging in a fairly loud bunch of communications that sounded like hostile forces planning something. That, in today’s scenario, would be the assclowns on Facebook. If there are really dangerous people, they will not appear on that radar screen at all. Even threat actors with moderately good tradecraft are very hard to catch – Bin Laden and Al Baghdadi were given away both by couriers, their out of band messaging system, which are very hard to find. When I referred above to cell structures, that’s what I’m talking about: the one-to-one controller:operative relationship that the KGB and “real spies” have used for a very long time. Cell structures are why you can have US forces grab a high-level Al Quaeda operative and waterboard the fuck out of them and nothing is learned: when that controller:operative relationship was compromised, everyone on the other side of that channel goes dark (in the case of cold war KGB, they go back home to Russia and retire to consultancy).
Anyhow, millions and millions of dollars are being spent to catch the occasional dipshit. If the money’s got to be spent, I am glad that at least a few dipshits are going under the knife.
brucegee1962@#4:
The ones who are both evil and smart (eg. the Unibomber) seem to be both rare and extremely difficult to catch.
Unabomb is a perfect example of a “lone wolf.” None of the techniques that will catch some jackass on Facebook will ever catch the lone wolf because, in principle, they don’t talk to anyone. Note that Kaczynski was caught only when he tried to communicate and someone realized “that sounds suspiciously like old Ted…”
There’s an open question that I think everyone has always wondered: might it be possible that there are plenty of murderers who are smart enough that their murders are never detected? Or, contrariwise, maybe it’s the case that one of the results of being intelligent is realizing that antisocial criminality is a bad idea?
Haha! I love that question and I have been noodling over it for decades. In my mind I call it “the Mythical Hollywood Hit Man” – in the real world, someone like that would never get caught. In my mind, someone like that would never use the same method twice, so they would have “the modus operandi of no modus operandi” – the unmatchable strategy. Consider the Washington DC Sniper – John Mohammed and Lee Malvo: their method became a signature, deliberately, and the signature was detectable eventually in the retro-scope. If you remove the signature, then what do the ‘good guys’ do?
But you framed your question as a dichotomy and that’s probably inaccurate. There are probably a few really high-level killers who occasionally do work and nobody knows it even happened and they never get caught. And there are other people who could play at that level, who decide to do something else with their time – like they become a Delta Force sniper or a drone pilot and channel their aggression that way. My guess is it’s a bit of both.
My sensei was pulled in to consult on a murder a decade ago. Someone was killed with something very sharp that hit them very hard and death was probably instant and silent. Sensei’s take was that someone with kenjutsu experience had decided to test a katana on a jogger. And, the test was apparently satisfactory because a kill like that never happened again.
brucegee1962@#5:
It doesn’t sound as if the FBI had to do any fancy covert ops to catch this guy — it sounds as if he was practically putting up a billboard.
Most likely they asked to join a secret Facebook group that is entirely a performance by a small team of cops. Talk about your “self-selected sample.”
lochaber@#8:
It was really bad. The segment I remember had some federal agent, backed up by a group of incredibly racist caricatured African Americans wielding baseball bats. They were going door-to-door collecting guns. :/
Yeah, it makes Heinlein read like Shakespeare, from what I gather.
there will generally be other signatures, if not method then target, social links, ect. a white supremacist is going to target people they hate, a nationalist will work in a particular area. even a hitman just in it for the money will leave a trail of contacts they got hired through and people who wanted the target dead.
if you’re smart enough and unethical enough to do that there are far better ways to get money or power. and if you still really want to kill someone, i’m sure that can be organised once you have the money/power.
from talking to an acquaintance, the Muslim community here in Australia are well aware of who the ASIO infiltrators. it’s probably easier for the police to infiltrate white supremacists, the police are already half way there ideologically, but i can’t imagine the more aware ones can’t spot the cops
brucegee1962@4, Marcus Ranum@11 >
I’m reminded of some apocryphal bit I heard somewhere a couple decades aback, and it was basically if you put some thought into it, you can probably kill someone and get away with it, as long as that person is a complete stranger.
And then I’m reminded of this story from a couple years back:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/11/27/the-serial-killer-detector
tl,dr: a researcher gathered up a bunch of data on murders, ran it through some computer algorithms looking for similarities, and claimed there are possibly thousands of active, unnoticed serial killers in the U.S.
Especially when you think about how many of the serial killers that have been caught seem to be caught only through a really narrow coincidence (I may very well be wrong here, I’m not a serial killer/crime expert, or even that terribly interested, and am just going off of some of the popularized details of a handful of cases…).
And then combined how cops really don’t care about victims unless they are “perfect” and can be even downright disdainful of victims belonging to especially marginalized groups (LGBT, sex workers, homeless people, Native American, etc.)
Seems quite likely… There are a lot of unsolved murders (and a lot of missing people) out there, and if we look at other serious crimes of violence (e.g. rape), we see that a fairly large proportion of them are committed by a fairly small number of prolific repeat offenders.
Hm. Seems rather speculative.
Only gotta fuck up once, after all.
As a man who works a trade, not so much any more, I feel a bit naked if I don’t have a few tools. My Leatherman is very handy. Mostly I use the knives but the other tools get a surprising amount of use.
Ruby Ridge was, IMHO, not the fault of the FBI. Idiot got himself all worked up over The Turner Diaries, newsletters, and figured Ruby Ridge was the place to go. Evidently it had a stream and was defensible. What he didn’t figure was the amount of time it would take TEOTWAWKI to roll around. He didn’t plan for a job or income. So after a few months living in his cabin high up on the ridge he was broke and desperate for cash. So, having heard about a guy looking to buy guns, he took a couple shotguns down to the local bar and sold them. It wasn’t much of a sting. Roll in, establish yourself a good-ole-boy, drink beer, intimate that ‘you sure wish you could buy some guns’ and wait for a fish to bite.
Lack of planning led to desperation, which led to violation, And he did it where government surveillance should have been expected and in a manner that was sure to attract attention. The resulting shootout was tragic, not the FBIs finest day, but when people are shooting at each other shit happens. How did he think it was going to end. When the law shows up at your hideaway you either flee ,or you walk out with your hands on your head. It isn’t like they are going away. You can’t win such a shootout unless you consider going down in a blaze of imagined glory ‘winning’.
So many errors in understanding, planning, and execution. Many of them rooted in ‘read as gospel’ Survivalist lore. The personal isolation, the obsession with guns, the idea you can win a shootout with the law, the racism and misogyny, the expectation of a clear and obvious break, the contempt and gross underestimation of people in cities, the desire to go back to halcyon days (1860s typically), an emphasis on gear instead of skills … on and on … the whole vindictive white male revenge fantasy. I used to spend time dealing with Survivalists but after a year or so I couldn’t stomach it any more.
Crime: Talking to a senior detective in Virginia he related that criminals are not that bright; but most cops are not significantly brighter. He related that if bank robbers took a few basic precautions and only did it once most would get away with it. Problem is that crooks are human and if something seems to work and feels good they tend to do it again, often repeatedly. Bet you can’t eat just one. No doubt, outside the few mentally disciplined killers, murder is be the same way.
People are creatures of habit. We invest in a skill set and naturally tend to try to exploit it by using it as much as possible. Logical, but it makes all of us easier to track and predict. Bomb makers are notorious for being nearly OC about the details of their personal style.
lorn@#18:
Ruby Ridge was, IMHO, not the fault of the FBI
It’s hard to know how to handle extremists; they are not exactly predictable or rational.
On the other hand, I don’t think the FBI is much more predictable or rational – if you’re dealing with someone unpredictable and well-armed, sending people dressed like cyborg ninjas to knock on their door is probably not a great idea for how to get things resolved peacefully.
Survivalists are really problematic; they’re basically primed to explode at random yet the FBI is required to extend them all the courtesy of citizens and the due process of law. My feeling is that if that makes life harder for the FBI sometimes, that’s what they signed up for.
One problem the FBI faced was that the cabin was remote and getting people to it was difficult.
The general preference, as I understand it was that they would coordinate with local law enforcement to have enough people to surround the cabin with multiple redundant lines, facing both in and out, and maintain a clearly overwhelming force. Followed by a negotiated surrender. Given a dozen helicopters and some luck they might have been able to do just that.
As I understand it they infiltrated a small team but they were observed and the element of surprise was lost. No shock that, stealth in steep open woods is pretty tough. ie: how do you advance across a slope silently when it is covered in loose rocks and leaf litter. One slip and you are head over ass tumbling down the slope. Nothing subtle about that.
Then, once the shooting starts, you have to face the fact that the FBI didn’t know what they were walking into. Did he have heavier weapons? Was the territory mined or booby-trapped? It isn’t unusual to find creative defenses. People living in remote locations have lots of time and very little to keep themselves entertained. Expressing your creativity through booby-traps has a long tradition. Either way, once the shooting starts you are committed. Ready or not.
You are right. The FBI operators signed up for this duty so I’m not so very sympathetic to their difficulties. In a way the existence of white supremacists gun-nuts justifies the existence of highly trained camo-clad special operators. Sort of the way only the existence of supervillains in the comics justifies the existence of Batman. You don’t use SWAT teams to issue tickets to jaywalkers.
I think both sides are stupid and unnecessary for a mature society but if we have one, we are going to need the other.
You are also right in that law enforcement often has a way of justifying its existence and glorifying its accomplishments by exaggerating the size and nature of the crime or threat. I had it explained to me that in the 70s the dollar amount of the marijuana was calculated as if it was sold by the joint. Something like two joints per gram sold at $10 a pop. Which might not be too far off with modern high-potency weed. But in 1976 it was a vast exaggeration. At 454 grams per pound it worked out to $9,080. a pound. Which is why they could lay it out on card tables, capacity of perhaps 1000 pounds, and claim it was worth $9,000,000. I’m no expert but nobody pays that much. As I remember it street price in the day was $300-500 a pound. Perhaps half that in Florida if you were friends with the importer. It was all about who you knew.
Similarly every knife, even a Leatherman or pen-knife is counted as a deadly weapon. Sorry, mine is still a tool. One of my pet peeves is how they count ammunition. As if 1000 rounds is a huge amount. Suitable only for war. Never mind that in smaller calibers 500 rounds can be a casual plinking session of murdering cans and rats.
My impression is that most of those exaggerations are not typically from the FBI. Sometimes the USCG would play that game but most cases come from local law enforcement desperate to justify themselves.
Please do read “the Turner Diaries”. It is a classic in the genre. Wooden prose, unrealistic plot, straw-man adversaries all make it laughable as a novel and utterly unbelievable but somehow the idiots lap it up like ambrosia.
Another is: ” Patriots”: Surviving the Coming Collapse by James Wesley Rawles. Hard to say which is worse. Each is awful in its own way. Rawles was annoying for me. He is absolutely pornographic in his description of his weapons. It is never just a pistol. It has to be a 1911 Colt government model .45 with a seven round magazine, Magnaported, with Hogue grips and a beveled magazine well. I half expected him to read off the serial number. His descriptions of violence are worthy of Samuel Peckinpah. Real one-handed purple prose.
While the gear was depicted pornographically and framed in a manner entirely suitable for advertising, if they aren’t afraid of going blue, the people not on the side of the protagonist get depicted as vile sub-human degenerates incapable of reason and justice. Coprophagia is featured prominently. It is all framed as the brave and upright survivor, with his trusty guns, bringing justice and civilization back to unworthy, degenerate, unwashed, masses.
Once you get over the shock of how vile he sees people as being both are merely bad examples of trivial escapist literature in an apocalyptic vein. “Patriots” is often cited as “educational” but IMHO there are precious few snippets of real and useful information in there. ie: At one point, if I remember the book correctly, it has been over thirty years, he gets very specific about the weight per square foot of steel plate used as ballistic protection. Cool that, except you can get loads more accurate information in a more usable form from any of a dozen real-world manuals. All without the need to dig through the gun porn and perverse descriptions of others meant to highlight the protagonist’s virtues.
Still, I recommend people read both of those works of fiction, and a few others for that matter. If for no other reason than to get a peek into how these people think, and how alienated they are from others ‘not like them’.
Heh, your remark about the “low-hanging fruit” has just made me realise: the FBI are basically running the Nigerian 419 scam on these ass-clowns 😂