--- From: "Thomas Leavitt" <thomasleavittat_private> To: "Declan McCullagh" <declanat_private> Subject: FBI "on the ball" (not) about "domestic terrorism"? Date: Wed, 18 Dec 2002 14:42:49 -0800 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 -- Thomas Leavitt -- thomasleavittat_private, Sr. Systems Admin For Hire Resume at http://www.thomasleavitt.org/personal/resume/ Wired since 1981. Internet-enabled since 1990. Web-enabled since 1993. Older, wiser, and poorer, post-crash. :) Stop the Stupidity of Michael Savage: http://www.savagestupidity.com/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list You may redistribute this message freely if you include this notice. To subscribe to Politech: http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ Declan McCullagh's photographs are at http://www.mccullagh.org/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Like Politech? Make a donation here: http://www.politechbot.com/donate/ Recent CNET News.com articles: http://news.search.com/search?q=declan -------------------------------------------------------------------------
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