
FBI Document: [DELETED] had "plan to kill local Occupy leaders via sniper fire" - thenewkid
http://whowhatwhy.com/2013/06/27/fbi-document-deleted-plots-to-kill-occupy-leaders-if-deemed-necessary/
======
grey-area
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
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.

~~~
smsm42
There's a pretty big gap between dissent and blowing people up on the streets.
So let's not engage in false equivalency.

~~~
Sharlin
The grandparent didn't do that. His/her point was that _governments do_.

~~~
anigbrowl
But Governments are neither homogenous nor monolithic. Saying 'Governments do
X' is like saying 'corporations are at the root of all our problems.' Reason
along those lines, and pretty soon the only rational choice is to become a
hermit and avoid society entirely. After all, society is made up of people,
and people are well-known to engage in murder, rape, robbery, etc. etc.
Therefore, _people_ are the problem.

~~~
grwkmewrlemw
If someone is engaging in murder, rape or robbery, it would make sense to call
attention to this fact, and then perhaps do something about it, wouldn't it?
Parts of the US government are CURRENTLY misusing the word "terrorist" as a
very broad label. This is very dangerous for the reasons discussed above. It's
important to call attention to this problem if we have any hope of halting it.

~~~
anigbrowl
Yes - you call attention to the specific person engaging in those acts. When
you overlook that requirement of specificity, you end up accusing people based
on their membership in a class, eg 'all gypsies are thieves, X is a gypsy,
therefore X is a thief.'

So saying 'the US government is doing X, and I think it's acting illegally
because Y' \- fine. But 'the US government is doing X and this will end badly
because governments always oppress citizens' (an argument that has appeared
here a lot lately) isn't fine, because it rests on a false premise.

------
gasull
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/](http://www.salon.com/topic/whowhatwhy/)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russ_Baker](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...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/29/fbi-coordinated-
crackdown-occupy)

~~~
brymaster
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](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5987208)

~~~
cjambassador318
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.

~~~
brymaster
> created: 23 minutes ago

Yeah, nice try tptacek. Continue the psyops

:)

~~~
angersock
But tptacek was actually losethos all along!

What a twist!

~~~
duncan_bayne
Oh God, HN is turning into Kuro5hin.

Also, I'm old.

------
thenewkid
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."_

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

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

~~~
cjambassador318
> the people

the sheeple

~~~
fusiongyro
Please knock it off. This isn't the right forum for undirected political
raving.

~~~
adventured
That nick appears solely dedicated to douchebaggery. It's not political
raving, it's targeted at making fun of the members posting here.

~~~
shardling
To be fair, a great percentage of the comments on these topics sound exactly
that ignorant. Maybe there's an echo chamber effect where reasonable people
just stop reading/participating in these threads, because to my eye it's been
getting worse.

I can understand why someone would be driven to mock them.

------
downandout
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.

------
tlrobinson
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.

~~~
leke
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
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?

------
munin
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...

~~~
gasull
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
That reads like pure speculation

~~~
contingencies
As does your comment. Hell, so does mine. We're not in S-expressions anymore,
Toto!

~~~
smsm42
There's a difference between logically following an evidence and reasoning
like "DELETED might mean FBI or NSA or Black Helicopters Squad - we are
doomed! PANIC!!!" DELETED might mean anything, so there's absolutely no reason
to give any weight to that specific speculated meaning against a meaning of
"two patients of local mental asylum, when their meds were accidentally
switched".

------
zmmmmm
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 ...")

~~~
angersock
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.

~~~
cjambassador318
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.

~~~
Intermernet
Sorry for the all-caps:

STOP USING THE WORD "SHEEPLE"!

It makes you look like the most mediocre revolutionary that has ever walked
the earth.

There are MUCH better terms (no, i'm not going to give them to you, you need
to do some research) for the people you have issues with, and your interests
would be better served in engaging them in debate rather than quoting XKCD
([http://xkcd.com/1013/](http://xkcd.com/1013/)).

------
angersock
Well fuck. I was there.

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

------
cinquemb
I'm getting a 500, so here's the cached version:
[https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http:/...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://whowhatwhy.com/2013/06/27/fbi-
document-deleted-plots-to-kill-occupy-leaders-if-deemed-necessary/)

------
tzs
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).

------
jcromartie
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?

------
lifeguard
Totally integrated corporate-state repression of dissent

[http://s3.amazonaws.com/dk-
production/images/14030/large/Occ...](http://s3.amazonaws.com/dk-
production/images/14030/large/OccupySniperPlan.PNG?1356861369)

~~~
bayesianhorse
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.

~~~
iSnow
>The US certainly handled that better than Turkey.

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

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

------
archgoon
Huh. I looked up conspiracy laws in the US:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_%28crime%29#United_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_%28crime%29#United_States)

"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
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.

------
pstuart
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?

------
logn
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?

------
orthecreedence
Mirror (site is down): [http://12160.info/forum/topics/released-fbi-documents-
reveal...](http://12160.info/forum/topics/released-fbi-documents-reveal-plans-
to-assassinate-ows-
activists?xg_source=msg_com_forum&id=2649739%3ATopic%3A1074535&page=2)

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

------
sliverstorm
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-priori
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](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](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.

------
pyre

      | 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.

------
powertower
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?

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

------
talhof8
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

------
dkarl
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
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......

~~~
dkarl
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.

------
walid
This is unbelievable!

------
Stealth-
Page is down :(

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

That's where RetroShare comes in:
[http://retroshare.sourceforge.net/](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.

~~~
mtgx
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.

