OK< paranoia on the internet

[Enzo]

So elsewhere we touched on "they" watching us.

Here is a guy who came to Washington from Illinois and shot up a softball game of republican congressmen.

Lawmaker Steve Scalise injured in GOP baseball shooting. Suspect James T. Hodgkinson dies after shootout

The guy put up a facebook page and wrote:

“Trump is a Traitor. Trump Has Destroyed Our Democracy. It’s Time to Destroy Trump & Co.”

Now it may be idle boasting or it may be real, but either way it is a pretty clear threat. Yet it didn't get him surveillance or followed. So the occasional mention of words like bomb or terrorist are not very likely to garner any attention either, among us users.

[Leo_Gnardo]

The guy put up a facebook page and wrote

Paranoia on the internet, and on the baseball diamond this morning.

On TV news the "suspect" is shown on his farcebook page with a display in the background "We Are ASHI". American Society of Home Inspectors? Geeze ya can't trust anybody . . .

Representative Steve King (R, Iowa) showed up at the scene of the crime, of course he starts running his stupid mouth and immediately blames "the left." Don't apprise him of the facts, genius Congressman Steve King already made up his own! Now the right will take this as their cue to start shooting back. Guess who has more weapons & ammo? Oh well it was a nice day, until 7 AM. Wonder what fresh horror tomorrow will bring.

[J M Fahey]

Personal opinion, may be wrong, I don´t read much on what happened today.
Granpa woke up angry today, his hemorrhoids or back pain or bad kidneys didn´t let him sleep for the third night in a row, absolutely hates Trump like millions, he decided to do something about it, grabbed a gun and did it.
Lone wolves like him are impossible to track or stop, because there is no pattern or organization to track.
What kind of intelligence could have singled him out between millions who post exactly the same on FB yet, obviously, do nothing of that kind?
Do you jail *everybody*?
And firearms, although a factor, are not indispensable, those 2 Pakistanis in London last week killed a lot of people (and wounded way more) just with a car and a couple kitchen knives .... how do you successfully lock both kinds of weapons out of the reach of general public?

[Justin Thomas]

Do you jail *everybody*?

Juan,

A lot of people make a LOT of money in this country. Our prison system only works under the GUISE of "punishment" or serving justice. It's a Big Business, like anything else, called "Criminal Justice." And so in answer to your question, yes, there ARE those on BOTH sides who would jail untold millions if they could.

Having to build more jails to hold all the "dangerous" undesirables means that those in power can ask for more tax dollars, because that 19-year-old with two joints on him who can't make a coherent sentence is a dangerous thug who is a menace to all of us (especially The Children! Think of the CHILDREN!) and who needs to be taught a lesson. Nab him, lock him up - more money we need! When he gets out cuz his life is ruined and he hasn't learned anything besides how to be a smarter criminal, he turns to crime. Gets caught again, hey, more money for us! Repeat ad nauseum.

And, some people make shitloads of money!

I have nothing against prison guards. This is about the INSTITUTION.

Justin

[The Dude]

That guy was obviously a whacko. A sane person would know the difference between baseball and golf.

[Enzo]

He was trying to get a hole in one?


(too soon?)

[bob p]

And firearms, although a factor, are not indispensable, those 2 Pakistanis in London last week killed a lot of people (and wounded way more) just with a car and a couple kitchen knives .... how do you successfully lock both kinds of weapons out of the reach of general public?

At the risk of stating the obvious, we have to be willing to accept some level of crime if we want to live in free society.

[Enzo]

And conversely, even the most repressive governments still have crimes in their lands.

[bob p]

> And conversely, even the most repressive governments still have crimes in their lands.

One difference between free and repressive societies is in the way "criminals" are treated. In a free society if you tear down a poster you don't get shipped home in a persistent vegetative state. That case illustrates my point -- I don't think any of us would like to live in a society that is so intolerant of crime that you are sentenced to brain-death for committing a misdemeanor.

Back to Juan's point: even the most repressive governments won't bother trying to eliminate crime by taking away kitchen knives.

[bob p]

Now it may be idle boasting or it may be real, but either way it is a pretty clear threat. Yet it didn't get him surveillance or followed. So the occasional mention of words like bomb or terrorist are not very likely to garner any attention either, among us users.

There are millions of threats posted on the internet every day. Chasing them all down on foot is not practical, unless you're willing to assign a sentinel to every man, woman and child who expresses dissent.

Of course, that doesn't mean that the computer tracking algorithms aren't activated every time that somebody posts a threat against the government on a site like Facebook.

In all likelihood, these types of posts ARE being investigated. All of them. It's just likely that most of the investigations are automated, and the automated tracking doesn't always result in enough useful leads to result in actionable data. It's not that the surveillance programs aren't paying attention to the mention of these words -- more likely, they DO pay attention to them -- but the algorithms are intended to stratify the level of risk that these kinds of statements represent. It's likely that the shooter's facebook posts did get him investigated, and the investigation probably showed that he was a lone wolf type of complainer, rather than someone who was operating within an organized terrorist cell with accomplices who were prepared to carry out an organized attack. It's a fallacy to think that surveillance is not being performed just because in this case the the surveillance did not yield actionable data. In all likelihood, the results of his investigation fell below the actionable threshold.

I'm willing to bet that someone who is responsible for risk-stratification in the automated surveillance department is getting his ass chewed on today, now that a bunch of governmental bigwigs have been injured in an embarassing high profile case, all because the shooter's FB threats were ignored. It would seem logical that if any response is forthcoming, it's going to involve paying closer attention to FB posts.

With that in mind, I think it's wishful thinking to suspect that they aren't paying attention because this shooter slipped through the detection mechanism. In all likelihood, the outcome is that they're going to start paying more attention to these things tomorrow than they were paying yesterday, and they'll tighten up on surveillance.

[Enzo]

Yeah, but the context was the earlier concerns that citizens like us here using a couple words like bombs was going to result in dropped cell phone calls because of all the line tapping etc. Our comments are very mild compared to the posts of the shooter. And even at his level of virulence, whether noticed by software or not, did not rise to the level of triggering actual response.

[The Dude]

I almost hate to "go there" because I know it'll start a feud. I'll say it anyway. Maybe "Johnny Law" would miss this shooter's rantings in a sea of similar rantings. BUT, one would hope that when such a person goes to purchase a semi-automatic weapon, it would trigger at least minor investigation into his psyche and discovery of his rantings. Sadly, this isn't so.

[bob p]

I almost hate to "go there" because I know it'll start a feud. I'll say it anyway. Maybe "Johnny Law" would miss this shooter's rantings in a sea of similar rantings. BUT, one would hope that when such a person goes to purchase a semi-automatic weapon, it would trigger at least minor investigation into his psyche and discovery of his rantings. Sadly, this isn't so.

I hate to say it Duderino, but it seems that you're not keeping up with the times. Exactly this is being done right now, and it's been being done in real-time since 1993.

The FBI has been performing instant background checks on every person that purchases any type of firearm for the past 24 years. The National Instant Criminal Background Check System, aka NICS, has been in effect since 1993 as a result of the Brady Handgun Violence Protection Act of 1993. Everyone who purchases a gun has an FBI background check performed at the time of sale.

I wonder why people keep calling for this sort of thing, when it's been in effect for almost 25 years.

[The Dude]

Well, it seems they aren't doing a very good job of it.

Reported by NBC:

"Hodgkinson has a history of arrests and was charged in 2006 with domestic battery and aggravated discharge of a firearm. At the time, police recovered a pocket knife and a 12-gauge shotgun at the scene."

[bob p]

Well, it seems they aren't doing a very good job of it.

Reported by NBC:

"Hodgkinson has a history of arrests and was charged in 2006 with domestic battery and aggravated discharge of a firearm. At the time, police recovered a pocket knife and a 12-gauge shotgun at the scene."

I don't concur. While the emotional response may be to complain that they're not doing a very good job of it, the data shows that the system is working just like it is supposed to work:

What's really sad is that the news media deliberately reports half-truths in order to manipulate the opinions of people who are willing to take news reports at face value. All too often human nature wins out, and people who are too lazy to investigate the story in detail will form opinions based upon the amount of information they get in a 10 second sound byte. It's really most sad when the 10 seconds of information that's made available in the sound byte is intentionally placed misinformation that's been specifically crafted to manipulate your opinion.

It's nothing new that the news media likes to dirty-up everyone they can -- dirty stories help to sell soap. They deliberately report half-truths as if they were fact, and they'll freely resort to all sorts of innuendo in order to convince us to believe whatever they what they want us to believe. They know that most people are too lazy to do the due diligence that's necessary for them to be able to recognize bullshit as bullshit, and to call "Bullshit!" when they hear bullshit on the television.

The case in point is a good example: NBC says "he was charged in 2006 with domestic battery and aggravated discharge of a firearm." Notice that they were not able to say that he was convicted of domestic battery, or aggravated discharge of a firearm, because he was never convicted of such a crime. If NBC were honest in reporting the news, they would have told you that he was ACQUITTED of bogus charges against him in 2006, but telling you that truth doesn't help their agenda, now does it? In typical fashion of dishonest reporting they purposefully avoid telling you that he was not convicted. They tell you that he was charged, to dirty up his character; they never tell you that he was exonerated because that truth doesn't suit their purpose.

They get away with these sorts of things because they know that the average person listening to the idiot-box is not paying enough attention to the details to call "Bullshit!" and is easily manipulated into holding the opinion that the idiot-box wants them to hold. It's sad that people are so easily manipulated by intentional half-truths.

So what if he was charged? He was never convicted. In the absence of a conviction it's both illegal and unethical to hold any of those 2006 deeds against him -- no matter how juicy they may be, no matter how foreshadowing of today's events they might have been. I realize that most people reading this wouldn't agree with that statement -- human nature is that most of us like to think that the law is supposed to work to our arbitrary standards. We like to think that if someone has been arrested multiple times, then they must be a bad person, irrespective of whether they have been convicted or not. Those evil people don't deserve to have rights.

The truth is that being able to buy a gun is a constitutional right, and you have to be convicted of a felony to lose that right. That guy was never convicted of being a felon. He was never prevented from buying a gun because he was not convicted of any offences that qualify as Federal or State "Prohibitors" in denying a background check.

What does this tell us about the background check system? It tells us that the system works exactly as it was intended to work. What's the reason that this guy slipped through? He had done nothing previously to warrant conviction of a serious crime, his name was clean in the databases, and his background check never reached the threshold of action.

FYI here's some more information on exactly how the NICS system works behind the scenes, courtesy of the FBI's Youtube account. It's amazing how much information they can process in a matter of seconds.

Reported by NBC: "At the time, police recovered a pocket knife and a 12-gauge shotgun at the scene."

Almost forgot -- What's the point of NBC saying that the police found a pocket knife and a 12-ga shotgun at the guy's house? It's legal to possess such items, there's no reason for them to mention it ... unless they're purposefully trying to color some demographic opinions by reporting those types of "unflattering" facts that are known to shape some peoples' opinions. If having a pocket knife and a 12-ga shotgun in your house is newsworthy, then NBC needs to come over to my place to visit. They'll have a genuine non-news story that's worth reporting, because I've got a pocket knife on my desk as I type this, and I've got my grandpa's 12-ga shotgun that's been locked up in a safe place, unused for many years.

If we all believed what NBC wants us to believe, then I'd be as dirty as Hodgkins, but the truth is that I'm not.