A couple of months ago, at the beginning of the semester, I posted on Facebook a plea to my fellow faculty that they not post complaints there about their students. You know the kind I’m talking about: where students are mocked for the errors they make in class, the faux pas of the politically incorrect, and so forth. I said that I considered such public commentary a kind of betrayal, even when the students weren’t named.
Yesterday, Gothamist reported that an undercover cop had been spying for months, if not years, on a group of Muslim students at Brooklyn College, leading to the arrest of two women last spring for allegedly planning to build a bomb.
Set aside the problem of entrapment with these schemes. Set aside New York City Mayor de Blasio’s promise to stop this kind of surveillance of Muslims in New York. Let’s focus instead on the leadership of CUNY that either knowingly allows this kind of spying on our students to continue or does little to nothing to stop it.
Tolerating, actively or passively, undercover officers of the state on our campus, allowing them to spy on our students, to report back to the state what our students say, as they meet with their friends to share in their studies, swap their stories, figure out their faith, shoot the shit, or whatever it is that students do when they believe themselves to be among friends, is a betrayal. Of the worst sort.
I posted my comment on Facebook because I believe we, as faculty, have a trust to uphold with our students. That when they come to our campus, they will be allowed to try on new clothes, nudge themselves away from who they were toward who they will become, make a stab at independence, that they will be allowed to make mistakes—in full knowledge that their fumbles and foibles are safe with us.
As my friend Moustafa Bayoumi, who’s also a professor at Brookyn College, writes in his book This Muslim American Life, which is just out with NYU Press:
Americans of all types are expected to acquiesce to intrusions into their private lives, supposedly for greater security, while any objection is interpreted as “having something to hide.” But having something to hide—or having the right to hold an inner life and to be free to determine how much of yourself you show to others—is not only a guarantee of our democracy but also a necessary part of being human. Losing that right is troubling and dangerous for the same reason that Elaine Scarry identifies as the dark innovation of the Patriot Act. “The Patriot Act inverts the constitutional requirement that people’s lives be private and the work of government officials be public; it instead crafts a set of conditions in which our inner lives become transparent and the workings of the government become opaque.”
The same applies, even more so, when we are talking about students.
When we allow officers of the state onto our campus to monitor and surveil our students as they make their way into the world, to troll for trouble (even creating the circumstances for that trouble), we betray that trust. We simply cannot build a campus that is true to its mission if we allow this kind of practice to continue.
There’s a petition being circulated calling on CUNY Chancellor James Milliken to stop this practice. I urge you to sign it. And to share this post, and the petition, widely.
{ 58 comments }
Chris Bertram 10.30.15 at 3:03 pm
The British government has introduced a duty on academic staff to spy on their students.
Here’s the union briefing on it:
http://www.ucu.org.uk/media/pdf/8/i/Prevent_duty_guidance_Jul15.pdf
BenK 10.30.15 at 3:14 pm
Very ‘second amendment’ thinking. This creates serious problems for advocates of the state…
Anarcissie 10.30.15 at 3:16 pm
You don’t believe the spying just started, do you? Anecdotes, some from a long time ago, on request.
Adam Hammond 10.30.15 at 3:37 pm
Hear, hear!
PKO 10.30.15 at 4:02 pm
Well said!
Corey Robin 10.30.15 at 4:05 pm
Anarcissie: Oh, please tutor me on these facts. Please tell me about my former student who is currently locked up in a supermax in Colorado b/c of his alleged “material support” for terrorism, a story that began with surveillance in Brooklyn College virtually the day after 9/11. Please tell me about all the instances of government spying on campuses that I’ve written about extensively.
David Hugh-Jones 10.30.15 at 4:36 pm
Are you saying undercover cops should never spy on people they suspect might be plotting a terror attack? Or that spying on the rest of the populace is fine, but they shouldn’t ever spy on students? Both of these are overgeneralized, and the second is self-regarding. The mission of education doesn’t override the need to protect the public.
Warren Terra 10.30.15 at 4:41 pm
This seems wildly overstated.
I’d certainly agree such a course of action should be a last resort, that it should be discouraged, that it should only be used when thoroughly justified and never in a trawling operation. And,to be sure, there’s absolutely no reason to think such circumspection is currently even being contemplated: the history of anti-terror investigations within the US and especially by New York City cops ranges from the absurd to the tragic, famously including the decade and millions of dollars the NYPD spent spying on mosques (and frequently bullying their members) without ever discovering a hint of extremist violence.
On the other hand, it’s not hard to think of situations that would justify undercover operations in a college setting – organized anti-gay or anti-abortion violence, for example, or a bunch of chemistry students synthesizing unsafe controlled substances. Universities are full of young kids exploring their identities and encountering for the first time powerful ideas, ideologies, and drugs. Sometimes they genuinely do get together and do dumb, stupid things. Would you really claim there’s never any reason to have undercover cops in a university setting?
Chip Daniels 10.30.15 at 4:54 pm
I’ll just harp again on how the pervasive climate of fear and suspicion is a dagger at the throat of a free and democratic society.
Without trust and confidence in each other and the ability to form secure bonds with our chosen community, ISIS couldn’t devise a better way to destroy Western society from within.
@Warren Terra- “Never” is a big word, but even with your chosen examples, almost all anti-gay/ anti abortion violence is done in small scale, often in impromptu crimes of rage and opportunity, exactly the sort of crimes that surveillance and investigation isn’t equipped to spot and prevent. And the perpetrators aren’t usually even clandestine- homophobes and bigots are out and proud, needing no secret police to ferret out.
The best way to make gays and women’s clinics safe and secure is to build a trusting supportive community where people know they can speak safely and freely.
Watson Ladd 10.30.15 at 5:14 pm
Chip, you are wrong. Abortion doctors are typically targeted by killers in contact with anti abortion activists who study their targets for long periods of time. They are sheltered and encouraged by sympathizers. Undercover work can do a lot to link the mam who pulls the trigger to others.
Barry Freed 10.30.15 at 5:32 pm
It doesn’t look like there’s a space on the petition for alumni. I’m a CUNY QC graduate (MLIS 2014) and I’d love to sign it.
Cian 10.30.15 at 5:39 pm
#9: Undercover work can do a lot to link the mam who pulls the trigger to others.
And your proof for this is?
Anarcissie 10.30.15 at 5:40 pm
Corey Robin 10.30.15 at 4:05 pm @ 6 —
I guess you don’t want to hear my anecdotes, some of which go back to the ’50s. Not important. Anything you imagine will be true enough.
It seems inevitable that the administrators of important state institutions would engage in a good deal of secret surveillance (spying). The military and the police, of course, and academia, the brain of the beast, but also corporations and state-certified religious bodies and so on. I think it will take more than petitions to get rid of it. Subversion and sabotage, at least. More fundamentally, you’d have to have different kinds of institutions.
Corey Robin 10.30.15 at 5:49 pm
Anarcissie: I’m happy to hear your anecdotes, though again, my first book was largely about the 1950s. But, tell away, seriously. What I’m less receptive to is snide insinuations that I somehow just woke up this morning to the reality of things that I’ve been talking about for a very long time.
Rakesh Bhandari 10.30.15 at 6:28 pm
http://www.npr.org/2012/08/21/159373688/student-subversives-and-the-fbis-dirty-tricks
Stephen 10.30.15 at 6:40 pm
Some time ago (so I don’t have a reference to hand) I read one of the autobiographical books of the excellent historian Richard Cobb, in which he explained how when he was a student at Oxford an old friend of his was suspected by the police, quite rightly, of a brutal murder in which Cobb might have been, but was not, peripherally involved; and his college refused to allow the police into University premises even in a case of murder, and his tutor advised him to spend the next vacation in Belgium (rather than France) where he would be safe.
If my memory is accurate, which I would not guarantee, this was denounced by reviewers as a case of outrageous establishment protection of their own.
How would that differ from the present case?
Trader Joe 10.30.15 at 6:58 pm
I can think of few cases where I fully agreed with Professor Robin without a caveat or an except for….this is one of them.
I’d rather “the University” occassionally shelter a political radical or two than see it fail to nurture an intellectual radical or two.
Chip Daniels 10.30.15 at 6:59 pm
@15
For the the difference would be here:
“suspected by the police, quite rightly, of a brutal murder in which Cobb might have been, but was not, peripherally involved; ”
If there was enough evidence for you to be able to assert “quite rightly” then there would be enough evidence to get a warrant.
I don’t think the OP here was calling for a suspension of police work or even wiretapping and searches. But the objection is more to do with warrantless, evidence-free probable-cause-free surveillance dragnets of innocent people.
@Watson Ladd #9 You are correct on that point. I shouldn’t have lumped anti-abortion terrorists with common homophobic assaults.
But I would point to that as support for the call to be more narrow and discriminating in surveillance.
No one used the murders of Dr. Tiller and Slepian to call for random surveillance of evangelical churches and campus groups. A narrowly focused surveilling of rabid anti-choice groups would be more effective.
Tom 10.30.15 at 7:03 pm
Thanks, Corey, I completely agree.
The problem is not just the spying – which is deeply concerning and often illegal – but also how selective that spying is. I never heard of an undercover cop infiltrating Wall Street’s banks. Who knows, had the NYPD spied a bit more on the bankers, they would have found more evidence to convict some after the recent financial crash. Instead, virtually no banker went to jail. (There are many reports on this, you can read “How Wall Street’s Bankers Stayed Out of Jail” by Cohan on the Atlantic recently. The piece also discusses the cozy connections between banks and who is in charge of investigating them). But if you are a Muslim, the NYPD will spy on you preemtpively.
adam.smith 10.30.15 at 7:06 pm
Stephen — are you really saying you can’t see the difference between the police (presumably uniformed, certainly not secretly) questioning and apprehending a suspect for a specific crime without active resistance by the college and the police conducting long undercover operations before a crime has been committed with the active support of the college?
Trader Joe 10.30.15 at 7:14 pm
“I never heard of an undercover cop infiltrating Wall Street’s banks. ”
Then you don’t listen hard enough. This happens too. Maybe not like at universities, but it totally happens. The level of surveilence on some trading floors would make prisons look like pikers.
SamChevre 10.30.15 at 7:15 pm
I don’t think the OP here was calling for a suspension of police work or even wiretapping and searches. But the objection is more to do with warrantless, evidence-free probable-cause-free surveillance dragnets of innocent people.
In that case, I see no difference between a college and any other place–businesses, parks, sidewalks–the government shouldn’t be running ” warrantless, evidence-free probable-cause-free surveillance dragnets” anywhere (and no, disparate impact in all its forms is not evidence; young men, or Muslims, or blacks may be more statistically likely to commit crime X, and no, that doesn’t mean you can run surveillance dragnets if you target them).
My assumption was that Corey Robin thinks that colleges should ban police work, of the kind that is allowable elsewhere; I’m not sure I would agree.
Tom 10.30.15 at 7:24 pm
@Trader Joe
Can you point out to me some cases where the police arrested someone working at a bank because of the spying work of an infiltrated cop? Thanks.
Corey Robin 10.30.15 at 7:27 pm
Before people comment on what they fantasize is or is not a legitimate role for the police on campus, I would ask that you read, entirely, the story in Gothamist that I am responding to.
Corey Robin 10.30.15 at 7:35 pm
And by the way, here is what Lawrence Sanchez, who was tasked by the CIA to work with the NYPD on its surveillance programs, had to say to the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs about what the job of law enforcement is: “Rather than just protecting New York City citizens from terrorists, the New York Police Department believes that part of its mission is to protect New York City citizens from turning into terrorists.”
If that is the governing philosophy that guides your surveillance programs, including surveillance programs on college campuses, you can see why, I hope, those of us who teach on those campuses would be leery of free-floating dragnets being spread across the college green.
Stephen 10.30.15 at 7:43 pm
adam.smith: no, not at all. What I’m trying to say is that there may be no very clear boundary between allowing police to investigate the involvement of students who attend college “in full knowledge that their fumbles and foibles are safe with us” in crimes that actually have been committed, and allowing the police to investigate their preliminary involvement in crimes – possibly much worse than individual murders – that are intended to be committed.
You may well argue, and I do have some sympathy here, that the former can be done openly by uniformed police, while the latter are done covertly. Trouble is, I can’t see how the latter can be done other than covertly, and having been on the outskirts of attempts at mass murder that could only have been prevented by covert surveillance – and hearing of other such attempts that were so prevented – I’m not persuaded that covert surveillance is, in itself, a bad thing.
If it’s a matter of agents provocateurs (a notable borrowing from the French) actually “creating the circumstances for that trouble”, why, that’s a different matter altogether.
Trader Joe 10.30.15 at 7:45 pm
@22
I’m not going to derail the important point of this thread by diverting it to a discussion of Wall Street’s ills. The fact is nearly every insider trading arrest you see reported involves some combination of wiretap and/or infiltration agent. Read the reports, you’ll see the mentions even the Post manages to note it. Your correct beef is with why they can’t get convictions. The police/SEC/FBI work is rarely the problem. We’ll save a more detailed discussion for a more appropriate thread.
Tom 10.30.15 at 7:51 pm
@26
Fair enough.
Collin Street 10.30.15 at 8:08 pm
But the objection is more to do with warrantless, evidence-free probable-cause-free surveillance dragnets of innocent people.
If cops were properly trained to recognise and avoid confirmation bias in their investigations, lack of probable cause wouldn’t actually be a huge problem.
Stephen 10.30.15 at 8:45 pm
Collin Street: agreed. There is a great difference between saying “what the police are doing, in these particular case, is wrong” and “for the police to be doing this sort of thing is always wrong”.
anonymousse 10.30.15 at 8:50 pm
“I posted my comment on Facebook because I believe we, as faculty, have a trust to uphold with our students. That when they come to our campus, they will be allowed to try on new clothes, nudge themselves away from who they were toward who they will become, make a stab at independence, that they will be allowed to make mistakes”
What’s your opinion of the Oklahoma fraternity boy, who, on a drunken bus trip (i.e. not on school property) sang ‘there will never be a nigger in SAE’ and was then expelled from campus and the fraternity to which he belonged disbanded?
(note: I’m sure you won’t address it-just pointing out your overt hypocrisy-to yourself if to noone else).
anonymousse
Chip Daniels 10.30.15 at 9:21 pm
@28
“lack of probable cause wouldn’t actually be a huge problem.”
We demand probable cause be shown to a neutral 3rd party, precisely because the police cannot possibly ever be free of bias. Otherwise, why bother with it?
Why not just say, “the police are well trained and have no confirmation bias, so no need for a warrant”?
kidneystones 10.30.15 at 9:25 pm
There are good reasons to curtail the activities of the state, but I think Corey must supply some sound legal reasons why universities are subject to a different set of laws, burdens of proof, etc. @ 15 has this precisely right.
The university is well within its bounds to request that faculty spread anti-union talking points, and to keep a keen eye out for those you may or may not be planning on blowing up a building. As others have noted, there’s nothing new or unusual about that.
@1 is a very different kettle of fish, noteworthy, and probably deserves a thread of its own.
Educators in most settings act in loco parentis, at least in part. That’s a responsibility many willingly accept. Given the ‘need’ some here feel to prosecute or proscribe, not just shun and condemn, those of us who regard the claims of climate ‘alarmists’ as overblown, poorly grounded, and/or cynical hacks/idealists, its clear that some/all academics are demonstrably and even passionately eager to purify the ivory tower of the intellectually unclean.
School shootings often involve students whose behavior might have been marked down for closer scrutiny, and in some cases was/is. What we have come to accept is an entire set of double-standards. Presumptions of guilt ‘all Republicans are sociopaths’ and an insistence that religionists be allowed to promulgate a set of values and ideas that begin, not end, with: the separation of genders, creationism instead of science, and the moral duty to jam their particular brand of claptrap into everyone despite our individual wishes.
They, too, have a right to spread their ideas at universities, but that doesn’t mean we ignore the reality that a handful share beheading videos on their cellphones and are engaged in an effort to recruit the gullible to commit atrocities.
js. 10.30.15 at 9:44 pm
Pity that the petition is only for CUNY-affiliated folks. If there’s a more general one, please let us know, I will sign it.
——-
On a less serious note, surely it’s okay to make fun of students once in a while! I mean, one certainly shouldn’t make a habit of it, but when they write something amazingly—and totally unintentionally—hilarious in an exam or paper, and you’ve laughed by yourself for half an hour, sometimes you just need to share the laughter. No?
Collin Street 10.30.15 at 9:48 pm
We demand probable cause be shown to a neutral 3rd party, precisely because the police cannot possibly ever be free of bias. Otherwise, why bother with it?
If cops were properly trained to recognise confirmation bias they wouldn’t object to having their theories tested, either, because they’d recognise the possibility of their error.
Bluntly, I think a lot of the problem is that a lot of police forces and legal agencies are dominated by workers that are just plain badly trained and incompetent. The problems you get — needless violence, lack of regard for rights of accused, railroaded prosecutions, bullshit prosecutions leading to the guilty going free, prosecutorial misconduct etc — all seem to bundle together, world-wide: you don’t get, disaggregated, “police forces that bash prisoners but are scrupulously honest in court presentations”, you get all the problems, each in the same degree.
Bill Murray 10.31.15 at 12:03 am
well Feinstein’s new NSA regulation bill will nip all this in the bud
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/10/sen-feinsteins-nsa-bill-will-codify-and-extend-mass-surveillance
jonnybutter 10.31.15 at 12:16 am
the New York Police Department believes that part of its mission is to protect New York City citizens from turning into terrorists.
Most nauseating thing I’ve read all day, and that includes campaign coverage. I don’t see how anyone here, left or right, can defend this.
ZM 10.31.15 at 2:53 am
In Australia we mostly have Chinese spies at our universities.
This has made ASIO annoyed since there are more Chinese spies than Australian spies, so I think they are building a bigger network of Australian spies at universities to compete with the Chinese spies.
“China is building large covert spy networks inside Australia’s leading universities, prompting Australia to strengthen its counter-intelligence capabilities.
Chinese intelligence officials have confirmed to Fairfax Media that they are building informant networks to monitor Australia’s ethnic Chinese community to protect Beijing’s ”core interests”.
Much of the monitoring work takes place in higher education institutions (including Melbourne University and Sydney University), where more than 90,000 students from mainland China are potentially exposed to ideas and activities not readily available at home.
I was interrogated four times in China,” said a senior lecturer at a high-ranking Australian university. He said he was questioned by China’s main spy agency over comments he made at a seminar about democracy at the University of NSW.
‘They showed me the report,” he said. ”I can even name the lady who sent the report.”
Such networks are driving the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation to build significant new counter-intelligence capabilities.
”They have more resources in Sydney University than we do,” an Australian official said.”
http://www.smh.com.au/national/chinese-spies-keep-eye-on-leading-universities-20140420-36yww.html
Martinned 10.31.15 at 11:43 am
I’m fascinated by the cultural differences at play here, compared to what I’m used to. I can honestly say that I’ve never attended or worked at a university that in any way acted in loco parentis as kidneystones [33] put it, or that felt like it had to protect the students against the consequences of “their fumbles and foibles”. By and large, the universities that I have been in contact with have assumed that their students are already adults when they come through the door, and should be treated as such. So they get to decide whether they want to come to class or sit an exam, and what they do when they’re not in class or sitting an exam is no concern of the university administration.
Clearly I have all sorts of problems with the American law (or lack thereof) on entrapment, surveillance, etc. But why a university campus should be different from other places, or why the university administration should seek to make it different, mystifies me. I guess it all depends on what you’re used to.
Francis 10.31.15 at 3:36 pm
If you’re using Facebook it’s total surveillance, 24/7 because the owner, Zuckerberg, promotes it. There is nothing more to discuss on this topic. Use facebook and everything you do, say or post will fall under the watchful eye of some over-paid psychopath. End of discussion.
Waiting for Godot 10.31.15 at 6:52 pm
How can there be any intellectually honest defense of undercover local police spying on ANYone on the campus of any public university in the United States?!!
dipper 10.31.15 at 8:25 pm
Apologies if I’m missing something but isn’t the point of undercover cops that you don’t know they are there? If they have to ask your permission then it’s not undercover work it’s a police operation? And you just say no to that as if you wanted to do police work you would have joined the police?
Art Deco 10.31.15 at 9:00 pm
I think a lot of the problem is that a lot of police forces and legal agencies are dominated by workers that are just plain badly trained and incompetent.
I don’t think mouthy academics have much they can teach the police about policing.
The Temporary Name 10.31.15 at 11:03 pm
It’s well-known that there is no field called criminology.
kidneystones 10.31.15 at 11:59 pm
@39 Thank you for this. I agree that in many cases those employed by universities to teach cannot be fairly called ‘educators’ for reasons we need not revisit now. I’d also add that ‘most’ and ‘in part’ mean just that. All K-12 and pre-K-12 educators are required to act in the role of parents to varying degrees. I suspect you’ll also find that many universities, especially those willing to provide university-assisted housing, make some claims to parents that their children will study in a safe, nurturing environment. I’ll allow that strictly speaking the housing is a separate issue, but only in so far that there is an implicit promises of safe passage to classes, etc, built into the explicit promise of safe housing. You might also be surprised to learn that the mission statements of many universities contain explicit language promoting a particular set of values for our ‘adults’ to imbibe and incorporate.
I agree that universities should not be subject to special laws. Free speech is in fact curtailed on many/some university campuses, as we have seen most recently at Oxford, where Germaine Greer has been prevented from speaking for having the temerity to confess that many women do not regard self-castrating males as ‘women.’
End of discussion.
parse 11.01.15 at 3:33 am
Let’s focus instead on the leadership of CUNY that either knowingly allows this kind of spying on our students to continue or does little to nothing to stop it.
According to the Gothamist story, Brooklyn College President Karen Gould denied that the administration had known about the undercover officer [PDF], and condemned “the alleged intrusion of the NYPD into campus life.â€
In the linked PDF (minutes from a faculty council meeting), Gould is quoted as saying: First, this administration, myself included, and our campus security director, have
had no knowledge nor has the prior administration, as far as I can tell, of this alleged
undercover intelligence gathering or any other intelligence gathering or surveilling of
our students, faculty, or staff or any Muslim student group in particular. But if these
alleged covert activities did take place, we would surely not have been notified,
because we would have condemned them outright. I am deeply concerned about
these allegations and have already shared my concerns with fellow CUNY
presidents and with the chancellor’s office, and I will share them with the NYPD
leadership very shortly. We are committed to upholding the constitutional rights of
each and every member of our campus community, and we expect all those who
visit our campus to do the same. The safety, security, and constitutional rights of
our students, faculty, and staff are and will remain of the utmost importance in all
that we do. We do not in any way condone the alleged intrusion of the NYPD into
campus life, and, if true, we view this as a violation of freedom of expression and
constitutional rights of our students, faculty, and staff.
Is she being misleading or disingenuous, or is your criticism of leadership at CUNY director at other administrators?
Nick Caldwell 11.01.15 at 7:36 am
Speaking of free speech, this thread is quickly becoming an amazingly good argument against it.
Corey Robin 11.01.15 at 12:38 pm
parse: The quote you’re referring to is from 2011, when another story of spying by the NYPD was broken. This is a new story.
Lynne 11.01.15 at 12:54 pm
“Free speech is in fact curtailed on many/some university campuses, as we have seen most recently at Oxford, where Germaine Greer has been prevented from speaking for having the temerity to confess that many women do not regard self-castrating males as ‘women.’”
Do you mean Cardiff University? It’s been in the news recently that she was invited to speak there and there was a petition against her coming, launched by a women’s officer in the student union. I believe the invitation still stands, but she has said she is too old to deal with protesters so may not go.
kidneystones 11.01.15 at 1:16 pm
@49 Thanks for this. Yes, you’re right. My eyes just glaze over. I have to say I’m looking forward to the end of the white hetro-patriarchy in Europe and the UK. Course, the demographics suggest that the new Britons and Europeans are going to be considerably less tolerant of trans-gender people than career rednecks such as Greer.
I happen to agree with Greer on this point, but that’s neither here nor there. We’re not supposed to agree. The resulting debates drive knowledge forward.
BBA 11.01.15 at 1:58 pm
If this is just ordinary “police work”, we should ban “police work” everywhere, since there’s no reason why colleges should be different from anywhere else.
William Berry 11.01.15 at 6:29 pm
@Art Deco: “I don’t think”
Nailed it.
Cranky Observer 11.01.15 at 6:29 pm
If this is just ordinary “police workâ€, we should ban “police work†everywhere, since there’s no reason why NRA meetings where attendees discuss whether or not they should start killing their librul neighbors with high-velocity firearms to prevent a tyrannical Administration from taking office should be different from anywhere else.
dipper 11.01.15 at 8:12 pm
Here’s an example of a UK high school student jailed for plotting an Islamist inspired atrocity. Worth checking the blue box at the bottom. Quite a lot of effort put into not avoiding this outcome.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3257289/Boy-plotted-Anzac-Day-parade-terror-massacre-Australia-age-14-jailed-life.html
dipper 11.01.15 at 8:15 pm
Oops – should read “avoiding this outcome.”. The not is erroneous .
ianbob 11.02.15 at 4:40 am
the daily mail is not a trustworthy source
Stephen 11.02.15 at 8:42 am
The opinions expressed in the Daily Mail are often very different from mine, and no doubt yours, but that doesn’t mean the facts they describe are necessarily wrong. If you compare their report with articles in the Guardian
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/oct/01/anzac-day-terror-plot-likely-to-have-resulted-in-deaths-court-told
http://www.theguardian.com/news/2015/oct/02/anzac-day-terror-plot-british-teenager-given-life-sentence
is there any significant factual difference?
SC 11.05.15 at 9:20 am
That Mother Jones article is worth reading. However, the rt.com summary of it looks inaccurate to me. MJ says the FBI’s counterterrorism budget is $3.3 billion, not that $3.3 billion is spent specifically on informants, as the rt.com article implies. Still totally ridiculous but perhaps a little misleading.
” . . . counterterrorism has been the FBI’s No. 1 priority, consuming the lion’s share of its budget—$3.3 billion, compared to $2.6 billion for organized crime—and much of the attention of field agents and a massive, nationwide network of informants. After years of emphasizing informant recruiting as a key task for its agents, the bureau now maintains a roster of 15,000 spies—many of them tasked, as Hussain was, with infiltrating Muslim communities in the United States. In addition, for every informant officially listed in the bureau’s records, there are as many as three unofficial ones, according to one former high-level FBI official, known in bureau parlance as ‘hip pockets.'”
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/08/fbi-terrorist-informants
Comments on this entry are closed.