Privacy

This is all very bad. But, much like with the tools used during the War on Terror to track "potential terrorists", I suspect this system has a problem of excessive false positives and false correlations.

Historically, the response to this kind of data sweep was not to target people based on the information but to justify targeting of people after the fact. Also, the FBI made a habit of setting out honeypots for (typically mentally ill or extremely naive) would-be radicals or even radicalization programs intended to foment prosecutable misconduct where none had existed.

Case in point, the Newburgh Four

In 2008, FBI-paid informant Shahed Hussain met James Cromitie in the parking lot of a mosque in Newburgh, New York, a town with a high poverty rate and large Muslim community. (Cromitie was not part of the compassionate release request that has set the other three free.) Hussain befriended Cromitie, a down and out petty drug dealer. Hussain claims to have told Cromitie that he was a member of a terrorist organization in Pakistan, which Cromitie allegedly expressed interest in joining. In subsequent recorded conversations, Cromitie made hateful antisemitic remarks, but according to evidence presented during the trial in 2011, when Hussain encouraged him to “make a plan, pick a target, find recruits, . . . procure guns, and conduct surveillance,” Cromitie did nothing. Hussain sought to motivate Cromitie by assuring him he would be rewarded in the afterlife for a jihadist attack, to no avail.

Hussain began offering more significant financial incentives for executing an attack, including promising Cromitie a BMW and cash, but Cromitie remained uninspired, taking no action to develop an attack plan. Even FBI agents thought that Cromitie was “unlikely to commit an act without the support of the FBI source.” Hussain’s enticements became more extravagant, including offering to pay Cromitie $250,000, an unauthorized inducement the FBI captured on a wiretap. Apparently tempted by the big payoff, Cromitie accompanied Hussian to scope out a potential target, but thereafter avoided Hussain and his persistent attempts to resume contact.

Cromitie avoided Hussain for almost two months. After losing his job and desperate for money, he reinitiated contact with Hussain and agreed to plot an attack. At Hussain’s urging, Cromitie recruited other Muslim men, David Williams, Onta Williams (no relation), and Laguerre Payen, to serve as lookouts. Like Cromitie, they too were impoverished with histories of petty drug crimes and mental illness. With the four men along for the ride, the informant Hussain pushed the scheme forward, selecting a synagogue and U.S. Air Force base as targets and driving the defendants across state lines (to ensure federal jurisdiction) to pick up mock weapons arranged by the FBI.

If these programs are allowed to run their course, I suspect we'll see similar stories springing up as less ideologically motivated judges recoil at investigations and prosecutions where the crimes themselves are entirely orchestrated by the investigating agencies.