The questionnaire seems pretty fair, to be honest.
If someone has access to weapons, tried to travel to a terrorist training camp, has mental instability issues, supports use of violence as well as using religion as a justification for violence and follows all the ISIS social media accounts, I'd be pretty worried.
I didn't see any questions about "does the individual holds a significant distrust of government and institutions?" or "does the individual own multiple anarchism books?". All the questions are very specific and practical.
The guy (girl?) you describe in the second sentence is very obvious to identify. The problem is not there.
I am in Quebec City. A terrorist killed 6 people here a few weeks ago. A young, quiet, white catholic guy with clean looks. He killed 6 muslims during their prayers.
Would that questionnaire have identified that young, quiet, white catholic terrorist killer?
> Would that questionnaire have identified that young, quiet, white catholic terrorist killer?
Possibly, but it's difficult to say based on your description, because age, skin color, general quietness, and religion are not on the questionnaire.
But to your broader point, could a questionnaire be written well enough to reliably identify all terrorists? If it only significantly improves detection, I'd think it would be worthwhile.
The problem with that reasoning is that if you rely on a detection method that's biased towards a specific target a competent terrorist organization can profile that method and then have a better than average change of passing through by behaving in an opposite way. That's why profiling doesn't work all that well against any sort of sophisticated enemy.
If he truly was a completely ordinary person by all outward appearances, then no questionnaire would identify him, and this one doesn't aim to. I don't know much about the Quebec suspect, but it seems like many of the Ideology, Research And Planning, and Social sections might have applied to him. I don't think this questionnaire is biased towards one type of terrorist.
In fact it seems like the whole point of this is to help agents identify less obvious suspects, so they don't only focus on the guy who keeps traveling back and forth from Syria and retweeting ISIS.
To be fair, the Quebec terrorist would have been caught on a couple of these items, but not all. Yes, this questionnaire would catch radical islamic terrorists but not the right-wing terrorist you mention, so it is only effective for a class of such possibly violent individuals.
If you apply a test like this to a few million people you will get tens of thousands of false positives. Those will clog up the works while in the meantime your quiet unassuming terrorist will walk right by under the radar and quite possibly will kill a bunch of people.
Most blood tests or tests for any major disease have a high rate of false positive, that's why you take the tests ALONG with a doctor analysing your symptoms (and that's there Bayes' theorem plays a big role).
So applying a single test to a huge general population makes little sense. But applying that to a population that already carries some traits is highly relevant.
Blood tests for diseases tend to have a much higher true positive rate as well because of substantial higher incidence rate of diseases for which simple blood tests exist than terrorism, besides that the cost of a false positive isn't that high (you just order another test to improve the odds, roughly at the same cost level as the first one).
Even Bayes can't make sense of garbage input, there has to be some relevance to the input numbers.
It's not magic, it's applied statistics.
If your probabilities are on the order of 'nonexistent' and your test has a false positive rate on the order of a few 10'ths of a % then you are wasting your time no matter what the method you use to analyze your data.
If your metric is simply "number of terrorists caught" then sure a broken test is better than no test.
But you are ignoring the cost of "catching" innocent people. Plus you are ignoring the cost of the administering the test.
You could dedicate your resources to actual detective work instead of wholesale dragnet operation in the hope that something useful turns up. Makes for good security theater though.
Uhm, what? The alternative is to have a few million people that you're concerned about for some reason and then have no way to exclude the vast majority of them from investigative interest.
The test is useful, just not useful enough to transform a random population into a list of suspects. It's useful for what the FBI says it's getting used for - determining how to allocate resources among a limited population that's already under suspicion. Eg, be more likely to assign an active agent if the case involves people with access to weapons.
> The alternative is to have a few million people that you're concerned about for some reason and then have no way to exclude the vast majority of them from investigative interest.
If you're concerned about a few million people to spot 10 (a high estimate) per year then you will need better tools than dragnet surveillance and questionnaires like these. Did you really expect to answer any of these questions about a would-be terrorist in such a way that it would help an investigation?
Check the questions, it's positively skewed towards one particular kind of terrorist (young Islamic males even though it does not state that outright it might as well be written there). And then you get your nice, upstanding Christian white-guy who murders 6 people in cold blood and would have murdered a whole lot more if he had the chance.
These questions are meaningless without accurate priors and accurate priors require incidence rates that are distinguishable from noise.
> A young, quiet, white catholic guy with clean looks.
Has media called him a terrorist even after he has done all that ? I doubt that. He was probably identified as a person with mental health issues.
A Canadian journalist like Tarak Fatah might get flagged as terrorist though he is an kick-ass islamic reformer. Tarak Fatah has extensively travelled in hotbeds of Islamic extremism, he is associated with and has engaged all the Islamic mullahs and currently runs a TV series debate with mullas titled "Fatah Ka Fatwah".
It is hard to catch terrorists by filling up questionnaires. Some of those questions however are obvious indicators of a threat. If you already know a person has travelled to a different country to participate in violence, I am not sure why you need to fill anything else.
The FBI is a predominantly white organization, over 88%<?> white. The rest are minorities used as pawns and analysts for infiltration and analysis of their respective ethnic populations. There's no way they're going to actively justify and develop a program to target other white terrorists/attackers/etc... They're just like the local police force except with bigger brains and some college degrees.
edit: I'd imagine the Canadian equivalent is the same since the US and Canada share a common background and approach in dealing with perceived threats to their "white supremacy".
Most of the questions are not religious-related, but related to violence, mobilization, etc. So if the young, quiet white catholic terrorist was doing any of those, he could be identified.
My guess is that the Columbine shooters could be flagged by the questionnaire.
There's nothing indicating that any of those factors by itself would make you a person of interest.
And I'd guess the FBI would be a really bad service if "uses encryption" or "camping" by itself would be considered as a strong signal. The noise would be too big.
Now talk about someone who has a history of violence, takes long camping trips with a large arsenal, suddenly dropped all non-encrypted means of communication and is obsessed about books on chemical warfare and terrorist attacks. If it were your call, would you dedicate attention to that person?
More importantly, it's probably used to screen out people who don't belong. You can be damn sure anybody who is an actual terrorist uses encryption. Most harmless religious camping enthusiasts do not.
Actually, a surprisingly large amount of terrorists do not use encryption (or at least not on purpose.) For a recent example, after news media widely reported that the Paris attackers used encryption, it turned out that they actually did not [0], and instead simply used common messaging apps. That didn't stop the FBI from using the attacks to denounce encryption, of course.
In reality, using encryption isn't going to help you all that much if a government entity thinks you're suspicious. It may make it marginally harder for them to be suspicious of you, but that's about it. If they want something, and 'encryption' is in the way, 99.9% of the time they have a way around it. A very relevant, and very hilarious article on this: [1]
The penalty for misclassifications is higher for false negatives than false positives. In fact, what happens if the FBI exhausts its budget investigating the positives from this classifier? Do they try to improve the classifier accuracy or do they seek a larger budget along with the prestige of playing a bigger role in the War on Terrorism?
I don't think camping fits. Take out camping and you get a person with a history of violence, a large arsenal, obsessed with terrorist books. Still pretty scary.
Technically speaking I really doubt interest in camping is any higher amongst terrorists than the population.
Has the subject participated in activities that simulate military or operational environments?
So motorhome and marshmallows with your family at Big Bear Happy Camp probably wouldn't count, unless you're planning to kill everyone by making them eat s'mores until their blood sugar spikes.
Perhaps terrorists with camping skills have a higher threat potential? It's not just about P(terrorism | camping) - they also care about the expected value of terrorism plots involving particular suspects.
Like, I'm not even sure that terrorists are more likely to be known to own guns. The EV of terrorist plots involving gun ownership are higher, though, so more investigation ought to go there.
You make a great point about expected value of damage done, rather than focusing on the probability of an attack. But I think an attack with guns has a low upper limit on the number of people you can kill (maybe around 100, plus or minus?) before an armed response is mobilized. Things like nuclear, chemical, biological attacks or bombs bringing down buildings scare me more from a statistical standpoint.
I'm pretty sure that P(bombs|guns) > P(bombs), so my point stands. It's a mix of guns being dangerous, as well as gun possession being evidence of possession of other dangerous things.
How many non-technical people do you know that use encrypted email on their personal email accounts?
There's nothing wrong with using PGP, for example, but if I found out my totally non-technical neighbor was using PGP, I would probably still give them the benefit of the doubt, but I would raise a flag in my mind and watch for other flags.
Actually, I looked at the encryption question specifically. The question is: "Has the subject engaged in or discussed tradecraft to contextually hide their online activity different from previous activity?"
So, if you're always encrypting everything, the answer here is no. Dude always encrypted everything, dude still encrypts everything.
They are flagging if you suddenly start using an encrypted communication service for specific things, as another indicator something's going on. That's fair enough imo.
No, but take a gander at 21). Does using encryption, "password-protected websites", IP Anonymization make me a terrorist? I think that describes a significant fraction of people here.
Sure, that should be taken in context to the rest of the questions, but should that even be a flag? Should we regularly detain and question pentesters now if they have a middle-eastern background?
No, but that isn't the only question on the list. Encryption combined with fundamentalism, tactical training, and a keen interest in prior attacks is definitely a red flag in my book. And the use of encryption/privacy software definitely strengthens that case.
Perhaps you are scared by fundamenralism. So you get tactical training, use encryption because you hate "big-brother", and anonymize your IP... Then because of your fear you research prior attacks.
I'm going to argue that's at least a tens of thousands of people if not many more. A lot of apps are implementing encryption (tens of millions of users), millions of Americans have tactical training, plus most Americans are interested in attacks.
Seems like this list doesn't really narrow down the suspect pool to meaningful numbers. More like, it makes it seem like people made this list to seem like they were doing something.
I'm not saying that this is a perfect filter that has no false positives. No one is saying that. But if you were to give me profiles of every American citizen and ask me to find the terrorists - it's exactly where i'd start.
See my reply to another comment. I concede that Encryption in tandem with the other criteria is possibly something to take into account, but it certainly should not be in the same category of things like "expressing desire to travel overseas to engage in violence." On reading the first page, it looks the questionnaire answers are weighed, but I certainly hope that "wanting violence" isn't anywhere near the same weight as "encrypts his shit."
I imagine it's not a weighting system per se. I don't know any more than you, so all I can say really is that if I were designing it, encryption would be considered a major red flag one someone who already had the other characteristics.
That is, if someone encrypts, that means nothing. But if you are comparing two fundamentalists predisposed to violence, and one of them uses crypto and privacy software and the other doesn't - I would lean heavily towards investigating the crypto guy. He's likely planning something.
I guess what i'm saying is that I think the interaction of a feature like crypto should be nonlinear with certain other features.
Someone like that who suddenly starts using encryption is a major red flag. Fundamentalism, tactical training and a keep interest in prior attacks aren't enough to single out someone who's preparing an attack, but someone like that who went off the grid, started using encryption and just maxed out his credit card needs far more attention than someone spreading have from their basement.
Encryption suggests active planning. Using encryption is what you do when you are actively trying to hide your activity. The others are indicators of susceptible traits - but encryption suggests imminence and active involvement. If you have gone beyond just developing radical beliefs and start actually planning an attack, that's when you're likely to start using encryption and taking operational security seriously.
Has the subject engaged in or discussed tradecraft to hide their online activities contextually different from previous activity?
The relevant part isn't the encryption, but the context. If you have two email accounts, one for general usage, unencrypted, and one encrypted that you rarely use, but suddenly see a spike in usage, that's a red flag.
It isn't if you use encryption, but how you use it.
That's hardly the only question like that. Many things on this list would, if taken in isolation, not be indicative of terrorist leanings. I'm assuming that's why there are many questions on this list.
Alright, I was about to delete my comment above when I saw a reply to another comment which had similar sentiment to mine. I guess what we need then is what weight they assign to each of these. That "using encryption" is on the same level as a listing on "express[ing] a desire to travel overseas to engage violence"[0] doesn't inspire my confidence. It makes me think that this questionnaire won't be as effective.
[0] according to the leaked document. If they weights are assigned by some other rubric in another document not leaked or part of this article at least, then I guess I am wrong.
But the document doesn't talk about "using encryption", it says: Has the subject engaged in or discussed tradecraft to hide their online activities contextually different from previous activity?
I am a convert to Islam and I say yes, I'm ready for the gap between reality and "common sense" to close on this topic.
I don't consider it offensive to talk about these issues openly because I am secure in my knowledge that Islam does not encourage terrorism. I'm more offended when people sweep it under the rug. When it's about safety, people have to leave their fears and biases at the door and accept the truth.
A typical person in some parts of America today will look at a practicing Muslim and automatically see a terrorist, but that's neither helpful nor accurate. The facts don't support that stereotype, and I think the FBI understands that. Of course ideology plays a role in detecting threats, but there are other factors that may play a bigger role, like mental health, social stability, criminal history, training in weapons, etc. If everyone understood this, it would lead to more accurate tips by the public to law enforcement, and the concept of a "Muslim ban" wouldn't be seen as productive. But the centuries-old narrative of Muslim hordes attacking the West has been revived, and that is how people see the issue, and that's unfortunate.
Sorry but that narrative has a basis in reality. Islam was started with the goal of expansion and that has not changed enough. Every territory taken over by Muslim rulers underwent subtle or not so subtle islamization. I was born on the Eastern border of the Christian world and the tensions have been very real there for many centuries. My great grandfather was killed for refusing to convert into Islam and some of his murderers were his neighbors whom he trusted and lived with together for ages. This was in an area where my ancestors lived in for many centuries and that was periodically taken over by Muslim countries. There are many examples of peaceful coexistence and the majority of Muslims are great people, but I personally would not raise my kids in a Muslim-majority country.
> I am secure in my knowledge that Islam does not encourage terrorism
There is not a universal flavor of Islam that is accepted by all Muslims. Islam is a decentralized religion with hundreds of factions that all have different interpretations of the Koran and its teachings.
At least on my fb feed, it's a far-right trope that refugees are admitted with no vetting process whatsoever. Enough that I managed to research it and found this very informative infoposter from the Obama administration:
note: multiple stages of bio checking, numerous three-letter agencies, additional steps for Syrians.
I used to post this every other day on fb, but lately I just realize there are simply groups who repeatedly gaslight each other and aren't interested in reality. One of them referred to my post as "liberal facts," implying, apparently, that the government doesn't perform the above screening process which it claims it does. shrug.jpg
I think the weakness here is in the first step "Collects identifying documents". If a potential terrorist in some countries can procure 'official' documents with a different name than their own, then all the rest of the screening will fail, because they will be checking the record of a presumably innocent resident of that country, while the person who would actually enter the country if approved would be someone else. Ideally, the government doing the checking also needs to be able to get or verify additional information from the potential refugee's home governments.
It therefore seems reasonable to me you might want to restrict travel from countries that either have such weak governments that fake 'official' documents can be obtained (somalia, syria, yemen etc) or countries that have a stated policy of non-cooperation with the US government on such matters (Iran).
That would also explain why you would not exclude people from 46 other muslim majority countries - there would be no reason to if their official documents can be relied on, and they are responsive to queries from the US when some information needs to be verified.
My argument isn't that the USA performs no screening, which is a strawman argument. It's that the screening process is inadequate. That is a nice checklist, but it relies on unreliable data such as documents and iris scans.
Unless the government has every present and future terrorist's fingerprints in a database, how will scanning fingerprints be effective? It cannot be, it logically does not make sense. This logic is confirmed by FBI director Comey who told congress the same thing.
Perhaps that is where your disagreements with the "far-right" are stemming from?
If the extreme vetting uses the criteria in the leaked document, then I don't have a problem with that at all.
Of course, it would be silly to (for example) bar someone from immigrating solely because they played laser tag, but I'd assume they would aggregate multiple factors into a total score and measure it against some threshold.
Yes, if only there were some sort of rigorous multi-year screening process that had been in place for several years, so we wouldn't have to ban everyone until we "figure it out".
its not a hard leap to go from edgy impressionable teenager seeing the moral relativity of "the west" to deciding to take an individual role in the jihad obligation
the "get them back" mentality of the west's constituents is incompatible with "attack anybody occupying muslim lands" mentality
I think it's fair to leak because most of this content is common-sense. My highschool civics class had a project to create a terrorist checklist... we hit at least 95% of this list. So I see absolutely no danger here.
I suspected I'd see a variation of this answer in this thread. While on some level it makes sense for some cases (the information is so benign that it doesn't matter if it is leaked), in this case I don't think it quite adds up.
First, while much of the information might be common-sense, it might not be to potential adversaries and I see no reason to provide further aide.
Second, revealing documents like this helps prove what FBI isn't doing. When trying to plan an effective counter to surveillance, it can be just as important to know what isn't be tracked as well as what is. Again, I don't see a public good here.
I simply don't think there is an overriding good that outweighs potential downsides (even if small). Revealing this document does not show moral or legal problems. All it does is fulfill curiosity. Which isn't a good reason for leaking information related to national security.
I think it's more important people are informed about what their activities might appear like to law enforcement than what actual terrorists are going to have to do to cover up their tracks.
Many would-be terrorists seem to only take casual precautions to avoid getting caught. Maybe, like so many criminals, they think they're better than others who have been caught.
It's come out again and again that a lot of these attacks have been planned with nothing more than email, Facebook and unencrypted text messages. There's just too much information out there to sift through and find all the true positives.
If they actually cared about operational security they'd read up on how spies do it. That stuff is pretty much public knowledge if you spend time researching.
"48 ways the CIA uses to determine when to drone strike someone".
Wouldn't you like to know if the CIA actually uses common sense methods to determine when to assassinate someone? By the same token, we should know when the government decides to put people on no-fly lists, and all sorts of other lists.
And before you say that the CIA is an intelligence agency and therefore everything it does must be kept secret, the thing is drone strikes should not be done by the CIA. If you wage war, then it should be done in the open, lest you want a repeat of the Vietnam war (which arguably is already the case with the mostly failed, yet continuing operations in the Middle East]).
Obama actually wanted to give drone strikes to the Pentagon, but of course, Obama as a weakly-minded politician that he was that always compromised to the other side's benefit, eventually backed down and allowed the CIA to handle drone strikes.
If you don't see doing drone strikes (of which thousands were kept completely secret) against 8 different nations by a secretive intelligence agency, then I don't know what else to tell you.
If your analogy was true, there would be a stronger moral argument for revealing such information. But it isn't. I'm talking about this very specific case.
Leaked document appears to be from 2013. Have you considered the possibility that the FBI was itself the source of the leak and the questions/methods have since evolved?
I'm not sure speculation changes the central premise of the question. Assume that the document was up to date with the latest techniques. Would you still that consider it to be a document worth leaking for the public good?
edit: I will acknowledge that the age of the document does change its impact. But 2013 is pretty recent.
Access to weapons: most of America, or all of America depending upon whether shopping is considered access and how 'weapons' are defined.
Has 'trained' overseas: anyone with a passport.
Has 'tried to acquire' bomb-making materials: Reading a book is not illegal. Clicked on the wrong torrent?
Using encryption: everyone.
Masking internet browsing: everyone.
Showing an interest in terrorist events: everyone.
"participating in activities that simulate military or operational environments": anyone who has ever been camping/hiking/played an FPS.
Changed appearance or habits? everyone.
Has "experienced a recent personal loss or humiliation"? Many people.
Has a history of mental health problems? A large proportion of the population.
Substance abuse. Almost everyone.
Hold a belief or ideology that supports the use of violence? Oh what, like "are they a current or former member of the military, politics, or big business?"
This is all really disconcerting in its vagary and scope for misapplication.
I really think you overshoot here on almost every point. The ones that stick out for me:
* Not everyone has trained overseas. In the west/east bubble maybe that's common, but nowhere else.
* You seriously try defending reading bomb-making books? To imply that reading a book on how to make bombs, without any background need for it like a job related to pyro, etc., is not suspicios is IMHO rediculous.
* Not "everyone" uses encryption. Actually, the majority of web users do not, and less so knowingly.
* Not "everyone" will suddenly and completly change the overall theme of themselves.
* Not "everyone" has recent loss or has been humiliated.
In general, your other points are getting onto something and i somewhat agree.
However, to be honest I don't think a break down approach is the best to gain incite into the FBI's process. The questions are supposed to be treated as a whole, not singulars. Each question is not designed to give a yes/no answer; but rather the end result, suspicion of terrorism, is a complex, non-analytic function of all the answers
You seriously try defending reading bomb-making books? Yes, because freedom to seek and impart information is a human right. More practically, if you start down this path of forbidden knowledge then you wind up at a point where learning or teaching at all is a banned, inherently political act. What about reading about physics or chemistry on Wikipedia? An interest in metalwork, sculpture, jewellery or pottery? Being observed working on "unknown" metal projects at a makerspace, keeping to yourself, and paying in cash? People deserve to be judged for their actions alone and not obtuse, politicized potential interpretations of their interests or past behavior generated by the secret machinations of the state, perversely nominally on their behalf and in the name of 'freedom'.
the majority of web users do not [use encryption]. False.
I occasionally read bomb-making books. In part because I once had a job that involved explosives, so I'm interested in high energy engineering, and in part because I'm curious about how IEDs are constructed, so as to consider how one might detect and defeat them.
I don't have a current employment need for this information. I'm simply curious as a matter of physics, engineering, and keeping myself informed about technology that influences events to some degree.
Given my interests, it appears that you'd shop me to the authorities because you regard those interests as suspicious.
That's unhelpful to society, to say the least. And illustrative of your misapprehension of actual risk.
>> Showing an interest in terrorist events: everyone.
What they meant by the question is not what you believe it to be... interest != concern. I would say almost everyone has a concern but not an interest.
Unlike in e.g. the UK, where the Official Secrets Act applies to the population at large, the prohibition against leaking or unauthorized possession of classified information is exclusively applicable to people with clearances.
Think of a Security Clearance as a scoped waiver of free speech in return for access to sensitive information. In the US, you have to opt-in to restrictions on your freedom of speech. Anyone without a clearance is protected by the 1st amendment, which has no National Security exception.
Assuming the list was derived scientifically, then this seems like a pretty sensible and useful law enforcement tool. It can be easily filled in by front line officers and gives them a good idea which lines of investigation to pursue.
Are we into precrime now? A criminal is one who is proven in court to be a criminal. Civilized societies use courts to decide the truth, not questionnaires filled out by shady people.
While on vacation maybe 15 years ago, I went to a library to get internet access. When I went to Google, the search dropdown box showed me that the previous several searches were all about burglary tools. Should the police be interested in that? (They were. And I don't blame them.)
An enemy combatants gets no such treatment. Since we're in a war against terrorism (the state's words, not mine), the legalese has mainly been argued from that distinction.
In an ideal world, it takes a crime to make a criminal. The consequences of commiting a crime are enough to keep most people from committing them. But if your crime involves suicide, what earthly consequence can we invent to reduce the numbers? I'm sure it would be helpful if whatever factors that are developing the perceived rewards of killing a bunch of people could be routed, but other than that, our thinking on the justice system doesn't really net a solution to politically motivated murder suicide. I.e. is this precrime? Under the western ideal of innocent until proven guilty, yes. Do the incentives of that system overcome terrorism? No.
This is not about deciding the truth or convicting criminals. This is "precrime" in the same way that a cop watching someone sneak around an empty house at midnight might identify them as a "precriminal". That's cause to watch them or go ask them what they're doing, not arrest them.
A widely acknowledged function of law enforcement is the anticipation of and prevention of crime.
Courts provide some restraint upon information gathering, such as the approval of search warrants - but mostly courts are only involved after an alleged crime has occurred.
Do you not understand the lesson being taught by such an exercise? It sounds like instead your biases made you think the school civics class would be teaching students how to profile people as terrorists.
We ban accounts that post uncivilly, so please don't do this on HN again. Instead, please (re-)read the site guidelines and post civilly and substantively, or not at all.
Question 21) "Has the subject engaged in [...] tradecraft to hide their online activities contextually different from previous activity? [...] password-protected websites."
I don't think it's unreasonable to ask whether password-protected websites are only an issue if they are being used to hide online activities. Or is this a strict liability thing, where any use of a password protected website is taken to mean that a user is attempting to hide their online activities.
I don't think that's the kind of encryption they're referring to, since you cannot infer anything about an individual simply for using HTTPS websites (which will soon be the majority of the web).
If someone has access to weapons, tried to travel to a terrorist training camp, has mental instability issues, supports use of violence as well as using religion as a justification for violence and follows all the ISIS social media accounts, I'd be pretty worried.
I didn't see any questions about "does the individual holds a significant distrust of government and institutions?" or "does the individual own multiple anarchism books?". All the questions are very specific and practical.