I probably do look like a terrorist somewhere. The problem isn't identifying that person and associating them with me, the problem is treating that information as significant, and that's on the FBI (in your hypothetical scenario).
The problem is that everyone in the chain ends up buying into this. The police make a record of it 'just in case.' You end up on a no-fly list 'just in case.' Everyone in the chain is covering their ass 'just in case' this person really is a terrorist.
No one ends up willing to stick their neck out and say, "this person probably isn't a terrorist"... just in case.
I tend to doubt your fear is to have your "terrorism points" incremented in some database, but rather the cold and distant nature of the federal government makes it nearly impossible to reason through how you're _not_ a terrorist (assuming you're not). There's no organized mechanism by which you can disprove your terrorism affiliations. Otherwise, being put in a database would be as much an issue as changing the wrong address on your insurance policy.
You may stand out, but that isn't necessarily bad, so long as what they remember about you isn't enought to identify you and might even misdirect them into thinking muslim terrorist.
At what point is it wrong to profile someone? If every terrorist and no one else had a blue crystal at the end of their nose, could we use that as a signal to check these people? What if every terrorist and 1 innocent had that? Where is the line drawn between when you can and can't use a data point to influence your decision? For what it's worth, I'm a man, and it seems that men tend to be more violent and more likely to be terrorists than women. I wouldn't mind if I on average got extra scrutiny because of my gender relative to women.
It's a correlation-causation problem. I'm sure terrorists ARE all about online privacy, so if you're all about online privacy, you MAY be a terrorist. But when you break it down, maybe 80% of terrorists (a small group) favor online privacy, but only 0.0001% of those who favor online privacy (a large group) are terrorists.
The same reason I have to take my shoes off at the airport: because one asshole tried to hide plastic explosives in his over a decade ago.
I'm genuinely curious, if it's not more data, what do we need to differentiate between a would be terrorist and a run of the mill extremist? Like better systems for prioritizing, filtering people?
1) Shield my screen in public places ( I don't want snoopers reading my emails....)
2) I pay cash most of the time (Helps me save money as the change goes into a change jar never to be spent again)
3) I have multiple cell phones. (One for business, one for personal)
4) I use a proxy to shield my IP address
5) I encrypt my computer and files, I send password protected compressed files.
6) I communicate with people I have never met in video games
7) I sometimes keep track of hackers and learn of vulnerable websites and infrastructures
Seriously though I am not keen on the flier. I think terrorism and extremists work best in fragmented societies. If you live in a small village where everyone knows everyone then the oddball or outcast will naturally be viewed with curiosity and suspicion. However, in towns and cities where you sometimes don't know your neighbor.. this is where a suspicious person can thrive.
Fliers like this encourage you not to trust to your neighbor. It screams. "The guy next to you might be a terrorist!" and encourages you to be distrustful. Its not healthy. It helps propagate the climate of fear. You expect messages like this in a police state not in a supposedly free country.
It is frustrating as I call it schrodinger's terrorist, why, well, say everybody is in a box.
now you do not know if that person in a box is a terrorist or not and by terrorist, a bad person who will impact others right to life.
So not knowing you can only tell if you look in a box, well if they are not and you look you are lambasted, if you look and they are then your just doing your job.
Now from a PR perspective, it gets down to let us not look as if they are not we get lots of people upset at us, and bad media more so if we get it right.
Which is fine but with one cavet, if you do not look and they are a terrorist then that box can go off and take out all the boxes around it.
So I call it schrodingers terrorist in a box and with that, you see the perspective more clearly.
That is why they look, and yes for those who are not terrorists/bad people it can be intrusive, but most if not all will not even know they are looking. Though many presume the worst and equally it is that mentality of the populous that also carries on in the security services and mentality of presume the worst, hence they look.
Time and time again the terrorists turn out to be people who were already being monitored by conventional intelligence strategies. However, the difficulty is in spotting the difference between people with terrorist sympathies and people who are an imminent threat. Harvesting more data won't help with this at all.
That's an interesting thought. Some terrorist is in the US and planning something, but they don't want to give away their intel. So do a bit of parallel construction and tip off the local cops to some relatively small crime he's committed in the course of everything....
Or substitute "whistleblower" or "inconvenient politician" for "terrorist" if you prefer.
I agree, but it is worth noting that these single phrase labelling isn't all that the NSA knows about these people.
For example, the first one you mentioned ("The U.S. brought the 9/11 attacks upon itself") has also had "writings appear on a number of jihadi websites".
Even combining those two things doesn't make that person a terrorist. OTOH I do think it is reasonable that the NSA has a file on a person like that.
Also, note that the NSA does not label them as terrorists - they use the word "Radicalizers".
Finally, the NSA doesn't actually seem to intend to discredit them - these are merely documented plans for how it could be done if required.
If the criteria they use become known, you're also creating a loophole for terrorists to target.
I can't remember the name of it, but some years back there a was a film (or possibly a TV drama) about a Chechen-American jihadi -- pale-skinned, blue-eyed and red-haired.
You might be Facebook friends with someone linked to terrorism, or you might have Liked posts from terrorism-linked groups. Or maybe there's a specific person who the government suspects has recently joined on with some terrorist cell, and if you're their Facebook friend, that is likely fairly interesting to some investigators.
I don't expect that this sort of question catches a lot of serious terrorists, but if they don't ask, you come blow something up, and you did have such immediately discoverable information on social media, it'd be really bad press for the folks who are supposed to stop that sort of thing.
I don't think it's a particularly controversial statement that lots of extra information about who you know and what your interests are would be at least a mildly useful signal for determining if you're a threat, but I doubt it's worth the intrusion and the risk of more nefarious uses.
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