Are Libertarians Terrorists?

[Paslode]

Originally Posted by HOLLiS

Is there any independent verification that this is happening?

I am out of the loop, but I do know a Sheriff and two chief of police, something does not sound right. I can also ask a friend in ATF, but with previous conversations, I can probably guess the answer.

The MIAC report is real, Missouri's Govenor Jay Nixon even acknowledged it and endorsed it. Missouri has more pressing issues than the Militias....just visit East St Louis, Kansas City, MO or watch the SWAT Channel and you can see for yourself.

There are a couple question that might be worthy of pondering. 1. Did Alex Jones blow this out of proportion? 2. Are Ron Paul stickers, Pocket Constitutions, Flags anymmore more radical than folks that run around with ACORN and Obama paraphernalia beating on your door to sign your allegence to Obama's Energy Plan?

In all honesty, I would take a Ron Paul supporting, Pocket Constitution carrying Militia Member over a Obama/ACORN Supporter as a neighbor any day.

[Sigaba]

Source is here.

Missouri Highway Patrol retracts controversial report on militia activity
By JASON NOBLE
The Star’s Jefferson City correspondent
Breaking News

JEFFERSON CITY | The Missouri Highway Patrol this week retracted a controversial report on militia activity and will change how such reports are reviewed before being distributed to law enforcement agencies.

The Highway Patrol also will open an investigation into the origin of the report, which linked conservative groups with domestic terrorism and named former presidential candidates Ron Paul, Bob Barr and Chuck Baldwin.

The Highway Patrol’s announcement followed a news conference in which Lt. Gov. Peter Kinder, a Republican, suggested putting the director of public safety on administrative leave and investigating how the report was produced.

The uproar revolves around a report released last month by the Missouri Information Analysis Center, a “fusion center” for local, state and federal law enforcement agencies to collaborate on domestic security issues. The report concerned militia movements in Missouri and across the U.S., and described how they had evolved over the last several years.

But it suggested that domestic militias often subscribed to radical ideologies rooted in Christian views and opposition to immigration, abortion or federal taxes. The report also stated that it was “not uncommon” for militia members to support third-party political candidates.

The Highway Patrol’s superintendent, Col. James F. Keathley, released a memo saying the report did not meet the agency’s standard for quality and would not have been released if it had been seen by top officials.

“For that reason,” Keathley wrote, “I have ordered the MIAC to permanently cease distribution of the militia report.”

The memo noted the report was compiled by an employee of the information analysis center and reviewed only by the center director before being sent to law enforcement agencies across the state.

In the future, Keathley wrote, reports from the center will be reviewed by leaders of the Highway Patrol and the Department of Public Safety.

On Thursday, Gov. Jay Nixon, a Democrat, expressed support for Keathley’s order and distanced his administration from the process that allowed the report to be released.

“Under a previous system, MIAC would prepare and distribute these reports to law enforcement agencies without review or approval from the colonel of the Highway Patrol or the director of Public Safety,” Nixon said. “That’s simply not acceptable.”

Conservatives in Missouri and nationally have criticized the report for lumping people with conservative political views in with domestic terrorists and potentially opening them to harassment from law enforcement.

Before Keathley’s memo was released Wednesday, Kinder criticized the report for suggesting that only issues championed by conservatives motivated domestic terrorists. The report “slanders” opponents of abortion and critics of illegal immigration, he said.

“Under the guidance of the present director, who apparently must think it is Nixon’s secret service, the Department of Public Safety has taken on the new and sinister role of political profiling,” Kinder said.

Also troubling Kinder said, the report makes no mention of Islamic terrorists or those who might subscribe to ideologies associated with liberals, such as environmental radicals.

The state’s response to the conservative outcry over the report evolved over the last few weeks. In one early response, the information analysis center released a statement reaffirming its “regard for the Constitutions of the United States and Missouri” and expressing regret that “any citizens or groups were unintentionally offended by the content of the document.”

Then earlier this week, Department of Public Safety Director John M. Britt retracted the portions that noted third party and Republican presidential candidates by name and sent letters of apology to the politicians.

But even with the retraction and the investigation announced Wednesday, Britt should be suspended and the General Assembly should investigate how the report was prepared, Kinder said.

“Director Britt has still not answered any of the questions about what other reports may have been developed and the procedure behind these memos,” Kinder’s spokesman, Gary McElyea, said in a statement. “Until those questions are answered Mr. Britt should be placed on immediate leave.”

ZooKeeper and QP Pete--

Sirs, I hope that you two don't mind that I'm including another link to the report. This link provides the entire report in PDF format that may be a bit easier for members of ps.com to save. The link is here.

[ZooKeeper]

Originally Posted by Sigaba

ZooKeeper and QP Pete--

Sirs, I hope that you two don't mind that I'm including another link to the report. This link provides the entire report in PDF format that may be a bit easier for members of ps.com to save. The link is here.

Sigaba - thanks for posting the latest article. I hadn't seen/read it yet.

Also, thanks for posting the .pdf for my file.

[nmap]

I have to chuckle at reports like these. People call for all manner of profiling - but they simply do not have the resources to begin doing it. Often, part of the concept is monitoring of the internet, or of individual behavior.

Back when I was teaching classes, I would stand in front of 200 students and bring up the issue of such profiling and monitoring. The students would express various opinions on the issue. I would then go to Google and type in the term "CIA letter opener" which brought up various suppliers for an amusing plastic knife. I would then point out that plastic knives would not register on a metal detector, and would then ask whether people who brought such things up on the computer were dangerous and should they be monitored.

There were some good discussions...

I would then describe a hypothetical older fellow with a cantankerous attitude who happened to complain about the government, wrote letters to the editor about taxes, and purchased fertilizer for his flower garden. I would ask if he should be monitored and talked to.

But the problem is, we have a group of people who are clearly bad people, who are breaking the law, and have been for decades. Those are the folks who deal in illicit controlled substances (drugs). So...has the war on drugs succeeded? Is the price for such things up or down? Is availability up or down? It is my impression, from watching the mainstream news and reading the occasional newspaper, that drugs are cheaper and more available than ever. If that's true, if we have failed to stem the tide after decades of effort, then do we have the ability to go after the hypothetical fellow with a flower garden, or the lecturer who brings up pictures of plastic knives?

I don't question that some would like to monitor everyone and everything - but I can't see how it could get done. What could be done is to create an atmosphere of fear, one in which everyone worries about whether they are being profiled. I hope we don't get there.

[6.8SPC_DUMP]

IMHO not enough mainstream attention has been given to the Missouri Information Analysis Center's (MIAC) Strategic Report of The Modern Militia Movement, 02/20/09.

The Modern Militia Movement report infers that opposition to, or concern with, the Federal Reserve System, Martial Law and restrictions of the 1st and 2nd Amendment are dangerous "conspiracy theory's". Furthermore, it warns those who hold these views are likely sympathetic to / involved with unauthorized paramilitary organizations, i.e. domestic terrorists.
(*Rereading this: I don't want to imply that Militia Groups are domestic terrorists. All I know about them is from reading through their web sites - But, I don't think they should be lumped in with domestic terrorists when there are people on a mission of their god to kill all of us, when you look at the track record of these groups being a threat. I'm obviously not an expert though and hope to learn from those who are more knowledgeable.)


This is a clear signal to LEO's that people with these views are a threat to them and should be treated as hostile. It punishes potentially valid, and constitutionally protected, critical thought by labeling it “subcultures of conspiracy and misinformation” which "the distortions keep alive grievances and filter out facts that would challenge popular prejudices and self-serving propaganda”.

The closest I found to a comparable historical reference was The Sedition Act in 1798. This act was used to imprison Republican party members and shut down their newspapers because they opposed the Federalist party. The act was repelled, and all rulings reversed, when the Republican party won the next election (in part due to outrage over this violation of the 1st Amendment). Section 2 reads:

"...writings against the government of the United States, or either house of the Congress of the United States, or the President of the United States, with intent to defame the said government, or either house of the said Congress, or the said President, or to bring them, or either of them, into contempt or disrepute; or to excite against them, or either or any of them, the hatred of the good people of the United States" ... "such person, being thereof convicted before any court of the United States having jurisdiction thereof, shall be punished by a fine not exceeding two thousand dollars, and by imprisonment not exceeding two years."
http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/sedact.asp

It reeks of treason to me that the MIAC report of The Modern Militia Movement would not have been publicly know unless an unnamed American hero LEO risked a great deal to "leak" this training pamphlet that reads:

MIAC Disclaimer: All information contained in this newsletter should be considered LAW ENFORCEMENT SENSETIVE. Further distribution or information in this newsletter is restricted to law enforcement officers and agencies, intelligence agencies, and Department of Defense organizations only, unless prior approval is obtained from the published source. NO REPORT OR SEGMENT THEREOF MAY BE RELEASED TO ANY MEDIA SOURCES. Civil and criminal penalties may exist for misuse, and persons or organizations violating this policy will be removed from all distribution lists. The information herein may not be MIAC originated intelligence unless noted. Therefore the annotated originated agencies in the newsletter should be contacted for the sources and reliability of information.
http://media.mcclatchydc.com/smedia/...filiate.91.pdf

Ahead of the curve, Team Sergeant wrote about Homeland Security 'Fusion Centers', and MIAC is one of them. http://www.professionalsoldiers.com/...ad.php?t=22423

Here is the contact information for a Sunshine requests to the Missouri Department of Public Safety http://www.dps.mo.gov/home/MOSunshineLaw.htm

[The Reaper]

When you rely upon reports from special interest organizations, like the SPLC for your information, you are buying into their agenda as well.

Lots of crackpot left wing groups must see the current dominance of the Dim party as an opportunity to promote their causes.

I would hope that LE organizations learn from this and are more careful of their sources for reports in the future.

Realistically, I suspect that they won't, it will get worse, and we may see Ruby Ridge and Waco II revisited.

TR

[11Ber]

I actually heard on FOX News this morning that this report is being rescinded. Pretty much telling people to forget it ever existed. Right...

[Sigaba]

Originally Posted by nmap

I don't question that some would like to monitor everyone and everything - but I can't see how it could get done.

nmap--

With respect, I would argue that this project is already well under way.

• If you have a gmail account, take a look at the advertisements that appear around a given email. The ads will be related to the text in that message.
• If you have a DVR, the recommended programs that are recorded for you come from software tracking your viewing habits.
• If you have an amazon.com account, your browsing and shopping history, as well as the contents of your shopping cart, will generate recommendations for future purchases.
• If you use stumbleupon regularly, topics for future stumbling will come from your clicking and your voting.
• When you use Youtube, your viewing patterns are correlated with the patterns of like minded end users to generate suggestions.
• If you use free software 'plug ins' like Xobni, or desktop search engines, you can get on the fly search results from your computer.
• If you use an internet-based search engine like Google, you can find almost anything if you have the right four word search string in less than a minute. (Even a software engineer in South Korea with one of that country's most common family names, Kim.)

Today's software and computers are so robust that these tasks are performed without significant effort.

Originally Posted by 6.8SPC_DUMP

The closest I found to a comparable historical reference was The Sedition Act in 1798. This act was used to imprison Republican party members and shut down their newspapers because they opposed the Federalist party. The act was repelled, and all rulings reversed, when the Republican party won the next election (in part due to outrage over this violation of the 1st Amendment). <<SNIP>>

Two minor but historiographically significant points. The Alien and Sedition Acts were aimed at the Democratic-Republicans, not the Republicans. The Republican Party was founded in 1854. Second, I'm of the view that the Alien and Sedition Acts should be viewed within the context of the conflict between the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans over how the United States should approach the rivalry between Great Britain and France, especially given the ominous implications of the French Revolution.* Centuries later, we have become a bit disconnected from the widely held contemporaneous understanding that revolutions were really big deals.**

_____________________________________________
* A brief discussion of this period can be found in George Herring, From Colony to Superpower: U.S Foreign Relations Since 1776, vol XI of The Oxford History of the United States, ed. David M. Kennedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 67-101.
** Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, enlarged ed. (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992); Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1993).

[JihadJilson]

Forgive me, I am still watching Fox News, but I just really love the idiocy of how "our" govt is concerned of Libertarians, militias, or "home grown" bad people yet we (Government) are SERIOUSLY contemplating releasing Gitmo detainees into our country and giving them Welfare so we can "Help" them get established? I am so frustrated, flabbergasted I don't know what else to do/say. Maybe we should start a thread titled "Vent" to dump all the frustrations in. Once again sorry for the "inflammatory" issue, just pissed.

[Sigaba]

Originally Posted by JihadJilson

Forgive me, I am still watching Fox News, but I just really love the idiocy of how "our" govt is concerned of Libertarians, militias, or "home grown" bad people yet we (Government) are SERIOUSLY contemplating releasing Gitmo detainees into our country and giving them Welfare so we can "Help" them get established? I am so frustrated, flabbergasted I don't know what else to do/say. Maybe we should start a thread titled "Vent" to dump all the frustrations in. Once again sorry for the "inflammatory" issue, just pissed.

Sir--

I'm increasingly of the view that the present administration's primary objective is to make "America safe for the world."

[nmap]

Originally Posted by Sigaba

nmap--

With respect, I would argue that this project is already well under way.

What you say is true enough - I don't doubt that those who want to monitor what we do on the internet can do so easily. I suspect they can do so right down to the packet level. But I wasn't sufficiently explicit about the meaning of resources. I didn't mean computers - I meant people.

Let's suppose someone, somewhere can monitor every packet. How can they tell when a packet is interesting, and when it requires action? For us, this is a rhetorical question - for someone in that business, it is the heart of the problem.

Let's suppose that someone includes some key words - say, "gun ammo dawn latte mocha grande". It is possible to monitor a packet stream and detect such words - in fact, there is free open-source software to do exactly that on a network. Would the above message (within the quotes) be interesting? Probably not. But if the program detected gun and ammo, it might trigger (pun intended) a flag, requiring further analysis.

Suppose someone includes a series of controversial words. One must ask at what point the system should "do something" and notify a human. Are the words a list, with someone trying to game the system? Is the context accurate? If an undergraduate writes "I really bombed that test! My dad will explode! My grade has been nuked. I'm dead.", is this typical hyperbole, or should we investigate the hapless student?

And still worse - there is free, reasonably effective software to encrypt or conceal information. How does one detect such things? And what does one do when something is detected? Detection is non-trivial; at the bottom, all data we exchange is a series of 1s and 0s. The smilie ( ) or the text is nothing but a stream of binary digits. What we see on the screen is how the software we choose to use interprets that data stream. Could we do this easily? As an example, find a GIF file on your PC. Right hand click and choose "open with", then choose the program "notepad". Examine the characters. You will notice the first letters are GIF89a followed by what appear to be random characters. But what is a GIF? Merely a pallet of colors arranged into what we see as a picture. So...what is an innocent picture, what is a stream of encrypted data, and what do we do about a picture with an embedded message within the data? More on the subject HERE

Now if one decided nmap is a bad fellow and chose to bring up every post he ever made, perhaps some damning pattern could be established. But that is after the decision has been made, and is not predictive.

That, I think, is the problem. How many agents/officers/whatever can the nation devote to examining these reports and following up. It strikes me as a hard problem. And unless someone somewhere has the ultimate top-secret AI program, I think a great many humans would have to involve themselves to discern useful information.

[Peregrino]

With respect - internet speculation about intelligence collection/analysis methods and resources is unwise and inappropriate. The NYT does enough damage without any help. If this continues, I will close the thread.

[nmap]

I'm sorry Sir. I will avoid the subject in future.

[Sigaba]

Originally Posted by nmap

Now if one decided nmap is a bad fellow and chose to bring up every post he ever made, perhaps some damning pattern could be established. But that is after the decision has been made, and is not predictive.

That, I think, is the problem. How many agents/officers/whatever can the nation devote to examining these reports and following up. It strikes me as a hard problem. And unless someone somewhere has the ultimate top-secret AI program, I think a great many humans would have to involve themselves to discern useful information.

nmap--

As always, you point to the heart of the issue.

IMHO, we're seeing come full circle a dynamic that criminializes certain types of cultural practice. For decades, members of minority groups have expressed strong reservations against the practice of 'profiling.'* Generally, these reservations reflect the sensibility that what ever else the benefits, profiling demonizes activities, forms of speech, and methods of dress. For years, a kid in baggy jeans, untied sneakers, a cap worn to the side over a 'do rag,' speaking loudly about nothing has been seen in some circles as a potential menace. Now, we're arriving at the point where a guy wearing a softshell from TAD Gear, with a Gadsen flag patch on one shoulder, a molon labe patch on the other, and a Mystery Ranch pack on his back needs to worry about how he's perceived.

As a QP put it recently in a remark that could have been offered by the late Richard Pryor:

Originally Posted by Peregrino

Accept the fact that you are an unindicted criminal. Big Brother will eventually get around to telling you what they’ve decided to prosecute.

(Meanwhile, the fellow in the suit from Brooks Brothers with the briefcase from Coach, holding the latte from Starbucks, with a copy of the Financial Times tucked under his arm, takes the elevator to his office, and starts brewing the digital equivalent of snakeoil...)

__________________________________________________
* Mauricio Mazon, The Zoot-Suit Riots: The Psychology of Symbolic Annihilation (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1988); Boogie Down Productions, "Who Protects Us From You?" track 7 on Ghetto Music: The Blue Print of Hip-Hop (New York: Jive Records, 1989); George Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995)

[nmap]

Yes, you're right - this clearly goes into profiling. At least some people love to rant against profiling; but just about everyone does it, often without realizing it.

John Stossel of ABC did a piece on the subject, emphasizing beauty. LINK

The hypothetical fellow you mention in the tactical gear could change the impressions completely if he dressed differently, just as the hypothetical minority member could manage impressions with a blue suit, a white shirt, and a good tie. Perhaps the image people choose to project says something. Perhaps knowing that has some value.

Have you ever read Molloy's "Dress for Success"? He did some research and found that even the color of the raincoat people wore had a clear and substantial effect on impressions.

So....will the monitoring system catch those who aren't bright enough to hide their true colors? And will this cause bad guys to evolve into more deceitful behaviors? (Those are purely rhetorical questions). Hard to say.