The FBI’s Growing Surveillance Gap

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Politico:

There are more homegrown jihadists than the feds can actually watch. And not everyone likes what the FBI is doing instead.

Garrett M. Graff

June 16, 2016

 

A day after Omar Mateen killed 49 and wounded 53 in an Orlando nightclub, purportedly under the banner of the Islamic State or other terrorist groups, the FBI announced that it had repeatedly scrutinized the shooter in recent years. As shocking as that news might have appeared, it fits a disturbing pattern: Many of the so-called “lone wolves” who have carried out terror attacks in the United States have been previously known by the FBI. Among others, the FBI had investigated Tamerlan Tsarnaev years before the Boston Marathon bombings, Nidal Hasan before he opened fire at Fort Hood and Carlos Bledsoe before he opened fire on a Little Rock military recruiting station in 2009.

 

Particularly in the wake of the Edward Snowden scandals, we tend to think of the FBI and the sprawling homeland security apparatus as a giant surveillance machine—an all-seeing government eye reading emails, tapping phones, tracking purchases and sitting in vans outside homes as undercover agents infiltrate terror cells. But the circumstances behind the Orlando shooting, counterterrorism experts say, underscore the very different reality: The FBI actually isn’t big enough to tackle the new era of online radicalization and independent-acting lone wolves. It’s not that the FBI didn’t recognize Mateen as a threat; it’s that there are too many people like Mateen and Tsarnaev and Hasan across America today for the FBI to track them all—leaving the vast majority of people who the FBI suspects might harbor terrorist aspirations to go about their daily lives without any regular government surveillance. Experts say it’s a big problem—one that’s been brewing for more than two years as the Bureau has struggled to keep up with a wave of aspirational homegrown jihadists, who act faster and leave fewer clues than would-be terrorists a decade or two ago.

 

And the resource crunch—as well as the obvious risk of being wrong about leaving someone like Mateen on the streets—has been pushing the Bureau to expand use of its controversial undercover terror stings, which help speed up the road to radicalization, but which also raise deep concerns among civil liberty advocates that the FBI is engaging in entrapment.

 

The Bureau has repeatedly said over the last six months that it has had more than 1,000 active probes related to the Islamic State. But, of these 1,000 or so suspected terrorists, the FBI only has the resources to thoroughly monitor a select few. The precise number of round-the-clock FBI surveillance teams is classified—and additional teams can be readied in an emergency—but sources familiar with Bureau resources say that the number is “shockingly” low, only in the dozens. At one point last year, sources reported that the Bureau was watching 48 people intensely, a number that is towards the upper limit of the FBI’s regular surveillance resources.

 

(Snip)

 

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Why Do I Do This?

 

From The Comments

 

Roger Wehage · Works at Retired
In 2013, 41,000 Americans died from suicide and 16,000 from homicide. Since the 1930s an average of around 40,000 Americans have died annually on our highways. Do we have our priorities mixed up? Watch for congress to pass a law requiring the implantation of a surveillance microchip in the head of every person living in this country. And when this chip detects abnormal brain waves and intent, in swoops the FBI.

 

 

Fairy Pardiwalla · Princeton University
Good. Entrap them. Also consider profiling them to gauge their overall stability... men in America and law enforcement generally do not think domestic violence is a big deal, and do not protect the vast majority of domestic violence victims, making it much less likely & more dangerous for them to even report incidents to authorities. Omar Mateen beat his ex-wife. He was an unstable pig, and authorities would have known that (and could have maybe used that information to decide to reopen surveillance on him) if reporting the beatings had been a safer & more reliable option for her than running away.

 

I mean all it does is make my head hurt....bad.