The FBI's History of Spying on Journalists

While we were all shocked, shocked to discover that the FBI secretly subpoenaed phone records from the Associated Press as part of a leak investigation, it's only the latest in a history of such collisions between the First Amendment and the Bureau's information collection techniques.

The FBI's spying on journalists is a generational problem going back at least to the 1940s -- every generation has its tale. I hate to be the guy who brings up COINTELPRO, but, well, I just did. The scope of the meddling with journalism in that case went beyond simple spying.

The much-vaunted reforms of the post-Watergate era didn't eliminate the tension between the FBI and journalism so much as it bureaucratized it. The FBI created a sensitive informant program that was applied during the 1980s and 1990s to sources within newspapers, television stations, and even extended past that to informants working in the offices of judges and congressmen. That program is currently the subject of a FOIA lawsuit by Jesse Trentadue that journalists interested in this issue would do well to follow. As exhibits in that case, Trentadue has submitted a number of FBI documents related to the program and highly redacted manuals describing its use, which should make for interesting reading.

The FBI's subpoena of Associated Press phone records was sweeping and shocking, but not unprecedented. The bureau, and presumably other U.S. intelligence-gathering agencies, are constantly redefining what's fair game in the world of journalism to fit the public relations demands of a new generation, but this tension has existed for decades without clear resolution. Perhaps it's time to stop treating this issue as if it was born anew every 10 years, but to tackle it with a longer view as a persistent problem, with an eye toward what has worked and what hasn't over the course of generations.

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The Roots of Radicalization

I appeared on Al Jazeera English's The Stream to discuss radicalization with Haris Tarin and Mubin Shaikh. 


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Labels: Internet, Radicalization

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Myths of Radicalization

Rolling Stone published a provocative piece yesterday titled "Everything You've Been Told About Radicalization is Wrong," prominently featuring Dr. John Horgan, who wrote at more length about his views in this piece. The piece and some comments I made about it led to a spirited discussion on Twitter, which was difficult for me to fully participate in from the series of airports where I was hanging my hat at the time. Rather than tackle the article directly, I wanted to post a few relevant and overlapping thoughts about myths surrounding radicalization that have been banging around in my brain pan for some time now.

Myth One: Radicalization leads to terrorism 

Some form of radicalization is almost always a pre-condition for terrorism, if you define terrorism the way I do -- as non-state public violence carried out in the name of a political or religious cause. But there are hundreds of thousands to millions of people in the world who are radicalized, and only a handful take up violence. So the road of radicalization by no means leads invariably to terrorism. There are many exits and alternate destinations, including among them the mainstreaming of one's radical political or religious cause.

Myth Two: Counterradicalization equals counterterrorism

There isn't much data to support the idea that intervening with people who are becoming radicalized is a reliable way to stop or reduce terrorism, in part because there's no way to know for certain how many radicals would become violent at any given time in the absence of counterradicalization. The sample size of the number of terrorists (excluding foreign fighters from this equation for the moment) is too small to present clear trends, and the definition and implementation of counterradicalization is too vague. Meanwhile, there is at least some risk of having the opposite effect -- if only a tiny, tiny minority of radicals become violent, there is almost nowhere for the rate of conversion to terrorism to go except up. In other words, given how few radicals become violent, there's more than a little risk that efforts to re-program people who are early in the radicalization process could create more terrorists, not fewer.

Myth Three: Radicalization is an issue best addressed by law enforcement

Because we talk about radicalization and extremism almost exclusively in the context of terrorism, we increasingly equate legal (if socially repugnant) political dissent with a pretext for investigation. This didn't start on September 11, but it has accelerated since then, particularly as it regards Muslims. People on Twitter keep asking me why Cambridge mosque-goers didn't report Tamleran Tsarnaev to the FBI for shouting about "kaffirs." Do those people call the FBI to report a white supremacist when they see a racist political bumper sticker? Cambridge Muslims dealt with Tsarnaev the same way an average white person might deal with a racist in the same context. They took him aside, and said "knock it off." It turns out many terrorists and criminals were known assholes before they were arrested. If we make "being an asshole" the center of our counterterrorism policy, we have a long haul ahead of us.

Myth Four: Radicalization is always bad

Martin Luther King Jr. was investigated as a dangerous radical in his day because he advocated racial equality against the social norms of his time. Few people today would defend the law enforcement tactics used against King. In the context of his era, King was radical, but he was also right. Radicals and radicalization can take on many forms, and much of what we consider radical today is also repugnant and regressive. But sometimes radicalism arises to address real problems that are entrenched in society. The verdict of history doesn't always track with the present view. Sometimes societies require radical change, but advocating for such change -- even loudly -- is by no means the same as advocating for violence or terrorism.

Myth Five: Because Myths One Through Four Are Myths, Radicalization Doesn't Matter 

None of the above means that radicalization and ideology are irrelevant to understanding terrorism and political violence. Radicalization is still the context in which most terrorism happens, whether it fits a programmatic progression down a particular religious path or whether it's sudden and shallow (as is often the case). There's nothing wrong with trying to understand how one feeds into the other, or trying to discern the path a particular individual took to becoming a terrorist. The problem is when we treat radicalization as a reductive explanation for violent action or a reliable indicator of violent intent.

There's a strong argument to be made that our national conversation about radicalization has expanded far beyond its mandate and its usefulness. We can and should retrench, but we shouldn't just abandon the line of inquiry. Radicalization is one component in understanding terrorism.

Radicalization is also a broader concern for society, and the conflation of radicalization with terrorism tends to make that concern harder to address rather than easier. Radicalization reflects tensions in a society or culture, at the fringes but also often emanating from the middle. When we reflexively categorize nonviolent (or "previolent") radicalization as a criminal indicator, we often foreclose political options for people whose views make us uncomfortable. We send a message to radicals that they are suitable targets for isolation, stigmatization and extreme measures such as violent confrontation and arrest. Regardless of how you feel about the radicals or their views, it's pretty hard to see how such messages decrease the risk of political violence.

There isn't a simple answer to this. Isolation and stigmatization are sometimes appropriate responses to morally repugnant views. But we should study and understand the impact of how our attitudes about radicalization affect radicals. None of this takes place in a vacuum. The ecosystem of "radicalization to violence" is complex and filled with butterflies flapping their wings.

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Forecasting Terrorist Attacks With Big Data and the Wisdom of Crowds... Or Not

Back in January, I was playing around with Google Trends, the free service that tracks when specific search terms have been historically popular on a scale from 1 to 100. I noticed that in addition to its tracking function, there was a humble checkbox labeled "forecast" that predicted when the search terms would recur for some months into the future.

I was intrigued by this idea, since searches theoretically represent a mass conglomeration of factors that feed into an extraordinarily large data set. Out of curiosity,  I plugged in "terrorist" and "attack" and clicked the forecast checkbox. I tweeted my results, which I read as predicting a terrorist attack  around May 2013.

More Google Trends prognosticating, this time for the terms terrorist and attacktwitpic.com/brzqo1
— J.M. Berger (@intelwire) January 3, 2013

The actual attack came in April. A two-week margin of error isn't bad, all in all, especially when you consider that search traffic might not peak until after an event took place.

So the question now becomes: Is this ridiculous, or is it meaningful? Could the raw wild data set of people's search queries somehow tap into something that gives us a reliable window on what will happen in the future?

Significant terrorist attacks are outliers. They happen so infrequently and are so diverse as to defy easy statistical generalizations. The data surrounding them tends to be clumpy. So the fact that several attempted terrorist attacks since September 11 have been thwarted in the period between April and June, and in September through November, may not be meaningful but might shape the Google trends data enough to make it forecast May and September as likely peaks in searches for "terrorist attack."

September is also a consistent peak month for such queries, almost certainly because of renewed media interest in 9/11 anniversaries. And April results may be similarly skewed by the anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, which is also a significant date for domestic extremists on other grounds.

This may be reflected in the current Trends forecast, in which searches for "attack" spike sharply once more in April and May 2014, while "terrorist" rises less dramatically. "Attack" shows lesser peaks in July (the anniversary of two different attacks in London) and September, when "terrorist" also peaks, although less dramatically.

I waited until now to re-run the analysis in order to allow the noise from the marathon bombings to die down a bit and hopefully produce a more reliable forecast. Overall, I'd say these forecasts raise more questions than answers. But it will be interesting to monitor developments and see what's exactly what's going on in September 2013 and May 2014. And there's an earlier benchmark, which I also tweeted about in January:

Google Trends predicts search patterns. So per Trends, expect mass shootings in August 2013 and January 2014.twitpic.com/bryxld
— J.M. Berger (@intelwire) January 3, 2013

As of today, Trends is still predicting peaks in August and January. Clumpy past data may again be contributing to the spikes -- Aurora took place in July 2012, and the Sikh Temple shooting in August -- but the past data is somewhat less clearly tilted toward those months.

It's intriguing to look at all of this and think there might be something to it -- that somehow the mass of all Google search queries, essentially crowdsourcing taken to its extreme, might somehow tap into knowledge or conditions that can predict serious events. One near-success is not nearly enough to go on, but it's interesting enough to keep track and see what the future holds.

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J.M. Berger on Marathon Bombings

Articles by J.M. Berger on topics related to the Boston Marathon bombings:

• Boston's Jihadist Past: Long before the marathon bombing, Islamists in Massachusetts were helping militants in Chechnya
• Inspire Inflation: Media and CT pros helped build AQAP's English-language magazine into a force
• Marathon Bombing: Issues to watch

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Marathon Bombing: Issues to Watch

The Boston Marathon bombing will have consequences in the weeks, months and years to come. I plan to write about some of these points at more length, as time allows, but I wanted to briefly outline a couple of the most significant issues raised by the attack so we can start thinking and talking about them.

• Budgets: Most people working in counterterrorism studies have seen training and research money dry up pretty significantly over the last two years in the United States, especially relation to Islamist and Al Qaeda-inspired terrorism. The Boston bombing may or may not herald a change in the tempo, effectiveness or essential nature of the homeland terrorist threat, but will it change the budget dynamics? Should it?


• Focus: Not unrelated to the first point, many people who study terrorism and extremism have, over the last two years, refocused on the prospect of domestic right-wing terrorism as the "next big thing." This was reflected in the widespread speculation about right-wing attribution of the attack in the early hours and well into the week. We were only beginning to see a commitment to the study of non-Muslim domestic extremism from academia, credible NGOs and the private sector. Will those studies -- which I think are important -- be sidetracked by the attribution of this attack? If they continue, will they continue to be confined only to "right wing" extremism? Or will all of this remain a cobwebbed corner of the research world until something terrible happens, and everyone asks why nobody saw it coming?


• Attribution and the definition of terrorism: The question of attributing the Marathon bombing ran hot last week, with a lot of rampant speculation in the media based on little or no information, blaming a number of possible motivations and even speculating the bombing was not political. With a suspect captured alive and additional information flowing in rapidly, it looks like we'll get some answers to these questions in the weeks ahead, but we still haven't figured out how to handle cases where attribution is weak or absent -- for example, the 2012 Sikh temple shooting in which an avowed white supremacist carried out a mass shooting against non-whites, but without leaving a statement of his purpose or any particular clues as to his motivation (aside from being a white supremacist). Given the events of the last 18 months, it's increasingly clear we need to define what is terrorism and why, so that we can craft consistent policy responses.


• The definition of Al Qaeda: Sorry to be a broken record on this, but we still haven't fixed the problem I've been talking about for years now -- what is Al Qaeda, what isn't, and how do those definitions affect policy and counterterrorism strategy? News coverage and speculation about the attacks this week highlighted this continuing problem, and it was further emphasized as the media rushed to try to figure out exactly what a Chechen jihadist is and whether it has to do with Al Qaeda. We need a clear consensus definition of Al Qaeda, so that we can craft consistent strategies and policies. Until then, we will continue to flail around every time a counterterrorism issue arises.


• The mainstreaming of conspiracy culture: We entered a brave new world last week when a reporter from the conspiracy Web site Infowars trolled CNN's live coverage with a bullhorn and crashed not one but two press conferences related to the bombing with questions about whether the attack was a "false flag" (meaning it was staged by the government to justify draconian security measures). Infowars and sites like it are increasingly driving chatter and defining world views among domestic extremists on both the right and the left, but there's very little study of this issue and very little understanding of how conspiracy theories, whether specific or generalized, do or do not relate to extremism and the prospect of violence. It's time to start shining a light on this issue. 

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Background on Marathon Bombers Tamerlan Tsarnaev and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev

ABC: The Stories of Two Brothers Suspected in Bombing

Boston Globe: Bombing suspects were local, ‘normal’ US immigrants

Boston Globe: Wrestling coach recalls Dzhokhar Tsarnaev as ‘dedicated kid’

USA Today: Uncle says bomber called to ask for forgiveness

NYT: Dragnet Shuts Boston; One Suspect Is Slain but Second Man Is on Loose

NYT: Brothers Seen as Good Students and Avid Athletes

AP Sources: A Boston Marathon bomb suspects traveled to Russia, was out of the US for 6 months

Boston Globe: Older bombing suspect ‘was up to no good,’ cousin says

Jamestown Foundation: Preliminary Profile of the Boston Bombers: The Tsarnaev Brothers

Atlantic Wire: Who Is Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the Man at the Center of the Boston Manhunt?

Foreign Policy: Displaced What happened to the people who fled the terror in Chechnya.

List will be updated throughout the day.

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A day in the life of a terrorism analyst, 2013 edition

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