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.
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.