[girvo]

Huh? The facts of his life were suspicious? Seemed like bullshit confirmation bias to me, coupled with ignoring Spain telling them they had the wrong man, over and over again. None of this is okay, and he should've received compensation for the ordeal.

Is it because he converted to Islam? That covers 1.25 billion people. In fact, the fact he did army service (yes I know there was the Fort Hood shooter, but for the most part people who do voluntary military service aren't your best bet for finding a terrorist, least of all one to bomb Spain of all places...), he had no valid passport (travelling under a fake ID In the western world is far harder than other places), etcetera. They ignored anything that would push them in the direction of "Oh he's not a terrorist". That's not very good, and that's horrifying as that could literally happen to any of us by nothing more than some bad luck.

And yeah, I agree with you on the spycraft thing. Those agents should be removed from field work if they're that terrible :/

[mgkimsal]

They ignored anything that would push them in the direction of "Oh he's not a terrorist".

==================

It seems in some cases they didn't just ignore it, they made up stuff to make it look worse. The "false identity" thing is just insane.

Agent 1: "Hrmm.... there's absolutely 0 evidence that he travelled internationally. That must mean that he's an ubercriminal who has the ability to travel undocumentedly - he's even more powerful and criminal than we thought! This has to be our guy! Anyone who can travel internationally without leaving any trace of it is that much more dangerous!"

Agent 2: "Well, he may just not have travelled at all, and this might not be the bomber."

Agent 1 (speaking in to sleeve): "HQ, we've got a 827 in progress - please proceed with plan XPJ - repeat, 827 in progress, request immediate XPJ."

[Daniel_Newby]

> That's not very good, and that's horrifying as that could literally happen to any of us by nothing more than some bad luck.

Try reading my comment again, you fucking dumbass. EVERY DETECTION METHOD HAS A FALSE POSITIVE RATE, AND THE FBI'S FOR COUNTERTERRORISM APPEARS TO BE ABOUT 0.5 PER YEAR.

It could not "literally happen to any of us with a little bad luck". You are several orders of magnitude more likely to be struck by lightning. More people have won $100,000,000 in a lottery than have been held in non-criminal custody by the FBI due to investigation mistakes.

That's an error rate so low it would make jetliner engineers faint with envy. (You are orders of magnitude more likely to be killed by such an engineer than inconvenienced for a few days by the FBI.)

[cnvogel]

I certainly agree with your conclusion that there's a pretty low probability to be "inconvenienced by the FBI", especially compared with other, pretty real, dangers of our everyday life.

Nevertheless, taking this case as an example, it must be concluded that the FBI would have "inconvenienced" one less citizen if they had applied Occam's razor on some of the evidence, or had not ignored some proof that had ruled out that particular suspect.

Would they constantly do this, their false-positive rate might even be lower(!), they might not have wasted resources on a pointless investigation against this person... But, yes, a further "Uber-Terrorist" which indeed is able to plant false evidence to cast doubt on his guilt might elude them.

What I don't agree with you at all is calling HN user girvo a "fucking dubass", so please leave this community, we'll not miss you.

[girvo]

Classy, mate.