Where is Coderman?
He filed Court case "Roark v. United States 6:12-cv-01354-MC" at address:
27464 SW Vandershuere Road
Hillsboro, OR 97123
This looks to be not there anymore? Or maybe Coderman got rid of horses.
A while back Coderman posted about FBI disruption strategies. Did Coderman get disrupted? Or is Coderman dead?
“FBI disruption strategies - extra-judicial life destruction
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Disruption strategy involves “a range of tools including arrests,
interviews, or source-directed operations to effectively disrupt
subject’s activities.”
“The FBI’s overbroad and aggressive use of its investigative and
surveillance powers, and its willingness to employ ‘disruption
strategies’ against subjects not charged with crimes can have serious,
adverse impacts on innocent Americans,” the ACLU concluded.
“Being placed under investigation creates an intense psychological,
and often financial, burden on the people under the microscope and
their families, even when they are never charged with a crime,” it
continued. “All the more so when a heinous crime like terrorism is
alleged, and when the investigators are convinced the subject of their
investigation is guilty but they just don’t have the evidence
necessary for arrest.”
The Congressional Research Service report noted that such methods are
reminiscent of the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover, and particularly the
COINTELPRO program, which engaged in “preventive, covert,
intelligence-based efforts to target and contain people, groups, or
movements suspected by the Bureau to be ‘rabble rousers,’ ‘agitators,’
‘key activists,’ or ‘key black extremists.’” The FBI “relied on
illegal means to curb constitutionally protected activity it deemed
threatening to national security.”
'''
FBI Won’t Explain Its Bizarre New Way of Measuring Its Success Fighting Terror
Jenna McLaughlin
Feb. 18 2016, 11:18 p.m.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation has quietly developed a new way to
measure its success in the war on terror: counting the number of
terror threats it has “disrupted” in a year.
But good luck trying to figure out what that number means, how it was
derived, or why it doesn’t jibe with any other law enforcement
statistic, most notably, the number of terror suspects actually
charged or arrested.
In the section on “Performance Measures” in the FBI’s latest financial
statement, the bureau reports 440 “terror disruptions” in the 12-month
period ending on September 30, 2015. That’s compared to 214 in fiscal
year 2014. And it’s more than three times the 2015 “target” of 125.
In a vacuum, that would appear to suggest that the FBI’s
terror-fighting mission — which sucked up $5.3 billion, or 54 percent
of the bureau’s $9.8 billion budget in 2015 — is exceeding
expectations.
But that number — 440 — is much higher than the number of arrests
reported by the FBI. The Washington Post counted about 60
terror-related arrests in 2015; a study by George Washington
University found 71 arrests related to the Islamic State from March
2014 to the end of 2015.
Of those arrests, many were of people trying to travel abroad or
trying to help others do so. Many more involved people planning
attacks that were essentially imaginary, often goaded by FBI
informants.
And according to a document from the Department of Homeland Security
obtained by The Intercept in November, there was only one genuinely
“foiled attack” in the United States between January 2014 and
September 2015. And that one, involving would-be shooters in Garland,
Texas, targeting a cartoon-drawing event inspired by the Prophet
Muhammad, was stopped by the local police department.
The FBI didn’t respond to emails asking basic questions such as what
qualifies as a disruption, why the number is so much higher than the
bureau’s recorded arrests, or how it comes up with its annual
“target.”
In a January 2015 Performance Report, Justice Department officials
explained that the “targets reflect the number of expected disruptions
based on the estimated threat, yet account for potential
fluctuations.”
The officials acknowledged that “disruptions can be a challenge to
quantify for future years” because the number of potential plots is
“outside of FBI control.” Nevertheless, they wrote: “Based on past
data trends, coupled with current and emerging threat pictures, the
FBI expects to achieve its FY 2015 and FY 2016 targets.”
A strange way to provide transparency
The “terrorism threat disruptions” metric is a relatively new arbiter
of success for the FBI. In a 2013 Department of Justice document about
strategic goals, fighting terrorism is identified as Strategic Goal 1,
and “number of terrorism disruptions” is Strategic Objective 1.1.
“To provide transparency to its work in the area of counterterrorism,
the Department will disclose a key statistic: the number of terrorism
disruptions,” the department announced.
But the definition was vague: “A disruption is defined as interrupting
or inhibiting a threat actor from engaging in criminal or national
security related activity. A disruption is the result of direct
actions and may include but is not limited to the arrest; seizure of
assets; or impairing the operational capabilities of key threat
actors.”
And the department’s idea of transparency was problematic. Because the
FBI’s “operational priorities are classified,” the document noted, “it
is only possible to report aggregate data that lacks significant
detail.”
Experts interviewed by The Intercept suggested two possible
explanations for the high number of terror disruptions.
Gold stars
One possibility, they said, is that the number is just a subjective
way to make people at the FBI look good, or to rationalize the cost.
“This is how the whole career system works in the FBI — statistics,
performance,” said Coleen Rowley, a former FBI agent and
whistleblower. Individuals use statistics to advance their careers,
and the agency, in turn, uses them to justify its budget, she said.
“In the agency, this is the way to advance.”
The fact that the agency establishes a target for terrorism
disruptions is also troubling, said Michael German, a former FBI agent
and fellow with the Brennan Center for Justice. “That the FBI actually
sets a performance goal stating the specific number of terrorist
disruptions it wants to accomplish over the year would seem to create
an incentive to gin up cases where no real threat might exist.”
And if the number is inflated, it wouldn’t be the first time the
Department of Justice or the FBI had been criticized for inaccurately
estimating the impact of their counterterrorism efforts.
In 2007, an inspector general investigation found that the entire
Department of Justice — the FBI included — had messed up its
bookkeeping efforts on terrorism. The FBI mistakenly included marriage
fraud, immigration cases, and others in their records of anti-terror
cases.
And in 2013, Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz called out the
office that oversees U.S. attorney’s offices for shoddy reporting that
significantly overstated the number of terrorism convictions, counting
cases that actually dealt with narcotics or money laundering or
including defendants who had their charges dismissed.
“These inaccuracies are important in part because DOJ management and
Congress need accurate terrorism-related statistics to make informed
operational and budgetary decisions,” Horowitz said in a statement
accompanying the 2013 report.
Easier to disrupt than arrest
Another possible explanation for such a big number, however, is that
it accurately reflects a new FBI approach to fighting terror that is
occurring outside of public view — where the bureau decides someone is
a threat and disrupts his or her life in some way that isn’t nearly as
subject to oversight and accountability as an indictment or an arrest.
“I’m sensing a significant change in counterterrorism policy in the
U.S., where we’ve gone from ‘watch and report,’ to ‘let’s just disrupt
them any way we can,’” David Gomez, a former FBI agent and profiler,
as well as a former LAPD officer, told The Intercept. “This has cut
short the way the FBI does long-term investigations. … They’re not
doing that anymore.”
The FBI has indeed been going through some changes.
As a 2013 Congressional Research Service report explains, “Since the
September 11, 2001 (9/11) attacks, the FBI has implemented a series of
reforms intended to transform itself from a largely reactive law
enforcement agency focused on investigations of criminal activity into
a more proactive, agile, flexible, and intelligence-driven agency that
can prevent acts of terrorism.”
This has led law enforcement agencies to use aggressive, proactive
techniques to catch potential terrorists before a crime is committed.
According to the CRS report, one technique is the “Al Capone” approach
— putting people in jail for a minor crime rather than sticking around
and waiting for evidence of a serious violent threat.
Another method is the informant, or “agent provocateur,” who starts
communicating with potential suspects, goading them into committing an
act of terrorism in order to catch them in the act.
“Where the person targeted really is a terrorist, that might make
sense,” said German. “But often when evidence that a person is a
terrorist is lacking — that’s because he isn’t a terrorist.”
German, in an email, asked: “Has the FBI secretly prevented people
from getting jobs, hazmat licenses, gun permits, security clearances,
or barred their travel where no charges were brought, providing no
opportunity for them to challenge the accusations against them or
prove their innocence? And then chalked that up as a successful
‘disruption’ so they would get a pat on the back and more resources
from Congress, regardless of whether the person was actually guilty?”
A 2009 FBI document obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union
explicitly allows field offices to engage in “disruption strategies”
at the conclusion of a terror assessment or investigation, after “all
significant intelligence has been collected, and/or the threat is
otherwise resolved.” Disruption strategy involves “a range of tools
including arrests, interviews, or source-directed operations to
effectively disrupt subject’s activities.”
“The FBI’s overbroad and aggressive use of its investigative and
surveillance powers, and its willingness to employ ‘disruption
strategies’ against subjects not charged with crimes can have serious,
adverse impacts on innocent Americans,” the ACLU concluded.
“Being placed under investigation creates an intense psychological,
and often financial, burden on the people under the microscope and
their families, even when they are never charged with a crime,” it
continued. “All the more so when a heinous crime like terrorism is
alleged, and when the investigators are convinced the subject of their
investigation is guilty but they just don’t have the evidence
necessary for arrest.”
The Congressional Research Service report noted that such methods are
reminiscent of the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover, and particularly the
COINTELPRO program, which engaged in “preventive, covert,
intelligence-based efforts to target and contain people, groups, or
movements suspected by the Bureau to be ‘rabble rousers,’ ‘agitators,’
‘key activists,’ or ‘key black extremists.’” The FBI “relied on
illegal means to curb constitutionally protected activity it deemed
threatening to national security.”
The goal of “disruption” has typically been reserved for FBI agents
pursuing people like drug traffickers — where “impeding the normal and
effective operation of the targeted organization, as indicated by
changes in the organizational leadership and/or changes in methods of
operation,” counts as disruption.
But that standard doesn’t really apply to the “lone wolves” or small
groups that make up most of the FBI’s terror suspects.
Great expectations
The FBI is under a lot of pressure these days — charged with
preventing every possible terrorist attack before it happens, while
withstanding public scrutiny of its methods.
Gomez, the former FBI agent, cuts the bureau some slack. “As a
policeman, we used to have a saying about local drug dealers — we put
them in jail for everything, use of heroin, a misdemeanor,” Gomez
said. “They’re doing life in prison 60 days at a time.”
The FBI is “going to be under severe criticism” one way or the other,
he said. “You can’t win.”
Rowley, though critical of the strategy, said she was also
sympathetic. “It’s a bad position of, oh, you better prevent every act
of terrorism,” she said.
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