NYT's "The Daily" podcast discussed this a little over a year ago in response to the Parkland shooting, and I found it to be quite insightful. I believe it was this episode, but I could be wrong[0].

A major factor impeding law enforcement is the sheer number of people posting violent threats on social media. I can't remember the statistic, but they mentioned that the US justice system basically wouldn't be able to effectively process everyone in a timely manner that posted indications of violent activity on social media, it's just too frequent. It's easy to look back after a shooting and ask why law enforcement failed to see the warnings, but it's much harder to predict looking into the future. Simply posting angry threats on social media doesn't meet the threshold of committing a crime, but perception around that could be changing.

Another major issue is that this isn't a mental health issue, despite how it's characterized by politicians and the media. Deeply angry young men aren't mentally ill by any classical definition of mental illness; they're just really angry. They don't necessarily exhibit traits of schizophrenia or bipolar disorder; they're driven by hatred and anger, and that's just not something mental health professionals are equipped to diffuse.

0: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/23/podcasts/the-daily/gun-ac...

You could probably just make an example out of a couple of particularly bad threats every 3 months and reduce the number of threats significantly with that. The question is what does that actually achieve? A couple of people will simply turn to Tor or similar services, while others might post less but still kill people. It might rob law enforcement of the ability to develop some sort of system that can sort through the noise and prevent a few of these incidents in the future.

I doubt that would change much.

And law enforcement does thwart these kinds of attacks on a fairly regular basis, we just don’t hear about them as much. The same day that El Paso occurred, the FBI arrested a kid in Lubbock who was trying to obtain an assault weapon with the intent to perpetrate a mass shooting[0]. It’s not like the feds are totally incapable.

Like it or not, relying on sigint from social media isn’t going to stop many of these attacks. 8chan is full of trolls who parrot off one another, there’s just no reliable way to determine who’s just trolling and who is serious.

Our gun laws and the purchasing loopholes that exist desperately need to be addressed.

0: https://www.kwtx.com/content/news/Feds-Texas-man-planning-ma...

They don't need to process all of them, just a relatively small number of public examples.

Sweden has a reality TV show whit that very premise and it is called trollhunters. They choose a hate comment and then proceed to locate and confront the author. When done they also sometimes help the target of the hate, by example helping them filling a police report.

The show is followed with vigilantist justice as the people they locate usually end up receiving a lot of harassment from the public, and the benefit of making examples of people has not had any effect in decreasing hate messages online.

An interesting side note is that when you actually go after hate messages online, the gender stereotype of young male start to melt and you get a new stereotype. It is people with a lot of free time and who feel ignored by society. A typical example is thus middle age women.

However turning that hate towards going on a killing spree is unlikely for a middle age woman even if they say things like "someone should go down there and kill everyone", so there is a high rate of noise-to-massacre.

A lot of people who feel powerless use very strong language precisely because they feel like nothing they do matters. They often don't really mean it literally and wouldn't say it if they actually felt like anyone listened to anything they said.

They basically exaggerate their real desire, hoping that if they express their feelings strongly enough, it might lead to some very small action because their experience is that they are mostly not taken seriously and what they say mostly makes no impact. This is probably true of a lot of middle aged women.

I don't approve of the vigilante model, it just increases the general animosity in society. I'd rather there be public prosecutions of violence-advocating speech through the legal process.

>I keep reading about blimps watching us 24/7, license plate readers tracking everywhere we drive.

It's almost as if this "surveillance state" you all imagine doesn't exist. There are checks in place and warrants needed for this. If you see something illegal online you could report it to the FBI perhaps?

The ability to see something and stop it is not the same as the desire to see something and stop it.

The ability to collect something and the ability to see it are two different things. Just because data about this guy may have been snarfed up, doesn’t mean anybody looked at it.

The data is gathered but it's so much that any signal is drowned in noise. You either spend billions investigating hundreds of thousands of idiots spewing shit on the Internet or you miss "that one." There is no middle really.

Yes there is a middle. It's a cultural problem. Too many people get away with it. By spending some money and cracking down on it it would remind people this isn't acceptable behavior and change the culture. Once the culture is changed it becomes easier to focus on the real threats. We don't need to throw everybody in jail, but a fine here and there (ala speeding tickets) would go a long way to reminding people that this kind of behavior is wrong.

> It's almost as if this "surveillance state" you all imagine doesn't exist.

How do you imagine that billing for EZ Pass and license plate scanners works?

EZ-Pass is RFID based, it doesn't use license plate scanning but a transponder you have to have in your car (typically it's affixed to the windshield, but it doesn't need be)

I've spoken to the Chef Technology Manager and the Chief Executive Director of E-ZPass for some research I did with their system [0] and confirmed that it is not 100% reliant solely on the transponders, and that they do use license plate readers as well.

[0] https://github.com/kwesthaus/ez-sniff

How do you think they bill you when you drive through the system without a transponder?

The surveillance state very much exists, it's just extremely incompetent.

Would you expect the FBI to investigate every moronic shitpost on every social media outlet?

I think you're setting the bar too high. That's a lot of effort, a lot of resources, for something that can be solved in other ways (ie. controlled access to devices with the potential for mass murder).

>So literally everyone so much as reading 8chan/pol is on a watchlist, right?

Well, crap. When I heard the news I decided to pay 8chan a visit (never really been there before) to see how they took the news(not surprisingly, not well). I really hope I am not on a list because of this.

>When I heard the news I decided to pay 8chan a visit

You and a million others. You'll be fine.

On the plus side, you've been removed from the list of people who haven't ever visited 8chan

The US police aren't that organized or technologically advanced. If these shootings keep up though, we may end up building out the infrastructure to catch these people based on their online posts.

There simply aren't enough FBI agents let alone competent ones. If you go to /sudo/ right now you can see Codemonkey's post on a report they received which was given to them as a scan of a print of a screenshot of a threat they wanted to investigate and it took an entire week for them to send it over by which point the post was long gone.

How is this realistic? How do you know he wasn't using Tor?

People who post threats via Tor tend to get caught for being the only plausible suspect using Tor at the time of the threat.