{"id":5942,"date":"2015-12-09T09:07:27","date_gmt":"2015-12-09T17:07:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spijue.wpengine.com\/news\/calif-attack-shows-difficulty-iding-terrorists\/"},"modified":"2015-12-09T09:07:27","modified_gmt":"2015-12-09T17:07:27","slug":"calif-attack-shows-difficulty-iding-terrorists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/news\/calif-attack-shows-difficulty-iding-terrorists\/","title":{"rendered":"Calif. attack shows difficulty ID’ing terrorists"},"content":{"rendered":"

LOS ANGELES <\/strong>\u2014 By the time the married couple who carried out the deadly San Bernardino terrorist attack came to the attention of police, it was far too late.<\/p>\n

Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, had gone undetected while planning the massacre that included amassing thousands of rounds of ammunition, high-powered guns and pipe bombs.<\/p>\n

The FBI\u2019s acknowledgement that the San Bernardino shooters had been radicalized Muslims for \u201cquite some time\u201d points to the difficulty discovering potential terrorists who keep a very low profile and shows the deadly consequences that can occur when identification comes too late.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt appears these people were very good at hiding their intentions,\u201d said David Schanzer, a Duke University public policy professor who runs a center that studies terrorism. \u201cWhat this situation shows is it\u2019s not a fool-proof system. … A hundred percent prevention is not achievable.\u201d<\/p>\n

The couple, who lived quietly in a two-bedroom townhouse with their 6-month-old daughter and Farook\u2019s mother, had not come to the attention of law enforcement before clothing themselves in black, donning face masks and bursting into an annual festive meeting of Farook\u2019s county health department colleagues with guns blazing. They killed 14 people and wounded 21 last Wednesday before dying in a shootout with police about four hours later.<\/p>\n

David Bowdich, chief of the FBI\u2019s Los Angeles office, told reporters the agency was searching for how and where radicalization occurred and who might have led them to those beliefs.<\/p>\n

Investigators believe e Farook, a 28-year-old restaurant inspector born in the U.S. to a Pakistani family, become radicalized before meeting Malik, 29, FBI spokeswoman Laura Eimiller said Tuesday,. She did not elaborate on what led the FBI to that conclusion about Malik, who emigrated to the U.S. from Pakistan in July 2014 on a fianc\u00e9 visa and married Farook the next month.<\/p>\n

Detecting those who hold radical beliefs \u2014 and determining who may lash out violently \u2014 is a challenge for law enforcement.<\/p>\n

America\u2019s counterterrorism infrastructure has had success at flagging individuals who try to travel abroad to fight alongside militants, fund operations overseas or who communicate online with overseas terrorists. But it\u2019s been far more challenging for law enforcement to flag each and every individual who self-radicalizes online, a process the Islamic State has facilitated with slick Internet propaganda aimed at the disaffected.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey\u2019re not communicating with a terrorist organization, they\u2019re not doing those other things that we have typically looked for when we\u2019re looking for terrorists,\u201d said John Cohen, a former Homeland Security Department counterterrorism coordinator.<\/p>\n

Behavior that is in isolation isn\u2019t likely to put a defendant on law enforcement\u2019s radar. But sudden withdrawal from friends or family, for instance, starts hitting trip wires when combined with other actions, such as increased visits to hate-spewing chat rooms or radical change in appearance. But even then, law enforcement is challenged on a daily basis in separating individuals who hold radical views, which in and of itself is not a crime, from those who are plotting acts of violence or encouraging others in that direction.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a highly individualized process, and each person is different,\u201d said Seamus Hughes, deputy director of the Program on Extremism at George Washington University\u2019s Center for Cyber & Homeland Security, which recently issued a study showing that 56 people had been charged in the U.S. this year in connection with supporting the Islamic State. \u201cThe radicalization process could take a few years, it could take a few months.\u201d<\/p>\n

FBI agents currently have hundreds of open inquiries in all 50 states related to terrorist ideology. When they identify someone they think is predisposed to violence, they\u2019ve turned to a range of techniques \u2014 including sting operations involving informants and inoperable weapons and placing undercover agents in chat rooms \u2014 as part of their investigation.<\/p>\n

But they\u2019re nonetheless constrained under Justice Department regulations in the investigative steps they may take. That guidance, known as the Domestic Investigations and Operations Manual, permits agents to check out a citizen\u2019s suspicion even when there\u2019s minimal factual basis for doing so.<\/p>\n

Actually opening a full-blown investigation, and using tools such as surveillance and phone wiretaps, requires a significantly higher burden of evidence of wrongdoing.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor law enforcement to take action, their investigation has to reveal that a person has gone beyond simply having extreme thoughts, and is actually moving in the direction of carrying out an act of violence,\u201d Cohen said. \u201cThey have to be in the process of committing a crime.\u201d<\/p>\n

So far, the FBI has revealed little of what it\u2019s learned about Farook and Malik and their planning, except for details about the weaponry they had, materials they had to make more pipe bombs and that both had been taking target practice. Malik also practiced at Riverside Magnum Range, where Farook shot at targets two days before the attack, Eimiller said.<\/p>\n

Investigators also are trying to determine a money trail for funding of the operation. A U.S. official said Tuesday authorities are looking into a deposit made to Farook\u2019s bank account prior to the shooting. The official, who had been briefed on the investigation but was not authorized to discuss it by name and spoke on condition of anonymity, would not further characterize the nature of the deposit or what was suspicious about it.<\/p>\n

Hughes said the FBI surely is looking to see what red flags law enforcement might have been missed \u2014 part of a post-mortem analysis that follows every incident of this nature.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat do you learn from this, and how do you mitigate the next attack?\u201d he asked.<\/p>\n

___<\/p>\n

Tucker reported from Washington. Amanda Lee Myers in San Bernardino contributed to this report.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

LOS ANGELES \u2014 By the time the married couple who carried out the deadly San Bernardino terrorist attack came to the attention of police, it was far too late. Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, had gone undetected while planning the massacre that included amassing thousands of rounds of ammunition, high-powered guns and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":4,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[65],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-5942","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-nation-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5942","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5942"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5942\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5942"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5942"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5942"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=5942"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}