Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - Entrapment

Episode Date: January 16, 2017

The FBI builds more surveillance traps that don’t work, and your host shares a few of his earliest adventures in surveillance.  

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. This installment is called Entrapment. It's not uncommon at all these days for the FBI to be monitoring people's social media accounts and surveilling and even investigating people who post things that are supportive of the Islamic State. Trevor Aronson is a journalist who covers FBI counterterrorism, mass surveillance, sting operations. In a recent piece for The Intercept, he wrote about the case of a Michigan man who ended up in the FBI's crosshairs. A man named Khalil Abu Rayyan. The reason that the FBI targeted him was that he had retweeted a tweet that linked to a propaganda video from the Islamic State.

When the FBI decides to target someone like Khalil, they'll send in an informant. In this case, the FBI was very calculated. They deployed not one, but two female informants. In the first example, Khalil meets this FBI informant working undercover online, and her name was Gada. And they put together, you know, what was in Khalil's mind a pretty intense relationship. You know, Khalil had never been with a woman, had very limited experience in relationships. And so for him, talking to this woman online and talking to her on the phone was a really intense thing. And just prior to him traveling to, I believe she claimed to be in Wisconsin, traveling from Michigan to Wisconsin to meet her, she called it off and broke up with Khalil over the phone.

And Khalil was fairly heartbroken as a result. Interestingly, whether this was coincidence or part you know, part of a grander plan by the FBI, soon after the breakup, the FBI introduces a second informant named Jana Bride. Hello. Assalamu alaikum. Hello. Assalam. Where are your parents? She just stepped out to Kroger's. The FBI recorded all the conversations Khalil had with John O'Bride. But she's going to be back any minute.

And in the one Trevor posted online, you can hear right away how clueless Khalil is. Why do you say you want to hang yourself today? Did you say you want to kill yourself today? Maybe. Maybe. Why do you say that? I'm tired of this. It helps a lot.

He's actually trying to woo this lady with suicidal self-pity. And while Janna Bride sounds genuinely concerned, the recording makes it clear that she's got some ideas of her own. No, Khalil, nobody should take away their own lives. But when it's for the sake of Allah, when it's jihad, or when it's based on our aqeedah or for a cause, that's the only time Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala allows it. But not to put your life to waste and just hang yourself like you say you want to do. That's not the right thing to do.

Yeah, she just casually slipped it in there that killing is okay if it's used for jihad. I think what the audio shows is that Jana Bride, the informant, is clearly pushing Khalil toward talking about violence and that Khalil is going along with it because in his mind he is into this woman. Which thought is greater to you right now? Hurting yourself or somebody else?

What is it? Are you thinking about hurting yourself or somebody else? Well, I mean, I would not like to hurt somebody else. At the same time, if I did it to myself, it would be easier. I wouldn't get in trouble. He's saying what he thinks she wants to hear to be interested in him. In his 2013 book, The Terror Factory, Trevor Aronson examined some of the high-profile FBI sting operations from the early days of the war on terror.

Sleeper cells like the Lackawanna 6, the Liberty City 7, and the Newburgh 4. The FBI not only supplied those men with weapons and cash, but some of the informants the FBI employed had financial incentives to push the targets to act. Today, in the era of the lone wolf, Trevor Aronson is asking the same question. Is the FBI catching terrorists or is it creating terrorists? And when you listen to FBI informant John O'Bride push Khalil Abourian to talk about hurting others, he says it's time for us to ask if the FBI is now supplying its targets with the very motivation to act. There's a real question in these counterterrorism cases, particularly among the lone wolf cases, whether any of these guys ever could have had the capacity to commit a significant crime on their own.

Now, I'm just going to state the obvious here. In 2017, if you have a foreign sounding name and you're posting something online that's even remotely connected to ISIS, it's pretty likely that the FBI will target you. Also obvious, there's nothing wrong with the FBI investigating someone who does this. Through these sting operations, what the FBI is hoping to do is find people who are just about to step over that line from sympathizer to operator. The problem is, is that the FBI now has serious institutional biases and incentives built in to push its sting targets to step over that line. The FBI is today this agency that has this bifurcated mission. You know, it's still very much the pre-911 FBI that investigates crimes

after they occur. But it's more and more an intelligence agency that's tasked with preventing the next attack. And the problem is that despite having these two missions, the FBI is still an organization that measures its success. And when it goes to Congress, you know, justifies its budgets through the metrics of law enforcement, which is, you know, arrests made, successful prosecutions for the year. And the problem with counterterrorism is such that if you investigate someone for months and months and months and find that they're not willing to do anything like Abu Rayyan seemed to be, there is an incentive to build a case anyway because you're measuring yourself through that law enforcement metric. You have arrests made, successful prosecutions.

And so there is an incentive by the case agent, by the special agent in charge, by the top brass at the FBI to build cases, whether that specifically involves a terrorist or not. And you can see the FBI's incentive to do this through many of the sting operations because, you know, throughout a sting operation, particularly the ones that are involved and are quite expensive and go on for months and months and months, you know, no case agent wants to be in a position where at the end they have to go back and say, yeah, we don't have any charges to bring. You can see in these cases, the FBI works really hard to have a fallback plan

and have a charge they can go with in case the larger goal of the sting falls through. This is the situation the FBI found itself in with Khalil. You see, John O'Brien succeeded in getting him to talk about crossing that line. He started bragging about an AK-47. Khalil even told her he shot up a church with his AK-47. This is when the FBI moved in and arrested him. But Khalil didn't have an AK-47. It turned out that that was something that he just seemed to have made up in whole cloth and was likely a result of, you know, John O'Bride through these conversations encouraging him to talk about violence or be interested in violence. And so as a result, he makes up having a gun he

doesn't have and he makes up, you know, as a result, he makes up having a gun he doesn't have and he makes up shooting a church that he never did. Khalil did own a gun, though, a handgun. He also had a permit for this gun. He claimed it was for protection. He delivered pizzas in a pretty rough part of Detroit. But Khalil lied on his gun permit application. He didn't declare his previous conviction for possession of marijuana.

And that's what they charged him with. But what's interesting about the case is that even though this was clearly not a terrorism case, they didn't charge him with any terrorism-related charges. They treated it very much like a terrorism-related case. They tried to get his lawyer and him to agree to a protective order so that the tape, the audio tape that we ended up releasing would not be revealed. You know, they did not want a lot of the internal workings of their investigation disclosed. Most of the FBI's high profile anti-terrorism success stories are about as glamorous as this case. A guy pleading guilty to lying on his gun permit application.

But with all of the money and time the FBI is plowing into anti-terrorism stings, they have yet to stop anyone like the Sarneia brothers who attacked the Boston Marathon, or the couple who went on a rampage in San Bernardino. From a practical standpoint, the FBI has gotten really good at, like, you know, manipulating people like Khalil Abu Rayyan into getting involved in some sort of criminal activity or finding people with mental illness or financial incentives and pushing them to get involved in terrorism.

But it's done a really horrible job at catching these other guys who are truly, truly dangerous. The FBI stings are a product of the war on terror, our response to the events of 9-11, 2001. And while you can point the finger at the Bush administration for introducing them, the Obama administration ramped them up. There is a misconception that the most egregious abuses of the war on terror occurred under George W. Bush. And I suspect part of that is just, you know, the association of the abuses at Guantanamo Bay and in Afghanistan and Iraq.

But, you know, indeed, you know, as far as, you know, counterterrorism programs, FBI surveillance, sting operations, you know, the Obama administration really doubled down on all of that. And, you know, the FBI further kind of has been emboldened by the courts by, you know, upholding so many of these cases and seeing so many convictions that I think a lot of people who had assumed that Obama would roll a lot of this back, I think he ended up endorsing it. It's frightening to imagine what the FBI might be doing next.

Through history, governments have shown that once they have an abusive program that they target against a vulnerable population, it's not long before they start using it on other parts of the population. And I think that's what people have really underestimated. This is something that obviously is largely affecting Muslim communities now, right? And so it's easy to be like, oh, I'm not Muslim, it doesn't affect me.

But it's naive to think that in the years to come, that won't be targeted toward others. This mini-series that we're doing on the podcast is called More Adventures in Surveillance because 10 years ago, in 2006, I launched a mini-series called Adventures in Surveillance. This is back when I was doing the first version of the Theory of Everything podcast, way before Radiotopia, and way before podcasting was cool. I wasn't exactly sure what I was doing back then, but I did know that I wanted to explore two things. On the one hand, there was this new, insatiable human desire to overshare everything.

And on the other hand, there was also this seemingly insatiable desire by the state to surveil everything. Okay, neither one of these was exactly new in 2006, but thanks to the internet, they were both accelerating at speeds so great, it was obvious they were going to collide. And that collision is what I wanted to make some podcasts about. Listening back to the whole series, I'm kind of surprised at how both ahead of its time it was and how current it is today.

I mean, even Donald Trump made an appearance. I was supposed to be a contestant on the second season of The Apprentice. how current it is today. I mean, even Donald Trump made an appearance. I was supposed to be a contestant on the second season of The Apprentice. Sally Barnett, a telemarketer from Cleveland. We were having sex, but it's not like you think. Anyway, so Mr. Trump and Mr. Barnett come in and they start talking about who is

going to make it into the final round. And when they come to me, Mr. Trump says, there's no way I could be on the show because obviously I had unionistic tendencies. That's the word he used, unionistic tendencies. I also spoke with ACLU hero Ben Wisner. He warned us about giving a president who believes he has unlimited power the keys to America's surveillance technology. Whatever you may think about the wisdom of surveillance, having a president assume the powers of a king is a threat to the survival of our democracy. And having a president who

believes that he has the authority to eavesdrop on people and express violation of a statute passed by Congress, really takes this to another level. And so, in a way, when we talk about that aspect of the scandal as an eavesdropping debate, we're off point. I mean, this is a law-breaking debate. This is a debate about whether the president is above the law and whether the president is actually a king. I also profiled a number of people who believed surveillance could be fun and entertaining and

artsy, like this guy Morgan Friedman. He ran a pre-Twitter website lots of people used to love called Overheard in New York. Surveillance isn't inherently negative. And I think we do it in a way to make it safe and fun. This isn't like surveillance so much as reality television, where this is where people want to be overheard. It's an interesting social phenomenon, though, knowing that someone is always listening and someone always can be listening and overheard, please, please enter this. Where I think it's better to have a big brother where you know Big Brother is watching rather than a secret one that no one knows about.

But the heart of the series were my own misadventures with surveillance. And I'm going to share with you one of the crazier stories after this short break. Overheard in New York isn't around anymore. But don't worry, you can still participate in the fun coolness of being overheard. And you don't even need to leave your house. Google, can you hear me? Loud and clear, Benjamin. We'll see you next time. I'm a big fan. I personally think it's quite underrated. Thanks, darling. There's a mic mute button for privacy. And if you forget to press it, you can easily manage or delete your past conversations with your assistant at any time by just going to https backslash backslash myactivity.google.com. Dot. But rating your own show. Really? Come home to a Google Home where you can be sure that someone is always listening.

And make sure to tell them that the Theory of Everything podcast sent you. Okay, we're going to end this episode with a story I did 10 years ago. Pre-iPhone. The first time my cell phone unintentionally dials someone up is when I'm in the bathroom of a bus from Boston to New York City. It's late at night and the bus is dark. I use my cell phone to light my way in the bathroom so I can see where the toilet is. But as I am relieving myself, I accidentally hit the call button, and my cell phone rings up the woman whom I'm en route to visit. It still pains me to imagine her picking up the phone,

seeing that it's me on the caller ID, and sweetly answering, Hello, are you almost here? And then the sound of rushing urine. When I get back to my seat, she calls me in tears. I'm unable to dissuade her that in fact I do not have a golden shower fetish and that my phone call was not a passive-aggressive attempt to turn her out. But when I finally arrive at her building, her doorman informs me that I'm not to be allowed in.

I never see her again. Ever since this unfortunate occurrence, I've tried to make sure I lock my cell phone whenever I'm not using it. But I often forget. Even today, this very afternoon, after everything I just went through this past weekend, I received a text message from my friend Leanne telling me, your phone keeps calling me up, and I'm hearing your conversation. But I'm already getting ahead of myself. We need to start this story at its proper place. Two months ago,

right about when I began this stupid adventures in surveillance series. I have a meeting in Washington, D.C. It's a noon meeting, and so my plan is to take the train back to New York City when it's over. But before heading home, I take the metro out to Silver Springs, where a few of my friends are attending the Silver Docs Documentary Film Festival. And just as I arrive, I find them outside the main theater. They have an extra ticket for me to go in and hear Al Gore give a keynote speech, and so I accompany them in. After the speech, my friend James, who has to fly to San Francisco, gives me his festival badge, and my friend John assures me that he can

get me into the Jim Jarmusch Martin Scorsese event later in the evening, and so I decide to stick around. We do indeed get into the event, and when it's over, John and I make our way to the after party. Now, my only Washington, D.C. friend, Chris Beck, is out of town, and John is staying with family friends, so I have no place to crash. I figure I have only enough time for one or two drinks before I need to leave for the train station. Unless, unless I can find the beautiful woman I noticed earlier in the day, sitting a few rows from me during the Al Gore speech. Perhaps I can find her at this after party and convince her that she should invite me to stay with her. I tell John my plan and he mockingly suggests that if I do find her

I should walk right up to her and say, Look, I have this dilemma. But as soon as he says this I catch sight of her standing aloof in one of the drink lines. And so I walk over and start up a conversation. Her name is Rebecca, and it turns out that we have a few mutual friends in public radio. And even though she's essentially working for the film festival, she's amused that my name does not match the one on the badge around my neck, and thus it seems completely natural for me to take her by the arm and say to her,

Look, I have this dilemma. A few hours later, we're smoking cigars in her convertible. The drive to her DuPont Circle apartment is more Mulholland Drive than Rock Creek Park, but eventually we make it in one piece. I end up staying with Rebecca for the entire film festival, and on Sunday she drives me back to New York City. And when she finally heads home on Tuesday, she's decided to quit her job making propaganda for the government and move to New York to pursue her lifelong dream of becoming a stand-up comedian. The following weekend, she comes up to visit again,

and then I take the bus to visit her for the 4th of July. We talk on the phone and text message each other every day. I spend many a night sitting on my front stoop just thinking about how good the universe is to me and how lucky I am. Okay, so that's pretty much Act 1. And believe you me, my dear listeners, I am just as uncomfortable sharing with you this happy little tale as I am sure you are of listening to it. So let's proceed quickly to Act 2, which contains the more familiar despair and desolation. Like I said, I spend many a night out on the stoop in front of my building, and well, about two weeks ago, late one evening, I'm smoking a cigar and contemplating things out on said stoop when

a strange woman comes up and asks me if I will let her into the building. She tells me she's trying to get a hold of Ray, who lives on the first floor, because she's staying with him and he isn't answering his telephone. Now, something is not right about this woman. First of all, her luggage is more or less homeless vintage, which is of course by no means an offense. This is after all the East Village, but she's also chugging a bottle of NyQuil. But who am I to pass judgment on what particular substance a person chooses to imbibe, so I let her into the building. She pounds at Ray's door for a few moments and then comes back outside and sits down next to me. She takes out her cell phone and pretends to dial a number, but I can clearly see that the device is turned off.

Then she lights up a cigarette and begins to flirt with me. She asks me what my name is and what I do and what my sign is and what apartment I live in. I tell her that I live in apartment 8, when in truth, I live in number 7. Then she tells me that if she can't get a hold of Ray, then she doesn't have a place to stay for the night. I let this hang in the air for a moment before rising to my feet. I tell her that I'm sure Ray will be home shortly, and then, without looking at her, I turn and let myself into the building. That night, Jesus makes an appearance in my dream, and he's totally pissed off.

Did I not recently reward you with a place to stay when you were in need in Washington, D.C., he shouts? Do I not treat you well? Have I not directed the universe to accord onto you multiple blessings and fortunes? Does it not say in the c***ing Bible that I will come into the world disguised as a beggar and woe be unto he who would deny me? His eyes are wild and terrifying and I'm speechless before him. The following night, I'm given a second chance.

Once again, I'm smoking a scar out on the stoop. Once again, this strange woman shows up, and once again, my neighbor Ray does not answer the buzzer or his phone. Only tonight, she's forsaken the night quell in favor of what has to be either crack cocaine or paint thinner. I notice this when she collapses on top of me. When I'm finally able to get her upright and seated on the stoop besides me, she takes out a piece of cake from her bag and rams it into her mouth. She doesn't even finish chewing before coming straight out with it. Can I crash on your couch? So there it is. The gauntlet is thrown down.

I opt to hedge. I tell her that actually I don't own a couch and that all I have are wooden chairs, extremely uncomfortable wooden chairs at that, but she waves this nonsense aside and says she will be fine with sleeping on my floor. I stand up and tell her that actually my girlfriend will be getting off work from the bar in about an hour and will not like the idea of finding a strange woman sleeping on the floor of my apartment. She waves this aside as well. Just let me crash on your floor for 45 minutes, she pleads. No, I say, and then I go back inside. That night, I do not dream of Jesus.

But the next morning, the very next morning, my boss calls me up to tell me that come September 1st, my job is going to be put on hiatus, and thus I am going to be unemployed for the foreseeable future. I can hear Jesus snickering on another extension on the line, and when my boss hangs up, he laughs. Ha ha ha, now who's going to be homeless? I phone my dear Rebecca in D.C. to tell her about my new dilemma, but I am unable to reach her, so I send her an instant message. But even though the computer says she's there, I get no response. I can feel the tremors

of a sea change. By four o'clock, I'm wandering the streets in total despair, taking note of the park benches and dumpsters that will surely soon be my new living quarters. But then, in front of a bar on 7th Street, I meet a sculptress named Annie who, over the course of a few vodka tonics, provides me with an opportunity to go into a state of total denial. And the following morning, I awake naked on the floor of her studio. Now, normally I would never share such sordid details from my personal life with you, my dear listeners, but alas, this discretion on my part is pertinent to the story. For you see, the following day comes and goes, and yet I still do not hear from my dear Rebecca. I send her a few text messages and I leave her a voicemail,

but I receive not a single response. By early evening, I'm at the point of mental and physical exhaustion, and so I decide to get some sleep so that the following morning I will be refreshed enough to worry and fret at full throttle. When I finally am able to get out of bed on Friday, I still have nothing from Rebecca. No emails, no text messages, no voicemails, nothing. I start to wonder what possibly could be happening. Could Jesus be this angry with me? Am I to lose both my livelihood and my lover in one fell swoop? By evening, I'm in a total panic. I even scan the Washington, D.C. news sites to see if she's fallen victim to the city's recent crime wave. I just can't comprehend what could be the reason

for her silence. And then, it hits me. On the night I spent with Annie the Sculptress, I accidentally rolled over my cell phone, and after a few moments before shutting it off, I noticed that it was lit. Truly a masterful stroke of genius for a vengeful Jesus, to make me a victim of my very own adventure and surveillance. I go to Singular.com to confirm my horrible hypothesis, but unfortunately some of the relevant data is missing. According to the fine print, details on calls made to other providers can take up to six business days to show up on the statement.

All I am able to discern is that on the night in question, my phone did indeed make a few out-of-area calls, one of which was for seven minutes. But at this point, I do not need confirmation. There is no need to substantiate my suspicions. No need to prove the paranoia. It is obvious that my cell phone had dialed Rebecca up and that she had answered only to hear me doing God knows what with some other woman. There can be no other explanation. Friday night, I am once again visited by Jesus. Only this time, he has Rebecca with him. They're both wearing combat fatigues and both are armed with automatic weapons.

Jesus has a 1984 vintage ghetto blaster slung over his shoulder. He plays a few moments from my phone call for me. It turns out that it was actually recorded onto Rebecca's voicemail. She tells me that she's going to post it on the internet and that she's already even purchased a domain, benjaminwalkerisatotalfraud.com. Jesus tells me that he's going to help her rent the apartment across the hall from me so that whenever I bring someone home, Rebecca will be able to offer first-hand testimony about my shortcomings, both as a lover and as a human being. I awaken Saturday morning, totally broken and beaten.

I decide to send Rebecca one last text message, one that will suggest to her that I know what is going on, but one that is vague enough to take the.0000001 chance that this whole situation actually has nothing to do with an unintended cell phone call into account. This is what I send. Ha ha, dash. This is the best surveillance story yet. But I don't get a response.

Which means, of course, that it is all true, and that she is already advancing against me. I decide against leaving any more voice messages, as surely they will only end up fodder for more degradation on YouTube or MySpace. And surely she has plans to telephone all of my friends and colleagues to share my secrets and all the bad things I've said about them behind their backs. Surely it is all over for me. I sit on the floor of my apartment for hours contemplating the various ways in which I

can kill myself with little pain until finally at 7 45 p.m. I get a text message from Rebecca. This is what it says. You know get my SMS? I am with ex-boyfriend's best friend, who I might be in love with, dash. So dealing with that, dash. Sorry not to tell you earlier, dash. Hope you are okay, dash. Talk to you tomorrow. you have been listening to benjamin walker theory of. This installment is called Entrapment. This episode was produced by myself with help from Andrew Calloway.

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