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Comment by pyvpx | Hacker News Reader

I read from a reliable source I cannot immediately recall that she in fact did not post anything jihadist or even inflammatory on any social media account of hers.

are you repeating a convenient falsehood or am I? in other words -- do you have a source that verified she in fact posted jihadist anything, anywhere?

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Excellent point. The whole episode is very instructive.

On Sunday the New York Times quoted "law enforcement sources" as saying that she had made postings on her stream. The story got a huge amount of coverage and even came up during Tuesday's Republican debate.

On Wednesday, FBI Director Comey described the reporting as "grabled" and clarified that no, it was just private messages -- and the Times (and others) rewrote their stories to reflect it. But you can't unring a bell; most people's opinion, and even more importantly their emotional responses, are based on the original story.

Erik Wemple covers this well in the Washington Post [1]

Times' "public editor" Margeret Sullivan's looks at it as well [2], noting that two of the reporters also incorrectly reported that Hillary Clinton was the target of a criminal investigation.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2015/12/...

[2] http://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/12/18/new-york-ti...

I wish we had something that tracked news articles and noted when they changed without either an inline note about the change or an update at the end. It would be like the snopes of news journalism, and we could get some really interesting statistics from that with regard to the journalistic integrity of different sources. There's a large population of people that could do with some good evidence to force them to be more critical of certain news sources.

It would be like, like a wiki, but before the admins go off the reservation.

Eh, I think it has to be third-party for exactly that reason. You can never rely on the admins not going off-reservation,or being explicitly ordered to hide changes. If an organization is willing to update a story to change major facts without any indication of such, I see no reason to trust they wouldn't hide change history. Sure, it may be a smaller portion of organizations on a smaller number of articles that are willing to take it to this next level, but it would be better to bypass that entirely and just have an impartial record.

This exists: http://newsdiffs.org/

Awesome, thank you!

You are right. The FBI has corrected the report of her Facebook warnings that was floating around the news networks.

Marquez (the Muslim convert who sold them the guns), however, did post something on his verified Facebook account a month before the attack.[1]

And Malik (the wife) did apparently post something on Facebook minutes before the attack.

Do you disagree with my overall point, that the U.S. law enforcement has over-surveillance and under-intelligence?

1. http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/san-bernardino-shooting/san...

Surveillance is simply a useful scapegoat it's actually fairly useless. The problem is if there are any read flags that get 24/7 monitoring then having several people flip them will quickly destroy the system.

Let's say they vent in private conversation well that's legal, they then buy some guns and ammo. Well again that's legal. Then one day they go out and shoot people, well sorry we can't afford to have a swat team around and you can go from 100% legal to shooting people in about 30 seconds.

I would disagree that surveillance is "fairly useless". Obviously, there are times when keeping a watch on potentially dangerous people is going to pay off. How many times, I can't say.

The problems begin when we have a process-bound bureaucracy rather than a group of smart people, each acting on hunches and excellent information. Bureaucracies can be composed of smart people yet act stupidly.

Also, there are political mandates that certain minorities not be singled out, e.g. the Muslims. Thus, the fact that the three involved in San Bernardino were Muslims did not come into play until well after the shooting. The initial news articles I saw didn't even mention their ethnicities and religious affiliations; even the conservative Wall Street Journal only mentioned it at the very end, and the fact that Marquez was a recent convert to Islam didn't come out until recently.

In fiction hunches work well, in the real world there far less valuable.

In terms of mass shootings Muslims are far from the most common profile. Seung-Hui Cho aged 23 for example killed 32 people and wounded 17 in VT on April 16, 2007. Jeffrey Weise, a 16-year-old killed 10 in Red Lake, Minnesota. 21 died at Columbine.

Go though: http://timelines.latimes.com/deadliest-shooting-rampages/ they don't really fit just 1 or 2 profiles.

Actually, there's a recurring theme among the non-muslim ones: Age 15-25 and taking antidepressants. The only reference I can find on a quick google is ZeroHedge ("The conspiracy site without the conspiracies"), but I've actually looked at some of the references in the past: It's not random.

[0] http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-09-17/antidepressants-sci...

Not really the page I linked had ~10 people age 40+:

  age 36 SEPT. 28, 2012 Andrew Engeldinger 6 killed, 2 injured 
  age 43 APRIL 2, 2012 7 killed, 3 injured: Oakland
  age 41 OCT. 12, 2011 Scott Dekraai, 8 killed, 1 injured: Seal Beach, Calif.
  age 34 AUG. 3, 2010 Omar S. Thornton, 6 killed, 11 injured: Tucson, Ariz.
  age 45 FEB. 12, 2010 Amy Bishop 45: 3 killed, 3 wounded: Huntsville, Ala.
  age 39 November 5, 2009 Nidal Malik Hasan: fatally shooting 13 people and injuring more than 30

Sure, you could say it's mostly 14-45 but that's true for most criminals and not that useful. And even just on that page there is Gian Luigi Ferri, age 55 JULY 1, 1993

Do you know why they listed these specifically? All the title says is "here are some of the deadliest ..."

Even if you don't subscribe to the "more than once a day" statistic (which does include gang violence), it's still "about once a week" in 2015 for non-gang completely-innocent random victims -- and yet, this page lists only about 5 a year.

If you talking about 5 or fewer people being involved then it's not exactly a mass shooting. And at that point you might as well start looking into car accidents or even jaywalking and realize untreated depressed people are younger and simply do less stuff. So, even a successful treatment without side effects is going to look bad on a lot of violent crime statistics.

something something heatmap. https://xkcd.com/1138/

Mass murderers in the U.S. are typically the mentally ill. There are many markers: isolated, anti-social, history of mental illness, "neighbors considered him a little strange", family who are fully aware ("we always feared this would happen" or "he scared us").

Of course, you can't just go pick up every strange person and lock them away, or 20% of us might be incarcerated. But we can definitely have better scrutiny of sociopathic children in junior high and high school, and steer them into treatment that might help protect them from hurting themselves and others. We've gone from excessive incarceration back in the 1950s to inadequate attention to the mentally ill since the 1970s, when the flawed policy of mainstreaming became popular.

The Columbine massacre was perpetrated by two disturbed boys whose families suspected something. Afterwards one of their dads said "That sounds like him." Well, if you suspected violence, why didn't you do something about it sooner?

The other kind of mass murderers today are ideology-driven Muslims. 3,000 on 9/11. Dozens at a Texas base. 14 in San Bernardino. I suspect there will be many more coming. These people are quite possibly mentally ill, sociopathic, something wrong upstairs. The ideology gives them a focus for their delusions. We don't need to go after Muslims in general; we need to focus on the unstable ones who are headed for trouble.

It's going to take clear heads and a lot of work, and in my opinion the very worst approach is to sweep all these problems under the carpet and simply tap everyone's phone and email. That's just an evasion and confers a dangerous sense of complacence.

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