Amateur ISIS Investigator Ends Up in Prison | Hacker News Reader

Amateur ISIS Investigator Ends Up in Prison

nytimes.com

90 pointsmhb58 comments

Holy Moly.

> Without access to his records, prison psychologists assumed his tales of talking to Islamic State members were fiction, symptoms of a mental illness that made him incompetent to stand trial. Prosecutors sought a hearing to decide whether he should be forcibly medicated.

This is sadly common. There was a famous case where a woman in a car accident was committed to a psychiatric prison because they didn't believe that Obama followed her on Twitter. Psychs believe that anyone who claims to know famous people is insane, just like cops believe everyone they encounter in the beat who looks sketchy is a criminal. Psychiatry is petty in the same way as police: anyone who seems "better" than the official is taken down a notch using the official's power.

Is this more of the justice system (and doctors, now) not understanding the Internet at all? We know I could go read jihadist website propaganda tonight if I wanted to, but I understand the true nature of the wealth of information I can access from my own home.

It's scary when a elderly judge doesn't understand the Internet. It's worse when that lack of understanding runs through the entire criminal justice system. Then you really are screwed.

Guy was clearly unstable and in over his head. Not against the law mind you, but his mental health was deteriorating (by his own mothers admission) and he began threatening FBI agents.

The 14 months in prison without due process could have been expanded on more in the article, there was next to no info regarding that situation which leaves the reader with a fair few unanswered questions.

What's there to say? Involuntary mental health commitment in the US is a disaster. The doctors operating state-run mental health prisons are overworked and underqualified. And, if you've had run-ins with the doctors operating private mental health hospitals, you know that's saying something!

Lopez was apparently armed and, from the picture painted in this article, pretty much unhinged. Something needed to be done. But the only "something" the criminal justice system has in its bag of things is, by pretty much all accounts everywhere, a total debacle.

Are things better in other countries? Who's doing this well? What does Norway do?

There is next to no funding in the US for public mental health. We no longer have aslyums, because those were awful infringements on people's rights, regardless of whether or not they're sane. But we never replaced those centralized mental institutions with the community psych care that was necessary to make up for the gap. So now many of those same people live on the streets and/or in and out of jail and hospitals because of a lack of long-term support.

My wife works as a nurse in the Emergency Department of a hospital in Washington state, which has a shortage of mental health hospital beds available for patients. They are forced to board these patients in the Emergency Room for days at a time. The rooms often have no windows and are not set up for long term care. If the patient wasn't crazy before coming in, they will be by the time they leave.

The stories she has make my engineering job look like some kind of kindergrten. Patients trying to eat their own feces, trying to hurt staff members. Just remember techie folks that there is a whole other world out there where very bad and difficult things do happen.

And they're all exacerbated by the broken political machine the US has become. (Not that this is exclusive to the US.)

I will never understand how the right wing in this country has become so detached from helping people that actually need it. It's certainly un-Christian, but put that powder-keg aside for a second and it's bad for property values and businesses and communities and tourism and everything that creates more wealth when the least of us aren't cared for.

In The Netherlands I imagine it would go like this:

He would annoy the AIVD (or RIVD?), at some point possibly breaking a law (the threat). The AIVD isn't authorised to arrest I think, so they would make a complaint and a police officer would come to his door, interrogate him, recognise the mental health issues and send a note to his physician.

The physician would call the guy and try to get him into a voluntary institution or at least to see some kind of therapist on a weekly basis. Let's say the guy is unreceptive to his.

Next step is that a social worker in his neighbourhood (this is a new system called wijkteam) is assigned to him that will visit his residence once a week. The worker will knock on his door and try to connect and build trust, family and friends are encouraged to participate in this process.

If the guy screws up too bad though, and the police gets involved another time or two the physician will be asked to authorise an involuntary treatment and he would end up in an institution of which would be much like a rich state in the US (NY, CA) one I think.

Note that nowhere in this process there would be a solitary confinement or separation from his family. That might happen in the NL but I can't imagine it would ever happen for more than a few days.

NY and CA state-run mental hospitals are deeply unpleasant and staffed with overworked, underqualified doctors who have caseloads consisting of the very most difficult patients in numbers that would overwhelm private-practice doctors even if they were just teenagers with mild eating disorders. Is that the case in the Netherlands as well?

(For whatever it's worth: the NYT piece doesn't say Lopez was ever held in solitary, or that he was denied visitation by his family --- but solitary confinement is a distinctive US problem and a legit contrast to draw with the Netherlands).

> solitary confinement is a distinctive US problem

Not really, it's a problem in Europe too. We just don't talk about it.

If you get arrested here in Finland, you'll by default be in solitary and will remain so until the cops, not the courts, feel like letting you out.

Has anyone tried to challenge that sort of thing in the European Court of Human Rights?

Yes, and Finland for example has consistently lost. The problem is that in practice these court decisions only end up benefiting the individuals bringing the suits, as it's almost impossible for public workers to get fired here they can safely ignore those decisions in most cases.

A few years ago I would have confidently and naievely answered no to that question. Unfortunately recently a few scandals made it to the national news that Dutch mental institutions are not in the state we'd like to believe they are. As far as I understand the 'average' mental health patient is treated O.K., but there's not enough budget for the really hard cases where one patient basically requires full time supervision. One scandal was that instead of dealing with a patient like this, the staff had just put him in solitary confinement. Another scandal revealed cases of bullying and sexual abuse by staff. The sort you'd expect in a big organization with humans and awkward power relations, I can't say for sure if it's any better than those in the US.

If the FBI investigated, found he was mentally ill and armed, and then all they did was send a note to his doctor, and this guy ended up shooting someone, there would be public outrage at why he wasn't detained.

I'm not particularly mad he was arrested. It's the extended trial-less detention (helped by the withholding of evidence by the FBI) that scares me. There's no speedy trial in the US anymore, and pre-trial detention can last years.

Don't get arrested. Your life will be ruined top to bottom.

Side note: I don't feel like anyone cares about real justice anymore...

Long pre-trial detention is a huge problem in the state systems and one of the biggest human rights issues in the U.S. today. At the federal level, adherence to the Speedy Trial Act, which provides a 30-day deadline for indictment and a further 70 days to trial pretty good. Average pre-trial detention is about 4 months in the federal system.

The article states that Lopez was held in mental units in prisons--his long detention was probably the result of his mental situation.

There's small outrages like that every now and then. I think it's better to have a system where every now and then a person is allowed to do something he's not supposed to, than a system where people should always be wary of communicating with their government in fear of being randomly detained for 14 months.

> “Any attempt to arrest me will be treated as a hostile act,” he wrote to Mr. Reising. By then, agents had been informed by the Delaware State Police that Mr. Lopez’s mother, Joyce Lopez, had told them that her son had a shotgun and was in a “poor mental state.”

I found the most surprising aspect of the article was the guy absolutely refusing to believe that his Skype contact was phony and trying to scam money from him, even when the very law enforcement he so trusted to help "save the hostages" 1/2 way across the world told him so.

I wonder what sort of physiological issues must be present, and why, that allows someone to be sucked so deeply into believing the fantasy of the situation, even in the face of overwhelming evidence, and how that very thing exists in so many other decisions that confront people.

I just finished a book[1] that explains this pretty clearly. Dissonance between reality and a person's self-image (i.e. "I am difficult to fool") is often 'resolved' in favor of the more important factor, which is the person's self-image. So they deny reality.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Mistakes-Were-Made-But-Not/dp/B003HFFI...

That look super interesting...just bought it in fact.

Thanks for the info.

That book looks very interesting, but note that you link to an old edition. The new edition is here:

http://www.amazon.com/Mistakes-Were-Made-but-Not/dp/05445747...

This URL also lets you preview the book with a "Look Inside" link.

Whatever the psychological issues he had, I suspect they were coupled with the so frequent movie plot of "I'm right and the stupid FBI doesn't believe me". So many movies portray this image of the clueless law enforcement agencies and the guy who, although has never heard of intelligence analysis and is mentally unstable, somehow ends up being right and everyone else ends up appologizing to him, becomes a hero, and the President honors him.

It sounds absurd but it's exactly what's happened here, down to the attitude of the FBI agents. Some people watch a James Bond movie and start acting like him, some even apply for a job in the intelligence domain (of course I suspect their names are diligently saved and they're prohibited from ever working in such an unforgiving field).

What irritates me isn't that an outsider took it upon himself to right a wrong by taking as a hobby something people do for a living and many die while doing so... what irritates me is that: Of course this would happen, what would one expect? The problem is how was this allowed to happen. No fail-safe mechanisms to make it impossible to go directly from selling Toyotas to jail.

So many red flags that should have triggered each a different action:

He wasn't aware of his own condition and his own delusion. He was mentally unstable, unknowingly incompetent in what he pursued which made him a fanatic in a way, armed, threatening tone ("Any attempt to arrest me will be treated as a hostile act"? It's a miracle he's still alive), and had a seemingly lousy lawyer who was confused about what his job was (to get his client out, not to diagnose his mental health).

With all that, add the fact he wasted agents' time and interfered with their jobs (every moment they spent on him, there was real work not being done; lives were at stake. Not only that but the worst he could do is add a parameter, a degree of freedom, to something already hard to do).

The question still is: why was this allowed to go this far? Why didn't the family seek help (the guy 'quit his job' because of his online activities). Whatever the psychological issues he had, I suspect they were coupled with the so frequent movie plot of "I'm right and the stupid FBI doesn't believe me". So many movies portray this image of the clueless law enforcement agencies and the guy who, although has never heard of intelligence analysis and is mentally unstable, somehow ends up being right and everyone else ends up appologizing to him, becomes a hero, and the President honors him.

So many red flags that should have triggered each a different action:

The question still is: why was this allowed to go this far? Why didn't the family seek help (the guy 'quit his job' because of his online activities). Prevent instead of mitigate.

This guy was really asking for trouble when he went ballistic on an FBI agent, from the article:

he sent an agent 80 increasingly overheated messages in 10 days. In one, he declared, “Just remember whatever ends up happening to you … You deserved it,” and added an expletive.

Which was the major reason to arrest him in the first place.

Valid reason to arrest him. Not a valid reason to sit in prison for 14 months, with no due process, trial, etc.

Edit: Also, to me, the context is fairly clear that the "threat" of "whatever ends up happening to you" is talking about the potential embarrassment or career consequences to the agent around ignoring advice that might save some hostage. He was (incorrectly) convinced he was trying to save lives, and frustrated that nobody would take him seriously.

That's why you just do whatever law enforcement says and be kind and deferential to them at all times. They're literally above the law.

Not sure if sarcasm.

Not sure if using Reddit style "questioning" or "asking" is right thing to do on HN.

Having experience with the legal system, definitely not sarcasm.

Depends on the country.

No it's not sarcasm. Law enforcement privileges tend to breed abuse.

I meant more the part that we should be deferential, rather than try to influence politicians to make law enforcement not be above the law.

I don't think you should be deferential to politicians, not legislators anyway. I think you should be deferential to law enforcement. If you're talking about current term executive branch politicians then I guess I would include them too if they are in law enforcement.

> Valid reason to arrest him. Not a valid reason to sit in prison for 14 months, with no due process, trial, etc.

I remember when the NDAA passed for the first time in the budget bill, Obama said it would not actually be used to keep people indefinitely in prison with no trial. In reality, the government has already been doing that to people, even before the NDAA passed, and now the NDAA just represents legal cover.

Kind of how they repealed the law that said the US government can't use propaganda on US soil, and now they can also do that in one way or another (either through the MSM or through Internet psyops).

No portion of the detainee provisions of the NDAA were at play in this case:

* Lopez wasn't part of al Qaeda or involved in the 9/11 attacks.

* Lopez wasn't apprehended by the US military.

* Lopez wasn't detained "under the laws of war".

* Lopez wasn't held in military custody.

Just to be clear: he was in prison for a portion of his detention, after being arrested for making the threat and being informed by his mother that he was armed. He was then moved to involuntary psychiatric commitment.

The article is unclear on the amount of time he spent in each kind of detention, but gives the strong impression --- by marking time in terms of psychiatric evaluations --- that most of it was spent in psychiatric inpatient detention.

>>most of it was spent in psychiatric inpatient detention

Apparently, mostly because extremely important information needed to make a serious psychological evaluation wasn't made available to the medical people doing those evaluations.

See this image from the article: https://static01.nyt.com/images/2016/04/24/us/24salesman-psy... They finally got the information on his 3rd eval, which is what led to his release. All charges were dropped at that point.

Maybe. But the documents make a pretty compelling case for mental illness, because they also indicate that he expected to talk to the President about freeing Kayla Mueller, and became unhinged after she died. Lopez's grandiose claims about his connections to ISIS were in fact fictional --- it looks like he was being set up for an advance-fee scam.

None of this is meant to excuse the criminal mental health care system in the US, which is, I think, criminal.

I think it took over a year in Lopez's case because pretty much nobody gives a shit about people in this system.

It always find it surprising that Americans say they have the right to own guns but whenever something else goes wrong, owning or carrying a gun seems to cause massively greater punishment. Shouldn't it be illegal to discriminate against people based on gun ownership? Otherwise it's kind of restricting people's freedom to own guns.

Modern leadership prefers "nudges" to outright bans.

If you live in England and think this kind of psychiatric detention needs stronger controls you might be interested in looking at becoming a "Mental Health Act Manager", or "Hospital Manager". This is often a voluntary position that looks at some detentions under the Mental Health Act and sometimes orders the de-sectioning of people detained under section.

http://www.mentalhealthcare.org.uk/mental_health_act

https://www.rethink.org/resources/m/mental-health-act

https://www.rethink.org/living-with-mental-illness/mental-he...

In England it's rare to become a mental health inpatient. Only about 8% of the people getting care from mental health trusts ever go in-patient. Some of that is lack of beds (especially for children), but mostly it's because hospitals are sometimes harmful (This is true for physical health too) and people should get better care from "Crisis Resolution and Home Treatment Teams" (for short term emergency care) and community teams (for longer term recovery and rehabilitation).

But if you think it's something that might happen you should probably think about advanced directives, and sorting out who your "nearest relative is", and getting a crisis plan set up.

People are saying he was "unhinged" or mentally ill, but it sounds like he was simply sucked into an online scam. That happens to normal people all the time (even professionals through "whaling"). If you believe your scammer, and he tells you about freeing hostages, and those stories corroborate with what you hear on the news, then what normal person wouldn't get agitated and emotional? That doesn't sound like mental illness, it sounds like normal reaction to finding out that the one person who could save some hostages is refusing to cooperate. Don't forget his friend was actually killed in Afghanistan so he's got some genuine emotional connection to these troubles already, making the other stories easier to believe perhaps.

What would you do if you believed you had a way to free a hostage and the FBI just told you to get some sleep? When the hostage was killed, what would you say to that FBI worker? Normal mentally healthy people would get angry and obsessive when they believe they're being impeded from saving lives. I've seen more extreme reactions for far lesser problems.

I would consider getting some sleep.

I agree with your point about the emotional involvement, but honestly, this is an unemployed former car salesman and restaurant manager. For him to think he's legitimately negotiating release of hostages over twitter and skype... sure, maybe, but it falls into the 'requires extraordinary evidence' bucket for me.

Off topic, but why does the NYT website have a 'show full article' button (on mobile at least)?

Guessing, but probably to get more accurate engagement stats. It would be better to assume a user has read most or all of the article if they clicked that button. Maybe also a way of determining if the introductory paragraphs were written in an engaging way, because they determine whether I will continue reading or not.

Seems like monitoring the scroll position would have the same (or better) effect.

It has a paywall so when you hit the limit of 10(?) free views that no longer works.

OK that makes the most sense - I've just never seen the paywall.

It's a common "recirc" technique (recirculation). All that crap after the button/article? If you skim the first paragraph and are not interested, they want you to go there rather than press "back".

Contacting fake ISIS members and FBI agents is one thing.

Really sad that he was contacting american hostages families.

Man who made a vague threat against FBI agent is disappeared for 14 months.

I know this is just a drive-by comment, but on the off chance you don't actually know the difference between unjust detention and "disappearing", I'll spell it out:

* Lopez was apprehended in daylight at his house by uniformed police acting on an arrest warrant. The disappeared are snatched by anonymous or covert paramilitaries.

* Lopez was taken to the NY Metropolitan Corrections Center. The disappeared are tortured and killed.

* Lopez' family was aware of his location throughout his ordeal. The families of the disappeared never know that, which is why they're called "disappeared".

* Lopez was released. The disappeared usually stay disappeared.

You're right, it was an exaggeration, to highlight the fact that he was held and not tried for fourteen months, and charges were only dropped when an evaluator finally got access to evidence that should have been available from the beginning. How much longer would he have been disappeared in plain sight if the government were able to suppress evidence/information even longer?

(And yes, I know the difference.)

Maybe. But I don't think that's what happened. What I think happened was, the guy was involuntarily committed through the criminal justice process, and so like everyone admitted to psychiatric inpatient care --- under any circumstances --- he was stuck until the facilities got sick of him or he lucked into a doctor that actually gave a fraction of a shit about him.

Unfortunately for him, private psychiatric inpatients are there on the dollar of their insurance companies, and so there's an implicit clock ticking on their stay. The same is not the case for the utterly unaccountable state-run involuntary mental health care system.

Then why would the prosecutor be motivated to have him "forcibly medicated?" They clearly were taking an interest in his "treatment."

What do you think involuntary psychiatric commitment is? This is what it is. Yes! The prosecutors believed --- with some justification --- that Lopez was crazy. The system is set up to err on the side of indefinite psychiatric detention.

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