A Peek Inside the FBI’s Unprecedented January 6 Geofence Dragnet | Hacker News Reader

A Peek Inside the FBI’s Unprecedented January 6 Geofence Dragnet

wired.co.uk

18 pointsStratoscope10 comments

It's a warrant meaning they have reason to assume they broke the law. Considering everybody who stormed the capitol was breaking the law, it actually makes sense here.

Violent crowd breaking into the Capitol was unprecedented in the era of geofencing, too. Sitting presidents ginning a crowd up against Congress was unprecedented. Lots of precedence established by this sequence of events.

Not commenting on substance here but I am curious about phrasing. Why did you say "storming the capitol"?

For reference I've been running a personal linguistic influence project where I'm tracking where certain oft-used phrases came into common parlance and this is one that arose as a clear winner in recent years (see also Google n-gram viewer). "Storming the Capitol" vs "Violent right-wing insurrection" vs "Stop the steal" vs "mostly peaceful protest" are the main trigrams I associate with that period, and I've been trying to track where those terms are used most. I've ordered them there by most used, FYI.

The thing that gets me is that "storming" seems like a very focus-grouped marketing term.

What's the definition of the verb: storm?

Dictionary.com; to rage or complain with violence or fury, or, to subject to or as if to a storm, or, to utter or say with angry vehemence.

You forgot a few: "to deliver a violent attack or fire", "to rush angrily", "to attack or assault (persons, places, or things)"

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/storm

Because it is. Don't get me wrong, what they did is unprecedented, and wrong. But as an outsider, that phrase struck me in the same manner.

I've seen a lot of these in US politics too, weird to think about it, heh?

That's a pretty common phrase that I've heard frequently in contexts like "she came storming into the lunchroom accusing everybody of {whatever}". If some folks here think it's strange and others don't, it may be a regional thing.

I doubt it was the result of a focus group. Probably came about organically then was amplified.

Looks like the FBI used geofence warrants of similar scope and scale for other similar events in that time period, here[1] is one for another set of rioters committing arson.

[1] https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21197805-seattle-fbi...

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