What & Who discovers terrorist plots?

[davidbfpo]

A BBC report on a current trial of a Muslim convert who was radicalised quickly and left for Syria - where he was stopped and returned to the UK. It appears he had an arranged Muslim marriage, who disliked his extremism and told someone and two undercover MI5 agents become his trusted friends.
Link:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england...yside-40863216

It almost fits what the UK's most senior CT police officer referred to in a Q&A:

Q: Police now work closely with MI5, sitting, literally, alongside them, so you’re getting all that intelligence. But is it harder to counter the threat from lone actors, because, by definition, they are loners and are working alone?
A: Well you can get intelligence about loners but it comes from different sources. So many of the lone actors have at some stage in their radicalisation connected into extremist groups in this country; or connected online to some of the propaganda being put out by Isis and other groups. So that gives us opportunities but also, of course, intelligence comes from communities. So, we’ve got examples where an escalating threat from lone actors has been spotted first by someone in the community who’s picked up the phone to us and that makes a difference. So when I talk about a “whole system effect”, I think expecting a small group of a few thousand police officers and security service officials to be able to solve this is not realistic. We will do everything we can to improve but we’re going to need that wider input from public and other agencies.

Link:http://news.met.police.uk/blog_posts...errorism-60655

Update 21/12/17 after court:

Watson, 27, who held "deep radicalised views" was jailed for five years

Link:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england...yside-42440771

[davidbfpo]

The police-operated ATS Hotline after a FOI request has reported:

Calls to a dedicated police hotline rocketed by more than 600 per cent in just six months as thousands of potential leads poured in.
(Later) It received 22,729 calls in the year to the end of June 2016 - almost double the tally of 11,892 in the previous 12 months. The service took 21,596 calls from July 2016 to June 2017.

Link:http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk...-a7897346.html

I wonder if calls to MI5 (Security Service) have also gone up.

[davidbfpo]

Nearly missed this report on Anglo-Australian academic research on 'community reporting'; the Australia research came first and was built upon here:

It expands and develops the approach of the Australian study through a sample of 75 community members and professional practitioners, with a particular focus on young adults, matching the demographic profile of many plotters and those who travelled to Syria. The UK study’s preliminary findings suggest we need to re-examine policy and practice approaches around two key issues.

Two points emerged:

First, sharing concerns with authorities about an ‘intimate’ is likely to be the last resort, with respondents much more likely to seek help from figures of authority within communities first....Second, reporting processes around terrorism are not clearly understood by community members or professional practitioners and need to be both strengthened and clarified. As in Australia, respondents in our current study express a strong preference for face to face reporting – they largely do not trust on-line or telephone based methods.

Link to summary article:https://crestresearch.ac.uk/comment/...ity-reporting/ and the full report (not yet read) is:https://crestresearch.ac.uk/resource...ds-full-report

(Added) A statement in November 2017 by a senior police officer, responsible for CT; which in sum says:

funding cuts for local policing will harm intelligence efforts

Link:https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/...head-neil-basu

[davidbfpo]

Rather unusual as the discovery was made by a non-UK national:

Hussain's activities came to the attention of counter terrorism police after a man reported receiving an email from him. The court heard how the witness, who lives outside the UK, emailed the Home Office in March 2017 after receiving a private message on Facebook, from someone he did not know, inciting him to join Daesh.
Commander Dean Haydon, head of the Met Police Counter Terrorism Command, said: "This investigation started with one conscientious individual trusting his instincts and reporting something suspicious. He could have ignored the message Hussain sent him but instead he took a screenshot of the message and contacted the UK authorities immediately. It is in great part thanks to him that police were able to bring Hussain to justice."

Link:http://news.met.police.uk/news/man-j...ffences-296161

[davidbfpo]

Came across this via a pointer in a journal article and it refers to the unsuccessful London bombings:

Said is wanted in connection with a blast on a No 26 bus in Hackney Road. In a statement, the family of the 27-year-old said that as soon as they saw his picture on news reports they contacted police....Said's family said they moved from Eritrea to the UK in 1990. They said he left home in 1994, lives alone and is "not a close family member."

Link (background): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/21_Jul...ondon_bombings and story:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4718797.stm

[davidbfpo]

Earlier in this thread I have cited UK court cases where families have regretted calling the police after incidents etc.

Now we may see a high profile case in Florida, where the wife of the Pulse night club attack is due to reach trial and on March 30th 2018 she was found not guilty. From:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-43599130

From the New Yorker:

Salman’s trial is expected to raise questions about what level of responsibility family members have to report suspicious behavior. It is also expected to draw more attention to the relationship between domestic violence and mass shootings. The link is well known among researchers, and increasingly part of the public conversation, but the domestic-violence laws that do exist—such as banning convicted abusers from owning guns, or a strangulation statute that could have put Mateen behind bars—are not always enforced. In recent years, domestic-violence incidents have foreshadowed shootings in Sutherland Springs, Texas; Fort Lauderdale, Florida; Northern California; and Harvey County, Kansas.
Salman’s relatives say that she did not know Mateen planned to carry out the attack. Her lawyers will likely argue that if the F.B.I. failed to detect Mateen’s radicalization, his wife would not have been able to do so either.

Link:https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-...goes-on-trial?

[davidbfpo]

A new national CT campaign:

It’s more important than ever that everyone plays their part in tackling terrorism. Your actions could help the police prevent terrorism and save lives.

Link:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6Sj...ature=youtu.be

The BBC report citing the police:

The campaign - encouraging people to report suspicious behaviour - comes as figures reveal 30,984 reports were made to counter-terror officers in 2017. More than 6,000 of those reports helped inform live investigations, police say.

Link:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-43465966