https://theintercept.com/2023/12/18/fbi-nypd-catfishing-terrorism-sting-hamas/
The NYPD and the FBI accused an autistic ex-Marine of backing Islamist militants. Maybe his real crime was being extremely online.
All he did was bounce between extremist pipelines, make terrorism 'jokes', compile intel, plan through various scenarios, let hardcore Muslims convince him to quit the Marines, engaged with groups explicitly tied to terrorist acts, and present himself as a terminally online kid with a processing disorder. I'm surprised he wasn't given the benefit of the doubt after he posted intel and linked to a group funding Hamas.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Fong’s case represents a new and increasingly common form of terrorism sting conducted primarily online, in which federal investigators and prosecutors must navigate the often obscure boundary between protected speech and evidence of crime.
Hundreds of pages of New York Police Department and FBI internal reports, months’ worth of chat logs, and hours of recordings obtained by The Intercept reveal how the investigation of Fong began thousands of miles away in an NYPD intelligence unit.
In March 2020, two months before the FBI and local police showed up at Fong’s house, James, the other young convert in the group, appeared to post a joking message of his own: “Me and the boys blowing up Keesler AFB near me,” he wrote, followed by a black flag emoji.
The government claimed Fong had aided Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham by uploading documents about military tactics and bombmaking to the group chat and accused him of supporting Hamas by sharing a link to a website for the Al Qassam Brigades.
Rather than retry the case, the Justice Department offered Fong a deal: Prosecutors would drop the material support charges if he’d plead guilty to a single count of making false statements to a federal agent.
In November, Fong was sentenced to three years and 10 months in prison — the net result of a four-month partnership between the FBI and the NYPD to nab a young man in California who, as even he admits, was guilty of an increasingly common offense: being a jackass on the internet.
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