This evening's music features Kansas City jazz and blues piano player, singer and bandleader Jay McShann.

Here are a few stories from tonight's post:

Why Does the FBI Have to Manufacture its Own Plots if Terrorism and ISIS Are Such Grave Threats?

The FBI and major media outlets yesterday trumpeted the agency’s latest counter-terrorism triumph: the arrest of three Brooklyn men, ages 19 to 30, on charges of conspiring to travel to Syria to fight for ISIS. As my colleague Murtaza Hussain ably documents, “it appears that none of the three men was in any condition to travel or support the Islamic State, without help from the FBI informant.” One of the frightening terrorist villains told the FBI informant that, beyond having no money, he had encountered a significant problem in following through on the FBI’s plot: his mom had taken away his passport. Noting the bizarre and unhinged ranting of one of the suspects, Hussain noted on Twitter that this case “sounds like another victory for the FBI over the mentally ill.”

In this regard, this latest arrest appears to be quite similar to the overwhelming majority of terrorism arrests the FBI has proudly touted over the last decade. ...

Once again, we should all pause for a moment to thank the brave men and women of the FBI for saving us from their own terror plots. ...

How serious of a threat can all of this be, at least domestically, if the FBI continually has to resort to manufacturing its own plots by trolling the internet in search of young drifters and/or the mentally ill whom they target, recruit and then manipulate into joining? Does that not, by itself, demonstrate how over-hyped and insubstantial this “threat” actually is? Shouldn’t there be actual plots, ones that are created and fueled without the help of the FBI, that the agency should devote its massive resources to stopping? ...

The ACLU of Massachusetts Kade Crockford notes this extraordinarily revealing quote from former FBI assistant director Thomas Fuentes, as he defends one of the worst FBI terror “sting” operations of all (the Cromitie prosecution we describe at length here):

If you’re submitting budget proposals for a law enforcement agency, for an intelligence agency, you’re not going to submit the proposal that “We won the war on terror and everything’s great,” cuz the first thing that’s gonna happen is your budget’s gonna be cut in half. You know, it’s my opposite of Jesse Jackson’s ‘Keep Hope Alive’—it’s ‘Keep Fear Alive.’ Keep it alive.

That is the FBI’s terrorism strategy – keep fear alive – and it drives everything they do.

FBI Entraps Americans in Terrorism Sting Operations

FCC Vote Enshrines Net Neutrality Protections

Today is THE day. #NetNeutrality

— Free Press (@freepress) February 26, 2015

The Federal Communications Commission on Thursday, in a 3-2 vote, approved the reclassification of the Internet under Title II of the Communications Act.

Though expected, the vote was greeted with cheers—applauded as "the biggest win for the public interest in the FCC’s history"— from supporters of net neutrality, the concept that says online traffic should be relegated to fast or slow lanes determined by the large telecom companies who control much of the nation's digital networks.

Held for hours at secret Chicago 'black site': 'You're a hostage. It's kidnapping'

• Protester Vic Suter was shackled to a bench and denied access to a lawyer
• Suter claims officer told her: ‘You’re going to get a tour of hell inside Homan’

Vic Suter, a protester arrested before the 2012 Nato summit in Chicago, has told the Guardian about her experience of being detained inside Homan Square, a warehouse where multiple detainees allege they have been unable to contact legal counsel. Suter described a situation in which she was neither booked nor permitted a phone call – in defiance both of Chicago police procedures and a statement by police on Tuesday attempting to deny the Guardian’s reporting.

Suter’s account echoes that of Brian Jacob Church, whose story of extended detention without public notification and delayed legal access was featured in a Guardian’s exposé on Tuesday.

Arrested alongside Church on 16 May, 2012, Suter found herself taken to the same warehouse, only kept by herself in a different cell.

“You’re going to get a tour of hell in Homan,” she said the police officer who drove her to the warehouse told her.

Granted two breaks for the bathroom during 18 hours of shackling to the bench, Suter said she was interrogated in a good-cop-bad-cop fashion. The first officer, she said, barked basic questions about what she was doing in Chicago; the second brought her a burger from McDonald’s, which she didn’t eat. Suter was more concerned about the ankle cuffs that occasionally tightened when she moved in certain positions, cutting off her circulation.

“Not being able to communicate outwardly by making a phone call or talking to a lawyer, and not being booked in so that someone can find you, you’re a hostage. It’s kidnapping.”

Why shutting down the Department of Homeland Security would be a good idea

George W Bush’s creation is too inefficient, wasteful and disrespectful of privacy to keep around. If Republicans want to shut it down, Democrats shouldn’t stop them

DHS is a behemoth and a bureaucratic nightmare that is projected to cost Americans $38.2bn this year. This conglomeration of over 20 government agencies, under one umbrella of dysfunction and secrecy, was mashed together by George W. Bush after 9/11 to form a largely incompetent and corrupt spy machine. Examples of its awfulness abound.

Consider the DHS’ so-called “fusion centers”, which are little more than spying hubs that vacuum up information from federal and local authorities and store it for indefinite amounts of time. A scathing Senate report on the centers, which have cost the DHS at least $1.4 billion dollars, concluded that they produce “predominantly useless information” - one employee was quoted as calling it “a bunch of crap” - and that they also “[run] afoul of departmental guidelines meant to guard against civil liberties” and are “possibly in violation of the Privacy Act”. While they’ve spied on many people who were engaged in purely First Amendment protected activities, they’re not known to have stopped a terrorist attack. ...

Secrecy is often the DHS’ response to inefficiency. The Office of Intelligence and Analysis keeps its budget classified, likely in an attempt to hide its uselessness. An inspector general report found that the TSA - a sub-agency of DHS that apparently has never caught a terrorist but routinely violates innocent people’s privacy - often arbitrarily holds back information that makes the agency look bad from the public. ....

In response to Republican threats, Democrats are in the midst of running a cringe-worthy “Don’t shut down our security” campaign. But why not recognize this as a blessing in disguise? Thanks to this contrived ultimatum, Congress can go a step further and do what should have been done a long time ago: dismantle this wasteful, invasive, secretive agency once and for all.

tags:

jay mcshann, fbi, caught with pants down, terror plots, fcc, net neutrality, chicago, black sites, gestapo, dhs, budget, shutdown, good thing