Source: www.indy100.com

Successfully identifying, intercepting and detaining a person intent on committing a violent terrorist act is not easy.

Individuals wanting to cause harm in the name of some twisted ideology are often organised and well funded, and it’s a round-the-clock effort by the security services to stop them before they can cause harm.

The methods which the security services use to track down ‘bad dudes,’ to steal a phrase of President Trump’s, are often criticised with regards to privacy and racial profiling.

However, one method is being criticised for being startlingly basic.

For the past year-and-a-half the FBI have allegedly been using a 48 question survey to determine if someone is a threat, and one of the questions includes whether the target likes to go camping or not.

The document, published by The Intercept, is known as the the ‘Indicators of Mobilization to Violence’ (IMV) survey, and assigns points on factors such as religious observance, travel history, financial transactions, and physical appearance.

It’s like a Facebook quiz, but terrifying.

There are, of course, logical and rational questions you would expect to find on a survey of this kind.

Question 1 asks simply:

Has the subject mobilised? (E.g. has the subject travelled, attempted to travel overseas to participate in violence; has the subject been arrested in a terrorism charge; or has the subject conducted a terrorist attack?

Question 20 asks:

Is the subject a regular consumer of extremist propaganda?

And question 31 asks:

Has the subject sought or received direct guidance from overseas extremists?

However, there are a number of questions in there that seem obtuse and in many cases, appear far too broad to truly be affective in identifying someone with extremist views.

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