Liberty City Seven Case Study

The “Liberty City Seven” case served as a prototype for these terrorism sting operations. There is always a vast divide between the information in the initial news reports and the eventual reports after the government discloses all of the details in court. The Liberty City Seven were a group of young black males from one of the Miami’s poorest areas, Liberty City. They were approached by an undercover FBI criminal informant, Abbas al-Saidi who began his career as a drug snitch at the age of 16 and then transitioned into terrorism stings. He recruited the group to blow up the Sears Tower by offering to pay them $50,000, but there was no evidence that they would actually carry out “the plot.” These young men had absolutely no affiliation with a terrorist organization nor did they have any weapons. All indications lead to the conclusion that this group was simply trying to hustle someone who turned out to be an undercover informant. James J. Wedick, former FBI supervisory agent and consultant for the defense, said, “These guys couldn’t find their way down the end of the street. They were homeless types…They only cared about the money. When we put forth a case like that to suggest to the American public that we’re protecting them, we’re not …show more content…
They developed an algorithm for pinpointing potential terrorist activity. Their program was encrypted to keep everyone’s personal data and private conversations anonymous. No one could unlock that information unless the system detected truly suspicious activity and then a warrant was issued. Otherwise, all unnecessary data was purged from the system after a short period of time. That eliminated clutter for security analysts by focusing solely upon pertinent threats and within a few months of Thin Thread’s implementation it helped the NSA track down key components of the Al Qaeda