The FBI wants to look at confidential social media files agents think could link a number of people to a plot to spread domestic terror across the country. The plot centers on three Floyd County men arrested by the FBI last February.
FBI agents now want Facebook to turn over the suspects’ confidential records. Terry Peace, Brian Cannon and Cory Williams are accused of plotting terror attacks on government targets. Agents clearly want to know who they were chatting with online and what they were saying.
“Georgia in particular seems to have produced a number of these cases in the last few years,” said Mark Potok, Senior Fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama.
“Let’s face it,” he told WSB’s Pete Combs, “you have to be rather foolish to be making these kinds of plans over Facebook, the internet and so on.”
That trend worries him, he said. But he’s not sure how much intelligence the FBI will mine from social media.
Aside from the Facebook records of the three suspects… the FBI wants those of a page belonging to the XXX Militiamen, a group that appears to align itself with the so-called Patriot movement and which has more than 54-hundred followers. Although the arrests of Peace, Cannon and Williams is mentioned prominently on the page, its administrator appears to distance himself from the idea of violence in any form.