Harry Houck, a law-enforcement analyst for CNN, told Anderson Cooper he didn’t notice any fingerprint dust on the walls as reporters were traipsing through the apartment.
“That would have been visible if it had been tested for fingerprints for people who might have been connected with the two shooters in some way,” he said…
“You have passports, you’ve got driver’s licenses, now you have thousands of fingerprints all over this crime scene. There should have been some crime scene tape up there.”
He said even after a crime scene has been processed, it’s usually kept locked up for days or weeks with a sign warning the public to stay out.
“They did not do that here,” Houck said. “I tell you, I am so shocked I cannot believe it. This is Detective 101, for crying out loud. Now we have, it looks like, dozens of people in there, totally destroying the crime scene, which is still vital in this situation. There might be tons of fingerprints in there. … There may be other people who were in there who could have been on a terrorist watch list. I’m really shocked here. I’m shaking right now because I can’t believe this happened.”
I have found it odd from the beginning, knowing the depth of surveillance coverage deployed in this nation, that Farook and his bride weren’t under coverage. There are probably hundreds, if not thousands of wholly innocent people under coverage right now. How could Farook not have been?
In the post-shooting investigation, priority number one would have been nailing down exactly who these two shooters were in contact with, to uncover any cells and prevent future attacks. We have neighbors saying there were a half-dozen Muslims coming and going from the apartment in the weeks leading up to the attack, receiving packages that were delivered there. That leads to two observations.
One, the FBI would naturally place a high priority on identifying those men. They could be other terrorists, planning an attack as we speak. If they didn’t know who they were, that entire apartment would have been covered in fingerprint dust.
Two, six Muslims receiving packages, if nefarious, would greatly increase the likelihood that the FBI would have picked up a thread on one of them somewhere else, maybe a tweet to an known terrorist associate, a questionable purchase of some chemical, something. Then they would have deployed surveillance on them, identified Farook’s house as a location of interest which they visited, and Farook himself as a target of interest. If so, once that house was placed under coverage, every individual who entered and left would be identified, maybe through car licenses, follows to their home locations, database queries, eavesdropping (illegal or not), or other means.
If Farook’s home was under coverage, and everyone who came and left was already identified through surveillance, it would explain why the FBI would not have bothered to run any prints from inside the house. They would have already known everyone who came and went going years back, through video from observation posts established by the house, technical pole surveillance established in the neighborhood, as well as the work of their mobile surveillance teams and computer/database techs. People think that type of coverage is only run in movies like Enemy of the State. It is not a fantasy – it is real, and the FBI runs a lot of it these days, as does DEA, ATF, DHS, and other fed agencies, often liaised with State, county, and local PD surveillance units as well as private sector contractors who specialize in it.
The other questions that hypothesis would answer are why shredded documents were not recovered before the scene was released, as described in the above article (technical monitoring already knew everything that went through Farook’s computer/printer because it was covertly mirrored and bounced out to private sector (hidden FBI) servers through his broadband connection, for monitoring), and why so much was left behind in a crime scene the FBI viewed as mostly worthless. On entry agents familiar with the intel already acquired through the surveillance team’s efforts would have simply looked for evidence that they already knew was there from surveillance, and anything not already known about and documented, which if Farook was under coverage would have been very, very little. It would also explain why the house was viewed as worthless as a crime scene and released so quickly. It had already been virtually taken apart in the years leading up to the shooting.
The only question is, how did a shooting go down if they were under coverage? The only possibilities I can think of would be if this attack was allowed to go down to preserve some potentially bigger investigative lead. Another possibility was they couldn’t figure out a way to perform a parallel construction of a reason for having discovered the attack through legal means. Or maybe their surveillance was detected, Farook was savvy at concealing his plans, and the coverage was light enough that Farook was able to ditch it before launching his attack.
There is one other possibility. There is news that Farook had planned to hit a larger target, and the community center appeared to be a last minute change of plans to attack an inferior target:
An examination of digital equipment recovered from the home of the couple who killed 14 people in San Bernardino last week has led FBI investigators to believe the shooters were planning an even larger assault, according to federal government sources.
Investigators on Thursday continued to search for digital footprints left by Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik, scouring a downtown San Bernardino lake for electronic items, including a hard drive that the couple was hoping to destroy, sources told The Times.
FBI agents will probably spend days searching Seccombe Lake and canvassing the neighborhood for clues after receiving a tip that the couple may have visited the area on the day of the attack, according to David Bowdich, assistant special agent in charge of the FBI’s Los Angeles field office.
Farook and Malik were in the final planning stages of an assault on a location or building that housed a lot more people than the Inland Regional Center, possibly a nearby school or college, according to federal sources familiar with the widening investigation.
Perhaps Farook saw his surveillance, realized his operation had been compromised, and the community center was an attack target chosen at the last minute, as he felt the walls closing in.
Or maybe the surveillance team was on him as he went out to hit the local college, and SWAT was at the college waiting to put him down when his spree began on surveillance’s call. Farook decided to stop by the office for something on his way, got in an argument, and went back to the car to get his wife and guns, figuring if they were going to meet Allah anyway, he might as well take out everyone at the community center before moving on to his main target. Surveillance updated everyone on what was happening, LE SWAT picked up and moved to the community center, as surveillance monitored the situation (and maybe even jammed the remote control frequencies, to prevent the bomb’s detonation). From there Farook split, lost his tail, laid low when he heard his description go out on the scanner, and then re-emerged to be killed by local LE later on.
As with everything related to LE Intel, you are on the outside looking in, so it is tough to do much more than theorize. But there are interesting pieces which still do not fit in any other context outside of Farook being under coverage prior to the attack.
Apocalypse cometh™
[…] Were the San Bernardino Shooters Under Surveillance? […]
If that’s the case, “Throw them all out” is going to sound a lot better.