*Law enforcement agents are concerned that the fictional film “How to Blow Up a Pipeline” could inspire real-life terrorist attacks on energy infrastructures.
Directed by Daniel Goldhaber, “How to Blow Up a Pipeline” is an environmentalist action-thriller film adapted from the same-titled non-fiction book by Andreas Malm. The story centers on a group of activists who plot to disrupt an oil pipeline.
Since its April 7 release, there have reportedly been zero attacks on the nation’s oil and natural gas pipelines. But the movie is still a cause of concern “amongst law enforcement and the private oil sectors,” the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives wrote back in March, according to FBI documents reported in Rolling Stone.
“On the whole, these documents reflect law enforcement’s extremely biased approach to threat assessment, which has chronically under-reported the threat of right-wing violent extremism and focused unnecessarily on environmental movements,” said Jake Wiener, counsel for the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a nonprofit research group that advocates for privacy, free speech, and human rights, Rolling Stone reports.
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“Several documents also fit a long-running pattern of using unrelated instances of far-right violence to justify surveilling and criminalizing left-of-center political organizing,” he continued. “This kind of low-quality analysis is common and dangerous because it can prime police to overreact to non-threatening activities and justify wrongful surveillance.”
Over two dozen state and federal law enforcement agencies sent 35 separate messages to the FBI warning that the movie could inspire terror attacks.
“The consensus amongst law enforcement and the private oil sector is that this film may motivate attacks or disruptions on critical infrastructure throughout the country,” the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives wrote in March.
“The film has potential to inspire threat actors to target oil and gas infrastructure with explosives or other destructive devices,” said the April 6 bulletin from the FBI’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate.
The bulletin was reportedly sent to police departments, government security agencies, and others involved in protecting energy infrastructures. FBI urged them to watch for suspicious activity, such as people taking photos and video recordings of the facilities.
Per Rolling Stone, a senior U.S. government official involved in protecting pipelines said: “If someone wants to attack a pipeline, they’ll attack a pipeline. They don’t need to be inspired by a movie to do so.”
“The movie definitely does NOT provide a step-by-step guide to construct a device, it’s much more focused on the radicalization process and why these subjects choose to conduct the attack,” a senior weapons of mass destruction intelligence analyst with Maryland’s state Coordination and Analysis Center’s anti-terrorism division noted in an April 14 email, according to Rolling Stone.
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