Joint Terrorism Task Force

[17] Before U.S. Army psychiatrist Nidal Hasan murdered 14 people in a mass shooting at Fort Hood, the JTTF in San Diego had acquired two messages from Hasen to radical Islamic ideologue Anwar al-Aulaqi.

[18][19] A commission led by William H. Webster investigated the FBI's counterterrorism intelligence in the lead-up to the Fort Hood shooting, and released its final report in 2012.

The Webster Commission found that the assessment of Hasan conducted by the FBI and JTTFs was "belated, incomplete, and rushed, primarily because of their workload" and an "exponential growth in the amount of electronically stored information.

[23] It was later revealed in 2019 from an FBI white paper that San Francisco police officers and the FBI were not truthful about the JTTF's violations of local law and policy, and that the police involved with JTTF thought civil rights and free speech in San Francisco were a problem.

"[30] In June 2008, according to City Pages, the Minneapolis-based JTTF approached a source to infiltrate vegan potlucks and eventually report back to authorities on organized protesting activities in preparation for the 2008 Republican National Convention in nearby Saint Paul.

[31] In 2010, the Justice Department Office of Inspector General (OIG) issued a report that criticized the FBI for investigating various domestic activist groups from 2001 to 2006, including PETA, the Thomas Merton Center, and the Catholic Worker.

This problem is exacerbated by the fact that rules relating to how police officers should act in the event of a conflict between their federal and state/local obligations are sometimes unknown and almost always unclear.