The FBI has caught a would-be terrorist who, in his fantasies, was going to bomb a synagogue.

To place a real bomb there would have been a hate crime; to thwart a real plan to do so would be laudable. But we have to wonder whether the supposed criminal would ever have made a real plan, or even formulated the desire, without encouragement from people serving the FBI. Perhaps he did, perhaps he didn't, but chances are we will never find out.

The FBI's agents are not required to save recordings of the conversations in which they press someone to agree to a plan to commit a crime. They only need to save a recording of a subsequent conversation where the subject affirms having that intention. By not recording the prior conversations, they can entrap someone while making sure there is no way to prove they did so.

In order for the FBI to protect us from real terrorist plots and not from nasty vague wishes, we must make it stop converting those vague wishes into pretend plans.