Infiltrating hate groups to stop mass killings

Roxxsmom · Aug 12, 2019

I ran across this article from Cosmo (of all things). It focuses on the work of a particular investigator, who infiltrates online hate groups to take down the men who are most likely to follow through on their hateful rhetoric. One interesting, and sad, take home is how many of these men are vicious misogynists, even some who ultimately target other groups. Another is how these online groups have proliferated in recent years.

I don't envy this woman her job, even though she has indeed exposed a number of would-be killers before they strike. I don't think it's possible to poke around in the darkest cesspits of the internet without amassing a certain amount of personal trauma.

Anyway, this article is an interesting read. I suppose it contributes a bit to hope, since there are indeed agents out there trying, with some success, to stop these killings before they happen. What's depressing is the sheer volume of human refuse they have to sift through.

https://www.cosmopolitan.com/politi...g-before-it-happens/?utm_source=pocket-newtab

...K is currently keeping close tabs on more than 1,000 men. She calls them her List. They’re right here on a spreadsheet, pages and pages of faces, light eyes and jelly-pocket cheeks, dark eyes and deeply sunken dimples, old skin and new.

One guy lives less than a mile from her. “I know their screen names, their real names, their fake names, when they change their names,” she says. Private accounts, alias accounts, multiple accounts—she knows. I can’t reveal her exact methods, but let’s just say anyone who is vocal online about his hate for women has likely chatted her up about his motorcycle or his family. In that way, these men are vulnerable, because they have to put themselves out there. The internet is their bullhorn, the best way they have to reach their disciples.

When she first started doing this, she did it in person. Once, a man caught her taking pictures at a gathering of white supremacists. She played it off, but her nerves were fried. Another time, she was jotting down some notes when a well-known extremist sat down right next to her. She remembers her heart beating so hard she could feel it in her fingertips. She slowly closed her notebook, terrified. What did he see?

Others in her field have been doxed, making them vulnerable to violence. One of her friends, who works in a similar job, told me she had to move after extremists firebombed a car in front of her house and ran her kids off the road. K does sometimes worry about the safety of her family. “Given the opportunity,” she says, “I’m sure they would come after me.”

So yeah, working from a computer has made her life easier. It’s also made it impossibly hard. When your territory is the internet, there’s a lot to sift through. Some words mean nothing; others mean people are about to die. And it isn’t always easy to find the words in the first place—the ones that belong to the person who will do the thing....

Introversion · Aug 12, 2019

Very interesting, thanks for posting it!

nighttimer · Aug 16, 2019

Well, if there was any reminder needed that White racist ideology is dangerous, here's another story you won't see on Faux News, but to be fair most of the mainstream media does a crap job of covering White nationalism.

For two years, the basic description had appeared in reporting by ProPublica and FRONTLINE: Atomwaffen Division is a neo-Nazi organization eager for a race war and committed to terrorist attacks against Jews, immigrants and other targets in the U.S. power grids, nuclear facilities that would foment fear.

The description ran in stories describing how the group had been connected to five murders in recent years, including one involving a gay, Jewish college student in California. It appeared in a FRONTLINE film raising questions about the federal response to domestic terrorism threats just weeks after 11 Jewish worshipers were allegedly killed by a racist gunman in Pittsburgh.

So it was striking, then, when late last week those very words turned up a formal complaint filed by federal prosecutors as they announced the arrest of a 23-year-old man in Las Vegas for plotting to firebomb one or more Jewish sites in the city.

AWD is a white supremacist extremist organization, the complaint read. AWD membership consists of mostly white males between the ages of approximately 16 to 30 years of age who all believe in the superiority of the white race. AWD utilizes a leaderless resistance strategy in which small independent groups, or individuals called lone wolves, try to achieve a common goal of challenging the established laws, social order, and government via terrorism and other violent acts. AWD encourages attacks on the federal government, including critical infrastructure, minorities, homosexuals, and Jews. AWD works to recruit like-minded members to the organization, train them in military tactics, hand to hand combat, bomb making, and other techniques in preparation for an ultimate and uncompromising victory in a race war.

The man arrested in Las Vegas, Conor Climo, was affiliated with AWD, shared its ideology and violent aims, communicated with its members in secret online chats and once had joined one of its offshoot groups, the authorities charged.

I am more interested in action than online shit, Climo said according to the complaint.

The complaint filed in U.S. District Court in Las Vegas lays out a disturbing array of action Climo was allegedly willing to undertake:

Attacking a synagogue, maybe with a firebomb, maybe with a group of gunmen;

A similar attack on an office of the Anti-Defamation League;

Another against a gay bar;

A trial-run assault on a homeless encampment.

In reporting on Atomwaffen, ProPublica and FRONTLINE obtained the groups secret chat logs in which members openly talked about their hatred and violent ambitions; uncovered training sites where the group conducted weapons instruction; met with the groups spiritual founder; and confronted both current and former members.

Hanging over that reporting was a question, one asked by us and by current and former law enforcement officials worried about the threat of white supremacist terror: Where was the FBI? It seemed hard to imagine that an organization of extremist Islamists vowing to kill people and destabilize the government would not face federal scrutiny. Of course, part of the answer is that law enforcement is constrained in certain ways about how aggressively it can investigate and prosecute potential domestic terrorism threats.

But in looking at the criminal complaint filed in Las Vegas last week, it appears that FBI agents conducted the sort of sting operation against Atomwaffen that they used to infiltrate and arrest suspected Islamic terrorist groups.

There seems to be a tendency to see groups like Atomwaffen Division as little more than a bunch of good ol' boys pounding brews and playing bang-bang with their guns and talking smack instead of actual threats who have intentions of backing up the big talk with dead bodies and mass casualty events.

Underestimating these mutts is not only foolish, it's dangerous.

Roxxsmom · Aug 16, 2019

nighttimer said:
There seems to be a tendency to see groups like Atomwaffen Division as little more than a bunch of good ol' boys pounding brews and playing bang-bang with their guns and talking smack instead of actual threats who have intentions of backing up the big talk with dead bodies and mass casualty events.

Underestimating these mutts is not only foolish, it's dangerous.

Not only are this and other groups chock full of dangerous psychos, their talk serves to radicalize and encourage other angry white guys to turn violent.

Funny how much attention is paid by the media to the process of radicalization among Islamist groups, but the concept isn't taken as seriously re White nationalists, in spite of the FBI's and Dept of Homeland Security's warnings that more terror attacks in the US are committed by White nationalists than any other extremist group. Moreover, our anti terrorist resources are focused on international terrorism, not domestic.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politic...bi-fight-far-right-extremism-ideology/595435/

“The overwhelming majority of our domestic counterterrorism infrastructure is geared toward the threat of international [jihadist] terrorism,” the former Department of Homeland Security official George Selim told me.

The FBI has noted that most of its domestic-terrorism cases featuring a racial motive involve white supremacists. The bureau doesn’t “investigate the ideology, no matter how repugnant. We investigate violence,” FBI Director Christopher Wray explained in July, adding that the agency operates with broad categories of “racially motivated” violence in mind.

Yet domestic terrorism by white nationalists is too often treated as “isolated, unconnected incidents,” argues the terrorism expert Clint Watts. This violence looks different than the sophisticated international jihadist attacks that Americans have come to associate with “terrorism” over the decades. It is carried out by Americans using guns, and thus bound up in the divisive political debate about gun violence. And it is largely a leaderless movement, in contrast to groups such as al-Qaeda and ISIS, which have identifiable leaders. (In this, it has more in common with homegrown jihadist terrorism.) These differences, however, are deceptive. Watts points out that in recent years, discernible patterns have developed in white-nationalist violence—the recurring targeting, for example, of minorities, and especially of black, Jewish, and Muslim places of worship.

This article on the ideological motivations of terror attacks in the US is interesting, as it breaks down the number of terrorist attacks, number of deaths from terrorist attacks, and percentages of each of these over each decade since the 1970s. Back in the 70s, there were a lot of left-wing terrorist attacks, but they've become very, very rare in the past few decades, Right-wing terrorist attacks, on the other hand, have spiked over the past decade.

https://www.start.umd.edu/pubs/START_IdeologicalMotivationsOfTerrorismInUS_Nov2017.pdf

Note the 2000s has more deaths in the US due to terror attacks than all others put together, and the religious motivation of the 9-11 attacks swamps all the other data. It would be interesting if they included data from that decade for terrorist attacks aside from 9-11.

Infiltrating hate groups to stop mass killings

Roxxsmom

Beastly Fido

Introversion

Pie aren't squared, pie are round!

nighttimer

No Gods No Masters

Roxxsmom

Beastly Fido