Terrorism dot com

[BoSoxGal]

Tech companies under pressure to ban far-right forum used for militia organizing

MyMilitia users have posted threats against protesters and lawmakers, and experts say it’s a dangerous recruitment tool

Kari Paul Fri 13 Nov 2020 13.26 EST

Pressure is mounting on tech companies to ban MyMilitia, a website used by far-right extremists and armed groups to organize, after it was linked to threats of violence against US protesters and lawmakers this week.

On Tuesday, police arrested Brian Maiorana after he allegedly posted online threats targeting Chuck Schumer, the Democratic minority leader in the US Senate, and threatened to “blow up” the FBI. Maiorana is also alleged to have used MyMilitia, as well as an unnamed mainstream social media platform, to make threats to kill protesters and discussed building his own weapons, according to the complaint. Maiorana, a registered sex offender, is barred from legally purchasing firearms.

The arrest has put more pressure on internet companies that control the infrastructure supporting MyMilitia, including GoDaddy and Cloudflare to ban the platform from their services.

“This is a very dangerous game they are playing, giving people the ability to recruit extremist militias during a perilous political time in our country,” said Matt Rivitz, the co-founder of the online activism and anti-bigotry group Sleeping Giants. “It is shocking to see these companies not only supporting but actively monetizing themselves off of it.”

MyMilitia was first registered with GoDaddy in 2016 by Ohio conservative Chad Embrey, according to internet hosting records reviewed by the Guardian. The website is one of several domains Embrey has bought related to the militia movement. Embrey’s expressed goals for the website include changing the “negative perception” of militias and assisting communities “from all threats foreign or domestic”.

The site further rose to prominence after a man named Michael Hari and other members of his Illinois-based militia allegedly bombed a mosque in Bloomington, Minnesota, and appealed on MyMilitia for others around the country to rally to their defense.

As of early October, the site had at least 20,000 users organizing more than 530 militia groups in the US, according to a report from Vice. It’s also becoming more popular. The site totaled 69,461 visits in October 2020, up 322.6% from October 2019 at 16,437, according to web traffic analytics firm SimilarWeb.

Embrey did not respond to a request for comment. Josh Ellis, whom Embrey sold the site to in April, told the Guardian that MyMilitia has aims of “helping American citizens to create strong organized constitutional militias in every town throughout the USA”.

Anyone who is requesting to have MyMilitia removed is an enemy of the USA, an enemy of freedom, and an enemy of every patriotic American citizen
“Anyone who is against that idea and is requesting to have MyMilitia removed from the internet is an enemy of the USA, an enemy of freedom, and an enemy of every patriotic American citizen,” he said.

The site is particularly dangerous because its explicit purpose is to recruit members and move their activities offline, said Talia Lavin, the author of Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy. MyMilitia has a feature, for example, called “area code militias”, which recruits for hyper-local groups by area code. The website has grown in popularity after Facebook began to crack down more forcefully on militia activity in recent weeks, she added.

“It is very useful to the movement to have websites like this feeding into offline activity,” Lavin said. “These groups are explicitly used to recruit militias, calling for people to be armed, and fomenting civil unrest in their communities.”

In addition to forums for organizing militias, the website has an extensive library of pdfs purporting to be manuals from US army forces on sniper training and other gun operations, and a treatise outlining justifications and strategies for an insurgency in the US. Recent posts include examinations of the short-term prospect of civil war and discussions of election fraud.

PayPal and Venmo banned MyMilitia this week from using their services to raise money, after an outcry online accused tech companies of facilitating violence through their platforms. The website is now raising funds using an account on CashApp, which is owned by Twitter’s CEO, Jack Dorsey, as well as self-described Christian crowdfunding site GiveSendGo. GiveSendGo said the militia does not violate its terms of service and it plans to continue hosting MyMilitia fundraising. CashApp did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The domain name for MyMilitia is registered with GoDaddy, and the site itself is hosted through FluidHosting, a Pennsylvania-based cloud server. Neither company responded to request for comment. GoDaddy’s terms of service explicitly ban activity that “promotes encourages or engages in terrorism, violence against people, animals, or property”, but the company has yet to remove the page despite many cited examples of such conduct.

Rivitz pointed out the site runs ads through a partnership with Google Ads, meaning Google is profiting from MyMilitia and companies advertising with Google may be unwittingly advertising their products next to controversial or violent content.

“This is a case of Google going against its own terms of service in and putting their advertisers at risk,” he said. A spokeswoman from Google told the Guardian the company is reviewing the site to see if it violates policies.

“We do not allow ads to run on content that incites violence or hatred,” she said. “This is a longstanding policy, which we enforce vigorously.”.

Cloudflare, which is providing online security to the site, did not respond to request for comment. In 2019, the company cut off services to the far-right message board 8chan, following a public outcry after it was used to post the manifesto of the attacker behind the El Paso mass shooting.

Nandini Jammi, who co-founded the activism group Sleeping Giants and now runs a service that monitors brand safety online, said in the absence of action from host sites like these, she is pursuing other ways to pressure MyMilitia offline. She said users on the site are “extremely violent”.

“The companies need to do everything in their power to remedy the situation,” Jammi said.

MyMilitia’s website runs on a software licensed to them by a company called Invision. Following pressure from Jammi and others, the creator of Invision revoked MyMilitia’s permissions to use the software. But the site is still up, and still using it. Jammi and others are now pressuring the owner of Invision to take legal action to force MyMilitia offline for violating their contract.

Activists have attempted to take MyMilitia offline by going after its financial base, such as PayPal, its infrastructure such as GoDaddy and Cloudflare, and its software. These efforts show just how many actors are involved in keeping the forum online – and how many tech companies are complicit in its existence, Lavin said.

“If you are enabling these websites, you are enabling civil war,” she said. “These tech companies need to decide where they stand, and by not acting, they already have.”

[BoSoxGal]

This is no conventional coup. Trump is paving the way for a 'virtual Confederacy' | Jonathan Freedland

Jonathan Freedland
Fri 13 Nov 2020 11.22 EST

Race is the message behind his supporters’ legal shenanigans, and a keystone for a Trumpian government in exile

Not for the first time, Donald Trump’s unhinged behaviour prompts an uncomfortable question: should we be laughing in derision or trembling with fear? Is he playing out his last days as nothing more than a sore loser pathetically kidding himself that he might yet score the winning run, even after the crowd’s gone home and the stadium is empty – or is his insistence that last week’s election was stolen an attempt to cling on to power, to stage a coup against his democratically elected successor?

The case for laughter is strong, as Trump’s allegations crumble to dust. On Thursday, a wing of the department of homeland security – part of the government that Trump still heads – declared that last week’s election “was the most secure in American history”, and that there was “no evidence” of any malpractice, still less of the mass-scale fraud that Trump has groundlessly alleged.

The result is that Trump’s lawyers have been all but laughed out of court, forced by impatient judges to admit that they don’t have any evidence, let alone proof. His courtiers continue to pretend that the emperor is fully clothed, of course, but even they are winking at the crowd. Surely Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was joking when he promised with a smile: “There will be a smooth transition to a second Trump administration.”

The inner circle are happy to let Trump, who has appeared only once in public since election day, remain hunkered down in his White House bunker, “feverishly tweeting, watching television and telephoning allies”, as the Los Angeles Times reports. They carry on telling him what he wants to hear, but they know his cause is doomed. Tellingly, even Trump’s own son-in-law, Jared Kushner, made his excuses for Saturday’s supposed council of war, sending “aides” in his place.

All that should prompt derision rather than fear. We can take the lead set by the president-elect himself, relax and let the process play out until Joe Biden is sworn in on 20 January. That’s certainly appealing, and most of the time I manage it. But every now and then, fear intrudes.

Why, for example, has Trump fired the civilian leadership of the defence department, including the defence secretary, Mark Esper, filling their posts and others in intelligence with ultra-loyalists? Esper stood up to Trump over the summer, when the president wanted to deploy the military to crush peaceful protests. Does Trump have something similar in mind, a move that would require a yes man to nod it through? Is it possible that Pompeo was not, after all, joking?

For now, I can accept that a full, tanks-in-the-streets coup is not on the cards. One Capitol Hill Republican tells me he suspects Trump sacked Esper mainly to “make him feel better”, and “to get even with the people who thwarted him”, rather than because he wants a Pentagon boss who will agree to send in the troops. Equally possible, says my source, is that Trump plans to go out with a bang, and wants pliant people in post. What kind of bang? Some talk of a total withdrawal from Afghanistan. Conversely, there’s chatter about a possible attack on Iran.

That would be huge – and Trump likes huge – but it’s not a coup. On this reading, Trump is rejecting the election result less in order to keep power than to instil in his base the sense of grievance that will bind them to him for his next act – whether that be a new media company, Trump TV, to challenge Fox News or another run for the White House in 2024.

But if that’s true, it’s hardly grounds for relief. That Trump’s attempt to defy a democratic election is comically inept or cynically motivated doesn’t alter the fact that he’s making it. No less alarming, all but a handful of Republicans have backed him. Fearing both his wrath and the hold he continues to exercise over the Republican electorate – highly relevant, given that two Senate seats are up for grabs in Georgia in January – the party’s most senior figures have acquiesced in Trump’s evidence-free claim that the Democrats rigged the election.

That matters. Most directly, it will impair the incoming president as he tries to get to grips with a pandemic that on Thursday saw a record number of new cases in the US – 159,000 in a single day – about which Trump is doing and saying precisely nothing. How can Biden lead if half the country has been primed to believe he is not the rightful president? The Republican rebuttal – that Democrats hardly welcomed Trump in 2016 – trips on one simple fact: Hillary Clinton conceded defeat right away. That is the only way a democratic system can work, with the consent of the loser.

The fear is that Trump and his followers will never give way, that he will remain the head of a “Trumpian government in exile”, as the historian Sean Wilentz puts it, antagonistic to the legitimate, elected government, armed with allies in Congress, sustained via social media and nourished by grievance and the romance of a lost cause: a new, virtual Confederacy.

The word is not wholly hyperbolic because, inevitably in America, so much of this turns on race. When Trump’s cheerleaders locate the supposed voter fraud in Philadelphia or Detroit, their listeners get the message: it’s that black cities are corrupt and, at root, that black people shouldn’t be allowed to decide who gets to be president of the United States. As Barack Obama writes in his upcoming memoir, these are “dark spirits” that have “long been lurking on the edge of the Republican party – xenophobia … paranoid conspiracy theories, an antipathy toward black and brown folks”.

So no, this won’t be a coup like we’ve seen in the movies. But nor can we just laugh it off. Trump is often ridiculous, but he’s no joke.

Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist

[BoSoxGal]

America’s Next Authoritarian Will Be Much More Competent

Trump was ineffective and easily beaten. A future strongman won’t be.

Zeynep TufekciNovember 6, 2020
Contributing writer at The Atlantic

Now that Joe Biden has won the presidency, we can expect debates over whether Donald Trump was an aberration (“not who we are!”) or another instantiation of America’s pathologies and sins. One can reasonably make a case for his deep-rootedness in American traditions, while also noticing the anomalies: the early-morning tweeting, the fondness for mixing personal and government business, the obsession with ratings befitting a reality-TV star—the one job he was good at.

From an international perspective, though, Trump is just one more example of the many populists on the right who have risen to power around the world: Narendra Modi in India, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Vladimir Putin in Russia, Jarosław Kaczyński in Poland, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, my home country. These people win elections but subvert democratic norms: by criminalizing dissent, suppressing or demonizing the media, harassing the opposition, and deploying extra-legal mechanisms whenever possible (Putin’s opponents have a penchant for meeting tragic accidents). Orbán proudly uses the phrase illiberal democracy to describe the populism practiced by these men; Trump has many similarities to them, both rhetorically and policy-wise.

He campaigned like they did, too, railing against the particular form of globalization that dominates this era and brings benefit to many, but disproportionately to the wealthy, leaving behind large numbers of people, especially in wealthier countries. He relied on the traditional herrenvolk idea of ethnonationalist populism: supporting a kind of welfare state, but only for the “right” people rather than the undeserving others (the immigrants, the minorities) who allegedly usurp those benefits. He channeled and fueled the widespread mistrust of many centrist-liberal democratic institutions (the press, most notably) —just like the other populists. And so on.

But there’s one key difference between Trump and everyone else on that list. The others are all talented politicians who win elections again and again.

In contrast, Trump is a reality-TV star who stumbled his way into an ongoing realignment in American politics, aided by a series of events peculiar to 2016 that were fortunate for him: The Democrats chose a polarizing nominee who didn’t have the requisite political touch that can come from surviving tough elections; social media was, by that point, deeply entrenched in the country’s politics, but its corrosive effects were largely unchecked; multiple players—such as then–FBI Director James Comey—took consequential actions fueled by their misplaced confidence in Hillary Clinton’s win; and Trump’s rivals in the Republican primaries underestimated him. He drew a royal flush.

It’s not that he is completely without talent. His rallies effectively let him bond with his base, and test out various messages with the crowd that he would then amplify everywhere. He has an intuitive understanding of the power of attention, and he played the traditional media like a fiddle—they benefited from his antics, which they boosted. He also clearly sensed the political moment in 2016, and managed to navigate his way into the presidency, though that probably had more to do with instinct than with deep planning.

Luck aside, though, Trump is not good at his job. He doesn’t even seem to like it much. He is too undisciplined and thin-skinned to be effective at politics over a sustained period, which involves winning repeated elections. He seems to have been as surprised as anyone else that he won in 2016. While he hates the loser branding that will follow him now, he’s probably fine with the outcome—especially since he can blame it on fantastical conspiracies involving theft or ballot-stuffing or the courts—as long as he can figure out how to escape the criminal trials that are certainly coming his way. (A self-pardon? A negotiated pardon? He will try something.)

Trump ran like a populist, but he lacked the political talent or competence to govern like an effective one. Remember the Infrastructure Week he promised? It never happened. Remember the trade wars with China he said he’d win? Some tariffs were raised here and there, but the jobs that would bring relief to America’s decimated manufacturing sector never resurged. In Wisconsin in 2018, the president announced “the eighth wonder of the world”—a Foxconn factory that was supposed to employ 13,000 in return for $4.5 billion in government subsidies. However, going into this election, the building remained empty, and the president lost Wisconsin in the Electoral College. (Foxconn hired people in the final weeks of 2019 to fulfill quotas for the subsidies, and laid off many of them right after the new year.) Most populists globally deploy wide patronage networks: state spending that boosts their own supporters. Trump’s model remained attached more to personal graft: He encouraged people to stay in his hotels and have dinner at Mar-a-Lago in exchange for access, rather than develop a broad and participatory network that would remain loyal to him for years. And when the pandemic hit, instead of rising to the occasion and playing the strongman, rallying the country through a crisis that had originated in China—an opportunity perfect for the kind of populist he aspired to be—he floundered.

Erdoğan has been in power nationally since 2003. After two decades, he has arguably lost some of his political magic, evinced by increasing missteps and a deteriorating situation around democratic rights. Still, he is among the most talented politicians in Turkey’s history. He has been able to navigate multiple challenges, including a previous global financial crisis. In Russia, Putin has won many elections, even managing to subvert term limits. In India, Modi has also been reelected. One could argue that these elections were far from perfect, but they were elections. Brazil’s Bolsonaro has bungled his country’s response to the pandemic but is giving the poor emergency aid and increasing his popularity. The CARES Act did the same thing, providing a significant subsidy to businesses and improving household finances, especially for people with low incomes, but it ended right before the election; Trump erratically tweeted about having nuked a new deal.

I suspect that the Republican leadership is sanguine, if not happy, about Trump’s loss. It’s striking how quickly Fox News called Arizona for Biden, and how many Republican leaders have condemned the president’s rage-tweeting and attempts to stop the count. They know that Trump is done, and they seem fine with it. For them, what’s not to like? The Supreme Court is solidly in their corner; they will likely retain control of the Senate; House Republicans won more seats than they were projected to; and they are looking at significant gains in state Houses as well, giving them control over redistricting for the next decade. Even better for their long-term project, they have diversified their own coalition, gaining more women candidates and more support from nonwhite voters.

And they have at their disposal certain features that can be mobilized: The Electoral College and especially the Senate are anti-majoritarian institutions, and they can be combined with other efforts to subvert majority rule. Leaders and parties can engage in voter suppression and break norms with some degree of bipartisan cooperation across the government. In combination, these features allow for players to engage in a hardball kind of minority rule: Remember that no Republican president has won the popular vote since 2004, and that the Senate is structurally prone to domination by a minority. Yet Republicans have tremendous power. This dynamic occurs at the local level, too, where gerrymandering allows Republicans to inflate their representation in state legislatures.

The situation is a perfect setup, in other words, for a talented politician to run on Trumpism in 2024. A person without the eager Twitter fingers and greedy hotel chains, someone with a penchant for governing rather than golf. An individual who does not irritate everyone who doesn’t already like him, and someone whose wife looks at him adoringly instead of slapping his hand away too many times in public. Someone who isn’t on tape boasting about assaulting women, and who says the right things about military veterans. Someone who can send appropriate condolences about senators who die, instead of angering their state’s voters, as Trump did, perhaps to his detriment, in Arizona. A norm-subverting strongman who can create a durable majority and keep his coalition together to win more elections.

Make no mistake: The attempt to harness Trumpism—without Trump, but with calculated, refined, and smarter political talent—is coming. And it won’t be easy to make the next Trumpist a one-term president. He will not be so clumsy or vulnerable. He will get into office less by luck than by skill. Perhaps it will be Senator Josh Hawley, who is writing a book against Big Tech because he knows that will be the next chapter in the culture wars, with social-media companies joining “fake news” as the enemy. Perhaps it will be Senator Tom Cotton, running as a law-and-order leader with a populist bent. Maybe it will be another media figure: Tucker Carlson or Joe Rogan, both men with talent and followings. Perhaps it will be another Sarah Palin—she was a prototype—with the charisma and appeal but without the baggage and the need for a presidential candidate to pluck her out of the blue. Perhaps someone like the QAnon-supporting Representative-elect Lauren Boebert of Colorado, who first beat the traditional Republican representative in the primary and then ran her race with guns blazing, mask off, and won against the Democratic candidate, a retired professor who avoided campaigning in person. Indeed, a self-made charismatic person coming out of nowhere probably has a better chance than many establishment figures in the party.

What can be done? First and foremost, we need to realize the nature of the problem and accept that elite failure cannot be responded to with more of the same. A good deal of the Democratic Party’s messaging has been wrapped in nostalgia. But populism’s resurgence is a symptom of the failures of the past. Pearl-clutching for the good old days will not get us out of this. Yes, it’s important to highlight the value of norms and call for the restoration of democratic institutions. But what we need in order to move forward goes beyond more politeness and the right rhetoric. The failures of the past aren’t to be yearned for. They’re to be avoided and, crucially, understood and fixed. There will be arguments about how to rebuild a politics that can appeal to the moment, and how to mobilize for the future. There should be. Our American crisis cannot be resolved in one sweeping article that offers easy solutions. But the first step is to realize how deep this hole is for democracies around the world, including ours, and to realize that what lies ahead is not some easy comeback.

At the moment, the Democratic Party risks celebrating Trump’s loss and moving on—an acute danger, especially because many of its constituencies, the ones that drove Trump’s loss, are understandably tired. A political nap for a few years probably looks appealing to many who opposed Trump, but the real message of this election is not that Trump lost and Democrats triumphed. It’s that a weak and untalented politician lost, while the rest of his party has completely entrenched its power over every other branch of government: the perfect setup for a talented right-wing populist to sweep into office in 2024. And make no mistake: They’re all thinking about it.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

Zeynep Tufekci is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and an associate professor at the University of North Carolina. She studies the interaction between digital technology, artificial intelligence, and society.

[Burning Petard]

Thank you, BSG for posting this here. I have made a hard copy so I could give it better attention. I used to have a Kindle subscription to Atlantic, but dropped it when I could no longer stand the differences between that and the print edition. I continued to read Atlantic in the local public library but that avenue has been closed since last March. I can still get it at a couple of local newsstands, but I have not been visiting them, even with a mask.

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