FBI Dives Into the 8chan Swamp the Poway Shooter Crawled Out of
A search warrant filed on April 29 was unsealed last week revealing intent by the FBI to investigate relationships between the accused Poway Chabat shooter and other persons at the 8chan forum.
A federal grand jury indicted the man in May, and he is now facing 113 federal counts, including hate crimes. In addition charges stemming from to the synagogue shooting, the 19 year old stands accused of an arson attack on an Escondido Mosque. Additional state charges are pending.
The FBI agent who requested the warrant claimed there was evidence the shooter was “inspired and/or educated” by other individuals posting on the forum.
8chan has come under extra scrutiny in recent months because it was also connected to acts of terrorism taking place in New Zealand earlier in 2019. Fifty one people were killed by a single individual at two mosques in Christchurch.
Both shooters appear to have been radicalized at least in part on 8chan. Both posted manifestos to the site explaining their racist reasoning behind their actions.
“I’ve only been lurking for a year and a half, yet what I’ve learned here is priceless. It’s been an honor,” the Poway shooter wrote in a post on 8chan, accompanied by links to a manifesto and Facebook page prior to the attack.
At the Center for a Stateless Society, which bills itself as a “A Left Market Think Tank & Media Center,” an unnamed observer who’s been paying attention to the goings on at the forum, posted:
The forum known as 8chan (8ch) is not just Susan’s racist grandpa, it’s the center of the most extreme branch of modern white-nationalism and wannabe right-wing terrorist death squads. They will no doubt take this as a compliment and object only to the fact that they’re “wannabe” death squads, insisting that they’ve already begun. This is true of course. Accounts of internet-bred white nationalist terrorism are on the rise and meanwhile there are countless threads on 8ch dedicated to arming yourself and preparing for the time when you will be called upon to form your own death-squad…
...They also take an interest in individual cases of cruelty. In one thread they were plotting ways to convince Chelsea Manning to kill herself, which she nearly did, in part as the result of such trolling. Elsewhere they go on various campaigns to destroy the livelihoods of people they deem enemies such as one person in Berkeley who they went so far in their doxx as to begin sending edited nazi porn propaganda with the person in it to their families workplaces and bosses. In the past they’ve called the feds on innocent people — particularly female gamers and their advocates during GamerGate — in a tactic known as swatting and even tried to set people up for crimes like pedophilia and drug sales…
...Structurally 8ch is just an average forum where users are basically anonymous. While anonymity itself is an important aspect of internet freedom, when combined with the culture of 8ch /pol/, it creates this cesspit. The forum is host to a lot of different kinds of boards from all over the world (such as the Arabic board “edgyptians”) on a wide range of topics from video games, anime, and guns to vore, waifus, and hacking. They host a lot of political tendencies including a thread devoted to some pretty sketchy leftist tendencies called /leftypol/. In general though, 8ch is the place where all the failed niche nationalisms go to frolic in their own muck.
Michael Rod, the FBI agent who penned the application for the search warrant, wrote a detailed commentary about the circumstances surrounding the crimes in Escondido and Poway and made a lengthy case for further investigation into the shooter’s online connections:
FBI Special Agent Maria Solomon observed part of the post-Miranda statement of [Poway suspect]. During that interview, he informed an SDSO Detective that he had adopted his ideology of hate for members of the Jewish religion approximately 18 month earlier. Based on my training and experience, I know that there is a process in which someone undergoes adoption of radical ideologies. This process can take several months or several years before a person actually commits to those ideologies. During the interview, [Poway suspect] also stated that he was inspired by individuals such as Adolph Hitler and [New Zealand mosque shooter]...
...This information suggests that Earnest was inspired and/or educated by individuals who commented on his threads. Based on this information, there is reasonable cause to believe that the information sought, specifically IP address and metadata for all commenters, constitute evidence of his motivation in committing the offenses described herein and are thus relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation, information that may be sought by an order issued pursuant to l S U.S.C. § 2703( c) and ( d). That is, the information may lead to the identity of individuals who inspired and/or educated Earnest or are aware of his motivation in committing the attacks.
The search warrant was sealed at the government's request, saying they had reason to “believe that notification of the existence of this search warrant will result in destruction of or tampering with evidence, and/or otherwise seriously jeopardize the investigation.”
U.S. Attorney Robert Brewer and assistants Shane Harrigan and Caroline Han asked the court to unseal the documents on June 13, to comply with the government’s discovery obligations to the defendant’s attorneys.
Over at 8chan [nope, not posting that link] there was plenty of discussion about just what the FBI could accomplish via the search warrant. Some felt a degree of safety because they used Virtual Private Networks to mask their IP (Internet Protocol) address.
Others believed those privacy protections had been compromised by the National Security Agency long ago. If true, the reason for such a search warrant would be to establish a parallel narrative for future use should any prosecutions occur that would protect the original source or method from exposure in court.
An article in Recode discusses the problematic aspects of taking steps to shutdown 8chan and its ilk:
For one thing, in the United States, there is a strong tradition of free-speech rights enshrined in the Constitution, and legally, internet platforms are not held responsible for third-party content posted there, however vitriolic or ugly it might be. “Trying to legislate 8chan offline would be a dangerous path to go down and probably untenable in the United States,” University of Michigan history professor Alexandra Minna Stern said...
...Even if 8chan were somehow to be taken down, white nationalists, neo-Nazis, and racists would find somewhere else to congregate. 8chan came about after 4chan started being slightly more vigilant in its moderation. The Anti-Defamation League found that after Twitter started to take more action on extremism, it wound up being a recruitment opportunity for the free-speech social network Gab. (Gab is also where the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter hung out.)...
...It seems unlikely, at least for now, that 8chan is going to disappear. It’s not clear how much the site’s administrators really care about the violence that’s being fostered on the platform, though 8chan’s Twitter account did note that the site took down the Poway shooter’s postnine minutes after it was created, and that manifesto has been much harder to find online than the New Zealand shooter’s. But chatter about the incident on 8chan continues — on Friday, I came across a post describing the shooter as a “saint.” A commenter countered that he was “at best, a half-assed copycat.”
What’s horrifying is that there’s really no way to stop this cycle.
While there will always be a subset of haters/bigots/apocalyptics, I’m not sure about there being no way to stop this cycle. It’s a matter of questioning our assumptions about how things work (or don’t) in society these days.
While this is no easy task, it can be done. In fact, it must be done. Part of the solution is political. Part of it is ethical. And part of it is aspirational.
It’s not right that history gets short shift in our education system. It’s not right that families can’t thrive in our economic system. It’s not right that the highest recognition in society goes to those with the lowest intentions.
As always, the place to start is by following the money. Let's end the illusion that there no connection between increasing economic inequality and the rise of hate.
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Thought for the day:
https://twitter.com/AOC/status/1140423877908189184
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