As Inauguration Nears, Enforcement Scrutiny Drives U.S. Extremists Into Internet's Dark Corners

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Shortly after rampaging Trump supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, a lover of the president posted a message on the pro-Donald Trump website TheDonald.win. Inspired by the mob’s plan to stop lawmakers from confirming President-elect Joe Biden’s electoral win, user CONN_WYNN said in an all-caps message, replete with an expletive, that it had been “TIME to go away THE KEYBOARD” and “FIGHT FOR MY...COUNTRY.”

Two days later, agents from the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation’s San Francisco field office came calling, consistent with another post by CONN_WYNN on an equivalent website.

“PRO TIP: Think before you post. they're watching. I learned the hard way,” wrote the user on Sunday alongside a photograph of a card from the agents.

A spokesman for the FBI’s San Francisco office said he couldn't provide any details about the reported interaction or confirm whether agents actually paid a visit to the one that posted that message. But “if he has our card and said he was visited, I’m pretty sure we visited him,” the spokesman said.

Before the Capitol attack, such a post might not have elicited a follow-up visit. But within the aftermath of the riot, which left five people dead, federal enforcement agencies have intensified their scrutiny of extremist chatter online, activity that officials warn might be early warning signals of planned attacks around Biden’s inauguration in Washington on Jan. 20.

“You don’t want to be those to possess FBI agents knocking on your door at 6 a.m.,” Director Christopher Wray said on Thursday during a televised briefing with vice chairman Mike Pence. “Anybody who plots or attempts violence within the coming week should calculate a visit.”

For months, far-right extremists are openly posting their threats on public sites. Now, wary of surveillance and amid a crackdown by social media, some are shifting their online communications to non-public chats or lesser known platforms that would make those threats harder to seek out .

Several social media websites that are popular havens for far-right views have closed, crashed or cracked down on violent rhetoric over the past week. for instance , Apple [AAPL.O] and Amazon [AMZN.O] suspended the social media site Parler from their respective App Store and web hosting service, saying it had not taken adequate measures to stop the spread of posts inciting violence.

That has pushed some users to more private platforms like Telegram, the Dubai-based messaging app, and lesser-known social media sites like MeWe.

U.S. downloads of Telegram from Apple’s App Store and from Google Play rose to 1.2 million within the week after the Capitol assault, a 259% increase over the previous week, consistent with Sensor Tower, a knowledge analytics firm. Roughly 829,000 U.S. users downloaded MeWe within the week after the attack, a 697% increase, the firm found.

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David Westreich, a MeWe spokesman, said the corporate has frequent membership spikes which “only alittle fraction” of the many thousands of public groups on the platform addressed politics. Westreich said MeWe’s terms of service were “designed to stay out lawbreakers, haters, bullies, harassment [and] violence inciters.

Telegram didn't answer an invitation for comment.

The FBI received nearly 100,000 “digital media tips” about potential unrest associated with the election and Biden’s inauguration, a politician told reporters on Tuesday, and has pleaded for more information from the American public.

Jared Maples, director of the New Jersey Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness, told Reuters his office was “doubling down” on its work to trace possible domestic extremist threats and “making sure we’re conscious of what the chatter is online.”

The FBI warned within the week in bulletins and a call with enforcement agencies nationwide of possible armed protests in Washington and at state capitols in the days leading up to Biden’s inauguration.

Extremists seeking a politically motivated war and people seeking a race war “may exploit the aftermath of the Capitol breach by conducting attacks to destabilize and force a climactic conflict within the us ,” officials wrote during a joint bulletin issued on Wednesday by the National Counterterrorism Center and therefore the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security and seen by Reuters.

Wray said at the briefing on Thursday that his agency was tracking involves potential armed protest within the lead-up to Wednesday’s inauguration, adding that “one of the important challenges during this space is trying to differentiate what’s aspirational versus what’s intentional.”

MONITORING harder 

The crackdown on public-facing extremist content isn't necessarily all excellent news for enforcement trying to combat threats, said Mike Sena, director of the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center, a “fusion center” staffed by federal, state and native public safety personnel who monitor threats and facilitate information sharing.

“When you pack up a platform that has public access, you drive people out of the sunshine ,” Sena said in an interview.

“Oftentimes that’s our only thanks to find them because they’re having conversation and making statements that are hospitable see.”

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The upside of driving extremists underground, Sena said, is that it's harder for them to radicalize others once they don't have access to more mainstream platforms.

Law enforcement is additionally within the difficult position of determining whether people saying “despicable” things online intend harm or are “just practicing keyboard bravado,” Steven D’Antuono, assistant director responsible of the FBI’s Washington field office, told reporters on Tuesday.

In US, freedom of speech is strongly protected under the primary Amendment of the Constitution.

In Queens, New York, on Tuesday, federal agents arrested Eduard Florea at his home on a weapons charge after he posted violent threats to Parler on Jan. 5-6, before its suspension by its web host Amazon.

Florea posted that he had “a bunch of men all armed and prepared to deploy” to Washington, D.C., and threatened the lifetime of Democratic U.S. Senator-elect Raphael Warnock of Georgia, who is Black, consistent with a complaint filed in court . In court, his lawyer called the posts “blather on the web .”

MIGRATION TO NEW PLATFORMS

Days after the Capitol attack, Facebook [FB.O] and Twitter [TWTR.N] purged some accounts that violated their policies around violence and hate speech, and other companies followed suit.

Chris Hill, leader of the III% private security force , a Georgia-based militia group, said his organization’s website had been taken offline on Jan. 8 by its hosting service GoDaddy [GDDY.N] for violating its terms of service. A GoDaddy spokesman said the location had been removed thanks to content that “both promoted and encouraged violence,” a claim Hill called “laughable.”

The moves sent users scrambling to other platforms.

On Telegram, Enrique Tarrio, leader of the right-wing Proud Boys, welcomed new users “to the darkest a part of the web” with posts that made light of the Capitol siege and linked to other Proud Boys channels on the service.

Gab.com, a social media platform fashionable right-wing users, said during a Twitter post on Thursday that it had drawn 2.3 million new users within the past week.

Amid the web reshuffling, conflicting messages have surfaced in far-right chat rooms and forums about possible protest actions round the inauguration.

Digital flyers have circulated in those spaces for weeks advertising armed marches in Washington and state capitals round the inauguration, posts that prompted recent warnings from federal enforcement about potential violence.

But some far-right groups on public platforms have cautioned supporters to avoid such demonstrations, saying, without evidence, that they're traps set by enforcement to clamp down on gun rights.

Devin Burghart, executive of the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, which monitors extremists, said that almost all of the planned protests his group had been tracking round the inauguration had been canceled or gone underground.

“That said, we’re still receiving many anecdotal reports of people who were involved within the Epiphany insurrection returning to DC on January 20,” he said in an email.

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MISSED SIGNS

A Jan. 5 memo from an FBI office in Virginia underscores the difficulties facing enforcement agencies now in trying to work out which threats round the inauguration are real and which are bluster.

The memo described possible violence by Trump supporters at the Capitol last week. it had been downplayed by many enforcement agencies, partly because the FBI labeled the fabric unconfirmed “open source reporting,” consistent with a enforcement source conversant in the memo.

Extremism experts had also noticed violent rhetoric lighting up online forums including Facebook, Gab and Parler within the days before the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol.

“It was frightening how open folks were being about the violence they wanted to commit,” said Melissa Ryan, CEO of Card Strategies, a consulting company that researches disinformation.

Posters on TheDonald.win, for instance , had fantasized about murdering members of Congress and even shared recommendations on the way to tie nooses, Ryan said.

Such posts became unusually frequent within the lead-up to Wednesday, consistent with Ryan. “We had definitely seen threats on these threads before, but it had been just the general volume - you were seeing it take over the conversation,” she said.

With many users now having migrated to harder-to-monitor communication channels like Telegram since last week, those sorts of threats are harder to identify now.

Frank Figliuzzi, a former assistant FBI director for counterintelligence, said enforcement officials are going to be more active in letting some right-wing online users fomenting violence know they're being watched.

“You bet they’re getting to be knocking on more doors, letting people know, ‘We’re here’,” he said.

Reporting by Julia Harte, Ted Hesson, Kristina Cooke, Elizabeth Culliford and Katie Paul; Additional reporting by Mark Hosenball, Sarah Lynch, Joseph Menn and Raphael Satter; Editing by Ross Colvin and Marla Dickerson