Authors: Jamie Bartlett
If you’re antifa, infiltrating the ‘closed’ groups – those that require permission or passwords to join – is the real prize. To do this, antifas often create fake accounts (or ‘sock puppets’) and pretend to be sympathetic to the EDL cause. Sometimes one person controls dozens of different sock puppets, each with their own personality and affiliations. I spoke to one activist who has spent two years
working up his – carefully liking certain pages, posting appropriate comments, building up a friendship network. Most forums and pages – whether EDL or antifa – are drowning in fake accounts. Tommy Robinson told me that almost every EDL group has been infiltrated, ‘by both far-right splinters and left-wing activists’. ‘Do your people infiltrate as well?’ I ask. He looks slightly coy. ‘Well, there might be some people that do that sort of thing, find out what they are saying about us, but I don’t ask them to do it,’ he says.
In truth, both sides are at it. One Expose group recently outed a far-right sympathiser who had joined over 650 Facebook groups, including hundreds of left-wing and anti-fascist groups. She started by posting messages of support to gain trust among the antifa groups, and then kept a low profile and silently watched, in order to capture information about their tactics and targets. On the other side, infiltration has been an endless problem for the Casuals, a far-right organisation with roots in football hooligan culture. Last year, a ‘Free the Brierfield 5’ (jailed EDL supporters) group was set up by antifa as a trap, and a few enthusiastic Casuals joined it, sharing valuable information. ‘Some of us have learned nothing in three years of being stalked by these online weirdos,’ fumed Joe ‘Stabby’ Marsh at other members on the Casuals’ blog.
Every time something happens that they know patriots will be angry about, they set up groups to trap people into saying things in anger that they hope they can get you nicked for. If you list where you work, or mention it in convos, they will screenshot you and they WILL ring and email your employer to try and cause you shit.
The sophistication of some of these groups is remarkable. The Cheerleaders are an unusual mix of Muslims, atheists, fashion models and former soldiers: mostly female, and mostly highly skilled programmers. The closest thing to a leader in this leaderless collective is probably Charlie Flowers, a former punk-rock musician in his early forties who had some sympathy with the EDL at the beginning, but left as the group drifted in a more extreme direction. The Cheerleaders are committed to tackling any type of extremism online. A few dozen of them from all over the world frequently meet in a secret Facebook group to plan their actions. They have also been called ‘cyber-thugs’ by enemies. It’s an unfair claim: although they occasionally act as hired help for causes they agree with, their methods are legal, if a little devious. Charlie has managed to get a few websites shut down by placing a Digital Millennium Copyright Act notice on his own webpage, and then waiting for his adversaries to screenshot and use his material without permission – which he instantly reports. They can appeal, of course, but only if they sign a public affidavit with their real names and addresses, which lots of bloggers would rather not do. ‘A potent weapon, if used correctly,’ Charlie told me, chuckling. The strangest of all the ruses I witnessed was a Facebook page set up soon after the murder of Lee Rigby, by someone claiming to be part of antifa. It was called ‘Lee Rigby deserved it’. The admin, who posted a picture of himself, declared: ‘I work for Hope not Hate [an antifa group] and the Community Party.’ He went on: ‘I Believe that Lee Rigby has become a far-right martyr and his death is being used as an excuse for violence and EDL buggery and thuggery. I want to lead the Communist revolution and take to the streets of Great Britain and declare this country the Soviet British Union.’ The
real owner of this page was not antifa at all, but a radical right-winger who (I think) hoped to push EDL members into a more extreme view of the antifa groups. Although quite obviously a very poor and transparent effort, it seemed to work: the page exploded with fury for hours. A user named Dave threatened to ‘cave ur fucking skull in you bastard’, while another named Kevin declared he was going to track the poster’s home address: ‘Good luck cunt in surviving the week.’
With all this trickery, working out who’s who can be incredibly difficult. Fiyaz Mughal, the head of Tell Mama – a group set up to find and document anti-Muslim hate – now hires internet detectives who use open-source information to try to piece together real-world identities and their networks. Even then, he says, ‘we’re only ever 60 per cent sure’. Trying to find out someone’s real-world identity and linking it to their offline one – doxing them – is a common but very controversial tactic used by both sides, because it runs squarely against internet etiquette, and can also be extremely damaging for the person who’s been discovered. SLATEDL and Expose – two of the key antifa groups – fell out over whether publishing home and work addresses and going after users in real life was acceptable. Mikey from Expose told me that doxing ‘is an absolute no-go area and it will never, ever be allowed in our group’. Hel Gower, however, told me that someone from Expose had posted her personal information on their Facebook page, which they’d found on the Companies House register (I put that to Mikey, who told me they only post information that is already in the public domain, which would include the Companies House register).
The most infamous doxing site is RedWatch, a far-right website that was set up in 2001. Its self-confessed aim is to find and identify traitorous ‘lefties’, posting the addresses, workplaces, children’s names and any other information they can obtain about those they believe are guilty of harassing and assaulting ‘British Nationalists and their families’. It is infrequently updated, but retains a certain notoriety online. In 2003, two people who appeared on the website had their car firebombed. Paul and @Norsefired both fear being doxed, for slightly different reasons. Paul won’t ever use his real name online, although he says he’d love to, because of the death threats he receives. @Norsefired worries that his name will end up on RedWatch. He insisted I didn’t give anything away that might identify him. Doxers seem to know no limits, but there is often little the police can do unless a direct and specific threat against someone is made. People go to great lengths to dox others. In 2010, two hacking collectives, ZCompany Hacking Crew and TeaM P0isoN, managed to hack the EDL’s Facebook account and take down their main page. The following year, TeaM P0isoN hacked the EDL again, and leaked details about the leadership of the group – phone numbers, email addresses, home addresses and even the user names and passwords of the admins who run all the sites (including some rather funny passwords: Cameron, Winston1066, Anglosaxon1 and allah666, to name but a few).
While I was with Paul, he showed me how an antifa had attempted, and almost succeeded, to dox him. He was beginning to feel under siege. ‘I can feel myself becoming more radicalised by what these people are doing to me,’ he says. ‘I’m not a violent person. But I could happily, easily, see these scum suffer.’
Many nationalists feel completely disconnected, frustrated and angered by traditional politics – and sometimes with good reason. Sitting with Paul in a run-down pub, the world of Westminster feels a very, very long way away. Queen Lareefer had never voted before becoming part of the EDL: ‘I feel ashamed that I took for granted the democracy that was given to me.’ Tommy Robinson left the EDL in late 2013 to try to pursue his ideas less violently. He was a football hooligan, and now he has plans to create his own political research group for the working classes. Whatever their beliefs, the internet and social media have made politics accessible and appealing to countless people, and that has to be a good thing.
On the other hand, the same dynamic allows hundreds of small, often closed communities and individuals to surround themselves with information and people that corroborate their world view, and gives violent racists and xenophobes a platform on which to spread their message quickly and effectively. Creating our own realities is nothing new, but now it’s easier than ever to become trapped in echo chambers of our own making. Nationalists and antifas both surround themselves with information that confirms what they already think. That can take people in a very dangerous direction. Breivik had convinced himself Norway was on the brink of destruction. Paul’s echo chamber has led him to believe that whites are ‘beautiful, intelligent, artistic, creative, magnanimous’, but now in a ‘tiny minority’ as millions of migrants (‘sneering, violent, drug dealers’) are taking over England. In Paul’s universe – lived through a screen – that’s his reality. I remind him that Britain is 85 per cent white, but he won’t believe it.
Paul genuinely believes he is standing up for the country and its culture, facing down an existential threat from radical Islam. Antifa believe that fascists are on the march across the country, that everyone in the EDL is a closet racist and violent thug, and that they are facing down a possible resurgence of fascism in the country. The reality is far more nuanced, but in their own closed universes they are both right. In their personal echo chambers they’ve made demons and enemies of each other. Neither is as bad as the other thinks.
Throughout our months together, I tried to understand which of these forces – the echo chamber or the public sphere – exerted the stronger pull on Paul. Online he always seemed so violent and aggressive, although he was clearly quite proud that he had become a voice in the public debate. Although Paul told me that he considers Breivik ‘a hero’, he also strongly denied that he would actually hurt anyone in spite of his extreme language. But I became worried about where this all might take him. There are a lot of people screaming hate online. Although only a tiny proportion will ever commit a violent act, it’s almost impossible to tell who that might be. Yet whenever we met in person, I was a little assuaged. Paul’s diatribes were usually prefixed with an apology. For him, the online and offline worlds were clearly very different realms.
But when Paul vanished suddenly, I started to worry. I feared his two worlds had collapsed: perhaps the police had tracked him down. Or worse. Two months later, I received an email from an unknown address. Paul hadn’t gone anywhere – he just needed a break. ‘I was becoming too hate-filled, too paranoid, it was seeping into my
blood, my bones,’ he tells me. He felt under too much pressure from all the trolling and abuse, and worried about the effects the attacks were having on him. He decided to kill off the digital Paul he’d created. ‘It was hard, because I ache to have a voice.’
The last time I heard from Paul, he had created a new online persona, a woman, whose profile he was busily building, posting in the ‘comment’ sections of political websites. Slowly, tentatively, but very deliberately, he was trying to drag a few more people towards his view of the world from behind a computer screen.
fn1
The following month another demo was held by the UBA and UPL, and turned nasty – with a number of arrests. Chants including ‘U – U – U – BA’, and ‘What’s it like to wear a dress?’ The UBA put forward a spokesperson named ‘Wayne King’. It was, in fact, Tommy. ‘I picked the name for a laugh,’ Tommy told me, ‘so when Victoria Derbyshire [a BBC radio presenter known for her husky voice] introduced me on the radio, it sounded like wanking!’
fn2
The EDL’s Facebook pages are usually ‘public’, allowing any users to post there.
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Typically, an administrator is in charge of the entire page or group, while a moderator has specific powers to edit or delete other users’ posts.
We the Cypherpunks are dedicated to building anonymous systems.
Eric Hughes, ‘A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto’ (1993)
A LARGE ABANDONED
Pizza Express in north London is an unusual place to start a revolution. But seventy of us have turned up to hear a computer coder named Amir Taaki explain how the crypto-currency Bitcoin will change the world. We share the space with a dozen slightly confused-looking squatters who have recently taken up residence here. Cans of lager are being passed around, and there is a fug of cigarette smoke in the air, which gives the whole event a rebellious edge, especially for the non-smoking sedentary audience members like me. There is a hush, as an unshaven man with short dark hair and a thin ponytail walks to the front of the room. Amir is in his mid-twenties, but is already considered to be one of the most gifted computer programmers around. In 2014, Forbes named him as one of the world’s top thirty entrepreneurs under thirty. He
is frequently offered lucrative jobs in the tech sector, but lives instead in what he calls a ‘techno-industrial colony’ in Calafou, Spain. He’s been working on Bitcoin software day and night for over four years now, and arguably knows more about this strange new currency than almost anyone else alive. He is here to tell us about his latest Bitcoin project – something he calls the ‘Dark Wallet’.
The reason Amir and so many others like him are excited by Bitcoin is that it’s a form of internet money with potentially far-reaching consequences. A Bitcoin is nothing more than a unique string of numbers. It has no independent value, and is not tied to any real-world currency. Its strength and value come from the fact that people believe in it and use it. Anyone can download a Bitcoin wallet on to their computer, buy Bitcoins with traditional currency from a currency exchange, and use them to buy or sell a growing number of products or services as easily as sending an email. Transactions are secure, fast and free, with no central authority controlling value or supply, and no middlemen taking a slice. You don’t even have to give your real name to start up an account. No one person or group is in charge of Bitcoin: everyone is.
Bitcoin was introduced to the world in 2009 via a public post on an exclusive emailing list for cryptographers. It quickly developed a following, and soon became the currency of choice for the online drugs market Silk Road. A growing number of people started to exchange Bitcoin for dollars, which pushed its exchange rate from under $0.001 in October 2009 to $100 in April 2013. In October that year, a US Federal Reserve spokesman hinted that Bitcoin might one day become a ‘viable currency’, and the following month the value of a single Bitcoin jumped to over $1,000. Millions of dollars’
worth of Bitcoin are now traded every day. In some parts of the world you can live almost entirely on Bitcoin.