The Dark Net Read online

  On the train home after one of our interviews, I texted him a note of thanks. As usual, he replied immediately: ‘You’re very welcome Jamie :-) Have a safe journey back. PS I really enjoyed it.’ But unlike previous meetings, very soon afterwards our correspondence slowed. The usually vocal Paul went quiet. His social media activity stopped. Maybe, I allowed myself to hope, our meetings had made a difference? Or maybe the police had finally worked out who he was? Perhaps something worse?

  A New Platform

  Paul is not alone in finding the internet a perfect place to spread his message. It has become a vital platform for political groups around the world. From Barack Obama’s Facebook electioneering in the US, to the Occupy movement’s flash mobs, to the Italian comedian-cum-politician Beppe Grillo’s digital reach, the battle for ideas, influence and impact is moving online. Over the last decade, Paul and thousands of people like him have eschewed the traditional stomping grounds of the nationalist movement in favour of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. They were among the first political groups to do so. Extremist organisations, denied a platform on mainstream media and unable to propound their beliefs in public, were particularly attuned to the opportunities that new outlets and platforms gave them. In the eighties and nineties, for example, the American white supremacist organisations Stormfront and the Aryan Brotherhood created and maintained popular support groups on Usenet and Bulletin Board Systems. (In fact, Stormfront started life as a website.) According to Alexa – a company that ranks website traffic – the far-right British National Party’s website is significantly more popular than either Labour’s or the Conservative Party’s. Blood and Honour, the epicentre of the extreme neo-Nazi music scene, has dozens of open YouTube pages and closed online discussion forums. Stormfront’s website – stormfront.org – hosts a long-standing forum, which has close to 300,000 members, who between them have posted close to ten million messages. Twitter is especially popular among neo-Nazis, who will often take a username including the numbers 14 and 88. Fourteen refers to the ‘14 words’ (‘we must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children’), while 88 refers to the eighth letter of the alphabet. HH: Heil Hitler. According to researchers at King’s College London, neo-Nazis use Twitter not only for disseminating ideas and sharing propaganda, but also for maintaining a coherent sense of self-identity. ‘The House of Rothschild must be destroyed if we are to save our race! 14/88. Sieg Heil!’ posts one user I find after a cursory search. Some nationalists find children’s chat rooms or innocuous-sounding Yahoo groups in which to meet. Anglo-Saxon history discussion boards are particularly popular among English nationalists, where hundreds of users with names like ‘Aethelred’ and ‘Harold’ discuss how to establish a purer, whiter England. In early 2007, supporters of the French nationalist party the Front National became the first European political party to set up a political office in the virtual world ‘Second Life’, prompting a wave of online protests from other users. The same year, its xenophobic avatars visited a virtual mosque, sat on the virtual Koran and posted anti-Semitic slogans, before activating a hacker script that automatically ejected everyone from the building. The Jewish human rights organisation the Simon Wiesenthal Center estimates that as of 2013 there were 20,000 active ‘hate’ websites, social network groups and forums online. The number is growing every year. The online world has become a haven for racists and nationalists, giving political extremists an opportunity to voice their opinions, share ideas and recruit supporters.

  Nick Lowles, director of the campaign group Hope Not Hate, has been working for anti-fascist groups since the mid-nineties. Nick tells me the internet ‘has given the ordinary person access to far-right groups in a way that was impossible a decade ago’. It is also changing the demographic of the typical nationalist, explains Nick. It’s no longer the jackbooted skinhead he used to target. The modern nationalist is young, time-rich, technologically literate – able to quickly and easily connect virtually to like-minded people around the world. People like Paul.

  The most infamous of this new breed of online extremists is Anders Behring Breivik, the right-wing extremist who killed seventy-seven people in a terrorist attack in Norway in July 2011. After leaving school he started to work in customer services, but his talent for computer programming led him to start his own computer programming business. By his early twenties, the young Breivik was spending hours each day reading online blogs and articles about the imminent end of the white race and the threat of ‘cultural Marxism’ to European culture. He became convinced that Islam was taking over Europe, and that violent resistance was the only way to curb its rise.

  In the years leading up to his attacks he wrote, under the pseudonym Andrew Berwick, a 1,516-page manifesto titled 2083: A European Declaration of Independence. It is part memoir, part practical manual for what he saw as a coming race war. Large chunks of it were copied and pasted from the net (he later admitted in court that he’d taken a lot of it from Wikipedia in particular), from sources as eclectic as the seventeenth-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes, to the British television presenter Jeremy Clarkson, whose Times article about multiculturalism Breivik quoted at length.

  Unusually for a terrorist attack of this size and scale, Norwegian security services believe Breivik acted entirely alone – a ‘lone wolf’ with no accomplices or co-conspirators. The term was popularised by the American white supremacist Tom Metzger in the 1990s, when he advised fellow neo-Nazis committed to violent action to act alone, in order to evade detection. According to Jeffrey D. Simon, author of Lone Wolf Terrorism: Understanding the Growing Threat, the lone wolf is ‘the most innovative, most creative and most dangerous’ type of terrorist. Lone wolves aren’t restricted by ideology or hierarchy, and don’t need to worry about alienating their group or organisation. More importantly, their lack of communication can make them difficult to identify. In Simon’s view, the wealth of easy-to-access information facilitates the rise of lone wolves. The number of lone wolf cases has increased steadily over the last decade, including the Islamist Major Nidal Malik Hasan who murdered thirteen fellow soldiers at the Fort Hood army base in Texas in November 2009, in protest, it is believed, at the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

  Breivik was a lone wolf: but he did have a network. He believed social media – especially Facebook – would help the white ‘resistance movements’ fight back against the multiculturalism he detested, because it offered new opportunities to push propaganda and connect with like-minded individuals around the world. He wanted to distribute his manifesto to sympathisers, whom he hoped would use it to further the nationalist cause, and perhaps even imitate him. So, over the course of two years, he painstakingly created a vast virtual community, using two Facebook accounts to connect to thousands of fellow extremists across Europe. In 2083, he documents the long hours spent on the monotonous, but important, task of finding them:

  I’m using Facebook to target various nationalist-related groups and inviting every single member [to become my Facebook friend] . . . aaaaarrrrggh:/ It’s driving me nuts, lol . . . I’ve been doing this for 60 straight days, 3–4 hours a day . . . God, I wouldn’t have imagined it was going to be this f...... boring :D

  Breivik was after email addresses – which he gathered by requesting and becoming friends with Facebook users.

  By early 2011 Breivik had thousands of Facebook friends and contributed to several online blogs, including the right-wing Norwegian site document.no, where he commented on a number of articles criticising Islam. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Breivik had also been a registered member of Stormfront since October 2008, using the handle ‘year2183’. By June 2011, he’d farmed 8,000 ‘high quality’ email addresses; ‘Ofc, it’s a quite tedious task,’ he admitted, ‘but then again, I can’t think of a more efficient way to get in direct touch with nationalists in all European countries.’

  Breivik saw opportunities everywhere online. Wikipedia, he suggested, was a good place to nudge public opinion through
carefully editing pages. He played the online shooting game Call of Duty to hone his shooting skills (he was also a fan of online games like World of Warcraft) and advised fellow resistance fighters to use the anonymous browser Tor to evade government detection. Towards the end of 2083, Breivik made a plea to all patriots to ‘create a nice website, a blog and establish a nice-looking Facebook page . . . to market the organisation’.

  Suddenly in July 2011 the usually vocal Breivik went quiet. His social media activity stopped. On the morning of 22 July, he posted a YouTube video urging comrades to embrace martyrdom. A few hours later he emailed his manifesto to over 1,000 of the addresses he’d harvested from Facebook. At 3.25 p.m. he detonated his home-made bomb outside government buildings in central Oslo, killing eight, before travelling to Utøya Island, where he shot and murdered a further sixty-nine activists from the Norwegian Labour Party who were attending a youth camp.

  Exactly who received 2083 remains a mystery. Around 250 people in the UK were sent a copy. Some of them were supporters of a very popular English Facebook page that Breivik had ‘liked’ using a pseudonym in early 2010, and that he praised in his manifesto. This is where Paul’s journey began.

  E-E-EDL

  The English Defence League is characteristic of a new wave of loosely related nationalist movements growing across Europe. Its ideology is difficult to pin down, but it combines a concern that large-scale immigration – especially from Muslim countries – is destroying national identity with a belief that the elite, out-of-touch liberal establishment don’t know or care what this is doing to ordinary people. It is usually ostensibly non-racist, claiming to support equality, democracy, freedom and traditional British (or sometimes Christian) culture. Above all, it believes Islamic and British values are incompatible.

  Since the Second World War, membership of formal political parties in the UK has fallen from over three million in the 1950s to under half a million in 2013. Unlike a traditional political party, membership to the EDL is open to all: it demands no money, energy or time. By 2012, the EDL had become one of the most recognisable street movements in the UK. Supporters had held hundreds of demonstrations across the country, and joined the Facebook group in their thousands. For a nationalist group, its rapid success was unexpected and unprecedented. At its peak in 1973, when the UK was gripped by fears about immigration, the extreme right-wing party the National Front had approximately 14,000 members. The British National Party’s peak membership, in 2009, was roughly the same. It took these parties years of concerted campaigning to accumulate these numbers. It took the EDL months. As of April 2014, over 160,000 people have ‘liked’ the EDL on Facebook – which is the same number of likes as the UK Labour Party. It has local branches in every region of the country and demonstrations, protests and events take place every month as supporters flit easily between the online and offline world. Its size and scale belie its humble origins – a simple Facebook account.

  In March 2009, a small number of radical Islamists from Luton announced they were planning to stage a protest against the British military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan at the homecoming parade of the Royal Anglian Regiment. Stephen Yaxley-Lennon – who now goes by the name Tommy Robinson – read about the protest, and knew of the group, who regularly handed out leaflets near the tanning salon he owns in Luton town centre. Although Tommy had briefly been a member of the British National Party, he wasn’t particularly interested in politics, but was incensed by the planned protest. Together with some friends, Tommy decided to oppose the group and support the soldiers, to show the world ‘that Luton wasn’t overrun by Islamic extremists’.

  At that first demonstration – which comprised a few dozen people – there was a skirmish, and the story was picked up by local newspapers. Tommy and his friends decided to create a new group to disrupt meetings and the recruitment efforts of Luton Islamist organisations. He phoned the few contacts he had in small patriotic and nationalists groups, including the United British Alliance. They called themselves the ‘United People of Luton’, and staged a second, larger demonstration in June 2009. It attracted hundreds of people, and resulted in clashes with the police, and nine arrests.fn1

  Tommy had paid a cameraman £450 to make a short video of the day, which he then posted on YouTube. ‘This time,’ he tells me in a pub just over the road from New Scotland Yard, ‘I went on to all the online football forums, chat forums, posting it.’ He instantly began to receive messages of support from across Britain. A dozen or so members of the nascent movement met in a pub shortly afterwards to discuss the future. They decided to create an online organisation – one with an international reach. Together with a friend Tommy signed in to Facebook to create a new group, calling it the English Defence League.

  Like

  As a recruiting tool and organisational platform for a fledgling nationalist movement with no money, and little support, Facebook was unsurpassable. It opened up a whole new world. Within a few hours of the group being created, hundreds had signed up. ‘It went mental,’ Tommy recalls. ‘Lads from all over the country were joining.’ It was a cheap and effective way to recruit new people, communicate information about upcoming demonstrations and share stories and photos of previous protests. ‘Queen Lareefer’ – a female supporter of the EDL in her late twenties – was initially attracted to the EDL Facebook page when she spotted a friend sharing a link to a discussion about a recent news item: ‘People were talking about the poppy burning on Facebook and I saw that someone had liked the EDL page, so I went on to it, I liked the page, I made a comment, someone replied, and I got talking.’ She went on her first demonstration the following month.

  By the end of 2010, the EDL had used Facebook to organise around fifty street demonstrations across the country – some with as many as 2,000 participants. Although the group’s site states their commitment to peaceful demonstrations, their meetings were often accompanied by drunkenness, violence, antisocial behaviour, Islamophobic chants and arrests – frequently involving clashes with the left-wing street movement Unite Against Fascism. But the group’s reputation grew, and so too did the media coverage, which in turn drove more people to the Facebook page and to the EDL’s website.

  While Tommy was charging up and down the country on monthly demonstrations, Paul was drifting: taking drugs and partying, for the most part. One day in the summer of 2010, he received a Facebook update when a friend ‘liked’ the English Defence League’s page. ‘I’d never heard of them until then,’ he tells me. ‘But something about the name piqued my interest.’ He wanted to learn more, so he too clicked ‘like’, and began to receive daily updates about this new movement.

  Like Paul, anyone could simply click to join the Facebook group, and click to leave just as easily. But more were joining than were leaving, and many wanted to do more than ‘like’. Soon enthusiastic supporters were setting up their own EDL pages and groups, keen to start local chapters and arrange their own demonstrations. Although the leadership decided to impose a more formal structure on the rapidly expanding organisation in 2010 – dividing up the management and administration along area-based and thematic divisions – it remained a uniquely loose, decentralised and flexible movement.

  But this type of membership model has downsides. By late 2012, initial enthusiasm among the rank and file waned, as members realised long-lasting political change takes more than online chatter and weekend demonstrations. And with such a changeable hierarchy, the group quickly split into several warring subgroups and factions. By early 2013, the EDL was on the verge of implosion. Tommy (who by this point had spent time in jail for breaching bail conditions that forbade him from attending demonstrations) was exhausted, inundated with death threats and ready to quit. Then, on the morning of 22 May 2013, a British soldier called Lee Rigby was murdered by two radical Islamists in broad daylight in the middle of a busy south London street. In the weeks that followed, the group’s online support increased dramatically, and Tommy found himself all over the mainstream
media. He couldn’t leave.

  Admins and Mods

  Soon after Paul joined the EDL’s Facebook page, he began interacting with other members and posting comments.fn2 His frequent, articulate and aggressive contributions were getting him noticed by the senior members who ran the page. A few weeks later he was invited to join a secretive Facebook group of hard-core EDL members, operating under a cover name. Shortly after that, he was asked to become a moderator or ‘mod’ of a page dedicated to outing Islamist extremists. It was a big step up for Paul. Before he knew it, he was a part of something.

  Whether it’s a closed or open forum, someone needs to control the chaos and regulate the tone of conversations. It’s an important role, because you have power to ban users, and delete or edit other people’s posts. By early 2012, over 1,000 people were part of the group Paul administered. Not only did Paul have a voice and a platform, but also an increasing level of power and responsibility. ‘I loved it,’ he said. ‘I’d be on there for hours – posting, monitoring, editing.’

  Running Facebook groups and Twitter accounts is an extremely important position in a nationalist group. When Lee Rigby was murdered, Tommy immediately contacted the members who ran the group’s social media pages. He asked the administrator of the EDL Twitter account to put out a call to arms. At around 6.30 p.m., an announcement was made: