The Dark Net Page 6
EDL leader Tommy Robinson on way to Woolwich now, Take to the streets peeps ENOUGH IS ENOUGH.
Hundreds of people retweeted the message, spreading it to thousands of others. EDL supporters quickly started to gather in south-east London.
The EDL’s Twitter administrator is a polite sixteen-year-old girl named Becky. As of writing, approximately 35,000 people follow her regular updates about important stories, information about demonstrations, propaganda and encouragement she posts on the EDL’s official feed. Like Paul, she was put in charge when the former EDL Twitter admin noticed she was regularly posting relevant messages and links from a personal account and invited her to help out. After ‘proving herself’ while another admin watched over her, she was made a permanent admin. It is a busy and important job, she explains: ‘Sometimes I go on it from the moment I get up, till when I go to bed.’ Even when she is out with her friends, she’s still tweeting: ‘But it doesn’t bother them. They know what I do, and they are understanding.’ She takes her responsibility seriously, carefully deciding what to post in order to strike the right tone. ‘I can’t imagine doing anything else – I love it.’
There are eight administrators that run the EDL’s Facebook page, each responsible for finding and posting relevant articles, providing advice about upcoming demonstrations, deleting inappropriate comments, answering direct messages they receive, thanking supporters and tackling trolls. ‘We get a lot of them,’ one of the admins tells me. According to Hel Gower – Tommy Robinson’s PA (although she’d be more accurately described as a ‘fixer’) – one of the most time-consuming jobs the EDL Facebook admins have is getting rid of racist invective. This job is made more difficult by the fact that the EDL’s Facebook page is also followed by a lot of anti-EDL users, people who masquerade as fans, but are only there to cause the group trouble. Each admin spends about an hour a day dealing with all this.
Because it’s so important, the leadership keeps tight control over the admin and mod functions.fn3 This means keeping a vice-like grip on the passwords. In 2010, a member of a splinter group successfully convinced the admin of a local EDL branch Facebook page to give him their password. The newcomer swiftly changed the password, locked out the old admin and hijacked the page. It took two weeks for Tommy Robinson to wrest back control, but he eventually managed to obtain the new password. I asked him how.
‘A few lads went round there and got the password back,’ he says.
‘How did they do that exactly?’
‘We just made sure we got it back,’ he replies.
Paul began spending increasing amounts of time as the password holder in his group, sharing stories, and building up a virtual network of friends. It was as much social as it was political. There was a sense of solidarity and camaraderie that came with membership. ‘We were all against the same things, and we felt like a team making a difference,’ he says. But a virtual community can also become suffocating. The more time he spent online, the more extreme his views became. He became very concerned about Islamists, and the threat he thought they posed: ‘I learnt how sophisticated their tactics are, how they are trying slowly to steal our identity, take over our politics.’ It was also here, in these raucous and aggressive Facebook pages, that he first started to interact with Muslims directly. He found them every bit as angry as he was. Each interaction seemed to push him on, to increase the intensity and number of his attacks. And his adversaries were more than willing to fight back. ‘Scum! Subhuman scum,’ he fumes at me, recalling the ‘battles’ he has had. These online tussles were an important part of Paul’s daily routine – and consumed more and more of his time. How long did you spend on an average day on the internet? I ask. ‘It’d probably shock me if I worked it out.’ (He later estimates it to be 90 per cent.) ‘It didn’t leave much room for anything or anyone else,’ he says, confessing that during this time he became ‘a little bit of a sociophobe’. He started speaking to his parents less and less, because it seemed ‘so mundane’ compared to the conversations he was having online. As his online profile grew, so his real-world profile diminished.
Paul and I spent some time walking around his small town. There is very little to do there. Paul tells me he’d love to get into politics, in some way, and move to a bigger city, but with little employment experience, few qualifications and no money, he realises that there’s very little chance of either happening. He tells me that not long ago he walked past a group of EDL supporters. He didn’t speak to them. Online he was becoming a respected member of the nationalist scene, with friends and supporters from all over the world. Offline he was nobody.
The Battle for Cyberspace
In early 2012, Paul decided to strike out on his own. He found the clutch of traditional nationalist parties a bit staid and old-fashioned. Rather than settle for what was there – and persuaded by his powers of rhetoric – he started a new movement instead. He spent weeks learning how to make videos, and set up a personal blog, Twitter and Facebook accounts. Paul took quite some time making sure the imagery and visuals were just right. ‘I was trying to create a symbol that everyone could look to – a solid symbol.’ His experience on Facebook had persuaded him to adopt a secret, anonymous profile where he could be more honest without fear of reprisals.
Paul became increasingly embroiled in what is a running battle online between nationalists and anti-fascist opponents (‘antifa’). Far-right groups and antifa used to clash on the street – they still do – but now the battle is mostly waged online. Antifa groups monitor every move the EDL and others like Paul make online, constantly watching key accounts, attempting to infiltrate their groups, and taking screen grabs or ‘screenies’ of anything they consider controversial, offensive or illegal: which they immediately publicise and often send to the police.
The longest standing of these groups is Exposing Racism and Intolerance Online, usually abbreviated to Expose. It’s an online collective primarily based on Facebook and Twitter, with a dozen or so admins and perhaps a couple of hundred volunteers who help out occasionally. Their main activity consists of taking and saving screenshots of far-right communication and propaganda. Over the last four years Expose has amassed at least 10,000 of these screenshots, including some that first linked Anders Breivik to the EDL.
Antifa is full of a new type of citizen activist. Mikey Swales has been involved from the start. I contacted him via Facebook: ‘We’re just an ordinary bunch of folk,’ he says, ‘mothers, fathers, sons and daughters. We recognise racism, hatred and bigotry when we see it and help, with other antifa groups, to show folk out there exactly who and what make up the EDL and all their splinter groups.’ Antifas spend just as much time as Paul online. One lone vigilante uses the Twitter handle ‘@Norsefired’. He monitors EDL activity, and publishes around one hundred tweets a day, ‘challenging, exposing and ridiculing extremist groups’. Like Paul, he got involved by accident, when he caught some slack on Twitter for being part of an anti-cuts group and found out one of the attackers had an EDL link. And like Paul, he thinks he spends too long online: ‘My ear [is] getting bent from my other half,’ he tells me via email, ‘that my spare time should be more efficiently applied to more lucrative pursuits.’ @Norsefired thinks using a pseudonym allows him to confront his opponents more aggressively. Offline, he reckons, ‘it is unlikely I’d approach a group of EDL supporters. But my Norsefired persona can be quite no-nonsense, direct, cutting.’ One of his favourite tactics is to ‘occupy’ EDL Twitter users’ timelines – using several fake Twitter accounts to befriend as many of them as possible – then posting anti-EDL stories and news items simultaneously. One Expose member, Alex, explains to me that humour is a very important part of what they do. ‘Basically,’ he says, ‘I take the piss. I have a large archive of pictures and videos I’ve made to mock the right with.’ Their diverse methods can be quite effective. When it was alleged that the glamour model Katie Price was a supporter of the EDL, Alex managed to get in touch with her and persuade her to publicly d
eny it.
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.’
The Denouement
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 ow
n 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.