Page 24 - Florida Sentinel 10-12-18

National
Undercover Cops Break Facebook Rules To Track Protesters, Ensnare Criminals
The Neo-Nazi Fight Club Named In The Charlottesville Arrests Is On The 'Cutting Edge' Of Peddling White Supremacy
In the summer of 2015, as Memphis exploded with protests over the police killing of a 19- year-old man, activists began hearing on Facebook from someone called Bob Smith. The name was generic, and so was his profile picture: a Guy Fawkes mask, the symbol of anti-government dissent.
Smith acted as if he sup- ported the protesters, and, slowly, they let him into their online community. Over the next three years, dozens of them accepted his friend requests, al- lowing him to observe private discussions over marches, rallies and demonstrations. In public postings and private messages he described himself as a far-left Democrat, a “fellow protester” and a “man of color.”
But Smith was not real. He was the creation of a white de- tective in the Memphis Police Department’s Office of Home- land Security whose job was to keep tabs on local activists across the spectrum, from Black Lives Matter to Confederate sympathizers.
Courtesy of Scott Kramer the detective, Tim Reynolds, outed himself in August under questioning by the American Civil Liberties Union of Ten- nessee, which sued the police de- partment for allegedly violating a 1978 agreement that prohib- ited police from conducting sur- veillance of lawful protests. The revelation validated many ac- tivists’ distrust of local authori- ties. It also provided a rare look into the ways American law en- forcement operates online, tak- ing advantage of a loosely regulated social media land- scape — and citizens’ casual re- linquishing of their privacy — to expand monitoring of the public.
Police officers around the country, in departments large and small, working for federal, state and local agencies, use un- dercover Facebook accounts to watch protesters, track gang members, lure child predators and snare thieves, according to court records, police trainers and officers themselves. Some maintain several of these ac- counts at a time. The tactic vio- lates Facebook’s terms of use, and the company says it disables fake accounts whenever it dis- covers them. But that is about all it can do: Fake accounts are not against the law, and the infor- mation gleaned by the police can be used as evidence in criminal and civil cases.
Investigators know this, which is why the accounts con- tinue to flourish.
“Every high-tech crime unit has one,” said an officer who uses an undercover account to monitor gang members and drug dealers in New Jersey and who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid having the account exposed or shut down.
Black Lives Matter protesters argue with police to let them walk down the sidewalk during a rally outside Graceland on July 12, 2016 in Memphis.
“It’s not uncommon, but we don’t like to talk about it too much.”
A FLOOD OF FAKE ACCOUNTS
The proliferation of fake Facebook accounts and other means of social media monitor- ing ─ including the use of soft- ware to crunch data about people’s online activity ─ illus- trates a policing “revolution” that has allowed authorities to not only track people but also map out their networks, said Rachel Levinson- Wald- man, senior counsel at New York University School of Law’s Brennan Center for Justice.
She is among many scholars who worry that expanded social media surveillance could make people less likely to engage in online activities protected by the First Amendment, from sharing their opinions to organizing protests of the government. But there are few laws governing this kind of monitoring. Few courts have taken up the issue. And most police departments don’t have policies on how officers can use social media for investiga- tions, according to Levinson- Waldman’s research.
“It’s pretty open territory,” she said.
Judges in New Jersey and Delaware have upheld investiga- tors’ use of fake social media profiles. U. S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Cincinnati Police Depart- ment and the Chicago Police De- partment have publicly boasted of using undercover Facebook accounts in cases against ac- cused child predators, gangs and gun traffickers. Following an outcry after a Drug Enforcement Administration agent created a fake Facebook account in a sus- pect’s name to catch members of a drug ring, the Department of Justice promised in 2014 to re- view the agency’s policies ─ but the department did not respond to multiple requests to say what has changed.
Several law enforcement agencies, including the New York Police Department, the Georgia Bureau of Investiga-
tion and the Indiana Intelligence Fusion Center, have policies that explicitly allow the creation of fake profiles, with some condi- tions ─ including obtaining prior approval from a superior and limiting interactions with tar- gets.
The only reprisals come from Facebook itself, which says it strictly enforces its ban on users pretending to be someone they’re not. Every day, it says, the company’s “detection tech- nology” blocks millions of at- tempts to create fake accounts ─ and detects millions more within minutes of creation. But Face- book won’t say how often it has taken action against a law en- forcement agency for using fake accounts, only that it has done so “many times.”
Despite this, police agencies have been able to keep under- cover accounts for years without Facebook discovering them.
“I’m skeptical that law en- forcement is going to look at Facebook saying this and sud- denly change their practices,” said Dave Maass, an investiga- tive researcher at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil lib- erties group.
Facebook took action against the Memphis Police De- partment only after the founda- tion alerted the company to coverage of the Bob Smith ac- count on The Appeal, a criminal justice website. Facebook dis- abled the Smith account and then found six more fake ac- counts linked to the department, which it also cut off.
The Memphis Police De- partment declined to comment about its use of social media, in- cluding the Bob Smith ac- count, noting that the lawsuit alleging illegal surveillance re- mains unresolved. In July, city officials insisted that the police had not violated anyone’s rights, or prevented anyone from demonstrating.
Monitoring social media posts, the city said in a state- ment, “is a necessary and com- mon technique in law enforcement; in fact it is viewed as best practice.”
RAM
Federal authorities on Tuesday arrested four mem- bers of the Rise Above Move- ment for their roles in the violence at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, last year, and in doing so, shed more light on a militant group that experts say is a new brand of white supremacy.
The group, known as RAM, prides itself on operating like a neo-Nazi Fight Club, train- ing and priming its members to incite violence at rallies, while spreading extremist ideologies through social media channels and a cloth- ing company.
"It's the cutting edge of white supremacy right now," Heidi Beirich, who helps track hate groups for the Southern Poverty Law Cen- ter, told BuzzFeed News.
Based in Southern Califor- nia, RAM has been sus- pended on some social platforms but has been oper- ating in the open since re- branding in 2017 as it recruits more members to focus on its mission of eradicating Jews, Muslims, and immigrants.
The men arrested on Tues- day were charged with violat- ing the federal riots statute when they engaged in vio- lence at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, in which one counterprotester was killed. And featured ex- tensively in the criminal com- plaint is information the FBI gathered on RAM from the internet, including a "publicly viewable Twitter page" and "photos of themselves posing shirtless and wearing skull half masks."
"Modern society fosters weak men, addicts, and apa- thy," reads a screenshot from RAM's now-defunct Twitter page. "We want to rise above all of today’s destructive cul- ture and see the rebirth of our people, strong in mental and
physical capacities as our forefathers were.”
Although its Instagram and Twitter accounts have been suspended, the group is still active on other channels like Vimeo and YouTube, where it has close to 2,300 subscribers, as well as Gab, a messaging platform popular in the alt-right world.
In social posts and promo- tional videos, the group high- lights its dedication to "clean living," training hard, and preserving a pure European identity. With American flag bandannas tied around their faces, young white men are seen boxing, doing sit-ups, and promoting their "nation- alist" clothing style.
For months, RAM used In- stagram to promote its ap- parel company, Right Brand Clothing, garnering more than 2,000 followers before the platform pulled its ac- count in August, HuffPost re- ported. The Right Brand website, however, is still ac- tive and is currently promot- ing its fall 2018 outerwear collection.
Last year, the organization boasted of having more than 50 members, according to a ProPublica report, but hate group monitors say it has at- tracted more followers due to its "real-world recruitment" tactics.
"They definitely have more chapters than they did a year ago," Beirich said. "Their connection to MMA fighting, aggressiveness, the clothing brand, this stuff really stands out to young men in a way that the Richard Spencers do not anymore."
Richard Spencer
h e l p e d organize last year’s Unite the Right rally but did not attend the anniversary event this year, where a small group of white nationalists were overrun by counterprotesters.
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