Search Results for: Feuerkrieg

After a 13-year-old was sentenced last week, a young victim of radicalisation talks about how white supremacists target children. John was 15 when a member of his Facebook group volunteered to become Britain’s “first white suicide bomber”. Another advocated attending Friday prayers at the local mosque and “slaying people where they stood”. Another wanted to firebomb the place of worship. Ultimately, no blood was spilt. Police soon raided several homes linked to the group. John and a friend – also 15 and an adherent of far-right ideology – buried an arsenal of knives and machetes to ensure officers never found them. John became increasingly radicalised by an online barrage of far-right disinformation. “Posts of homeless British soldiers were set against Muslim families being given free homes. Now I know the posts were all fake, but the 15-year-old me didn’t bother to fact-check.” The worry is that John’s contemporaries won’t either. A surge of online extremism and disinformation has arrived at a time of lockdown-induced isolation, loneliness and home-schooling, creating what police call a “perfect storm”. One British far-right group has even started pushing an alternative white-supremacist school curriculum for lockdown learning. Last week, the youngest person in the UK to commit a terrorism offence was sentenced. Only 13 when he downloaded a bomb-making manual, the teenager subsequently became the leader of the UK arm of a banned neo-Nazi terrorist group that glorified individuals responsible for racist mass murder. His swift journey from lonely adolescent to UK leader of the Feuerkrieg Division is disquieting not for its uniqueness but for its part in a growing pattern. At least 17 children, some as young as 14, have been arrested on terrorism charges over the past 18 months. A new neo-Nazi group led by a 15-year-old from Derby emerged last year. Its entire membership consisted of children. The group discussed attacking migrants in Dover and how to acquire and modify weapons. (…) Khan, who will publish a report this month chronicling myriad failures in the government’s counter-extremism strategy, said they had identified considerable extremist content, much on unregulated platforms and propelled by algorithms that could quickly draw young minds like John’s deeper into violent extremism. “Thousands of videos, memes, GIFs and other content promote Islamist beheading videos, neo-Nazi material advocating for ‘Jews to be gassed’, to videos celebrating the actions of terrorists such as Thomas Mair [the far-right supporter who murdered MP Jo Cox],” said Khan. Meanwhile, new research reveals how rightwing extremists are using fresh methods to lure young recruits. Researchers for an initiative supported by the UN counter-terrorism executive directorate identified the online game creation-system Roblox as having been used by rightwing extremists to recreate playable versions of infamous far-right atrocities. Tech Against Terrorism researchers found users being invited to roleplay Anders Breivik’s 2011 attack on the Norwegian island of Utoya, the 2019 mosque shootings in Christchurch, New Zealand, and the 2019 terrorist attack in El Paso, Texas. Significantly, the rapidly growing UK white-nationalist group Patriotic Alternative is actively targeting younger recruits and recently started Call of Duty Warcraft gaming tournaments for its supporters. (…) The research by Tech Against Terrorism also found that extremists used language on gaming platforms such as Roblox – which says it swiftly acts on any inappropriate content – to recruit new youngsters online. They found that extremists used references to the computer game Minecraft or Roblox in their posts in order to hide their messages as online gaming chat. One example, found on the social messaging app Telegram, involves a user posting comprehensive bomb-making instructions to a youngster with the message: “Hey kid, want to make a mailbox bomb for Roblox?” Also on Telegram was a Roblox simulation of a vehicle attack against protesters, a recurrent theme of far-right memes, and a real life feature of last year’s Black Lives Matter protests in the US.

via guardian: How far right uses video games and tech to lure and radicalise teenage recruits

Coronavirus has created a ‘perfect storm’ for online radicalisation, Neil Basu says. Teenage neo-Nazis are being arrested on suspicion of terrorism offences in record numbers as part of a “new and worrying trend”, the head of UK counterterror police has said. Assistant commissioner Neil Basu said children as young as 14 had been detained in the past year, and almost all of those investigated by police had been radicalised online. “We are seeing more young people being drawn towards terrorist activity,” he added. “That is a relatively new and worrying trend in the UK, because just a few years ago we were not seeing anyone that young amongst our case work. “What concerns me most is this – there has been a sharp increase in extremist material online in the last few years, and Covid-19 has meant that vulnerable people are spending a lot more time isolated and online, and with fewer of the protective factors that schooling, employment, friends and family can provide. (…) Official figures show that between January 2019 and June, 17 children under the age of 18 were arrested on suspicion of terror offences. The vast majority were thought to hold extreme right-wing beliefs, and police are urging families to seek help over any worrying behaviour using a new website and advice line. Senior officers are concerned that the coronavirus pandemic may mean that radicalisation is not spotted by teachers, social workers and mental health services because of ongoing restrictions. Earlier this month, a 17-year-old boy was jailed for preparing acts of neo-Nazi terrorism. Paul Dunleavy had researched how to convert a blank-firing gun into a live weapon, and provided “advice and encouragement” to fellow extremists online. He communicated with fellow neo-Nazis and joined the Feuerkrieg Division group, which was later banned as a terrorist organisation. In an online test to join, he wrote that Jewish people “must be eradicated”, called fascism “the pursuit of restoring the natural order”, and said he wanted to “go out there and provoke” a race war. Another teenager, Harry Vaughan, was arrested at the age of 17 last year for encouraging neo-Nazi terror attacks online.

via independent: Counterterror police chief warns of ‘new and worrying trend’ of teenage neo-Nazis

Boy, then 16, described himself a nine to 10 on the ‘full-on Nazi Hitler’ scale. A teenage neo-Nazi who researched how to convert a blank-firing gun into a lethal weapon has been convicted for preparing acts of terrorism. The 17-year-old, who cannot be named because of his age, joined the Feuerkrieg Division (FKD) online before it was banned as a terrorist organisation. Birmingham Crown Court heard that he rated himself as a nine to 10 on the “full-on Nazi Hitler” scale when questioned by police, but the boy denied planning a terror attack in court. The defendant, from Rugby in Warwickshire, said he “had existed in an echo chamber” of far-right chat rooms, amid mounting warnings about online radicalisation. (…) Detective Chief Superintendent Kenny Bell said the teenager had been discovered by a “covert internet investigator” who engaged with him online and allowed police to identify him from anonymous chats. “He was a member of Feuerkrieg Division, clearly with extreme right-wing violent ideology and trying to accelerate a race war,” he added. “Having become part of that group and got online he was discussing with them how he had the capability to source a blank firing firearm and convert it so it could be used.” Investigators did not identify a target for any potential attack, but said they swooped on the teenager because of fears he would be able to create a live firearm. Prosecutor Matthew Brook told the court the boy had asked an adult friend for advice on where he could buy a blank-firing gun. ”Even before joining FKD, the defendant was interested in whether this was a serious group that could be involved in physical action in the real world, rather than being in his words ‘just an online thing,” he added. Birmingham Crown Court heard that the boy was admitted as a member of FKD after doing an online test where he was asked his opinion of Jews and fascism.

via independent: Neo-Nazi teenager convicted of preparing acts of terrorism after trying to obtain gun to ‘smash heads’

The UK’s recent ban of the sixth far right group since 2016, the neo-Nazi Feuerkrieg Division, might come as little surprise given the growing challenge posed to the country by right wing extremism. But what might seem stranger is that this largely online entity—allegedly founded by a 13-year-old Estonian boy—‘no longer existed’ by the time of its proscription, with members already fanning out to join new online groups since the its dissolution in February[1]. Episodes like these reflect a constellation of interrelated challenges associated with an increasingly ‘post-organisational’ threat landscape—where the fluid boundaries between organisations and movements, direction and inspiration, and online and offline are becoming more and more ambiguous. The fracturing and franchising of global extremist movements globally poses a critical challenge for policymakers and tech companies. Amid mounting pressure from governments and civil society, some progress has been made in recent years in removing illegal terrorist content associated with proscribed groups from more mainstream social media platforms. However, our current approaches are not fit to tackle an increasingly diffuse, ‘post-organisational’ threat emerging from both Islamist and far-right extremism. Given the increasingly decentralised, post-organisational and ‘crowdsourced’ nature of both the global Islamist and far-right movements, in large part enabled through burgeoning online extremist ecosystems, it is essential that policymakers and tech companies alike develop policy frameworks that move beyond a group-centred approach to understanding the threat from violent extremist groups. (…) This post-organisational challenge poses a particular threat within far right extremism, with increasingly ideologically cohesive, networked and transnational movements forging new online ecosystem across unregulated imageboard sites such as 8chan and 4chan, censorship-free discussion platforms like Voat, ultra-libertarian social media sites like Parler, and encrypted messaging channels such as Telegram, to coordinate campaigns and share extremist content[10]. But there remains considerably less international alignment around the far right than there is on Islamist threats, posing major challenges to classification and enforcement. There have been moves to proscribe far right groups as terrorist organisations in some national contexts, such as National Action in the UK and Blood & Honour in Canada, while the US recently proscribed its first foreign ‘Racially and Ethnically Motivated’ terrorist organisation, the Russian Imperial Movement[11][12][13]. But such movements are banned in some countries but not others, even if, like Combat 18, they have transnational membership[14]. While tech companies have been developing their own internal guidelines and terms of service around ‘hateful’ and ‘dangerous’ groups, specific policies around terrorism are partly hamstrung by the limitations of international lists of proscribed terrorist groups, such as the UN Designated Terror Groups list, which are focused on ISIS and al-Qaeda related threats[15]. Meanwhile groups like Atomwaffen Division, originally formed in the US, are currently not banned at all despite explicitly advocating for the use of terrorist tactics. An analysis of the presence of terrorist-supporting constituencies on Telegram has shown that while the organisational power of groups such as Atomwaffen Division is still important, there is an expansive network of terrorist-endorsing channels on the platform that are not explicitly affiliated with any group, which are very easy for individuals to tap into without expressing formal affiliation to a movement or making contact with other affiliates. Channels and content can thus be seen as “pro-terrorist” whereby support is expressed for politically motivated violence or individuals who have committed attacks, even when there is no express affiliation to a proscribed organisation[16].

via orfonline: Confronting the Challenge of ‘Post-Organisational’ Extremism