Tool Identifies, Exposes Violent Extremists Online

A recent NCRI paper, Cyber Swarming, Memetic Warfare and Viral Insurgency, offers an example of NCRI’s technology. Here are a couple of sections from the paper:

Cyber Swarming, Memetic Warfare and Viral Insurgency:
How Domestic Militants Organize on Memes to Incite Violent Insurrection and Terror Against Government and Law Enforcement
By Alex Goldenberg and Joel Finkelstein

Introduction
Even as law enforcement and intelligence begin to map how social media can rapidly radicalize individuals to commit acts of domestic terror, they remain challenged to understand how social media empowers entirely new groups to self-organize radicalized militant cells and incite violence. The ability of extremist groups to self-organize creates a new and poorly understood theater for emerging threats in the cyber domain.

In this briefing, we document a recently formed apocalyptic militia ideology which, through the use of memes—coded inside jokes conveyed by image or text—advocates extreme violence against law enforcement and government officials. Termed the “boogaloo,” this ideology self-organizes across social media communities, boasts tens of thousands of users, exhibits a complex division of labor, evolves well-developed channels to innovate and distribute violent propaganda, deploys a complex communication network on extremist, mainstream and dark Web communities, and articulates a hybrid structure between lone-wolf and cell-like organization. Like a virus which awakens from dormancy, this meme has emerged with startling speed in merely the last 3–4 months.

Using a combination of quantitative and qualitative approaches to our investigation, we chart this contagion as it metastasizes across Facebook, Instagram and the chans. We document how boogaloo enthusiasts strategize, share instructions for explosives and 3-D printed firearms, distribute illegal firearm modifications, and siphon users into encrypted messaging boards en mass. Perhaps most alarmingly, we observe how the boogaloo is specifically marketed, through merchandise and memes, towards current and former members of the American Armed Forces. As we document this new structure and capability, we provide recommendations for how policy makers and officials examining unlawful acts or perceived threats may better investigate, prepare and operationally integrate for memetic warfare, an evolving threat domain.

The Boogaloo Meme, Origins and Current Context
On January 20th, thousands descended on Richmond, Virginia, for the Virginia Citizens Defense League’s annual Lobby Day. In attendance were traditional gun-rights supporters as well as militia groups, conspiracy theorists, and far-right extremists ranging from ethnic supremacists to extreme libertarians. One particular group of interest, identified as the Patriot Wave, donned Pepe the Frog patches entitled “Boogaloo Boys,” as well as patches evocative of the American flag emblazoned with an igloo in place of the 50 stars. Some members wore a skull balaclava, which according to the SPLC, is considered the face of 21st-century fascism and is a key symbol of the Atomwaffen Division.¹ One member of the Patriot Wave during a podcast posted on the Patriot Wave Facebook page boastfully declared, “Some of the guys we were with aren’t exactly out of the military yet, so they had to keep their faces covered.”

The boogaloo catchphrase, or meme, is based on the 1984 movie sequel Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo, which critics panned as a shockingly unoriginal, near-mirror copy of the original film. As adopted by meme culture, the term is often used by libertarians, gun enthusiasts, and anarchists to describe an uprising against the government or left-wing political opponents that is a near-mirror copy, or sequel to, the American Civil War. While the reference has been around for years, recent iterations have caught on and spread quickly over the past few months. While many still use the boogaloo meme jokingly, an increasing number of people employ the phrase to incite an apocalyptic confrontation with law enforcement and government officials

or to provoke ethnic warfare. This ambiguity is a key feature of the problem: Like a virus hiding from the immune system, the use of comical-meme language permits the network to organize violence secretly behind a mirage of inside jokes and plausible deniability. Evolving threats, from this vantage, can emerge all at once, undetected and with no top down organization at all. Traditional qualitative analysis methods, by themselves, fall short in the capacity to detect such self-organized genocidal violence over massive scales of data, through inside jokes and unknown dog whistles.

Demystifying the Movement: Machine Learning Analysis Dissects the Boogaloo Meme Viral Dynamics and Themes
We thus used Contextus, the Network Contagion Research Institute’s massive data ingestion and machine learning/semantic analytic platform to index all of the topics and code words for the boogaloo meme at scale, in order to better resolve the meaning of the term. Our quantitative methods, described here,² for analysis of the boogaloo meme, unveil a slew of cryptic code-words, relevant topics, and reveal how the meme migrates to charged political events and exposes activity and underlying dynamics of its use.

We began by analyzing over 100 million comments on 4chan’s /pol/, a radical Web community that our previous work has shown to be highly influential for the origin and spread of memes,³ and therefore an important source for contextualizing new viral memes such as the boogaloo. In figure 1, a comprehensive topic map of the term shows that the boogaloo communicates a suddenly emergent (yellow) inevitable (blue-green) apocalyptic event (blue). Terms such as “hopefully” and “someday,” migrate toward “quickly” and “overnight” and confirm that the viral-like emergence of the boogaloo is self promoted by radical communities. Language on 4chan seems to associate the term to “racewar” and more coded conspiracies such as “dotr,” or day of the rope, a fantasy to instigate a civil war and murder race traitors. These acts would presumably be accomplished by “rwds,” a code for Right Wing Death Squads, such as the “atomwaffen” division, a neo-Nazi domestic terror organization. Other coded associations such as “shtf” stand for “shit hits the fan,” a slang for the end of civilization, and a term that appears near topics of doomsday preparation, “ammo” and “stockpile.”

Conclusions
The boogaloo, a joke for some, acts as a violent meme that circulates instructions for a distributed, viral insurgency for others. The topic network for boogaloo describes a coherent, multi-component and detailed conspiracy to launch an inevitable, violent, sudden, and apocalyptic war across the homeland. The conspiracy, replete with suggestions to stockpile ammunition, may itself set the stage for massive real-world violence and sensitize enthusiasts to mobilize in mass for confrontations or charged political events. Furthermore, the meme’s emphasis on military language and culture poses a specific risk to military communities due to the similar thematic structure, fraternal organization, and reward incentives.

Recommendations

1. Tracking and indexing maliciously encoded conspiracies through meme images and language is a critical element for the purpose of better understanding and dissecting the status of viral-security threats from the cyber domain. Law enforcement can evolve to develop large scale and data-driven approaches and central information sharing capacity to develop a coherent framework to decrypt these massive and rapidly evolving threats.

2. The military community, in particular, may merit special consideration in risk evaluation and social-climate research because seditious memes are now tailored for infection among veterans and active service members.

1. Staff, Hatewatch. “Donning the Mask: Presenting ‘The Face of 21st Century Fascism’.” Southern Poverty Law Center, 20 June 2017, www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2017/06/20/donning-mask-presenting-face-21st….

2. Zannettou, S. Finkelstein, J., Bradlyn, B. and Blackburn, J., 2018. A quantitative approach to understanding online antisemitism. arXiv preprint arXiv:1809.01644.

3. Zannettou, S., Caulfield, T., Blackburn, J., De Cristofaro, E., Sirivianos, M., Stringhini, G. and Suarez-Tangil, G., 2018, October. On the origins of memes by means of fringe web communities. In Proceedings of the Internet Measurement Conference 2018 (pp. 188-202). ACM.