DHS Falls Short Addressing Domestic Terrorism | U.S. Spies Wanted to buy Pegasus Spyware | Fixing Government Software Vulnerability, and more
large, well-established network. In many terrorism cases, Wray said, “you’re talking about largely lone actors, maybe one or two other people who don’t have to do a lot of plotting, who don’t need to have a lot of money … don’t need to do a lot of training, and whose targets are pretty much everywhere.” As a result, Wray continued, “there are very few dots out there, as compared to, say, the 9/11 model of an al-Qaeda sleeper cell. … With fewer dots and much less time in which to connect those dots, it may well be that Ken’s folks have one dot and we have the other dot, and if we’re not super latched up, we’re going to miss the only picture that’s out there and it’s got to happen fast.
Exploiting a Crisis: How Benin Became the New Frontline for Jihadists (Marco Simoncelli and Davide Lemmi, DW)
Northern Benin is at the center of a security crisis which has moved south from the Sahel. Poverty and climate change have provided fertile ground for criminals and extremists.
How the ‘Great Replacement’ Myth Inspired a Wave of Racist Terror Attacks (Tim Hume et al., Vice)
Joshua Fisher-Birch, a researcher at the Counter Extremism Project, said that Tarrant’s so-called manifesto was full of in-jokes and memes from internet and gaming culture. He referenced a dance from the game Fortnite, and joked that one old PlayStation game had “taught [him] ethnonationalism.” Before getting out of his car and launching the attack, Tarrant told his livestream followers to subscribe to the popular YouTuber PewDiePie. His followers have responded in kind, with the gunman who attacked a mosque in Baerum, Norway, in 2019, posting a meme shortly before the shooting depicting Saint Tarrant, with himself as a “disciple.” “[Tarrant] really created this this whole subculture in a sense of neo-Nazi accelerationists,” said Fisher-Birch. But it’s not just Tarrant’s methods that have caught on, but also the underlying ideology that motivated his crimes. These far-right gunmen have all subscribed to a racist conspiracy theory known as “the great replacement” – the title that Tarrant gave to the rambling document he posted online – which has gained increasing currency in right-wing circles over the past decade or so. The theory, a rehash of longstanding far-right narratives around the erasure of white people, holds that white populations are being actively “replaced” by non-white immigrants.
