Homeland Security Admits It Tried to Manufacture Fake Terrorists for Trump - eviltoast
A new Homeland Security report details orders to connect protesters arrested in Portland to one another in service of the Trump's imaginary antifa plot.
  • CharlesDarwin@lemmy.worldEnglish
    83·
    2 months ago

    Nothing surprising about this at all.

    This is the same old rat-fucking playbook of the fascists going way back to the days of COINTELPRO and probably earlier. And then this same mentality is what led the right wing to do things like infiltrate vegan potlucks in order to combat “terrorism”, lol.

    This is the same bunch that ignored the obvious planning of the donnie fanbase of J6. The same bunch that already found that the far right are the ones that represent the biggest threat to this country and yet do very little about it.

  • xmunk@sh.itjust.works
    72·
    2 months ago

    Why fabricate fake terrorists when we have so many white nationalists around? Oh, because he likes those ones…

  • odelik@lemmy.today
    45·
    2 months ago

    Shouting “were not fascists!” while doing facist things, does not stop you from being fascists.

  • just_another_person@lemmy.world
    30·
    2 months ago

    Harris certainly needs to be bringing this up in every.single.interview.

    Not only does it shut up the critics of her being the fake “border czar”, it also illustrates the need to manufacture bullshit to sell a false narrative, which is the entirely of Trump’s being.

    • RunningInRVA@lemmy.world
      4·
      2 months ago

      This article is from November of 2022, so it probably won’t resonate with voters any more than his more recent offenses.

  • FarFarAway@lemmy.world
    23·
    2 months ago

    One point of contention. I dont think tangles is some defunct meta app. Texas has recently acquired a contract with a law enforcement surveillance tool called tangles.

    Tangles is a product offered by the cybersecurity company Cobwebs Technologies, which was founded in Israel in 2014 by three former members of Israeli military special units. The company has said their products, which are marketed as open source intelligence (OSINT) tools, have been used to combat terrorism, drug smuggling, and money laundering, but Meta has accused the company of operating as a surveillance-for-hire outfit. In 2023, Cobwebs Technologies was acquired by the Nebraska-based tech firm PenLink Ltd.

    This tool is out there, and still being used.

    • m0darn@lemmy.ca
      4·
      2 months ago

      Meta has accused the company of operating as a surveillance-for-hire outfit.

      What?

      • FarFarAway@lemmy.world
        1·
        2 months ago

        Idk, ask the Texas Tribune, haha.

        I feel people have made the same mistake before, and confused crowdtangle, which is a disinformation tracker, and tangles, which is a “surveillance-for-hire outfit.” Meta probably felt the need to clarify, at least once time before.

  • ArbitraryValue@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    1133·
    2 months ago

    The headline is overstating things quite a bit. From the article:

    DHS analysts recounted orders to generate evidence of financial ties between protesters in custody

    I wouldn’t call that manufacturing fake terrorists.

    • Veedem@lemmy.worldEnglish
      65·
      2 months ago

      The headline is absolutely NOT overstating things.

      From page 64 of the actual report:

      1. Politicization of Intelligence Products. This investigation revealed no evidence of politicization (roughly “write this analysis this way to support this political assertion”) 467 by anyone in the I&A chain of command or DHS Secretary’s office. However, Mr. Murphy did make other attempts to controvert the collection-analysis process. Particularly illuminative was the promulgation of the term “Violent Antifa Anarchists Inspired” (VAAI).

      As discussed by several intelligence analysts, to understand the genesis for VAAl, one must take the events of the summer into context. In many conversations, Mr. Murphy stated that the violent protesters in Portland were connected to or motivated by ANTIFA. This may have made sense to Mr. Murphy based on his own beliefs, but 1&A did not have collections (evidence) to show it and absent reporting or some other evidence on motivation, 1&A analysts could not ascribe motivation to the violent actors as Mr. Murphy expected. Mr. Murphy would tell the analysts to cite to existing OSIRs as evidence of the motivation, but the OSIRs did not draw a connection to ANTIFA. For weeks, the analysts had been telling Mr. Murphy that because ANTIF A was not in the collection, it could not be put into the analysis. Notwithstanding this feedback from the I&A analysts, on July 25, 2020, Mr. Murphy sent an email to his senior leadership instructing them that henceforth, the violent opportunists in Portland were to be reported as VAAI, unless the intel "show[ed] … something different."468 The analysts stated that “if you lived through the process, you could see where this VAAI definition was coming from a mile away. He got tired of the analysts telling him they did not have the reporting and he was convinced it was ANTIFA so he was going to fix the problem by changing what the collectors were reporting.”

      This is a pretty big fucking deal considering how much the GOP was crying about ANTIFA.

      • ArbitraryValue@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        228·
        2 months ago

        I’m not saying that this was no big deal, but I stand by my assertion that this was not “manufacturing fake terrorists”. First, Antifa (the idea of it, not the dubious reality) does not match the common definition of “terrorists”. Second, the word “manufacture” in this context implies a deliberate intent to deceive the public which may have been present in the mind of the person ordering this investigation (or maybe he was simply deluding himself) but clearly wasn’t present throughout Homeland Security, where the analysts investigated as they were ordered to but truthfully reported their (lack of) findings.

        • EleventhHour@lemmy.world
          251·
          2 months ago

          I’m see that the LHC is now being put to use in splitting hairs down to the quantum level.

          Apparently, there’s no space between for your humility.