The Alt-Right and Antifa Are Waging a New Kind of Internet Warfare Jacob Siegel, Vice Aug 30 2017, 8:25am Intelligence and surveillance powers that once belonged only to militaries and state spooks are now available to anyone with a high-speed internet connection. Live long enough and you may hear future historians recall the war between 4chan and an art collective called LaBeouf, Rönkkö & Turner. They'll tell the story of how anonymous, interconnected imageboard users gathered clues from public video footage, like passing aircraft and the position of stars, to geolocate the roving, anti-Trump art project He Will Not Divide Us, put on by actor Shia LaBeouf and his collaborators. Records will show that the people on the group's trail—pro-Trump activists, impish saboteurs, and budding neo-Nazis—didn't need high-end spy gear. Instead, they found their mark by collecting and processing public information through decentralized and supposedly leaderless networks. It might one day look, in retrospect, like a form of social automation: continuously updating intelligence assessments converted into real-world effect by volunteer foot "soldiers" acting without orders. Or maybe the saga will be remembered as a trial run of sorts, when tactics later used in domestic guerilla warfare first appeared as sinister pranks. Whatever happens next, the genie is out of the bottle, and intelligence and surveillance capabilities that once belonged only to militaries and state spooks are now available to anyone with a high-speed internet connection. Military theorist and futurist John Robb, who wrote the influential 2008 book Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization, developed the concept of "open-source insurgency" to describe emerging forms of conflict. You can see a version of it at work in the current season of political upheaval and clashes in American cities. Of course, it's violence in the streets that captures most of the attention, especially after a car plowed into a crowd amid the neo-Nazi spectacle in Charlottesville, killing counter-protester Heather Heyer and injuring many more. But in the background, much of the fighting is being done online. Memes, trolls, bans, doxes, sock puppets, and targeted disruption campaigns like the one used against LaBeouf, Rönkkö & Turner are being deployed in a cycle of attacks and counterattacks that, much like traditional military intelligence and information operations, set conditions for the next round of physical confrontation. The foundation of open-source insurgency is what Robb calls "superempowerment": "an increase in the ability of individuals and small groups to accomplish tasks/work through the combination of rapid improvements in technological tools and access to global networks." That increase, Robb argues, "has enabled small groups to radically increase their productivity in conflict." It's a concept that helps make sense of the seemingly outsized cultural clout of the alt-right, a movement built on beliefs that fail to attract more than fringe support in national surveys... In full with links: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/7xxmad/the-alt-right-and-antifa-are-wagin...