by: Mark Pitcavage April 13, 2016   In the popular imagination, the bomb is the weapon typically associated with terrorists or extremists—but in the U.S. extremists seem to be killing more people with firearms than with any other weapon, and that use may be increasing. It is certainly true that many of the high-profile terrorist attacks in the United States over the past century have been bombings, including the 1919 anarchist bombing campaign, the 1963 16th Street…

March 28, 2016 Updated: July 05, 2017 Andrew Auernheimer (aka Weev) is doing his best to escalate the increasingly fraught battle between CNN and the anonymous Reddit poster who created a video clip of President Trump wrestling "CNN" to the ground. Auernheimer threatened CNN on the Daily Stormer, the neo-Nazi website, giving the network one week to fulfill a range of demands, including firing everyone involved in the Reddit story, creating a college scholarship for the Reddit poster, and…

by: Marilyn Mayo March 25, 2016 Update — 3/28/16: Hacker Andrew Auern­heimer has claimed credit for exploit­ing net­work print­ers at these col­leges to print these flyers. More information available here. On Thursday, March 24, a number of campuses around the country received an anti-Semitic flyer that blamed Jews for destroying the country “through mass immigration and degeneracy.” The flyer asks people to “join us in the struggle for global…

by: Oren Segal March 25, 2016 It’s tough being born as a teenager. Yesterday, Microsoft launched its new artificial intelligence (AI) computer bot - named Tay and envisioned as a teenage girl – and she had a very rough first day.  She was immediately besieged by excited techies, the curious and the haters. In a few hours, she was drawn into tens of thousands of exchanges. In the process, racists, anti-Semites, misogynists and other haters manipulated her into repeating…

by: Mark Pitcavage March 21, 2016 Federal prosecutors in Portland, Oregon, obtained a 19-count grand jury indictment in mid-March against Winston Shrout, a Hillsboro, Oregon, resident and one of the most prominent sovereign citizen gurus in the United States, a man whose videos and seminars have attracted thousands of people to the anti-government extremist movement. Shrout was charged with 13 counts of using fictitious financial instruments in connection with an alleged debt elimination…

by: Oren Segal March 07, 2016 On March 12, the Anti-Defamation League will play a key role at the first South by Southwest (SXSW) Online Harassment Summit.  In a series of panels at this day-long event, the Summit will focus attention on various manifestations of hate online, including everything from cyberbullying to the sale of offensive merchandise to hate speech on social media to online extremist recruitment and propaganda.  The overarching goal will be to identify the most…

by: Mark Pitcavage March 04, 2016 Updated March 22, 2016, to reflect additional charges and defendants. In early March, federal prosecutors in Las Vegas announced charges against 14 anti-government extremists from a variety of states in connection with a 2014 armed standoff between the federal government and supporters of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy at Bundy’s ranch.  Prosecutors added additional defendants later in the month.  As of March 22, 19 people have been indicted…