Just 19 minutes before he went into a Walmart store in the mainly Hispanic city of El Paso and gunned down 22 people, Patrick Wood Crusius was alleged to have posted his four-page manifesto of hate on the controversial 8chan website.
The document outlined Crusius’s white supremacist beliefs and said he was planning an attack.
The notice appeared along with a letter from a college that included Crusius’s name.
This is not the first time the controversial forum has served as a platform for the violent ramblings and murder plans of rightwing extremists. Before the Christchurch Mosque and the Chabad of Poway Synagogue, California shootings earlier this year, the perpetrators posted their own manifestos on the website.
Although these attackers come across as lone wolves, many of them discussed their extremist views on 8Chan beforehand and by the time law enforcement acts, often it is too late.
Here are five things you may not know about the site:
The site is funded by a pig farmer based in the Philippines
On Tuesday, the site’s owner, Jim Watkins, was asked to testify before Congress in the wake of the El Paso shootings, but is yet to publicly respond. Earlier that day, he posted a video on YouTube defending the website as “a peacefully assembled group of people talking”.
Mr Watkins is a US army veteran, who now runs a pig farm in the Philippines. He has also made money building websites, including a pornographic site aimed at evading Japanese censorship laws.
The founder of 8chan, Fredrick Brennan, is no longer associated with the site and distances himself from it.
In an interview with Wired magazine in April, less than a month after the Christchurch mosque attacks, Mr Brennan said: "Since the time I resigned, I sometimes wonder whether creating 8chan was a good thing. I sometimes wonder about the things that I said in the past while I was being its admin.
“Sometimes I think I should have been harder on violent threats. I think maybe I should have worked much harder to improve the moderation systems.”
As well the far-right, 8chan has forums that attract the far-left
The site’s most infamous message board, known as “/pol/”, attracts far right groups, such as neo-Nazis and self-described fascists. Many of these came to 8chan after an exodus from the 4chan website following Gamergate, a controversial movement involving the video gaming community, which led to a torrent of misogynistic abuse and people in the industry losing their jobs.
8chan’s “/leftypol/” forum attracts characters from the radical left, supporters of communism, Marxism, anarchism and the board’s moderator is known for Stalinist views.
The website can’t be found on Google
It was kicked off the search engine in 2015. Users now mainly access it via the Tor browser through the deep web.
8chan was dropped from the search engine partly because it is easy to access malicious content on the site as it doesn’t require users to log in at all to post.
When he launched the site, Mr Brennan found other forums too restrictive and so chose a ‘free-for-all’ approach to promote free speech. The expansion and openness of the website saw it play host to some of the darkest characters on the internet, including extremists, paedophiles and trolls.
8chan has been reported to the FBI multiple times, but until recently, the website wasn’t seen as a threat
In April, the FBI filed a warrant to search 8chan’s Nevada office seeking information on the Chabad of Poway synagogue shooter, who had posted on the forum before the attack.
Mr Watkins said on Wednesday that he was working with the FBI “within minutes” of the three recent shootings linked to 8chan.
It has a forum dedicated to a racist plot to colonise Namibia
8chan users on that forum believe Namibia is a wild lawless space that they can colonise as white supremacists to promote alleged “values” of National Socialism.
They have been looking to raise funds towards their cause under the guise of a charity.
Forced Deportations
While the Lebanese government has deported a number of refugees back to Syria since 2011, the latest round is the first en-mass campaign of its kind, say the Access Center for Human Rights, a non-governmental organization which monitors the conditions of Syrian refugees in Lebanon.
“In the past, the Lebanese General Security was responsible for the forced deportation operations of refugees, after forcing them to sign papers stating that they wished to return to Syria of their own free will. Now, the Lebanese army, specifically military intelligence, is responsible for the security operation,” said Mohammad Hasan, head of ACHR.
In just the first four months of 2023 the number of forced deportations is nearly double that of the entirety of 2022.
Since the beginning of 2023, ACHR has reported 407 forced deportations – 200 of which occurred in April alone.
In comparison, just 154 people were forcfully deported in 2022.
Violence
Instances of violence against Syrian refugees are not uncommon.
Just last month, security camera footage of men violently attacking and stabbing an employee at a mini-market went viral. The store’s employees had engaged in a verbal altercation with the men who had come to enforce an order to shutter shops, following the announcement of a municipal curfew for Syrian refugees.
“They thought they were Syrian,” said the mayor of the Nahr el Bared municipality, Charbel Bou Raad, of the attackers.
It later emerged the beaten employees were Lebanese. But the video was an exemplary instance of violence at a time when anti-Syrian rhetoric is particularly heated as Lebanese politicians call for the return of Syrian refugees to Syria.
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Countries have been coming up with ways to restrict and monitor the use of non-commercial drones to keep them from trespassing on controlled areas such as airports.
"Drones vary in size and some can be as big as a small city car - so imagine the impact of one hitting an airplane. It's a huge risk, especially when commercial airliners are not designed to make or take sudden evasive manoeuvres like drones can" says Saj Ahmed, chief analyst at London-based StrategicAero Research.
New measures have now been taken to monitor drone activity, Geo-fencing technology is one.
It's a method designed to prevent drones from drifting into banned areas. The technology uses GPS location signals to stop its machines flying close to airports and other restricted zones.
The European commission has recently announced a blueprint to make drone use in low-level airspace safe, secure and environmentally friendly. This process is called “U-Space” – it covers altitudes of up to 150 metres. It is also noteworthy that that UK Civil Aviation Authority recommends drones to be flown at no higher than 400ft. “U-Space” technology will be governed by a system similar to air traffic control management, which will be automated using tools like geo-fencing.
The UAE has drawn serious measures to ensure users register their devices under strict new laws. Authorities have urged that users must obtain approval in advance before flying the drones, non registered drone use in Dubai will result in a fine of up to twenty thousand dirhams under a new resolution approved by Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed, Crown Prince of Dubai.
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