Em 11 de agosto, Adam Bies entrou em sua conta no Gab e começou a digitar:
"Eu sinceramente acredito que se você trabalha para o FBI, então você merece MORRER."

Bies, 46, era um aspirante a fotógrafo freelancer que encheu seu site com fotos de carros velozes e esportes ao ar livre. Ele havia sido demitido de seu emprego diário em marketing por recusar a vacina COVID-19, escreveu ele on-line, e lutou em seus esforços para registrar um pedido de desemprego.

Como os promotores federais descreveriam mais tarde em documentos judiciais, Bies estava preenchendo seus dias postando sob um pseudônimo no Gab, um serviço de mídia social popular entre os extremistas de direita.

Sua postagem incluiu um link para uma matéria da Fox News sobre o diretor do FBI, Christopher Wray, denunciando a onda de ameaças violentas dirigidas à agência nos três dias desde a busca na casa e no clube Mar-a-Lago do ex-presidente Donald Trump. Ele comparou os agentes federais às forças nazistas. Ele se irritou com a "escória do estado policial". E ele compôs o que poderia ter sido visto como um plano final.

"Já sei que vou morrer nas mãos desses... canalhas da lei", escreveu ele, intercalado com palavrões. "Meu único objetivo é matar mais deles antes de cair."

Quatro dias depois, com mandado em mãos, agentes federais armados e equipes da SWAT cercaram a casa de Bies, perto de uma cachoeira na região de caça de floresta profunda do oeste da Pensilvânia. Dentro da casa estavam Bies e seu filho de 12 anos. Estava escuro, quase meia-noite.

Os policiais ligaram para Bies em seu celular, uma e outra vez, 16 vezes ao todo. Eles deram ordens através de um alto-falante para se render.

Finalmente, Bies emergiu, carregando um fuzil de assalto. Os policiais ordenaram que ele largasse a arma.

Nesses quatro dias entre as postagens ameaçadoras de Bies e o momento em que enfrentou agentes armados, ele foi apanhado por uma prática complexa e pouco conhecida dentro do FBI chamada exploração de mídia social, ou SOMEX – uma que pode, neste momento, monitorar as atividades online de qualquer pessoa nos Estados Unidos.

Os principais líderes do FBI tentaram minimizar até que ponto os agentes podem monitorar legalmente as atividades públicas online de pessoas que não estão sob investigação. Mas, na realidade, a agência pode realizar monitoramento quase ilimitado de mídias sociais voltadas para o público, desde que o faça para fins de aplicação da lei, disseram funcionários do FBI ao U.S. TODAY.

Especialistas dizem que isso dá ao FBI mais poder do que ele está disposto a reconhecer publicamente – poder que a agência e outros especialistas em segurança dizem que têm a responsabilidade de usar para prevenir o terrorismo.

Mas os críticos dizem que a exploração da mídia social também significa que os agentes podem revisar as postagens on-line à vontade, sem supervisão, mas com vastas autoridades.

"Os funcionários do FBI divulgaram muitas informações erradas sobre o alcance de suas autoridades", disse Michael German, ex-agente especial do FBI e membro do Centro Brennan de Justiça da Universidade de Nova York. "O FBI tem poderes tremendos para investigar muito antes que haja um predicado criminal razoável."

SOMEX, envolve agentes que desenvolvem suas próprias pistas e recebem informações de uma rede de contratados e colaboradores, como um grupo de pesquisa de terrorismo que primeiro sinalizou as postagens de Bies.

Mas a agência foi criticada pela forma como seus investigadores reagiram – como no caso de postagens online feitas por ativistas liberais durante os protestos do Black Lives Matter de 2020 – e como eles não reagiram – como no acúmulo de direita para a insurreição de 6 de janeiro.

O FBI há muito está sob escrutínio por exagero na criação de arquivos sobre figuras públicas e outros, mesmo que não estivessem sob investigação criminal. E alguns especialistas dizem que a agência tem um histórico de se concentrar em grupos de esquerda, como ambientalistas e ativistas da justiça racial, enquanto ignora ameaças de supremacistas brancos e outros da direita. Eles dizem que essa tendência se estende para a era digital.

E registros internos obtidos por um grupo de defesa parecem mostrar agentes em pesquisas cibernéticas com foco específico em comícios contra a polícia e justiça racial, em vez de contramanifestantes armados ou supremacistas brancos.

"O problema com a vigilância de mídia social é muitas vezes o problema com o policiamento em geral, que é que a polícia não pode prever o crime, tudo o que pode fazer é avaliar que tipo de pessoa tem mais probabilidade de cometer crimes e colocar esse grupo sob vigilância. ”, disse Matthew Guariglia, analista de políticas da Electronic Frontier Foundation. Essa "reação instintiva", disse Guariglia, acaba significando mais vigilância e assédio de pessoas de cor e grupos marginalizados.

Mas como a indignação com Mar-a-Lago agora estimula ameaças de extremistas de direita a níveis históricos, questões de longa data sobre como o FBI realmente monitora os americanos online encontram uma nova reviravolta:o que acontece quando as pessoas ameaçadas são os próprios agentes do FBI?

O FBI tem uma latitude mais ampla do que muitos imaginam

Em junho do ano passado, em uma audiência do Comitê de Supervisão e Reforma da Câmara, a congressista de Nova York Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez questionou Wray sobre o fracasso do FBI em prever o caos da insurreição de 6 de janeiro.

"Agora sabemos que os ataques foram planejados abertamente em plataformas populares de mídia social", disse Ocasio-Cortez. "O FBI inclui regularmente o monitoramento de mídia social como parte de seus esforços para combater o extremismo violento?"

A resposta de Wray foi enfática:

"Temos políticas muito específicas que estão no departamento há muito tempo que governam nossa capacidade de usar as mídias sociais. E quando temos um propósito autorizado e uma predicação adequada, há muitas coisas que podemos fazer nas mídias sociais", disse Wray. . “Mas o que não podemos fazer nas mídias sociais é sem a devida predicação e um propósito autorizado, apenas monitorar”.

Meses antes, a ex-diretora-assistente executiva de segurança nacional do FBI, Jill Sanborn, deu uma explicação semelhante ao Comitê de Segurança Interna e Assuntos Governamentais do Senado. "Não podemos coletar atividades protegidas pela Primeira Emenda sem o próximo passo, que é a intenção", disse ela.

O senador Kyrsten Sinema continuou, perguntando:"Então o FBI não monitora as conversas de mídia social publicamente disponíveis?"

"Correto, senhora. Não está dentro de nossas autoridades", respondeu Sanborn.

As próprias regras do FBI dizem o contrário.

Funcionários do FBI disseram ao U.S. TODAY que a declaração de Wray estava correta, embora reconhecendo que um “propósito autorizado” significa simplesmente fazer qualquer coisa de acordo com os deveres de um agente do FBI.

Esse "propósito autorizado" é, na verdade, extraordinariamente amplo. A política proibiria os agentes de olhar as mídias sociais para, por exemplo, manter o controle sobre um parceiro romântico ou monitorar algum outro uso não policial. Mas permitiria que um agente analisasse essencialmente qualquer coisa online, de forma proativa, se a intenção fosse impedir um crime ou manter os americanos seguros. Um funcionário do FBI chamou isso de "penumbra da segurança nacional, aplicação da lei federal ou inteligência estrangeira".

German, membro do Programa de Liberdade e Segurança Nacional do Centro Brennan, argumentou em um relatório recente que agentes individuais do FBI têm uma liberdade extraordinária para examinar postagens de mídia social voltadas para o público sem solicitar autorização prévia de seus superiores ou mesmo manter um registro oficial de Suas ações.

As regras do FBI, estabelecidas em seu manual e diretrizes do procurador-geral periodicamente atualizadas, permitem que os agentes realizem "pré-avaliações" de possíveis ameaças, disse German. Those pre-assessments can be conducted "without any factual basis to suspect wrongdoing," German writes in his report.

He and several other experts agree that the FBI certainly can, then, proactively monitor Americans' social media for signs of unrest, dissent or violence that might lead to criminal activity.

FBI officials told U.S. TODAY this is correct. There's no need for "proper predication," or evidence of a crime, when conducting a pre-assessment of a subject.

German's analysis of the rules was echoed by Brian Murphy, a former top FBI official who helped pioneer the FBI's social media exploitation efforts.

He cited Sanborn's statements, telling U.S. TODAY, "I just think that she was wrong." He said the agency has a risk-averse culture that prevents agents and managers from taking the steps necessary to fully protect Americans.

Sanborn, who is no longer at the FBI, did not respond to messages seeking comment. An FBI spokesperson said Sanborn's comments referred specifically to "conversations" on social media and not to public-facing posts by individuals.

While the bureau describes its authorities carefully, its agents—and third party contractors—can track critics of the government like Adam Bies, watching until their online rantings cross a line into outright threats.

Then the FBI can act.

What SOMEX really looks for

The FBI's SOMEX team, which sits within the agency's National Threat Operations Center in Clarksburg, West Virginia, receives and investigates tips on imminent social media threats from concerned citizens, other law enforcement agencies, independent monitoring organizations and others.

But the effort involves more than just acting as a catcher's mitt for incoming tips. It also develops its own social media intelligence.

Documents obtained by the open-government group Property of the People (and first reported by Rolling Stone) give insight into the broader social media monitoring role SOMEX plays inside the FBI. The documents detail reports from the team to federal and local law enforcement in the Seattle area during the civil unrest that unfolded in the wake of the murder of George Floyd.

"While overnight social media activity was very light, the SOMEX team did find some tweeting by individuals stating they would monitor police radio activity," reads a typical extract from the documents, taken from a June 2, 2020 situation report emailed to dozens of FBI agents.

"The FBI aggressively scours social media for information related to topics of Bureau interest," said Ryan Shapiro, executive director and co-founder of the nonprofit group, which provided U.S. TODAY with hundreds of pages of documents about the FBI's social media monitoring that it acquired through open records requests. "This routinely includes surveillance of Americans who are not the subject of an investigation or even suspected of committing a crime."

In a statement, the FBI said that SOMEX was created to assist in identifying "unknown subject, victim, or location information" when there's a threat to life by using publicly available information. The team then forwards information to the appropriate agency for further investigation and appropriate action.

FBI officials told U.S. TODAY that agents are not allowed to use specific SOMEX tools without additional training in privacy and civil liberties protections. Those tools include commercial software the FBI purchases to use in-house. The FBI also works with third-party contractors for social media analysis, the officials said.

One contractor is the private intelligence firm the Hetherington Group, which has trained law enforcement and the military on conducting online investigations.

Cynthia Hetherington, the firm's founder and president, said the company identifies "actionable intelligence" that can be used to protect life or someone's reputation by helping those it trains learn how to hyperfocus and efficiently identify a key collection of terms that demonstrate legitimate threats, such as "kill," "die," "shoot," "fire," "bomb," "rob."

"Individuals should be allowed to say what they want to say on the internet, but should also understand that it's open source and the parties concerned will trace it back" to them, Hetherington said.

Another way of saying that, said Shapiro, who holds a doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology focusing on government surveillance, is that the FBI can, and is, monitoring practically whoever it wants, whenever it wants.

"The FBI is almost entirely unhindered in its ability to monitor American social media postings," Shapiro said, "So when the FBI reported to Congress that it was unable to do so—I mean, that is a bald-faced lie. That's what the bureau does. They lie."

As the FBI becomes more interested in specific posts, the bureau can also ramp up its monitoring in more "intrusive" ways, FBI officials said. With additional internal approvals, FBI agents can access not just public-facing social media, but also private groups and chat rooms.

Even when accessing this more private information, the FBI's internal checks don't protect Americans' civil liberties, several experts told U.S. TODAY.

The FBI has a long and troubled history of focusing on groups on the left of the political spectrum while largely turning a blind eye to domestic extremists on the far-right, said Guariglia, who holds a doctorate in the history of police surveillance.

"Both historically speaking, and in current events, we've seen the amount of surveillance that has been marshaled specifically against groups fighting for racial justice increased exponentially than from what we've seen being monitored on the right," Guariglia said.

The FBI pushed back on this assessment. "The FBI aggressively investigates threats posed by domestic violent extremists," a bureau spokesperson wrote in a statement. "We do not investigate ideology and we do not investigate particular cases based on the political views of the individuals involved."

Are there enough resources to do the work?

The FBI isn't the only law enforcement agency doing social media exploitation.

The bureau's SOMEX team is part of a constellation of social media analysis that has occurred across the national security apparatus over the few years. The Department of Homeland Security has its own SOMEX team plus social media analysts at dozens of "fusion centers" across the U.S. sharing intelligence with local, state and federal law enforcement, said Mike Sena, executive director of one of those fusion centers, the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center.

The FBI also works to train and assist local police departments in their social media exploitation efforts, a tactic that came to light earlier this year in a report by the Intercept, which detailed how the bureau provided the Chicago Police Department with fake social media accounts to investigate demonstrators outraged at the Floyd murder by police officers in 2020.

The San Bernardino terrorist attack in 2015 turned out to be a "proof of concept" on the efficacy of social media analysis, Hetherington said, when reporting from Facebook to a fusion center social media analyst helped the FBI quickly identify the people involved.

But using social media analysis to identify future crimes, rather than research past ones, is a broader net. That federal effort to prevent crimes is still small given the scale of the internet, Sena said.

"Most people would be shocked in America," Sena said. "There's a small number of folks trying to deal with these threats that are huge."

Sena and Hetherington told U.S. TODAY that after the ACLU of California publicized law enforcement's use of commercial software to "monitor activists and protesters" in 2016, many companies stopped selling their software to law enforcement or minimized their capacity to use it to track online activity.

As a result, Sena said, "our people are manually doing things, they're doing the work, but they're having to work 10 times as hard as they used to."

That's why agencies plan to bring their teams together, at least virtually, to break up siloes and avoid duplication, Sena said. One byproduct of this effort, he said, will be fewer blindspots or gaps that can be used to accuse law enforcement of bias.

"Even if you're being proactive, it's basically walking with a teaspoon at a river and trying to put that in a bucket," Sena said. "We're not getting everything, but it's better than nothing."

But German argues in his report that the majority of social media exploitation work is actually counterproductive. The sheer volume of tips generated by contractors and the FBI's own analysts results in an "information overload," German writes.

"Obviously, the multiple forms of social media monitoring that the FBI and other law enforcement agencies conducted prior to January 6 was not helpful in preparing for the attack," the report states. "Yet after the Capitol insurrection, the FBI invested an additional $27 million into social media monitoring software, effectively doubling down on a failed methodology."

Ongoing investment in social media exploitation

Those efforts continue even in the weeks since the Mar-a-Lago search and backlash.

Three days after the FBI executed its Aug. 8 search warrant on Mar-a-Lago and was inundated by right-wing threats, Ricky Shiffer, a 42-year-old Navy veteran, walked into the FBI office in Cincinnati armed with a nail gun and an AR-15 rifle.

As U.S. TODAY reported, Shiffer had spent the last nine days of his life ranting on Truth Social, the social media company founded by Trump. His hundreds of posts included explicit threats against the federal government including "Kill F.B.I. on sight."

When his attack failed, Shiffer fled north along rural highways and into a standoff where was ultimately shot and killed.

The FBI said in a statement that it had been informed of Shiffer but that "the information did not contain a specific and credible threat."

Wray told the agency in a message the day after that attack that the FBI's security division would be adjusting its "security posture accordingly."

A $32,400 contract approved Monday—after discussion that started weeks before the search of Mar-a-Lago, Hetherington said—notes that the agency will hire the Hetherington Group to train its agents on SOMEX later this month.

According to a document the bureau filed to justify making the purchase without opening it up to bidding, "it is an immediate need to expand and broaden the social media knowledge for the NTOS SOMEX team." The FBI wrote that the training can provide it with expertise in the "forces and factors that lead to the radicalization of terrorism specifically white supremacy extremism."

That document was filed Aug. 11, the same day Shiffer carried a nail gun into an FBI office, then fled into the Ohio cornfields.

It was also the same day Adam Bies was logging post after post on Gab.

'Why don't you send them my threats'

As Bies tapped out his messages, he wasn't just speaking to his 1,600 followers. According to court documents, he also deliberately tagged Gab founder Andrew Torba in his posts, goading him to report Bies to the federal government.

"Why don't you send them my threats so that they'd at least have something credible to show on Fox News," Bies wrote in the post. "Just scrub my timeline for the posts you didn't delete after you threatened to ban me."

Also watching Bies' posts was a third-party media monitoring and analysis firm, the Middle East Media Research Institute. MEMRI cut its teeth monitoring Middle Eastern media for English-speaking audiences, but over the last three years has expanded to real-time social media monitoring, specifically for threats from white supremacists and other homegrown extremists.

"We're consistently in communication with (law enforcement and government) agencies at the local, state and national level, and providing" them with actionable intelligence, said Simon Purdue, director of MEMRI's Domestic Terror Threat Monitor team. "Having people like us helps speed things along."

MEMRI alerted the FBI, according to a later criminal complaint. The FBI contacted Gab, who handed over Bies' subscriber information and Internet Protocol logs for his computer connection. Soon, agents were outside his Mercer County home.

After a 30 or 40 minute stand-off at his home, Bies eventually emerged carrying an assault rifle, an FBI agent testified in court. Agents told him several times to drop the weapon, which he eventually did.

Had he not done so, the agent testified, according to local media reports, "It would have ended differently."

Bies' son left the house safely. Inside the home, agents found 12 other guns and a compound bow. Bies was taken into custody and charged under a law that covers making threats against a federal law enforcement officer.

He has pleaded not guilty and is being held awaiting trial. + Explorar mais

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