El 11 de agosto, Adam Bies inició sesión en su cuenta en Gab y comenzó a escribir:

"Creo sinceramente que si trabajas para el FBI, entonces mereces MORIR".

Bies, de 46 años, era un aspirante a fotógrafo independiente que había llenado su sitio web con fotos de acción de autos veloces y deportes al aire libre. Lo habían despedido de su trabajo diario en marketing por rechazar la vacuna COVID-19, escribió en línea, y había tenido problemas para presentar un reclamo de desempleo.

Como los fiscales federales describirían más tarde en documentos judiciales, Bies pasaba sus días publicando bajo un seudónimo en Gab, un servicio de redes sociales popular entre los extremistas de derecha.

Su publicación incluía un enlace a una historia de Fox News sobre el director del FBI, Christopher Wray, denunciando la ola de amenazas violentas dirigidas a la agencia en los tres días desde el allanamiento de la casa y el club Mar-a-Lago del expresidente Donald Trump. Comparó a los agentes federales con las fuerzas nazis. Se enfureció por la "escoria del estado policial". Y compuso lo que podría haber sido visto como un plan final.

"Ya sé que voy a morir a manos de estos... cabrones de las fuerzas del orden", escribió, intercalado con blasfemias. "Mi único objetivo es matar a más de ellos antes de caer".

Cuatro días después, con una orden judicial en la mano, agentes federales armados y equipos SWAT rodearon la casa de Bies, cerca de una cascada en la zona de caza del bosque profundo del oeste de Pensilvania. Dentro de la casa estaban Bies y su hijo de 12 años. Estaba oscuro, cerca de la medianoche.

Los oficiales llamaron a Bies a su teléfono celular, una y otra vez, 16 veces en total. Dieron órdenes a través de un altavoz para que se rindieran.

Finalmente, salió Bies, portando un rifle de asalto. Los oficiales le ordenaron que dejara el arma.

En esos cuatro días entre las publicaciones amenazantes de Bies y el momento en que se enfrentó a agentes armados, se vio envuelto en una práctica compleja y poco conocida dentro del FBI llamada explotación de redes sociales, o SOMEX, una que podría, en este momento, monitorear las actividades en línea de cualquier persona en Estados Unidos.

Los principales líderes del FBI han tratado de restar importancia al grado en que los agentes pueden monitorear legalmente las actividades públicas en línea de personas que no están bajo investigación. Pero en realidad, la oficina puede realizar un monitoreo casi ilimitado de las redes sociales públicas, siempre que lo haga con fines de aplicación de la ley, dijeron funcionarios del FBI a U.S. TODAY.

Los expertos dicen que eso le da al FBI más poder del que ha estado dispuesto a reconocer públicamente; poder que la oficina y otros expertos en seguridad dicen que tienen la responsabilidad de usar para prevenir el terrorismo.

Pero los críticos dicen que la explotación de las redes sociales también significa que los agentes pueden revisar las publicaciones en línea a voluntad, sin supervisión, pero con vastas autoridades.

"Los funcionarios del FBI han difundido mucha información errónea sobre el alcance de sus autoridades", dijo Michael German, ex agente especial del FBI y miembro del Centro Brennan para la Justicia de la Universidad de Nueva York. "El FBI tiene tremendos poderes para investigar mucho antes de que haya un predicado criminal razonable".

SOMEX involucra a agentes que desarrollan sus propias pistas y reciben información de una red de contratistas y colaboradores, como un grupo de investigación sobre terrorismo que primero marcó las publicaciones de Bies.

Pero la oficina ha sido criticada por cómo reaccionaron sus investigadores, como en el caso de las publicaciones en línea realizadas por activistas liberales durante las protestas de Black Lives Matter de 2020, y cómo no reaccionaron, como en la acumulación de la derecha para la insurrección del 6 de enero.

El FBI ha estado bajo escrutinio durante mucho tiempo por extralimitarse en la creación de archivos sobre figuras públicas y otros, incluso si no estaban bajo investigación criminal. Y algunos expertos dicen que la agencia tiene un historial de centrarse en grupos de tendencia izquierdista como ambientalistas y activistas por la justicia racial, mientras ignora las amenazas de los supremacistas blancos y otros de derecha. Dicen que esta tendencia se traslada a la era digital.

Y los registros internos obtenidos por un grupo de defensa parecen mostrar agentes en la investigación cibernética que se enfocan específicamente en manifestaciones contra la policía y la justicia racial en lugar de contramanifestantes armados o supremacistas blancos.

"El problema con la vigilancia de las redes sociales es a menudo el problema con la policía en general, que es que la policía no puede predecir el crimen, todo lo que puede hacer es evaluar qué tipo de persona es más probable que cometa un crimen y poner a ese grupo bajo vigilancia. ”, dijo Matthew Guariglia, analista de políticas de Electronic Frontier Foundation. Esa "reacción instintiva", dijo Guariglia, termina significando más vigilancia y acoso de personas de color y grupos marginados.

Pero a medida que la indignación por Mar-a-Lago ahora aumenta las amenazas de los extremistas de derecha a niveles históricos, las preguntas de larga data sobre cómo el FBI realmente monitorea a los estadounidenses en línea encuentran un nuevo giro:¿Qué sucede cuando las personas amenazadas son los mismos agentes del FBI?

FBI tiene una libertad más amplia de lo que muchos creen

En junio del año pasado, en una audiencia del Comité de Supervisión y Reforma de la Cámara de Representantes, la congresista de Nueva York Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez interrogó a Wray sobre la incapacidad del FBI para prever el caos de la insurrección del 6 de enero.

“Ahora sabemos que los ataques fueron planeados abiertamente en plataformas de redes sociales populares”, dijo Ocasio-Cortez. "¿El FBI incluye regularmente el monitoreo de las redes sociales como parte de sus esfuerzos para combatir el extremismo violento?"

La respuesta de Wray fue enfática:

"Tenemos políticas muy específicas que han estado en el departamento durante mucho tiempo que rigen nuestra capacidad para usar las redes sociales. Y cuando tenemos un propósito autorizado y una predicación adecuada, hay muchas cosas que podemos hacer en las redes sociales", dijo Wray. . "Pero lo que no podemos hacer en las redes sociales es sin la predicación adecuada y un propósito autorizado, solo monitorear".

Meses antes, la ex subdirectora ejecutiva de seguridad nacional del FBI, Jill Sanborn, dio una explicación similar al Comité Senatorial de Seguridad Nacional y Asuntos Gubernamentales. "No podemos recopilar actividades protegidas por la Primera Enmienda sin dar el siguiente paso, que es la intención", dijo.

La senadora Kyrsten Sinema siguió preguntando:"¿Entonces el FBI no monitorea las conversaciones de las redes sociales disponibles públicamente?"

"Correcto, señora. No está dentro de nuestras autoridades", respondió Sanborn.

Las propias reglas del FBI dicen lo contrario.

Funcionarios del FBI le dijeron a U.S. TODAY que la declaración de Wray era correcta, aunque reconocieron que un "propósito autorizado" significa simplemente hacer cualquier cosa de acuerdo con los deberes de un agente del FBI.

Ese "propósito autorizado" es en realidad extraordinariamente amplio. La política prohibiría a los agentes mirar las redes sociales para, por ejemplo, controlar a una pareja romántica o monitorear algún otro uso que no sea de aplicación de la ley. Pero permitiría a un agente mirar esencialmente cualquier cosa en línea, de manera proactiva, si la intención fuera detener un crimen o mantener seguros a los estadounidenses. Un funcionario del FBI calificó esto de caer dentro de la "penumbra de la seguridad nacional, la aplicación de la ley federal o la inteligencia extranjera".

German, a fellow with the Brennan Center's Liberty and National Security Program, argued in a recent report that individual FBI agents have extraordinary leeway to look through public-facing social media posts without seeking authorization from their superiors in advance or even keeping an official record of their actions.

The FBI rules, laid out in their handbook and periodically updated Attorney General's guidelines, allow agents to conduct "pre-assessments" of possible threats, German said. 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. + Explora más

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