Police Target Random People Who Signed Anti-Trump Petition

According to an article on Raw Story (August 30, 2018) police pulled fake ‘Antifa’ lists from a neo-Nazi web-site and used it to target random people who’d signed an anti-Trump petition.

Harvard Law School Lecturer Thomas Frampton is suing the Louisiana State Police (LSP) on behalf of a civil rights lawyer who discovered a list titled “full list of antifa.docx” that bore a striking resemblance to a hoax roster circulated on the neo-Nazi Stormfront website.

In May, New Orleans-based attorney William Most filed a request for public records on all LSP emails “containing hate speech and racist catchphrases,” the report noted, including the “white genocide” conspiracy theory.

The LSP delayed for months, issued an initial denial of the request and then finally released a cache of 64 emails — one of which contained a file named “full list of antifa” as an attachment. According to the suit, the document was circulated among high-ranking officials in the state police and was also given to local law enforcement groups.

Most requested a copy of the email — but was told by the LSP that “releasing the document could ‘compromise’ an ongoing criminal investigation in which LSP anticipates arrests, and reveal the identity of its ‘Confidential Informant,'” the report noted.

Frampton alleges in the lawsuit that the document originated on the conspiracy theory-oriented 8chan message board before being spread on Stormfront and other white supremacist sites.

Rather than containing an actual list of anti-fascist organizers, the lawsuit alleges that the roster “contains the names of thousands of ordinary, law-abiding citizens who signed an online petition against President Trump.”
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This type of thing happens all too frequently. Many police departments and other government agencies conduct open source intelligence (OSINT), collecting and distributing information obtained from public / semi-public web-sites.

A person conducting OSINT sees something on-line and distributes it to a mailing list as part of a daily / weekly bulletin. Often the distributed information does not have a working link to the original source of the information. Those that receive the information (like a fake Antifa list) now re-distribute it and credit the source as the police department / government agency from which they received it - thereby giving credibility to completely inaccurate and fake information.

In the absolute worst cases departments and agencies will send out information "posted and reported as found" with no sourcing or analysis whatsoever.

If you receive information that you intend to rely on for official purposes, ensure that you know the original source of that information.

It’s not just what you know, but how you know it.

Check your sources and validate your data.

By its very nature intelligence is imperfect (i.e., everything cannot be known, analysis is vulnerable to deception, and information is open to alternative interpretations). Credible sources and validated data create accurate intelligence. Poor premises and accepting information as found results in inaccurate conclusions.