White nationalist writer’s knowledge uncovered in Amazon cloud leak | far proper

Knowledge leaked from the web site of a white nationalist writer embrace recordings, printed and unpublished paperwork, and recordings of hitherto personal interviews that make clear the way in which the group promotes its ideology on-line.

Inside knowledge from Counter-Currents, a publishing home co-founded and run by notoriously secretive far-right ideologues Greg Johnsonwas revealed in an Amazon cloud storage container that was unlocked on the open web.

Heidi Beirich, chief technique officer and co-founder of the World Undertaking Towards Hate and Extremism, advised the Guardian in a phone dialog on Friday: “Countercurrent has lengthy been a number one white nationalist publishing home and web site in the USA. “

In keeping with internet visitors metrics on Similarweb, the Counter-Currents web site attracted greater than half one million distinctive guests final month.

Bierch added that Johnson had developed sturdy connections with worldwide far-right actions, and that Countercurrent was “one of many locations the place you first began to see reprints from far-right publishing homes in Europe,” and “pre-pandemic”. , Greg Johnson. He was on the circuit, talking at white nationalist occasions throughout Europe.

In November 2019, Johnson was arrested Upon arrival in Norway and for talking on the far-right Scinza Discussion board in Oslo, he was deported.

Largely incorporates archives, plugins and configuration recordsdata for the leaked True Counter-Present web site. A lot of the content material within the cache consists of photographs, audio recordsdata, and paperwork at present printed On the Counter-Currents web site. Included recordsdata embrace audio recordsdata from Countercurrent Radio podcasts, PDF paperwork of Far Proper books that the group has shared with readers, and picture recordsdata.

The Guardian emailed Counter-Present for Johnson’s remark however didn’t obtain a reply.

Nevertheless, among the materials within the cache has by no means been printed.

One such file is a recording of a 2017 interview between Michael Polignano, an American journalist and co-founder of Counter-Currents, who Billed Because the “managing editor and webmaster” of Counter-Currents within the web site’s early days, and who has lived within the Hungarian capital of Budapest since 2014.

Within the interview, Polignano argued that he was “a member of the Nationwide Alliance and a follower of William Pierce”, and “a part of this entire anti-Semitic proper, the place you see the Jews as this alien race … lower than human and in equity. form of beings completely different from humanity”.

Pierce based the neo-Nazi Nationwide Alliance in 1974 and led it till his demise in 2002. He additionally wrote the race battle novel, The Turner Diaries, which impressed assassination teams together with the Order and Oklahoma Metropolis bomber Timothy McVeigh. Southern Poverty Regulation Heart, which He explains Because the “hardest anti-Semitism” of the neo-Nazi motion.

On August 15, 2022, Polignano posted on Fb himself visiting Paris in 2000 at his house in Hillsboro, West Virginia, with the caption: “Laborious to imagine it was 22 years in the past.” In different current posts, Polignano shared pictures of himself in Budapest with far-right figures together with Jason Kessler, organizer of the 2017 “Unite the Proper: Rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.” Band screwdriver.

Regardless of his long-term involvement in anti-Semitic politics, Polignano made detailed claims in a 2017 recording a couple of sexual relationship he had with a girl who was “a left-wing secular, atheist Jew” earlier than leaving the USA and himself. Was in a “polyamorous relationship”. together with her husband.

The Guardian spoke to freelance journalist Carol Schaeffer to cross-reference metadata on the 2017 recording and to establish related clues within the recording as journalist Polignano.

Since 2017, Schäfer, who relies between New York and Berlin, has printed journalism Tracking and Monitoring European Far Right. He confirmed in a phone dialog that the dialog befell on January 2, 2017 in Budapest, the capital of Hungary.

Schaefer advised the Guardian that he “did not find yourself utilizing something” from the “a number of interviews” with Polignano as he thought his solutions have been half efficiency.

“He wished to current himself as a fancy character and I feel he wished to current his antisemitism as one thing that was emotionally earned, or that he thought of rather a lot,” he mentioned. .

He said he shared a recording with Polignano on a whim but did not know how it ended up on the Countercurrent site. Metadata indicates that it was uploaded in December 2019.

Requests for comment on Polignano’s previously listed emails bounced, including one sent to a previously listed address at the Countercurrent domain. The Guardian asked Counter-Current for Polignano’s current contact details but did not receive a response.

In 2017, “Hungary was already providing a sympathetic home for people with white nationalist ideas,” extremism expert Berich said of Polignano’s ongoing residency in Hungary and the far-right fair in Hungary at the time. The Orbán government itself, because it is anti-immigrant, anti-LGBTQ, anti-refugee, and authoritarian, is very appealing to white nationalists.

Now, he added, “the Orbán regime is directly connected to the powerhouse, far-right actors in many countries, including the United States,” including “connections between the Trump people and the Orbán people”.

“In a way, all these connections that you’re talking about in Budapest seem like a predictable trend of that time period. CPAC HungaryBerich concluded, referring to the recent annual conference held by the US right-wing conservative Political Action Committee in Budapest.

The site includes other unpublished materials that appear to be manuscripts for published works, including one of the Microsoft Office Manuscripts for an anthology, The Alternative Right, that was published in Counter-Currents 2018.

The files also include recordings of speeches Northwest ForumAn invitation-only far-right gathering that Johnson convened in Seattle in 2016 featured prominent white nationalists as speakers, and limited new attendees. Strict inspection. The event’s website has been offline since 2020, according to Internet Archive records.

The Guardian reviewed the leaked data in a copy hosted on The Guardian grahat war The website collects and stores content in so-called buckets uploaded by website administrators to cloud storage providers, including Amazon, Google, Microsoft Azure and Digital Ocean.

The Guardian emailed GreatWarfare administrators for comment on the data but did not receive an immediate response.

Jim Salter is a system administrator, consultant, and co-host 2.5 Administrator The podcast. In a video call, Salter told the Guardian that the data was “mostly a backup of a WordPress site’s web services directory”, noting that sensitive PHP files are missing, and that it “means the absence of the content of written posts”. Therefore, third-party web scraping is not possible.

He added that the tech media’s focus on the issue of open storage buckets meant that “Amazon added a dashboard warning indicator whenever you had an open S3 bucket in 2017”, but that leaving the bucket open was still common. .

“People are naive about security,” Salter said.