The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Saints and Soldiers Inside Internet-Age Terrorism, From Syria to the Capitol Siege by Rita Katz

Episode Date: October 18, 2022

Saints and Soldiers Inside Internet-Age Terrorism, From Syria to the Capitol Siege by Rita Katz More than a decade ago, counterterrorism expert Rita Katz began browsing white supremacist and neo-Nazi forums. The hateful rhetoric and constant threats of violence immediately reminded her of the jihadist militants she spent her days monitoring, but law enforcement and policy makers barely paid attention to the Far Right. Now, years of attacks committed by extremists radicalized online―including mass murders at a synagogue in Pittsburgh and mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, as well as the Capitol siege―have brought home the danger. How has the internet shaped today’s threats, and what do the online origins of these movements reveal about how to stop them? In Saints and Soldiers, Katz reveals a new generation of terrorist movements that don’t just use the internet, but exist almost entirely on it. She provides a vivid view from the trenches, spanning edgy video game chat groups to what ISIS and Far-Right mass-shooters in El Paso, Orlando and elsewhere unwittingly reveal between the lines of their manifestos. Katz shows how the online cultures of these movements―far more than their ideologies and leaders―create today’s terrorists and shape how they commit “real world” violence. From ISIS to QAnon, Saints and Soldiers pinpoints the approaches needed for a new era in which arrests and military campaigns alone cannot stop these never-before-seen threats.

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Thanks for coming by today. I think I lost a breath there and choked on the mic there. But that's probably what most people listen to in my audience. We're like, we wish you'd choke on that mic. No, you don't. Anyway, guys, just another funny intro that we improv as we go along. Welcome to the show. What's going on with the voice today, Chris?

Welcome to the show. Share the show on with the voice today, Chris? Welcome to the show. Share the show with your family, friends, and relatives. Today, we have an amazing author on the show. She's the executive director and founder of Sight Intelligence Group, the world's leading non-governmental counterterrorism organization. We're talking about her in her latest book. But in the meantime, before the show, your family, friends, and relatives, remember, we're the family that loves you but doesn't judge you. You go to goodreads.com, 4chesschrisfoss, see all the authors and stuff we talked to over there. And there are great books. Go to our big

LinkedIn group, the 130,000 LinkedIn group over there, the LinkedIn newsletter, LinkedIn audio chat that we've been doing lately. That's kind of fun. And also go to youtube.com, 4chesschrisfoss, hit the bell notification button, refer that show to friends and family. Tell them to subscribe to the show. Today, an amazing author we have on the show with brilliant insight. The new book that's coming out October 11th just came out a few days ago, two days ago. The book is called Saints and Soldiers Inside Internet Age Terrorism from Syria to the capital siege, Columbia studies in terrorism and irregular warfare. Rita Katz is on the show with us today. She'll be talking

to us about her amazing book. She is the executive director and founder of Sight Intelligence Group, the world's leading non-government counterterrorism organization specializing in tracking and analyzing online activity of the global violent extremist community. She has tracked and analyzed global terrorist networks for over two decades and is well recognized as one of the most knowledgeable and reliable experts in the field. Welcome to the show, Rita. How are you? I'm great. Thank you. How are you? I am awesome as well. Thank you for coming. Congratulations on the new book.

Give us your dot com so people can find you on the interwebs. Of course. So the organization is Site Intelligence Group, and it's spelled SiteIntel.com. SiteIntelGroup.com. My Twitter account, it's easier to find all the links for my Twitter account, which is Rita underscore Katz. And LinkedIn is the same thing, Rita Katz underscore Katz. There you go. And you've infiltrated terrorist fronts undercover.

You've testified before Congress. You've briefed officials at the White House and the Department of Justice, Treasury and Homeland Security. What motivated you to write this book? First of all, maybe about a few words about the work I have been doing in the last 20 years. I created the Side Intelligence Group after I moved to the United States from Israel. And I happened to be active and working in a counterterrorism organization in which 9-11 really changed everything for me. And that changed when you could see that they have been shifting their strategy, their infrastructure to the online. I decided to create my own organization that will really start monitoring the new shift where the concept of the traditional terrorism was replaced by a whole new virtual

concept. So that's where the work started. And what led me today to write the book is that even after the change that we have seen after 9-11, in recent years, we saw a whole new structure and shift in how terrorist organizations operate from recruitment to finances to planning attacks and the entire infrastructure of where when I studied terrorism in the past back in Tel Aviv University we learned that terrorism has several sectors one is you have to plan the attack you have to have training camps you have to plan the attack. You have to have training camps. You have to be able to teach the shooters or the attackers how to, and they had ideology. This is our goals. And slowly in the 20 years of involving in counterterrorism, I could see a whole new trend. I could see a shift. And that shift came especially when ISIS was created and later on also the far right extremist movement, the way we see it today. And I attributed the growing, the fast growing, the radicalization, the shift in attitude, the shift in targets to the whole new way that things can operate online.

So tell me what's inside of the book. What do you go into inside the book? Looking at your website, you cover a whole different variance of terrorism that are out there in the world. And you're right, the original was, when we started the site intelligence group, was mainly monitoring the jihadi infrastructure. 9-11 happens. I remember calls from all government agencies

asking for help. How do you monitor the jihadist threat? How do you monitor al-Qaeda? How do you know who is jihadi? Where is the next attacker going to come from? And these calls were coming, like I said, from all over the government agencies, because remember, we lived the time of 9-11. And you remember that day, and you remember that everything we were thinking about before changed immediately during that day. And what happened with government agencies,

they realized that they needed to shift many more resources towards counterterrorism. And I remember that agents from customs that were fighting drugs cartels or criminal activities suddenly had to work on counterterrorism, calling and saying, what does it mean? How is it different? What are we going to do?

And so that's where a lot of training and teaching went into that. And it was really, you could know I was working on terrorism per se. It is terrorism about where is bin Laden? Where are their training camps? Who's the next attacker? Really monitoring pure terrorism.

And so over time, what you could see is that the definition of terrorism changed. What was terrorism before, it's not the terrorism of today. Slowly, we started seeing more and more extremist communities that played a major role in our day-to-day lives. And we started monitoring far-right and far-left communities as part of the concept. It's a request that came from several government agencies because, especially after Obama's election, the threat of domestic terrorism started growing. And I had to really start facing the organization shifting also gears towards monitoring the extremist community in the United States.

So you really saw a growth of domestic terrorism over Obama. I mean, that's wild. Yeah, that was a critical point in creating a whole anti-Semitism, anti-social, the racial, social. Seeing a black president being elected in the United States was a major setback for many Americans. And I was shocked when I started monitoring that community, and I have a lot of description about it in my book, about what people were willing to do and discussing attacks against the president. And I kept thinking to myself, how can something like this be legal? But then you have the freedom of speech where people can say and do what they can, what they want in the United States. And that really triggered me into, let's start more deeper

into investigating what is causing all of that. And so what we saw as starting point back in 2008 when Obama was elected, really though shifted gears in 2018 when an attack, an important attack happened that was widely covered by the media, but missed an important point. And that was the October 2018 attack by Robert Bowers at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh. You know, I remember 9-11 and several years after, you know, I think most people, when they thought of terrorism, they thought of, you know, jihadis and people from the Middle East. Now I'm afraid of white guys who look like me, like older, you know, angry. Am I angry? I don't know. So it depends on what day you get me on or if I've had my coffee. But, you know, guys like me who, you know, I've had people come on and they're like, you look like somebody we know who you voted for.

I can't wear a red hat on the show, basically. They assume that I voted for somebody who likes red hats. And so, you know, I see these guys who've done the white terrorist thing. You know, the FBI has come out and said, you know, white supremacy, terrorism is the worst it's ever been. I watched during the Trump years, just the rise of Southern Poverty Law Center's hate, hate, hate group, hate, hate watch, I think they called it. You go on there and see all the different groups and the explosion of it. It was just, it was extraordinary. But yeah, when I go to, when I go out in a crowd, if I'm kind of worried about being in a big place, I'm looking for guys who look like me, white guys who are Americans, who have some sort of, you know,

ax to grind about racism or whatever the case is, and them shooting a place up and stuff. Yeah. And I just need to add to that, you know, it's just, we were talking about 9-11. When I wrote my first book back in 2003, published by HarperCollins, was called Terrorist Hunter, really documented my own personal story, going undercover, going somewhere, doing my work as have to be physically located in order to record people, to collect information. And part of it was because one of the things we tried to do is to expose the network of the front groups in the United States. And the United States was a great ground for that because of the great advantages that this country provides. Like, for instance, when you collect funds, it's tax deductible. You are free to protest, et cetera.

And so these events were critical in collecting information about the jihadists and those that support terrorist organizations. But today, all of my job is being done online. And when I wrote my first book at that time, it was written by Anonymous because I was very, very scared to my life. I mean, my family having four kids and you don't have your protection that the government has, you know, as a personal and private citizen. So I decided to write it as anonymous. But one of the messages I had there in the book was that we have to counter this threat from the root. And what happened today, look at us 20 years after, the threat of terrorism is all over the world, not only from the jihadists, but also from white supremacists, QAnon movements, and other extremist communities that are spread all over the world. And why did that happen? That happened because the internet changed the way that terrorist

organizations recruit and finance. And today, a shooter, an attacker doesn't have to be present or doesn't have to be a member of a terrorist organization. These terrorist organizations exist on the internet and all you need to do is join one of their virtual places, their state havens. It was kind of surprising to find recently there was, I think, a mailing list that had been exposed from the group that was part of January 6th. The, what was the name?

Yes, the Oath Keepers. And it was surprising to find out how many emails they had of chiefs and police officers, people in the military. It was surprising to find how many of them were involved in just, you know, being part of the mailing list and knowing what was going on with the organization? Yes, and it's true. And right now the trial is going on. The Oath Keeper, one of the leading organizations that is, many of them are from the military. Some of them still were serving in the military. It's an organization that was created, as far as I remember, after the election of President Obama in order to protect

the infrastructure of the government. But later on, as you can see, it became something that protected Trump. And of course, that Trump had a lot to do with everything that happened on January 6th. He led to the January 6th riots, but all of that started, didn't happen in one day. And I basically talk about the analysis of what led all of this happened, how the safe haven of the far right community and the sharing of the conspiracy theories really created the block that continued to grow since the Obama, but it's mainly after Bauer's attack at the Tree of Life, for them is by carrying arms, carrying attacks, carrying out violence activities as really the only solution to achieve the goals that they, they, for the white race. Wow. I mean, it's just crazy what's going on. You know, if you've studied fascism, the rise of taking power by violence is the way that this usually arises. And it usually rises after a time where, you know,

there's a lot of different expansion of rights and people feel alienated or people feel segmented and they feel that this is their country, whatever the country is. I mean, you can take this back to Italy under Mussolini. You can tie it back to what went on with Hitler. And these grievances continue until they take power with violence.

What do you see? You know, we've had a lot of authors on the show. We talk a lot about, you know, the next few elections and violence and rise of kind of fascism or authoritarian violence. What do you see? What are you worried about the next few years coming up? You know, you said you're very worried when you go to all these demonstrations where people see you on the street. I'm the same. I'm very worried. I wrote this book because not

only that, because I'm worried, of course I'm worried, but I think that what is missing in the, in fighting counterterrorism today is really understanding the roots of the problem. In the last 20 years, the growth of Al-Qaeda and ISIS spread all over the world very quickly. In 2007, when I testified before Congress, and at that time, only Al-Qaeda existed, just a few years after 9-11, I said that the growth of Al-Qaeda is going to continue because look at that. At that time, they already arrested Ali Cheikh Mohammed, many of the executors of 9-11, destroyed the training camps of Al-Qaeda. But the group continued to grow. They grew in a way that there were suddenly cells all over the world, everywhere.

In the United States, you started seeing attacks. In London, everywhere in the world. And so I said at the end of my testimony that the most important thing to do is to counter the internet and to treat the internet as an equal battleground just before you go and carry out an attack or operation on a base of al-Qaeda operatives, you really have to understand what is causing this radicalization. But sadly, somebody who

was involved in this field, and this has been always my expertise, I didn't see any specific places and focus that was really spent in understanding how it works. It's like, I'll give you an example. When a patient goes to a doctor and he has pain, it turned out that he has cancer, let's say, the doctor will prescribe him with Advil to basically treat him with a problem. That's not going to treat the problem. That's just going to be healing the pain at some one point. And so that was the attitude that was taken for a long time by not only the government,

the US government, but an understanding, the lack of understanding what the internet is serving us. And so instead of really having a comprehensive understanding and approach, you can't have an approach before you really totally understand the roots of the problem. And so if that was done before, we possibly would not have been here today where we are, but it's never too late. Look, yesterday there was a mass shooting in Slovakia. That shooter was not working alone. He was working alone. He was alone in his cell, but he wasn't working alone.

He was emotionally and inspired, connected through the Internet to shooters like the Pittsburgh shooting, Tarrant in Quest Church in New Zealand, Buffalo shooter. He thanked the Buffalo shooter. And he basically was one of the shooters that expedited the shooting in Slovakia. These people are connected virtually. And you cannot take one website and thinking that's going to resolve the problem. And my book really explains how the online infrastructure works in our lives. I do provide, for instance, an example of death threats against me by the far right community with

pointing to my locations and locations that work for me and how we led to the investigation of identifying these individuals and why I was very worried. Because I was worried because it's just today, my neighbor might be one of these people. Just like you have people in the earthkeeper, some of them served in the military or or other government agencies are part of the far-right community so the threat today is big for mass shooters to people that are infiltrating government agencies and so on and the only way to fight it that basically there are ways to fight it and you have to fight it by cutting off their oxygen their oxygen is the internet this is a movement that is growing on the internet lives on the internet and you can

defeat it by fighting it on the internet do you talk in your book about how you know facebook and twitter and some of these social media websites really gave these guys a lot of ground and a lot of run room. I mean, there was, there was crazy groups that we would find that were anti-Jewish and all sorts of stuff. And for a while there, Facebook was like, well, you know, free speech and blah, blah, blah. And then finally they got enough pressure to shut down some of the hate groups, but they were, they gave them a lot of oxygen and runway to build up. Do you talk about that in your book at all as to how they contributed to some of that hate? Absolutely. It's actually a very important point, and thank you very much for bringing this up.

Hi, folks. Chris Voss here with Little Station Break. Hope you're enjoying the show so far. We'll resume here in a second. I'd like to invite you to come to my coaching, speaking, and training courses website. You can also see our new podcast over there at chrisvossleadershipinstitute.com. Over there, you can find all the different stuff that we do for speaking engagements if you'd like to hire me, training courses that we offer, and coaching for leadership, management, entrepreneurism, podcasting, corporate stuff. With over 35 years of experience in business and running companies as a CEO, I think I can offer a wonderful breadth of information and knowledge to you or anyone

that you want to invite me to for your company. Thanks for tuning in. We certainly appreciate you listening to the show and be sure to check out chrisfossleadershipinstitute.com. Now back to the show. What we're seeing is that most of the far-right community members, mass shooters, have been kicked out from mainstream social media. And the problem, one of the problems that exists today is that they have their own safe havens. These safe havens, websites such, I'm sure you heard about that, Perler, Gab, True Social, some of them are social media alternatives to Twitter or Facebook, these websites are very dangerous because they are not moderated. And when you put people that were already pushed away, kicked out from the mainstream social media into one or non-moderated platforms where they can do, say, and incite each other, it becomes very dangerous.

And when you look at the mass shooters in recent years, or even the far-right community as part of the QAnon community, most of these communities were kicked out from mainstream social media. And when they moved to applications and their own websites, situation got worse. And so they couldn't have been running these websites if the ICT sector, which is the internet communication and technology sector, was able to provide these communities.

And I'm telling you, you will be shocked to see the millions of people that are members of these communities. And when you have a person with a loner or somebody who's not fitting in the society and is looking for a place to belong to, comes across the 4chan or 8chan site or Gab, they immediately become more radicalized. They start thinking about the ideas that are pushed on these sites for violence activities. Take the weapon and do it yourself. I wrote about it a lot, especially when the Pittsburgh shooting happened and Bowers, the attacker, belonged to Gab.

He explained there that his Twitter account was pretty much, he was kicked out from Twitter several times. So the far-right community created Gab as an alternative for Twitter and had hundreds of thousands of members at that time, 2018. And because the United States is a country that allows freedom of speech, and I love freedom of speech, and I think this is something that we should always fight for. But because of freedom of speech, most of the servers are in Silicon Valley or protected at least by Silicon Valley. And so what you could see is that users from all over the world, whether it's Germany or Australia and other locations that don't have freedom of speech are logging into these

websites. And together, you have an international virtual community that talk about all these things together and radicalize each other and when and and when you have a community such that it grows and that's what you see now like you mentioned before the threat of of far right all over the world yeah it's it's just insane how how crazy it's gotten and the ability for these guys to go online and stuff and do other things. Right now, I don't know if you got a chance to catch part of it, but ironically, today is the last January 6th committee from the House representatives. They're holding their hearing, I think, live right still now.

Did you get a chance to watch any of it today? And do you have any thoughts on that? No. Okay. No. But I have been following it. And in fact, you mentioned January 6th. Maybe if I can say a few words about that.

January 6th was an event that was very much predicted. It was an event that was building up. It didn't happen in one day. Inside Intelligence Group was one of the probably major organizations that provided the intelligence information before January 6th. So the intel was there. Our clients are government agencies, and I know, we know that they received the information, but the problem was acting upon the information. And in fact, there are so many articles that are still trying to understand an investigation. This is one of the things that the January 6th investigation has been doing, trying to understand why the intelligence information was not acted on. And clearly, there was a lot building up within the Trump organization, the Trump leadership and Trump himself.

But we have to look also at the big picture here. You have millions of people that follow organizations like the QAnon. And I would like to talk about QAnon because it is really a turning point in everything that we know about terrorist organizations. QAnon is a movement of millions of people. People pledge to Q, including many of you are familiar with Geno Flynn, who I called him the king of Q, the QAnon movement. He was one of the first people to post a video

of himself pledging to Q. QAnon is a movement that is leaderless. Nobody knows who is Q. No one. It has no function. I'm Q. Who's Q, right? It's somebody who goes online, used to go pedophilia and drinking the blood of people and the

Jewish-controlled media, Jewish-controlled organizations. And what happened with the QAnon movement is that it spread all over the world without having any real ideology. No ideologies, but people followed it. It's full with misinformation and people bought it. It hijacked communities of people that were really didn't know what to believe in and they joined the QAnon movement. The QAnon movement is an example of how terrorist organizations shifted gears from when people followed Hamas, when people followed even Al-Qaeda or Hezbollah or even the Ku Klux Klan. They had some kind of ideology. They had a goal. And the goal was, this is what we want.

We want our territory. We want our independence. We want IRA. We want the independence from the UK. But today, you have organizations like the QAnon, that the threat, the target, continues to expand from what started as Hillary Clinton emails to the Pizzagate to today. It is about doctors. It's about hospitals. It's about nurses.

It's about cooperation. And it's growing and it's growing. And everyone who's against anything that Trump say or against any idea of the conspiracy theories, he's going to be a target. And so today I find myself monitoring threats against doctors and threats against the Q community because this is the current threat where 20 years ago I used to do real terrorism, what I call, but terrorism shifted.

And much of that is because of how, what the internet enabled these communities to achieve. And that's by recruiting and publishing fake information and conspiracy theories, whether it's about COVID, whether it's about the Jews, whether it's about the LGBTQ, et cetera, and turning them into a target. Yeah, it's crazy insane what's going on. In fact, I was seeing, you know, I'll catch videos of some different people that I think are TikTok creators and YouTube creators that they follow QAnon and Trump events around and interview people. And one of the videos I recently saw, they're like, there's a break-off group from QAnon. Like there's a new branch. Like they're starting to have even crazier branches branch out from the crazy. It's like,

it just gets more crazy. Like you saw the QAnon thing where they're all down in Dallas waiting for John F. Kennedy to come back to life. And I see the interviews with them where they're like, Biden really isn't running the government. It's John F. Kennedy and his son, Junior, who are the president, vice president. You're just like, holy crap. And it's insane. It makes you feel like, how can people actually believe in it? Especially though, if you follow the massive propaganda online on these platforms,

I lost a lot of people in my company, great people that I really needed because they just couldn't take it anymore. One of the examples happened after the Christchurch attack where the internet was packed, packed with slogans. They turned him into the saint of the saints. The white replacement manuscript that he wrote turned into a holy script that people have to read. It was translated to languages. And you could see the incitements about killing more and just do it. You have to go. And I lost people because they just couldn't take it anymore. And so no surprising that today you see

families that are basically broken apart, whereas one of the members in the family suddenly believes in Q and the QAnon movement, and you can't talk to that person anymore. As you know, it's very similar to jihadists, where somebody suddenly turns into a jihadi. It doesn't matter what you will tell him. It doesn't matter you vote to him that the Quran does not say that they will not listen to you. It's like, I used to compare this to, yeah, I know you have kids and I have kids, you know, when they're a teenager, it doesn't matter what you tell them. They know better than you. They're smarter than you. They think you're stupid and they're just

locked in your, in their brain that that's what they do is the right thing and their friends know better and so this is exactly the same is it as if you're talking to teenagers it doesn't matter what you do or say you can't change their minds but as long as this online infrastructure allows that to happen enables you, you know, it's just, it's not going to stop. So my book is really about, if you understand what's going on, you can fight it. And I provide specific solutions of how things like, how this can be resolved and immediately be stopped if you will counter the right, the roots of the problem. Wow.

Well, Ria, this has been really insightful insightful people should pick up your book and read it anything more you want to tease out before we go on the book no i think that this is all you know everything is important i i thank you for you know giving me the opportunity to talk to talk on your podcast i always listen to your podcast because i feel like a lot of what you say is what made people do a certain thing. How were they able to create the solution or create a company? And I think that it's really great. It gives motivation and inspiration to a lot of people. Thank you.

And that's what we're trying to do. We try and educate and affect the world. We entertain a little bit, tell some jokes. But, you know, using info entertainment to deliver the message of trying to make, you know, the world a better place and think. You know, we had Peter Strzok on the show. I think it was in October of 2000. Wait, when was January 6th? It was 2021, right? Yeah.

Or no, it was 2020? 2021. 2021. My brain has completely lost the COVID, the whole COVID thing. I've lost track of time and of course, everything else that was going on those prior four years. We had Peter Strzok, the FBI agent who was overseeing two different investigations for the FBI. And we had him on the show for his book. And I think a week or something or two weeks before January 6th,

someone wrote a cryptic message on the YouTube video saying, we're going to change and fix all this on January 6th. Maybe it might have been a month or two before. And it was quite alarming. Somebody sent me a message and they pointed it out and they go, and this is way after January 6th, they said, did you see that comment that was on the Peter Strzok video? And I was like, wow. Yeah, the planning that went into this was extraordinary. And hopefully

Americans realize where we're at in history. You know, we've had a lot of great authors like yourself that have come on the show, and we are in a very dangerous point in history. I think it was the Washington Post or New York Times recently came out with a study they did. Let me see if I have it over here. But the study they did. Let me see if I have it over here, but the study they did of where they talk with historians. When you talk with historians, we're at a very dangerous point in history. And you document this a lot in your website. People can go to your website and they can see what's going on with the far right, far left, jihadi. Even the Russia-Ukraine war has its own version of terrorist activities and stuff that you're documenting over there.

So very insightful and something that people need to be very wary of when they vote coming up in the next two elections. Correct. Yeah. And you just mentioned January 6th. You know, the January 6th, if you read this week on October 11, when my book was finally out, it took some time. Salon posted, took experts from my chapter that's called It Will Be Wild, which is about January 6, describing the coordination before January 6, what was going on online on the platforms dedicated to the far right, from soup to nuts, from bring your zip ties to surrounding Congress, to kidnapping lawmakers. Everything that happened on January 6th was presented step-by-step online on their platforms before January 6th. I will ask the question, why didn't any of these platforms take down these servers? How would they allow this to continue when you have internet companies have their own rules and conditions

that you sign up for, where they say that if you are going to be posting violence activities or violence or incitements to kill anyone, you will be taken down and nothing happened. And these platforms continue to operate. So as long as they continue to operate just like that, I mean, it's going to become even more dangerous because on a daily basis, more and more people are hitting these platforms. And I show how much more joined these platforms since January 6th to 2022, in January 2022, because many more people are being pushed away from the mainstream social media, joining these platforms and getting even more radicalized. And that's what we're seeing today. And that has to be fought as quickly and as soon

as possible. Look, I'm talking about the online infrastructure, but the online infrastructure was proven that ICT companies have a major role in countering terrorism. And that is the example of ISIS. When the world realized that as long as ISIS is online, we're going to be seeing more and more mass shooters all over the world. People, lone wolf attackers that will just take the weapon and kill because they follow ISIS online. That ICT sector working with us and other companies was able to immediately take down everything. And you could see the impact and the success that they had when fighting this group. Today, it's very difficult to follow ISIS media online. And so the ability and the success exist within the ICT sector.

But why not to adopt the same campaign, the same success within the far-right community? Definitely, definitely. Well, a very insightful book. People need to pick it up. They need to learn about what's going on in the world you know i i i'm always struck by how lazy people are and it seems like a lot of the people that subscribe to these q anon theories it's almost like they're just too lazy to go learn something or go watch something or spend hours reading a book and and they just they just they're just like well it's easy to pick up this stupid crap and parrot it. And it's almost like a lazy brain Dunning-Kruger sort of effect where,

you know, people think they're smarter than they are because they have a tidbit of information and they just need to learn more. But this democracy, you know, we've talked about it lots on the show. You know, everyone is a steward of this democracy. It's very young and it's very fragile and they can end very easily and quickly. We saw that in Hungary in 2020. And we've signed that in another place in 2020 that I forget. But it can be over very quickly. And these two elections are very important.

Thank you, Rita, for coming on the show. We really appreciate you spending some of your valuable time with us. Thank you very much, Chris. Thank you. And please give us your dot com so people can find you guys on the interwebs. If you can give me your.com so people can find you on the interwebs. So on Twitter, Rita Cats, Rita underscore Cats. I think that people will search for Rita Cats. It's going to come very quickly. There is a Wikipedia page about me. Don't believe everything that it says there. And then LinkedIn is the same thing, Rita underscore Katz.

And the site intelligence group is siteintelgroup.com. There you go. There you go. Thanks, Samanis, for tuning in. Order of the book, wherever fine books are sold. You can pick them up now at Amazon or wherever fine books are sold. October 11, 2022, Saints and Soldiers, Inside Internet Age Terrorism from Syria to the Capital Siege. You can get that wherever fine books are sold and check it out. The more you know, the more you learn, the more educated you are, the more power you have in your world.

Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe. And we'll see you guys next time. Thank you. And that should have us out.