Aaron Weisburd

Aaron Weisburd
Born	1964
Alma mater	University of Illinois at Chicago
Member of	DisinfoPortal
Director Threat Context In office July 2022 - Present Employer Microsoft  Chief Knowledge Officer In office July 2020 - July 2022 Employer Southern Hudson River Valley  Operator In office January 2014 - July 2020 Employer The Cloud  Employee In office August 2014 - August 2017 Employer Southern Illinois University,  Carbondale  Director In office 2003 - August 2014 Employer Society for Internet Research  Founder In office June 2002 - August 2014 Employer Internet Haganah  Instructor In office August 2007 - January 2013 Employer Combating Terrorism Center

Andrew Aaron Weisburd is the Director Threat Context at Microsoft. He was formerly a campaigner disrupting websites which he believed were a threat including Islamic websites, and was part of a network of amateur "cyber terrorism experts" in the US and Britain, which were linked to extreme right wing Zionist groups.

Pen picture

In early 2015, as tensions between US and Russia simmered over conflicts in Syria, Ukraine and NATO expansion in eastern Europe, a computer programmer named Andrew Weisburd created a blog called Kremlin Trolls. The site aimed to undermine recognisably pro-Russian news and opinion sites by publicising their domain locations, IP providers and the personal details of those behind their operations, including phone numbers. This project was soon folded into a blog purporting to expose “KGB style active measures,” which relied on the same techniques of blacklisting, doxxing and harassing that Weisburd had perfected years before when earned notoriety for his role in the mass shuttering of websites of Palestinians, Islamists and leftists.

According to the Atlantic, Weisburd launched his online crusade “because he was mad—mad that Yasser Arafat had rejected the peace plan at Camp David in 2000, mad that al-Qaeda had blown up the buildings in Manhattan he grew up around, and mad because he had read that Hamas was teaching Palestinian kindergartners to hate Israelis.”

There was also a strong body of evidence suggesting that Weisburd himself was simply mad.

Raised by parents in a mixed Catholic-Jewish marriage, Weisburd confessed that he developed a strong attraction to Jewish identity after his mother sent him to Catholic school at an early age. He also complained about the presence of “gay priests” in his school. As he came of age, Weisburd developed a strong attachment to the state of Israel, and an apparent affinity for some of its most extreme elements. While targeting websites he considered extremist, he sprinkled in a heavy dose of ultra-Zionist commentary, Islamophobia and fulsome admiration for Vladimir Putin.

An attic in Carbondale, Illinois, was the base for Weisburd’s one-man war against online extremism. He focused heavily on hardline Islamists and jihadists, publishing the phone numbers of their IP providers and encouraging his followers to pester them until they agreed to shut the sites down. He also hounded Palestinian political factions and their supporters, as well as American leftists. His vehicle was Internet Haganah, a personal blog he described as “one part combat mission, one part intelligence operation, one part grassroots political action.”

Though Weisburd’s website has been defunct for years, a portion of its archives was recovered for this article, and it offers a portrait of an enthusiastic Zionist rallying support for the Israeli military’s draconian crackdown on the Jenin refugee camp in the occupied West Bank city in 2002. The blog also features pornographically Islamophobic screeds blaming Arab Muslims for the Holocaust and accusingPalestinians of “child sacrifice.”

Internet Haganah was also a platform for the writings of Daniel Pipes, a vehemently anti-Muslim scholar who has accused Barack Obama of being a Muslim apostate, called for the razing of entire Palestinian villages and described Muslim immigrants as “brown-skinned peoples cooking strange foods and not exactly maintaining Germanic standards of hygiene.”

Weisburd might be known today for his obsessive efforts to counter Russian interference, but back in the months and years after 9/11, he was an unabashed admirer of Vladimir Putin. On Nov. 12, 2002, in a post on Internet Haganah, Weisburd honored Putin as his “Tough Jew of the Week.” Putin is a member in good standing of the Russian Orthodox Church, but Weisburd concluded that an angry tirade the Russian leader launched against radical Islamist terror somehow qualified him for the “Tough Jew” award.

By 2005, national media was taking notice of Weisburd’s prolific efforts and puffing him in lengthy features as an online anti-terror hero, or a “solo maverick,” as the Atlantic put it. None of these outlets, from Wired to Newsweek, seemed interested in Weisburd’s anti-Muslim extremism, and few scrutinised the ethically dubious tactics he was accused of employing against his targets. Weisburd had boasted to reporters that he had forced hundreds of Islamic extremist websites offline, however, it was unclear which of these sites deserved to be censored.

Naziri, an administrator of a chat community for Shia Muslims called fitriyyah.org, protested that his site had been forced offline by Weisburd’s vigilante efforts. Naziri claimed that his site was targeted for supporting terrorism despite its opposition to the tactics that Sunni extremist groups like Al Qaeda have used to massacre his fellow Shia. Naziri maintained, “we always have and always will unequivocally oppose the aforementioned illegal and immoral actions which masquerade under the term ‘jihaad.’”

He explained how the host of his site had been “threatened over one hundred times in one weekend when Weisburd called for [the site host] to be ‘pressured’ to stop hosting us… It was all people calling him and threatening his life and safety over the weekend that Internet Haganah called for these illegal tactics to be implemented.” Naziri claimed that many of the threats emanated from the Jewish Defence League, a violent extremist group which has been responsible for the terrorist assassination of an Arab-American civil rights organiser, firebombing Russian diplomats and Palestine solidarity activists, and attempting to murder Rep. Darrell Issa.

By his own admission, Weisburd did not speak Arabic, had no scholarly background in Islam or the politics of the Middle East, and no record of any time spent in the region. What’s more, he had no credentials in law enforcement, though he would later earn a master’s in criminology. He was an ideologically driven vigilante, acting according to his own rules, and according to his targets, was walking a fine line between legal conduct and malicious harassment. But Weisburd’s methods were not without utility to a government that was surveilling and prosecuting American Muslims and antifa activists with unprecedented ferocity.

Background

Born in New York in 1964 Aaron Weisburd is a Jewish American who describes himself as a "good ole boy". He is a computer programmer and web designer by trade but quit his job to run Internet Haganah. He told The Atlantic Monthly that he started Internet Haganah "because he was mad -- mad that Yasir Arafat had rejected the peace plan at Camp David in 2000, mad that al-Qaeda had blown up the buildings in Manhattan he grew up around, and mad because he had read that Hamas was teaching Palestinian kindergartners to hate Israelis."

Aaron Weisburd in his home office

Weisburd has stated that the "primary inspiration" for his "own efforts" was John Galt, the web designer who set up Islamic News for the British 'expert' Glen Jenvey. He also credited the Christian right winger Jeremy Reynalds and fellow IT technician Jim Ownbey with encouraging him to set up Internet Haganah.

Internet Haganah was registered on 19 October 2003 and Weisburd began to appear in the media shortly afterwards. The first record the Internet Archive has for the website is dated 7 December 2003. The homepage stated the group was "Confronting Islamist terrorists and their supporters online" and "Defending Israel and the Jewish people". It also requested payments to the 'Haganah Fund', which at that stage it said had raised $5,800 in donations. Internet Haganah is reportedly a one man operation run out of Weisburd's home office in Carbondale, Illinois. The Atlantic Monthly described Weisburd's operation as follows:

Weisburd is the only paid full-time member of Internet Haganah. He runs his operation from the second-floor office of his home. Surrounded by five computers, he trawls online in search of the press statements and videos that terrorists release to rally their supporters. He goes undercover, logging on to restricted forums (if he has been able to get a password) and visiting the many open sites advocating jihad. He doesn't speak Arabic but insists the limitation doesn't slow him down much. Though he relies on translation software at times, and on associates in Internet Haganah's network who speak Arabic, linguistic comprehension isn't his goal.

By April 2004 Weisburd claimed that he had facilitated the closure of over 420 alleged jihad sites by targeting the internet service providers.

Although Weisburd works at home alone, he is part of a network of online activists. In 2005 The Washington Post reported that Weisburd and others like him had 'managed to put together well-organized operations that run almost like companies'.

Irhabi 007

Along with several likeminded individuals Weisburd was involved in monitoring the online activities of Younes Tsouli, known by his internet pseudonym Irhabi 007.

In 2004 Weisburd successfully lobbied Tsouli's internet service provider to have his website taken down. He also passed on information to the US and British police of Tsouli's general whereabouts, having narrowed him down to the Ealing area of London based on his IP address.

Tsouli was arrested in October 2005, apparently independently of the 'intelligence' provided by Weisburd and others (notably Evan Kohlmann). The case attracted enormous media attention, focusing on the use of the internet to promote terrorism. Tsouli was said to be a key figure in what has been dubbed ‘cyber-terrorism’. The Guardian called Tsouli the “godfather of cyber-terrorism for al-Qaida”. Tsouli and two other mem were charged with “using the internet to incite murder”. According to the evidence at trial, Tsouli had posted material onto websites supporting Al-Qaeda, whilst his co-defendants provided him with stolen identities and credit card details. He boasted that he was their “favourite files-uploader online”.. Although Tsouli was sentenced to 24 years in jail, Judge Openshaw said of Tsouli that he “came no closer to a bomb or a firearm than a computer keyboard”. Fellow cyber terrorism expert Evan Kohlmann submitted what he called an Expert Report in the case but he acted as a fact not expert witness.

Affiliations

Weisburd runs Internet Haganah a project of the Society for Internet Research and 'endorses' two other organisations: The Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center and the Global Justice Group Inc.. The former is run by a retired colonel in Mossad the Israeli intelligence agency and maintains an office inside the Israeli defence ministry.

• Kremlintrolls.com
• Alliance for Securing Democracy
• Hamilton 68

Media Appearances

Interviewed on Newsnight BBC2 16 January 2008.<youtube align="right" width="300" height="200" caption="Newsnight, BBC2, 16 January 2008 - featuring Weisburd, Evan Kohlmann and Metropolitan Police Commander Peter Clarke">IpK7tgBxNeQ</youtube>

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References

This page imported content from Powerbase on 5 August 2023.
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