Episode 701 : Terrorism Expert Rita Katz

Hello there! Sorry I didn't show up to work yesterday. I needed a day off and I made the best of it. Thanks for your support and not giving me a hard time. I hope you are ok. I will host a virtual hangout today but you have to be a paid subscriber so get going ! 

Stand Up is a daily podcast. I book,host,edit, post and promote new episodes with brilliant guests every day.

Please subscribe now for as little as 5$ and gain access to a community of over 800 awesome, curious, kind, funny, brilliant, generous souls

Joining me on today's show!!

Rita Katz is the founder and executive director of the SITE Intelligence Group, which tracks and analyzes extremist movements. Her decades of experience include assisting in a wide range of governmental terrorism investigations and developing counterterrorism strategies used across the tech sector. Katz is the author of Terrorist Hunter: The Extraordinary Story of a Woman Who Went Undercover to Infiltrate the Radical Islamic Groups Operating in America (2003).

 

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.

 

Check out all things Jon Carroll

Follow and Support Pete Coe

Pete on YouTube

Pete on Twitter

Pete On Instagram

Pete Personal FB page