Members of violent white supremacist website exposed in massive data dump

Editor’s note: this article discusses a hate group’s uses of racist language that may be hard to read.

Private data for Iron March, a notorious website for violent white supremacists, has been published online in a stunning leak that exposes a trove of detailed information on as many as 1,000 or more members. The 1GB SQL database appears to contain the entirety of the site’s information, including user names, private messages, public posts, registered email addresses, and IP addresses.

The leak was posted on the Internet Archive on Wednesday by an anonymous individual using the handle antifa-data. A list of domains used in email registrations shows two from US universities. Private messages show some members discussing life in the US Marines, Navy, Army, and military reserves.

“Be careful if you get deployed with those fucking sand [deleted] and jews,” a user claiming to be in the Navy tells another member who says he’s in the Marines and is about to be deployed. (The racist term he used has been deleted.) “They are all a bunch of slippery pieces of shit that wash their faces in rain puddles in dirt on the ground. We are too good to be interacting with those people, maybe trump will at least relax the ROE’s [rules of engagement] so those pieces of shit can be blasted back to allah, jews and all.”

To the right of the Alt-Right

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center and Rational Wiki, Iron March was launched in 2011 by Alexander “Slavros” Mukhitdinov, who is believed to be a Uzbekistani who emigrated to Russia. The fascist vision he espoused was critical even of the Alt-Right movement that gained visibility after the election of Donald Trump, the SPLC said, citing a review of more than 150,000 public Iron March posts it scraped from September 2011 to September 2017. The website went dark in 2017 for reasons that remain unknown.

Iron March was affiliated with or offered support to at least nine fascist groups in nine different countries over its six-year span. Several violent neo-Nazi paramilitary fascist groups were organized on the forums, including, the Antipodean Resistance and the Atomwaffen Division. Members and associates of the groups and their offshoots have been connected to at least five murders documented by the SPLC and Rational Wiki.

Among the fatal attacks, both sources say, was the brutal 2017 murder of activist Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, Virginia, on August 12, 2017. During the incident, James Alex Fields rammed his car into her after she had protested a “Unite the Right” rally. Fields, the SPLC said, had marched at the rally as a member of a group called Vanguard America, which descended from another Iron March group.

While the SPLC had already obtained all or at least most of Iron March’s public posts, the trove posted Wednesday is sure to offer a much more complete, and likely incriminating, picture of one of the Internet’s most sordid forums. The ability for researchers, law enforcement investigators, and others to cross-reference IP addresses, email addresses, and private and public posts is likely to shine a bright light into a nether region that thrives on darkness.

The open source journalism collective Bellingcat has already established a forum for people to collaborate on research.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1598725