Keyboard warriors: The murky world of online terrorism
A Telegram channel recently became the first online group to be proscribed as a terrorist organisation by the British government.
But do the keyboard warriors who produce bile and prejudice on a daily basis really pose a physical threat?
Last year I covered the case of Kristofer Kearney (pictured above), a self-declared “British fascist”, and I’ve also interviewed Rossa McPhillips, a former soldier and National Crime Agency officer who has experience of tackling terrorism.
But let’s begin with a short history lesson.
The first organisation to be proscribed by the British government was the Irish National League in 1887.
The INL, founded by Irish nationalist Charles Parnell, was banned by Conservative prime minister Arthur Balfour after it used intimidation to enforce a rent strike by Catholic tenants against absentee landlords, who tended to be English or Scottish Protestants.
Over the years Irish groups were often proscribed - Sinn Féin was banned between 1919 and 1922 - and when The Troubles broke out in the late 1960s so was the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and then the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) and the Ulster Defence Association (UDA).
New legislation in 1989 drew up a list of proscribed organisations and in 2000 this was updated under a new Terrorism Act.
On the list of proscribed terrorist organisations are a number which are considered defunct, such as November 17, a far-left Greek group which carried out bombings and assassinations between 1975 and 2002.
I remember being on holiday in Athens in the early 1990s and hearing the explosion when they threw a bomb at a car carrying a Greek politician in Syntagma Square.
This century the biggest terrorist threat has come from Islamic extremist groups such as al-Qaeda and ISIS, or by lone wolves who were influenced by their online propaganda.
In the last decade there has also been a number of far-right and white supremacist groups which have been proscribed under a number of names, such as Atomwaffen Division, which transformed into National Socialist Order in 2020 and is sometimes known as Feuerkrieg Division.
National Action, a racist, homophobic and anti-Semitic organisation which was banned in 2016, is also known in various guises as NS131 (National Socialist Anti-Capitalist Action), System Resistance Network (SRN) and Scottish Dawn.
Most of these groups had a physical manifestation - they met up in pubs or at football matches and had actual meetings - and some of them, like Jack Renshaw, committed terrorist offences.
In May 2019 Renshaw, then 23, was jailed for life for plotting to kill Labour MP Rosie Cooper.
Renshaw (pictured above) wanted to repeat the murder of Labour MP Jo Cox, who was killed by another deluded “patriot”, Thomas Mair.
Kristofer Kearney - who shared the world view of people like Renshaw and Mair - pleaded guilty in March 2024 to two counts of disseminating terrorist publications by making Telegram posts on January 23, 2021 and March 8, 2021.
But he disputed the prosecution’s version of events and a two-day Newton hearing - which I sat through - was required to enable a judge to assess whether the self-declared “British fascist” was trying to influence people or was just “reckless”.
Kearney disseminated dozens of documents which glorified terror attacks, including the so-called manifestos of Anders Breivik (pictured below), who slaughtered 77 people in Norway in 2011, and Brenton Tarrant, who was responsible for a mosque massacre in New Zealand.
Another tract he posted was The Last Rhodesian by Dylann Roof - who killed nine African-Americans in a church in the US in 2015 - in which Roof wrote: “Anyone who thinks that white and black people look as different as we do on the outside, but are somehow magically the same on the inside, is delusional.”
In the witness box, asked by his barrister, Ged O’Connor, what his aim was he replied: “Our main aim is to not become minorities in our own homeland.”
Prosecutor Naomi Parsons cross examined him and asked him what he meant by “indigenous”.
Speaking with a slight Liverpool accent, Kearney (pictured below) said: “The indigenous people of the British Isles...the Irish, Welsh, Scottish, and English people. If you were born from those nationalities you would be ethnically British. They are in danger of becoming a minority.”
Ms Parsons shot back: “Do you mean white people?”
“It’s an ethnicity. Germans are white but they are not British,” he replied.
She asked, “What about a black person who was born in the UK, would they meet your definition of British?”
As Kearney wriggled in the witness box the judge, Mr Justice Marks, asked him: “Are black people born in the UK capable of being treated as indigenous?”
“I'd say no. Irish, Welsh, Scottish, and English are indigenous groups,” he replied.
Kearney - who ironically lived in Spain at the time - also posted a video by Kai Murros, who was described as a “Finnish far-right activist”, on his Telegram channel, which was called Charlie Big Potatoes.
In the video Murros said: “There is nothing more frightening in this world than the bloodlust of a nation that has suffered injustice.”
Ms Parsons asked Kearney if he agreed with Murros, and he replied: “His language is inflammatory and he goes off on a crazy tangent.”
Eventually Mr Justice Marks decided Kearney had posted the material deliberately and jailed him for six years and eight months.
The judge said the theme of Kearney’s Telegram channel was that there was a “white genocide which white males needed to fight to resist” and he posted videos which “encouraged violence in the context of the battle against white genocide.”
Mr Justice Marks said he found Kearney’s answer to Ms. Parsons’ cross examination to be “deliberately evasive.”
“It was obvious that he was referring to white people only but he was reluctant to concede that, clearly realising in my judgement that to do so could be damaging to his case,” he added.
Mr Justice Marks concluded: “My overall impression of Kristofer Kearney was that he was articulate, intelligent and thoughtful. He was also fervent and fanatical about his beliefs which he had clearly honed over many years and played a very central part in his life, as demonstrated by the frequent and lengthy podcasts in which he was involved.”
If Charlie Big Potatoes - Kearney’s Telegram channel - was proscribed it would have sounded quite comical.
But Terrorgram - or the Terrorgram Collective - to give it its full name, is no laughing matter.
Unlike terrorist groups like ISIS and the Provisional IRA, it had no physical manifestation and was simply a group of people on Telegram who shared the same warped views of white supremacy to blacks, Asians and Jews.
But the Home Office describes Terrorgram as an “online network of neo-fascist terrorists who produce and disseminate violent propaganda to encourage those who consume its content to engage in terrorist activity.”
“The aim of the Terrorgram collective is to bring about the collapse of Western democracy and a ‘race war’ by encouraging others to engage in violent acts of terrorism,” says the Home Office.
Rossa McPhillips, a former counter-terrorism officer, told me: “Terrorgram was a new thing when I was operating in the counter-terrorism world but we had been seeing those trends - the shift of extreme right-wing groups further online and utilising social media.”
“At one stage extreme right-wing groups were communicating purely through gifs, which are hard to translate unless you are part of that cabal,” he added.
He said: “The hope is that more online terror fraternities are wound up after this.”
McPhillips, who nowadays works as a scriptwriter and consultant to TV and film companies, said: “It’s a surprise that Telegram is still allowed to be the voice of violent extremism but if it went we would be without a good source of intelligence. As the KGB chief says in the Bond film, A View to a Kill, when asked if he would like to see Silicon Valley destroyed, ‘On the contrary…where would Russian research be without it?’”
He said: “Extreme right-wing groups were overlooked for many years. MI5’s G Branch failed to help counter-terrorism capabilities until the Home Office were spooked by the capabilities of National Action and dragged MI5 kicking and screaming to tackle extreme right-wing and left-wing groups.”
Another online group which has not yet been proscribed is 764, which has been described as a ‘pseudo-Satanist’ group.
Cameron Finnigan, 18, who was allegedly associated with 764, has been charged with a series of offences, including “preparing for an attack against a single homeless individual” and is due to go on trial in January 2025.
But McPhillips says: “In terms of intent and capability the Islamic terror groups will always be more of a threat than extreme right-wing groups, at least in the UK. In the US, following Trump’s ascendancy to the White House, extreme right-wing groups may well have eclipsed Islamic extremism as a domestic threat.”
“Extreme right-wing groups fail to grip the British zeitgeist, and fail to attract competent believers,” he added.
“Some British people might have extreme right-wing views but 99.9 percent won’t turn to violence,” said McPhillips.
McPhillips said the UK intelligence community has long known Russian and Chinese intelligence were sending feelers out to extreme right-wing groups in Europe.
“They see these groups as good obfuscation for their intelligence activities and can exploit these groups’ yearning for credibility. It’s something worth watching over the next 12-18 months as more stories come out,” he added.