The federal indictment of 15 alleged antifa cell members in Minnesota on conspiracy charges last week is sending antifa’s leaders into a panic, scrambling over the case’s legal implications for the underground movement.In response to last week’s raids on the residences of the defendants, allied antifa accounts across social media started circulating an alert warning others, “One of our comrades was arrested and all of their electronics were confiscated. Please alert all of your groups. Stay safe.”The People’s City Council of Los Angeles, an anti-capitalist collective in California, issued a statement saying that federal authorities mounting a conspiracy case against suspected antifa operatives is “how they will come for you,” instructing its followers, “You should be discussing this with your comrades and organizing groups.”
Meanwhile, supporters of the defendants have since set up a legal defense fund on Chuffed.org, a left-wing crowdfunding site for financing social justice causes. Within a week of its creation, the fund has already amassed more than $200,000 from over 3,000 donors, most of them anonymous.Conspiracy case exposes antifa’s covert operations
Antifa, by design, is subdivided at the local level into loosely affiliated cells, or “affinity groups,” organized around their shared anarcho-communist beliefs. This decentralized structure serves to shroud antifa’s operations in secrecy and undercut claims that it is a unified criminal organization, despite these cells often working in tandem to attack political targets they perceive as “fascist.”For years, the mythos surrounding the far-left movement has helped antifa’s forces evade prosecution. But compromising the clandestine movement’s public image as an amorphous and imaginary threat is the 94-page indictment that lays out, in extensive detail, the Minneapolis-area antifa network’s organizational structure, operational strategies, and covert communication tactics.Direct Action Minnesota, the antifa network named in the charging documents, is accused of organized violence targeting Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers. As outlined in the indictment, DAMN’s members hold regular meetings, coordinate almost exclusively through encrypted Signal chatrooms, and train their foot soldiers in guerrilla-like warfare ranging from tactical surveillance to mass mobilization.INSIDE THE ANTI-ICE ANTIFA CELL RAIDED IN MINNEAPOLISSome extremism researchers expect the conspiracy case to expose antifa as a real and organized threat, debunking the myth that antifa is merely an idea.Capital Research Center president Scott Walter said the investigation’s findings will “blow up the ridiculous lie that antifa doesn’t exist.”“Antifa does exist but in a decentralized way,” Walter said in an interview with the Washington Examiner. “And it works very hard to maintain what its soldiers call ‘operational security,’ so that their enemies can’t figure out what they’re doing, who they are, and where they are.”Walter noted that antifa activists are particularly alarmed about the FBI infiltrating the Minneapolis cell’s Signal group chats, as many other antifa groups rely on the supposedly secure messaging platform to plan criminal activities.“The feds have penetrated into the encrypted messaging of these underground networks, and they’re terrified because that is where the evidence is of their crimes,” Walter said. “To prove a conspiracy, you have to prove these people were planning crimes and then carried out those crimes.”The Intercept, a liberal outlet sympathetic to the antifa cause, published a piece last week panicking over how federal investigators were able to access the accused’s Signal messages, which prosecutors largely built the conspiracy case around. Antifa-aligned influencers then shared the instructional article highlighting “steps” to take to conceal their correspondence.“Keep in mind that Signal’s disappearing messages delete the contents of a message, but they don’t remove evidence that communications between parties occurred in the first place,” the Intercept article advised. “This means that even if a group has enabled disappearing messages, someone who gains access to a member’s device could later determine with whom they were chatting. Therefore it’s safest to regularly delete entire groups and chats, not just the messages themselves.”Allies also vulnerable to exposure
