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Unmasking a troll: Aussie 'jihadist' Australi Witness

PostPosted: Sat Sep 12, 2015 1:17 pm
by Twyla LaSarc
Forgive me if this is posted elsewhere, couldn't find it:

Unmasking a troll: Aussie 'jihadist' Australi Witness a 20-year-old American nerd

FBI: 'Aussie jihadist' actually US imposter

Joshua Goldberg is not Muslim, and he's not Australian. He is a 20-year-old nerd of Jewish background who until yesterday lived with his parents and sister in a suburban house in Florida.

But under the online alias "Australi Witness", Goldberg managed to convince even Islamic State jihadists that he was an Australian IS mujahid who once worked for Amnesty International.


What is real anymore? How much of it is mindfuck?

Re: Unmasking a troll: Aussie 'jihadist' Australi Witness

PostPosted: Sat Sep 12, 2015 1:44 pm
by coffin_dodger
TLS
What is real anymore?
Nothing. It never was. :blankstare

How much of it is mindfuck?
All of it. Always was. :blankstare

Re: Unmasking a troll: Aussie 'jihadist' Australi Witness

PostPosted: Sat Sep 12, 2015 2:07 pm
by Wombaticus Rex
Man, this is gorgeously gnarled. Thank you.

Re: Unmasking a troll: Aussie 'jihadist' Australi Witness

PostPosted: Sat Sep 12, 2015 8:17 pm
by tapitsbo
Goldberg's other personas included ones who promoted "MGTOW" or male separatist ideology !

Re: Unmasking a troll: Aussie 'jihadist' Australi Witness

PostPosted: Sun Sep 13, 2015 1:26 am
by Twyla LaSarc
He had quite a bunch of them from what I've been reading.

Makes one wonder how much of the internet is bored twenty somethings pretending to be someone else and how warped our public discourse might be for it.

It reminds me a bit of Illuninatus. Too bad he was working for the wrong side and not Hagbard Celine.

Yep, reality=SNAFU.

Re: Unmasking a troll: Aussie 'jihadist' Australi Witness

PostPosted: Sun Sep 13, 2015 2:22 pm
by Wombaticus Rex
Edited the OP so the link worked, FYI. Wrapped up some writing projects, was doing laundry and still thinking this kid over. When the Fifth Generation Warfare conversation was poppin' back in the Bush II days, there was talk of the Super Empowered Individuals - SEIs, natrulich - and hot damn if any half-way competent adolescent with a little patience and discipline ain't exactly that in 2015.

International development circles talk about "Democratizing" technologies and services, and I think we have definitely Democratized PSYOPS for many years now. The game has been omnidirectional and McLuhan fucking called it. I'm not a wandering bishop quite yet, but I've long suspected Marshall was a secret pope for some ordination or other.

Per the OP:

And even before his recent exploits, Goldberg's dangerous social media fantasies may have had real-world consequences. An Australi Witness tweet in the lead up to an exhibition of pictures of the Prophet Mohammed in Garland, Texas, in May, urged Muslims to go with "weapons, bombs or with knifes". Two men answered the call, and were killed by police.

"Australi Witness" praised them as martyrs.


Mathematically, yo, the odds of actual correlation there are extremely slim indeed. That said, who cares? Any court that speaks English will vote to fry this kid based on that alone. The sheer stakes of trolling are mad wild to contemplate.

Overall, though, my big question based on this story goes a little something like "So Is Our Planet Managed By Discordian Jew Nazis From a Secret Moon Base?" I realize there's some room for interpretation there but I don't know how else to parse it. The absurdity of it alone would explain ... too much. Moon Metropolis, indeed.

Re: Unmasking a troll: Aussie 'jihadist' Australi Witness

PostPosted: Sun Sep 13, 2015 2:42 pm
by coffin_dodger
'...when you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.'

Re: Unmasking a troll: Aussie 'jihadist' Australi Witness

PostPosted: Mon Sep 14, 2015 3:29 am
by Twyla LaSarc
Thank you for fixing the link WR. :basicsmile
Is Our Planet Managed By Discordian Jew Nazis From a Secret Moon Base?
If only it were that simple.

Re: Unmasking a troll: Aussie 'jihadist' Australi Witness

PostPosted: Tue Sep 15, 2015 2:49 pm
by Wombaticus Rex
The criminal complaint is kind of a wild read, not least because I've never seen one where the narrative is primarily sourced from Twitter DMs and IP/MAC logs. Firmware will get you. Professional trolls use laptops with no batteries, for instance.

Also: Goldberg's daily routine consisted of way, way more than "trolling." Seems like he was genuinely making infiltration attempts. Hamfisted, but undeniable.

Another takeaway is that "salaambro" is something that happens in Jihadi chat channels.

That can't be f'ing halal.

Re: Unmasking a troll: Aussie 'jihadist' Australi Witness

PostPosted: Tue Sep 15, 2015 3:12 pm
by zangtang
Twyla LaSarc ยป 14 Sep 2015 07:29 wrote:
Is Our Planet Managed By Discordian Jew Nazis From a Secret Moon Base?
If only it were that simple.


indeed, but sure answers a load of questions!......

Re: Unmasking a troll: Aussie 'jihadist' Australi Witness

PostPosted: Tue Sep 15, 2015 6:18 pm
by backtoiam
wombaticus rex wrote:

Man, this is gorgeously gnarled.



Absolutely :starz:

Wow. It is one thing to know this happens, and quite another to look over the shoulder of it's creative process in such detail. This guy is a one man wrecking ball. Theoretically extrapolate that into the work of several hundred similar people and try to get a mental calculation on the enormous amount of resulting chaos? :ohwh

The older I get and the more concepts and information I absorb, the more of it I decide to leave in the sandbox, neither believing nor disbelieving it, for the inevitability that I will probably have to adjust it further in the future. My sand box just got larger by reading this. :blankstare

Re: Unmasking a troll: Aussie 'jihadist' Australi Witness

PostPosted: Mon Sep 21, 2015 5:27 am
by coffin_dodger
for reference, the BBC take on the story:

Neo-Nazi, radical feminist and violent jihadist - all at once BBC News 21 Sep 2015

To some he was an Islamist extremist, to others a radical feminist, to others a neo-Nazi. These are all online identities that seem to have belonged to Joshua Goldberg - but in reality he was none of these things.

They were simply online aliases used to whip up ideological hatred, with seemingly dangerous and even violent real-world consequences. In reality he lives in Florida, spent huge amounts of time online - and has now been arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

But if the allegations now being made against him are true, posing under these fake identities, he seems to have incited others to act abusively and in some cases, to take up arms.

Among the alleged victims was Ben Garrison, an artist living in Montana. Around the time of the 2008 financial crisis he started drawing libertarian-themed political cartoons, lamenting what he saw as the rise of "big government." But he soon found that his work was attracting people he vehemently disagreed with - who seemed to be extremists and white supremacists.

"There was a page on Facebook using my photographs, and all my cartoons, but they were all vandalised with hate and anti-Semitism," he told BBC Trending radio. Fake accounts set up in Garrison's name posted racist messages, and his family was targeted as well. "When I went on there and saw what they were doing I was just abhorred."

cont - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-trending-34292809

Re: Unmasking a troll: Aussie 'jihadist' Australi Witness

PostPosted: Mon Sep 21, 2015 8:56 am
by zangtang
I'd be real interested to know if he was doing this in concert with others, or if there are others doing the same , specifically from the provocateur angle.
- who did he show off/brag to?

Re: Unmasking a troll: Aussie 'jihadist' Australi Witness

PostPosted: Mon Sep 21, 2015 10:33 am
by tapitsbo
8chan and Feministing as well as Twitter for starters. Also Thought Catalog

Re: Unmasking a troll: Aussie 'jihadist' Australi Witness

PostPosted: Mon Sep 21, 2015 4:31 pm
by Twyla LaSarc
Thank you for the new info. This situation is quite baroque. I do wonder if others are involved.

I am awaiting the lifetime channel docudrama or CSI that paints a character that might possibly be him.