Lawfare Archive: The Violent Extremist Threat to Critical Infrastructure in the United States

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[MUSIC PLAYING] I'm Sarah Wildrich, internet author with an episode from the water archive from December 7, 2026. Over the past few weeks, numerous cyber attacks have been launched against water purification

systems in over 12 states, which some have attributed to a wrong-linked talking group. On August 26, President Trump declared an national emergency related to the security

of a different kind of critical infrastructure, the US

energy grid. In his executive order, Trump warned of the potential

“for foreign actors to remotely disrupt the grid.”

For today's archive, I chose an episode from October 24, 2022, in which Thailand, McBrion, spoke with Melana Kril and Sheamus Hughes, of the George Washington University program on extremism, about the threat to critical infrastructure posed by violent extremists.

They discuss specific movements in their plans, how such plans spread, and what can be done to protect critical infrastructure going forward? [MUSIC PLAYING] I'm Tyler McBrion, managing editor of Laugh Fair.

And this is the Laugh Fair podcast on October 24, 2022. Last month, the George Washington University program on extremism published a report called Mayhem Murder and Mr. Action, violent extremist attack plots against critical infrastructure

in the United States. To talk through that report and a recent Laugh Fair article on the topic, I sat down with Alana Kril, a research fellow at the program on extremism, and Sheamus Hughes, the program's deputy director.

We discussed the white supremacists and Salafi Jihadists who make up these movements, the encrypted channels through which propaganda and plans are spread,

and what's to be done to protect critical infrastructure

in the United States. It's the Laugh Fair podcast, October 24. The violent extremist threat to critical infrastructure in the United States. So Sheamus and Alana, you have just released this report

and subsequent Laugh Fair article on the targeting of critical infrastructure by violent extremists. So to start things off, can you tell me a bit about who the actors are here,

which violent extremists that we're talking about? - So the report looked at attacks and plots in the last six years. So since 2016, directed towards critical infrastructure. And so what we try to do is we took about 94 cases

that we had 55 white supremacists, 39 Jihadists, and said, listen, what are they targeting? Are they looking at energy sector? Are they looking at the internet? Are they looking at schools or things like that?

“And whether the lessons we can learn from those type of things, right?”

There's a giant talk about this need

for a critical infrastructure.

But when we found out for the report is not a whole lot of people kind of dug into the data a bit. So when Alana and Bennett were working on this, they found some kind of interesting stuff. This is a niche area that no one really focuses

and entirely on. And these actors, whether they be white supremacist or Jihadists, they share some levels of tactics, but there are also some differences that are interesting. - And Alana, I know that there's this distinction

in the report between homegrown violent extremists and domestic violent extremists. I think to a lay person's ear, these might sound like synonyms. Could you describe sort of the distinction there?

- Yes, so homegrown violent extremists include actors that are motivated by foreign terrorizations, such as Alqaeda or Islamic state, but our residents are have grown up or our citizens of the United States.

- Domestic violent extremists are somewhat the actors we've seen at, say, the January 6th Capitol siege. They adhere to white supremacist doc trends that includes your average neo-nautzy actor

Those who adhere to neo-fascist ideology. - Great, and shameless, you know, now that we've gotten that straight away, we're talking about mostly salafi gehadists and white supremacist movements, militias,

“et cetera, what do we mean by critical infrastructure here?”

Materially, you know, what does that look like? - Yeah, no, it's a catch all phrase, right? So if the terminology of homegrown violent extremism was confusing and versus domestic violent extremism,

extrapolate that even further for critical infrastructure.

So it's 16 different industries, and it can range from energy industry, can range from schools, military bases, a kind of everything you could think of that's critical infrastructure. Anything that keeps the lights on and the internet on

is type of the folks or trains and airplanes, things like that. Things that we've seen traditionally that al-Qaeda's as focused on, you know, obviously 9/11, we have the attack on airplanes and other places like that, but we've also seen a rise of plotting and attacks towards

railstays to the systems and buses and things like that. - You know, your original question about, what is this difference between domestic violent extremism and homegrown violent extremism? Obviously it's ideology, right?

So it's one's foreign base to which be homegrown violent extremists, that's ISIS and Al-Qaeda, and then domestic is, you know, the garden variety of white supremacist and neo-Nazis, and it's really confusing for the public to understand

those dynamics, and that's because we have this like got awful system in government where we try to confuse people as much as possible. It makes sense to the FBI agent talking to the DHS officer, but for the general public, this idea of domestic violence,

extremism and homegrown violent extremism being very different, it confuses people, but it's kind of just what we're stuck with now. - And Shamus started to hint at this at an earlier answer about the motivations behind this report. You mentioned that there's a lot of rich data out there,

but no one is really comparing it and no one's quite talking about it. Alana, could you speak to a bit about, you know, what motivated you to embark on this project with your colleagues, you know,

“what you were hoping to find and what you were looking for?”

- Yes, so when we first entered this space

and started thinking about critical infrastructure targeting,

we had a wide range of actors to choose from when starting this comparative study, we elected white supremacists and selfie-g hottest, because they're known to government agencies to be some of the most lethal actors out there

that conducts some of the most lethal attacks. And from there, we noticed that there was a gap in the literature, especially comparative literature, surrounding critical infrastructure targeting by all types of extremists,

specifically white supremacists and selfie-g hottest. So we wanted to compare over the last six years, their actions, their what targets they tended towards, and their successes, their failures, and what at all means for the state

of critical infrastructure moving forward. - And Shamus, I think a lot of listeners will be wondering at this point, how bad could this be, or how bad could it get?

Critical infrastructure, as you said,

is definitely right there, it's critical. So what's the spectrum of severity that we're looking at, you know, from the low end to the high end, if some of these attacks were to be successful? - Yeah, that's always the question

when you look at these kind of homegrown or domestic violent extremist groups,

“is like, how much capability do they actually have?”

And if you peel back the numbers, you know, we're talking about 94 different individuals, it's not that large of a sample size admittedly so, you've got a population size of 330 million. So you're not talking about a large number of folks,

but we have seen both in the propaganda, whether it be ISIS or increasingly, white supremacists saying listen, we got to take down the energy grid because for the ISIS guys, it's like,

we take that down and then the system falls and for domestic violent extremists, it's like, we got to start a civil war, right? This is the way to do it. But most of these guys, for lack of a better word,

are knuckleheads, right? Dangerous knuckleheads hold really atrocious beliefs and all of those things, but some of them have a very hard time putting together a plot. They had the general idea of man,

we should derail a train or we should take down a power grid, but the actions don't usually resup to this level of this mastermind Hollywood idea of a terrorist. We've seen a number of cases where the FBI has interjected themselves in the process

and it may have been the white supremacist idea to attack, say, an energy grid, but there was some help along the way to get them to the point where they can have handcuffs on them. We always think like, are these kind of masterminds

planning us out? And the short answer is usually not. The downside is if it's such a large sector, critical infrastructure, then the opportunities there are vast, right?

And because we rely on kind of a system of systems,

You take down one spot and it has a ramification. You know, we saw that in COVID, right? So we shut down certain areas. Other things get affected. - To go back to the two umbrella groups

that we're talking about here, as you've been talking about, they have their own motivations which then will subsequently motivate different targets, different methods.

So taking each group separately, how do their beliefs then motivate which sector that they target?

“So I think your reports speaks well to the fact”

that the energy sector is well targeted

because it's so essential to every other sector

as you mentioned, it's a system of systems. But what is the, the white supremacist more likely to target versus the slough of your hottest, likely to target and why? - So it's a lot of you hottest.

We've seen throughout the cases that they tend to target government infrastructure sectors, emergency services and commercial facilities. Their belief is that they're in an entrenched conflict with the West and Western governments.

So in fact, it's quite logical that they target government infrastructure for say, compared to that, white supremacists, they tend to target energy sector the most while they also want to create mass chaos.

They're hoping to, as I said earlier, kind of influence and edge on the downfall of the United States systems and governance, but that includes a long-winded scale of attacks. So they see the energy sector as one step in the process

to influence all their energy sectors. So eventually down the road, the downfall of our society as we know it will occur. - And a lot of touch on something that was very important, which is this idea of accelerationism.

So if we're gonna confuse the listeners even more, let's add another definition. Accelerationists are mostly of the domestic violent extremism

mindset, but they're basically like, listen,

we got to start a civil war. The system that we have is not working and if we can cause as much chaos as seemingly possible and so be it. And the targeting kits a bit scattered shot on that,

and it's also particularly hard for the US government to kind of wrap their head around, because it's ideologically focused, but not really. Meaning that, you know, look at the gentleman

“who put a bomb at the DNC and the RNC on January 5th, right?”

You know, if you put a bomb towards the DNC, you give a ideological pack for the bomb in front of the RNC, you get an ideological back. You put them on both. You're probably dealing with an accelerationists, right?

Somebody's just trying to cause as much mayhem as possible. You know, we call it the Joker effect, right? They just wanna watch the world burn. Yeah, and kind of teasing at that thread a bit more, you know, and thinking about accelerationists,

why is then critical infrastructure

almost the perfect target for their aims? - So critical infrastructure is one piece of potential vast targets that accelerationists could target. It's a key target for them because overall, as I think Shamus mentioned earlier,

critical infrastructure itself. It's assets are spread wildly across the United States, which creates opportunity for say actors as far as the north west in the United States to target an asset that's closer to them.

Additionally, as Shamus mentioned, there's so many different infrastructure sectors. There's an ability to say target one initially, and then what we've seen is these actors, they attempt to evade law enforcement

and evading consequences after what they hoped would be after their first attack to target a different sector. So it creates a wide range of opportunities for these actors who are motivated to do

more than just wanna tap.

“- You know, it's this idea of a domino effect, right?”

You knock out the power grid and you move on to the trains, you move on to the buses, you go from there, and you cause as much mayhem as humanly possible. And that's what their angle is, right? Anything society is teetering on such an edge

that if it just gives a little bit of a push, we'll be able to build back society into what we believe it should be. - Now I wanna go into some of these case studies or these cases rather that you looked at,

can you give us a sense of what some of these plots looked like when they were being planned? I understand that every person that you looked at here, either was apprehended in the process of planning or attempting to just carry out an attack.

What did some of these attacks look like, shame us, so go back to you? - It runs with the spectrum, right? So you in the Salafi Jihadis specter, you have two or three guys who are targeting the railway systems in the Northeast.

What I find the most interesting case would be one of Ohio, which is a bunch of domestic violence extremists who were targeting energy sector, right? So the idea was to target a substation and go from there. What I find most interesting about that case

is those guys were charged with materials,

for a non-Jihadist case.

Most of these guys get charged with some sort of attack

on infrastructure or gun charges or drug charges or things like that. This is a part of a case where DOJ decided to put their finger on the scale and charge these guys from the Chile support.

“Now they were lucky in some respects in that they pled out, right?”

Now if you take a domestic violence to use them in case to trial under materials, for terrorism, it gets a little bit messy pretty quickly without a connection to a designated foreign terrorist organization.

So I find those cases would be the most interesting. And like I said, some of these guys, you look at the plots and you think yourself, there's no way this is gonna happen, right?

It's never gonna come fruition.

On the other hand, you know, you only gotta be lucky every once in a while on these type of things.

“And I think that's why the FBI was taking some of these cases”

so seriously. - And shame is just what we're following up on that. You know, are we talking here mostly kinetic plots or also attempted cyber attacks as well? - Yeah, cyber security is probably a different animal.

I mean, listen, it falls on the critical infrastructure

clearly, but we don't have the capability.

We haven't seen the capabilities in the 94 cases. You know, the low level data attack is probably within their window, but you know, widespread hacking of systems and things like that is not the skill set of these guys, right?

You know, the white supremacists tend to like to shoot guns in the woods and drink beer. They don't like to spend their time learning Python and are. So it's a little bit different in the way they're doing things. They're kind of like the caveman approach to an attack.

They're less likely to do kind of cyber security type of attacks. Those are much more state sponsored, right? The Iran, the Russia, the China of the world. We haven't seen that capability rise to a level four. Domestic balance stream is Oregon, Johannes.

- Hopefully that comes some nerves among our listeners that white supremacists don't want to learn Python. - Who does? - Really honest.

“Yeah, that's true. It's really the war, honestly.”

- In the end, the contract is on the right side. - Monatly, you can see Euro-Emonat. - Frank. - No. - Frank. - The last sponsored jobs. - The last sponsored jobs. - The last sponsored jobs.

- The last sponsored jobs. - And the last one. - Mila. - Mila. - And that works of information where both propaganda of radicalization and ideology are spread, but then also sort of the hard knowledge to know where the vulnerabilities are in these infrastructure systems. - Yeah, so a lot of these actors come across this knowledge through, I'd say, personal research,

but also mostly over communication apps, including telegram, it could include encrypted apps, where a lot of propaganda is being spread. For example, we saw a lot of accelerationist focused groups emerge out of what was called the Iron March Forum, which was an online forum that where a lot of different domestic violent extremists were able to speak to their ideas, share information, targeting information, and where a lot of these groups, including the Adam Waffen Division, or the base congealed, and started to branch off into their own like-minded groups.

A lot of the propaganda being shared over these communication apps is how actors, especially loan individuals,

We've seen this in multiple cases. Furthermore, we have seen actors who are arrested for plotting to target critical infrastructure that have used resources,

such as books that understand more thoroughly how nuclear reactors work. So they use a wide range of materials, but I'd say most focus should be on the communication apps that they use, the information that they share. This also we've seen includes publications such as Terragram. It is known to be a collection of telegram channels that discuss accelerationist plots and domestic extremist plots. They have published propaganda resources, including large-scale documents that explain critical infrastructure, the weaknesses,

how to circumvent such security within the infrastructure, and that's definitely something that's most concerning. I would also mention the labor intensiveness of these investigations. So it's one thing these guys are organizing on open platforms, like Twitter and Facebook and things like that, relatively open platforms. It's a little bit of a different animal when they go to telegram or other encrypted apps.

Now the FBI has always been complaining about this idea of going dark, right? We don't have window into encryption, things like that.

“There is some truth to that. I think what the real truth is, it just means a little bit more work on the front end.”

Meaning that you've got to run sources against it. You've got to rely on online covert employees. It's a whole thing, right? And you've got to begin the channels all the time, and those channels get knocked down on a daily basis. You've got to add it to the next one. You've got to have somebody to vouch for you. So it's just a little bit more work on the front end for law enforcement. But that's where these guys are heading now, right? So they're basically just kind of trading their lessons learned online.

And to add to that, a lot of these actors also take information and notes from past attacks that have occurred.

There's propaganda books out there that discuss attacking critical infrastructure sectors.

They're fiction. Let me be clear on that. They are fiction, but a lot of these actors and current day learn how or emulate this with their plots, with what they want to achieve. And that's something to be wear as well, because we can't control as a society, the flow of media, but it's something that's really, really important to understand.

“Is that these materials being spread around are influencing new radicalized actors?”

And to begin to shift the conversation toward solutions, what law enforcement can do. I'm curious, you know, the sharing of blueprints, for example, are some of those classified and the mirror sharing of it illegal or, you know, is it perfectly legal to share information about how a power good works. And then, you know, if so, you know, what challenges does that pose to law enforcement trying to root out these networks? Yeah, so you have an open flow of information on the internet, right? That's the best part about the internet. You can get the Taylor Swift CD and you can get a power plant grid and both those things are fascinating to me, right?

So there's very little that law enforcement you can restrict it. So you've seen some level of attempt to basically, you know, not put some of this stuff online or air drops, some of the plans, so they're not on on the online space, but for the most part, the horses at the barn, right? And so the question then becomes, how do you harden what's already out there? And then how do you kind of, I mean, something is going to be good old foot fashion law enforcement, right? How do you infiltrate your network so that you know what's up?

If you look at solutions, right, there's there's a variety of them, right? One is, I think one of the takeaways from the report is yes, it's concerning, but it's not the be all and all. And so if they're not targeting energy, they're going to be targeting the public, if they're not attacking a power grid, they're going to be attacking the mall.

“And so at the end of the day, the target matters a little bit, but not as much as the individual itself, right?”

And getting yourself into the system where you can stop that individual from doing something horrible. Shame is I was waiting for you to work in your Taley Swift reference. And you have a drop today, so like, that's, this is an important thing, I don't really know why we're talking about critical network structure. I mean, there's nothing more critical than Taylor Swift's new CDA. Her album is fantastic.

So I'm going to ask a bit of a cynical question pivoting away from Taylor Swift's unfortunately for the moment. You know, your report focused on cases in which individuals were apprehended, as I mentioned in the process of planning or attempting to attack, you know, which made lead, like I said a cynic to ask, you know, why, why pay closer to attention to this if it seems like law enforcement's got this, you know, they've been catching the bad guys and the plots have been foiled. So, a lot of to go to you, you know, why still raise the alarm on this by publishing a report?

It's very important to understand that it's not just the government's job to protect such critical infrastructure and the assets around the country, but we need to be building more partnerships and stronger partnerships, so that one threats arise.

“The law enforcement as well as the private companies can be prepared and update their securities accordingly.”

I couldn't agree with a lot more on that, right? So, you know, it's one thing to add to the guard base to Fort Bragg, because you're worried about threat.

That's not something that you can do out of power plant. You can't demand that they do things. You can add standards, you can add regulations, you all have variety things you want to do. That takes time, right? At the end of the day, you need to have a partnership. The FBI needs to say, listen, these are the cases we saw. This is what we think they're targeting, and here's the information to the local power plant or other critical infrastructure and saying, this is what we're seeing, right? This is where we think you should think about doing things, and that's where groups like infiguard that the FBI runs that works with private sector to alert them to emerging threats and things like that. It's going to rely a lot on private sector to do this, and then we have to figure out incentives for it, right?

“If you're worried about the bottom line, which you are as a private company, what is the incentive to stop these types of tax or harden your stuff?”

The answer is, if it goes down, that's going to affect your bottom line. The more the FBI and law enforcement can hammer home that place with the understanding that we're not talking about a massive wave of people that are interested in this, but still something that's concerning nonetheless. While critical infrastructure targeting, we've seen a lot of cases that have been unsuccessful that actors have unsuccessfully carried out their plots, there have been a small subsection of plots that have occurred that people were injured.

In the 2016 tax within Chelsea, New York, and New Jersey, an actor who adhered to Al Qaeda's ideology named Amad Khan Rahimi, he targeted a 5K race and other transportation systems using explosives, and it injured over 30 people, and this was only in 2016. There's been other attacks that have been successful, but it's really clear that while we hope these actors won't carry out their plans, we need to be diligent working with law enforcement and our private partnerships to prevent further tax from happening.

“So as much as there are a lot of cases that have not come to fruition, it's still a possibility and we should all be wary of that.”

That's all attacks, right? So think of the Oklahoma City bombing that killed hundreds of people, and then a number of security measures are put in place post that to try to harden federal buildings from that. I hope that this report can provide some level of nuance and understanding of the threat so that we can prevent future tax that occur. And this is not a time-plancing novel, right? These are not these guys that are planning to poison the entire water system, they don't have the capability of those things, but they're still dangerous than the less.

And so we set ourselves up for failure if we don't try to figure out what happened in the past so we can learn and prevent the future. In addition to that, there are other actors out there that we did not focus on for this report, many other actors adhering to different ideologies that do target critical infrastructure and we hope to dig into this into further research.

But this is just a small subsection of the actors that are willing to target the United States system of governance and our society through critical infrastructure.

So we can leave it there, stay tuned for more research from the program on extremism, Alana Crill and Sheamus Hughes, thank you so much for speaking with me. Thanks for having us. The law fair podcast is produced in cooperation with the Brookings Institution. You can get at free versions of this and other law fair podcasts by becoming a law fair material supporter at patreon.com/law fair. You'll get access to special events and other content available only to our supporters.

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