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After months of investigation, the FBI has arrested one of the most prolific swatters in American history. The 17-year-old Californian suspect, who goes by the alias Torswats, is being held in detention as he awaits extradition to Seminole County, Florida.
The teenager faces four felony charges, including terrorism and prejudice-motivated acts, according to Wired. Florida law prosecutes minors as adults; therefore, their identity is concealed. This swatting suspect arrest follows a surge in swatting incidents across the nation, with Seminole County experiencing high-profile attacks targeting a mosque and a courthouse.
Up to 10 informants managed by the FBI were embedded in anti-pipeline resistance camps near the Standing Rock Sioux Indian Reservation at the height of mass protests against the Dakota Access pipeline in 2016. The new details about federal law enforcement surveillance of an Indigenous environmental movement were released as part of a legal fight between North Dakota and the federal government over who should pay for policing the pipeline fight. Until now, the existence of only one other federal informant in the camps had been confirmed.
The FBI also regularly sent agents wearing civilian clothing into the camps, one former agent told Grist in an interview. Meanwhile, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, or BIA, operated undercover narcotics officers out of the reservation’s Prairie Knights Casino, where many pipeline opponents rented rooms, according to one of the depositions.
The operations were part of a wider surveillance strategy that included drones, social media monitoring, and radio eavesdropping by an array of state, local, and federal agencies, according to attorneys’ interviews with law enforcement.
This week alone saw Atlanta-area raids by law enforcement that took a woman out of her house with no shirt, left a naked photo of another woman on display after ransacking a room and dragged a man by his hair – while arresting none of them.
The pre-dawn raids on three houses on Thursday were the third Swat-style operation in residential areas of Atlanta and nearby unincorporated DeKalb county tied to a movement that began in 2021 – and the first in which the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) played a prominent role.
The fight against Cop City has attracted national and global headlines, especially after police shot and killed one environmental protester at a campsite in a public park – the first such incident of its kind in US history.
At least one of the search warrants for Thursday’s raid seen by the Guardian authorized the FBI to confiscate dozens of items from the raided homes – including laptops, cellphones, “Defend the Atlanta Forest” stickers and posters and personal journals.
The operation came after weeks of Atlanta officials promoting a campaign to catch activists linked to arson against construction and police equipment, all the while activists have been committing more acts of sabotage, alternating with nonviolent, civil disobedience.
Obama had a true crime podcast and a group of my classmates and I decided we were gonna solve to crimes. We solved two cold cases before the FBI started trying to stop us and then Joe Biden yelled at them.