Early signs of a threat to shoot up a Manhattan synagogue were detected on Friday morning not by law enforcement officials but by an online security analyst working in a Manhattan office building.
A Twitter user with the handle @VrilGod posted a series of alarming tweets caught by the analyst’s filters used to identify possible online threats.
In one post, the user warned: “Big moves being made on Friday.”
In another, the user wrote: “Gonna ask a Priest if I should become a husband or shoot up a synagogue and die.”
When the analyst saw these tweets, “alarm bells went off,” said his boss, Mitchell Silber, who leads the Community Security Initiative for the UJA-Federation of New York. They resulted in a police investigation that ended in the arrest of Christopher Brown, 21, and Matthew Mahrer, 22, just before midnight on Friday at Pennsylvania Station.
Analysts on Mr. Silber’s team who contacted the authorities about the threat were monitoring filters that scrape the internet for possible local attacks by employing search terms like “Jewish, New York, synagogue, kill, shoot and die,” said Mr. Silber, a former director of intelligence analysis with the New York City Police Department. The initiative was created after the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue attack in Pittsburgh, he said in an interview on Tuesday.
The filters search mainstream social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, as well as other chat forums including 4Chan, 8chan, Gab.com and Telegraph, he said.
https://www.jns.org/jew-accused-of-threatening-nyc-synagogue-is-grandson-of-a-holocaust-survivor/