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On January 6, 2021, the world watched in shock as domestic right-wing extremists launched a violent attack on the United States' Capitol Building in Washington, DC. Many recorded and live-streamed their invasion, documenting the violent assault on the capitol as they broke through barriers and Capitol Police forces, breaching the building and taking up residence inside congressional chambers and the offices of congressional representatives. The insurrection was triggered by Donald Trump's inflammatory call to action and the mob's desire to halt the certification of electors and overturn the 2020 presidential election.
In the aftermath of the January 6th assault on the Capitol (and US democracy), public focus quickly turned to the Federal Bureau of Investigation's (FBI) response and the ensuing investigation as well as to questions about what information law enforcement and intelligence agencies had prior to the attack and how they should have responded to that information prior to the Capitol invasion. Over the succeeding months, the FBI's investigation has shed greater light on the US federal government's surveillance and classification of domestic extremists and domestic terrorism. In June 2021, FBI Director Christopher Wray called the insurrectionists "violent extremists" who had "betray[ed] the values of our democracy" (Wray 2021); he had previously called their actions "domestic terrorism" (Naylor and Lucas 2021). Wray (2021) reaffirmed the FBI's position that "the greatest terrorism threat" to the US was from "domestic violent extremists (DVEs) and homegrown violent extremists (HVEs)." He defined DVEs as "Individuals who commit violent criminal acts in furtherance of social or political goals stemming from domestic influences-some of which include racial or ethnic bias, or anti-government or anti-authority sentiments" (Wray 2021).
Wray's statements confirmed that federal law enforcement had been conducting extensive surveillance of domestic extremists in the year prior to the attack on the Capitol (see, e.g., Wray 2021). In the aftermath of the attack, the FBI examined hundreds of thousands of digital tips, photographs, and videos collected through crowdsourcing calls for evidence and open-source intelligence gathering practices (Wray 2021; Ward 2021). The surveillance and scope of the investigation is tremendous, but its reliance on freely shared or publicly posted visual-media content is not without some comparison. In this case, the FBI relied on techniques used in the past to investigate violent public...