In the times after the January 6 riot on Capitol Hill, one man struck an alarming observe on the MyMilitia.com message board. “I’m not a dumbass suicide bomber,” he posted beneath the deal with Dionysus. But he would “happily die a young man knowing that I didn’t allow the evils in this world to continue unjustly treating my fellow Americans so disrespectfully.” Over the next months, prosecutors say, that man, whose actual identify was Seth Pendley, centered his anger at Amazon, concocting a plot to destroy an Amazon Web Services knowledge facilities in Northern Virginia with C-Four plastic explosives.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation took Pendley, 28, into custody on Thursday; court docket paperwork say that he admitted to orchestrating the plan on the time of his arrest. The case presents one other unsettling revelation into how the more and more heated rhetoric from the far-right has translated into real-world threats. How did Dionysus need his “little experiment” to finish, one other MyMilitia.com member requested? “Death.”
Pendley’s posts got here at a time when Amazon was beneath intense scrutiny from the far-right. The firm introduced on January 9 that it could lower ties with Parler, the “free speech” social community that had turn into a haven for harassment and extremism and hosted many contributors within the January 6 assault. “Sounds like war,” wrote one Parler member in a submit spotted by Buzzfeed News editor John Paczkowski. “It would be a pity if someone with explosives training were to pay a visit to some AWS data centers – the locations of which are public knowledge.”
Two days later, Insider reported that an AWS government despatched a memo to staff urging vigilance within the wake of the Parler ban. “If you see something, say something—no situation or concern is too small or insignificant,” wrote Chris Vonderhaar, AWS VP of infrastructure.
In private and non-private posts on-line, court docket paperwork say, Pendley claimed to have been on the Capitol on January 6, however not to have entered the constructing. He expressed disappointment that his fellow protesters weren’t extra aggressive. “I feel like we all went into this with the intentions of getting very little done,” Dionysus wrote on MyMilitia.com. “How much did you expect to do when we all willingly go in unarmed.”
The MyMilitia.com posts have been regarding sufficient that somebody tipped off the FBI; investigators subsequently obtained entry to Pendley’s Facebook messages by way of a search warrant, and started bodily surveillance of his home in Wichita Falls, Texas. “We are indebted to the concerned citizen who came forward to report the defendant’s alarming online rhetoric,” appearing US Attorney Prerak Shah mentioned in an announcement. “In flagging his posts to the FBI, this individual may have saved the lives of a number of tech workers.”
In late January, Pendley allegedly started speaking with an affiliate over the encrypted messaging app Signal about his plans to assault AWS. “If I had cancer or something I would just drive a bomb into those servers lol,” Pendley wrote on February 19, in accordance to the legal criticism. He in the end hoped to “kill off about 70 percent of the internet.” (AWS has over 30 % of world cloud market share.) What Pendley did not understand is that particular person he was texting was an FBI informant.
The plot continued from there, in accordance to court docket paperwork. On February 22, Pendley mentioned he had ordered a topographical map of Virginia, the place a number of AWS knowledge facilities are positioned. The following month, FBI brokers noticed that Pendley painted his silver Pontiac black, allegedly as a part of a technique to conceal his identification through the assault.
On March 31, Pendley met in particular person with the affiliate and an undercover FBI agent posing as an explosives supplier. There, Pendley allegedly outlined his plan to bomb AWS knowledge facilities in Northern Virginia that he believed offered providers for the CIA, FBI, and different federal authorities businesses. Prosecutors say he had deliberate to fabricate particular bins that may direct the pressure of the blasts.
