FBI Catches Their First Juvenile ‘764’ Member, I Think; It’s Kind of Hard to Tell

(Content Warning: It’s 764, so Self-Harm is involved.)

For the first time ever, the federal government has charged, adjudicated, and detained a juvenile for crimes tied to the so-called 764 network, and the FBI wants you to know they’re very proud of themselves for it.

A 17-year-old from Maine was found to have conspired to sexually exploit a child, sexually exploited and enticed a child, distributed CSAM, sent interstate threats, cyberstalked victims, and committed identity theft.

Because the kid is a minor, federal law keeps the name sealed, and the FBI Boston field office made sure to announce all of this with maximum fanfare and minimum substance.

Special Agent Ted Docks said the case “should make it crystal clear that if you conspire to commit violent, extremist crimes, your age will not shield you from accountability,” and added that publicizing it might deter other kids from following the same path. US Attorney Andrew Benson chimed in with his own version of the same warning, and Assistant Attorney General John Eisenberg used the occasion to remind parents to stay vigilant.

Somewhere in all that self-congratulation, the FBI also mentioned they’re currently investigating more than 500 people nationwide tied to networks like this one, which is the kind of number that should get your attention, but instead it just gets buried in the sixth paragraph of an FBI press release.

If you’re not familiar, 764 is what the FBI calls a “nihilistic violent extremist” network, or NVE for short, a label they’ve been leaning on hard this year. According to the bureau, groups like this “work in concert with one another towards a common purpose of destroying civilized society through the corruption and exploitation of vulnerable populations,” all in service of sowing chaos and social unrest. That sounds like it came straight from a CBS show about counterterrorism, but they’re not exactly wrong.

What I think is actually driving 764 has a lot less to do with destroying civilization and a lot more to do with a bunch of powerless, friendless incels discovering that the internet lets them feel powerful for the first time in their miserable lives. You can call it “accelerationism” if you want a scarier word for your press conference. But I call it what it is, a bunch of basement-dwelling copycats who think they’re criminal masterminds.

But getting back to the press release, which is linked below, it’s vague to the point of being useless. We caught a kid who did something so shocking it “would shock most people to their very core,” according to Docks himself, and then the FBI just… stops. No specifics. No pattern. Nothing parents or teachers or anyone else could actually use to spot warning signs in their own kids or their kids’ friends.

I understand the Juvenile Delinquency Act requires the name to stay sealed, but withholding the actual conduct isn’t required by anything. It just makes the announcement read like a ghost story some teenager made up to scare his little brother. Big scary crimes happened, trust us, but we can’t say what.

If the goal here is deterrence, as Docks claims, deterrence requires people to actually understand what they’re being deterred from.

So since the FBI won’t tell you what 764 actually does, I will. The typical playbook is grooming underage girls online until the predator convinces them to send explicit photos of themselves, at which point those photos become CSAM and, more importantly to the predator, leverage.

Once they have that leverage, they use it to blackmail their victims into committing acts of self-harm, things like carving names or symbols into their own skin, on camera, so the predator has fresh content to prove his conquest. Some of these victims have also been coerced into abusing family pets.

The point of all this isn’t sexual gratification in the traditional sense; it’s clout. These predators then take the footage of self-harm or animal cruelty and circulate it among their own network as a kind of trophy they can trade for status among a bunch of other losers doing the exact same thing to other kids.

That’s 764 in a nutshell. Not an ideology per se but a blackmail-and-humiliation pipeline run by little boys who found out the internet would let them feel like gods if they broke enough teenage girls to prove it.

Given all that, Docks’ line about age no longer being a shield is going to land on precisely nobody who actually needs to hear it. These are egomaniacal nihilists who genuinely believe they’re either too clever to get caught or, in the more extreme cases, don’t particularly care if they do because they’re expecting to die in some blaze-of-glory finale anyway.

A press release isn’t going to talk a kid like that off the edge, and pretending otherwise is more about giving the FBI a sound bite than actually disrupting the pipeline.

If the Department of Justice wanted to prove they were serious about dismantling these networks, they’d throw the same resources at 764 that they throw at rounding up and deporting brown people, and they’d do it just as publicly. But going after basement-dwelling white kids with that same level of theater runs the risk of embarrassing a chunk of the voter base that doesn’t love hearing “domestic extremist” and “white teenage boy” in the same sentence.

So instead we get a press release with all the specificity of a chain email. And if anyone in Washington genuinely wanted to choke this pipeline off at the source instead of just prosecuting the fallout, they’d start by making mental healthcare actually accessible to isolated, friendless teenagers before some 764 recruiter finds them first.

(Sources)