‘Tinder for Nazis’ and the woman who hacked it

0:00Martha Root:This is The Guardian.

0:09Eva Hoffman:Today, how one woman took down Tinder for Nazis, dressed as a feminist superhero.

0:24Eva Hoffman:It was the very end of December last year when the Chaos Computer Club held its annual conference in Hamburg.

0:30Martha Root:Welcome to the 39C3 Power Cycles.

0:39Eva Hoffman:So the Chaos Computer Club is one or the oldest hacking organization in Germany and they have a yearly convention called the Chaos Communication Congress This is Martha Root, not her real name, not her real voice It's a mixture of people just sitting there for three days playing with hardware or 3D printers or whatever and there are a lot of presentations and talks while hacking. Martha is a hacker and is incredibly secretive about her true identity. I am a researcher, investigator, and I prefer to keep my rear name for myself because the neo-Nazis and the racist networks I'm investigating, they are like some people who are quite dangerous.

1:28Eva Hoffman:Martha took to the stage to talk about her latest and most audacious hack In disguise, of course She was dressed as a pink Power Ranger

1:36Martha Root:Meet the Pink Ranger Kimberly is a bright and beautiful girl Who loves shopping malls and gymnastics

1:44Eva Hoffman:I was kind of looking for Not too dangerous looking way to hack my face and also to make it seem a little bit funny at least.

2:02Eva Hoffman:Martha had been invited to address the Congress alongside two journalists from the German newspaper Die Zeit. Together, they'd been investigating a neo-Nazi dating website called White Date, which Martha had hacked into.

2:15Martha Root:Vielen Dank. Ihr habt ja noch gar nichts gehört. Danke, dass so viele sich hier reingequetscht haben.

2:21Eva Hoffman:They discussed how White Date worked. It's basically Tinder for white supremacists. And they read out some of the profiles. I'll translate it for you. I'm a German who loves Germanic culture and traditions and lives by old values. I'm hoping for a wife to come on this path with me to build a family. I have very good genes.

2:49Eva Hoffman:Once the talk had ended, the two journalists left the stage. But Martha stayed on. She had something secret planned. A piece of hacking theatre. So there were some technical issues, so I was pretty stressed because I also could not see properly in this helmet.

3:10Eva Hoffman:After a few technical problems, she shared her screen. Some code popped up. So it was like first saying that it changed the internet address of the owner. And line by line, Martha began deleting the neo-Nazi dating site. And then that it logs in to the hosting company, that it deletes white-date.map, deletes all the backups, deletes all the social media profiles, and then also deletes all the email addresses. The crowd went wild, and Martha's place in hacking history was assured.

3:47Eva Hoffman:From The Guardian, I'm Helen Pidd. Today in Focus. How a secretive hacker exposed a global network of white supremacists looking for love.

4:01Eva Hoffman:Before we go any further, I should tell you that we've done something pretty unusual in this episode. Martha is voiced by an AI. Now, I did interview her via the secure messaging app Signal, but Martha then ran her side of the conversation through an AI voice generator. For reasons that are probably already clear, she takes her privacy very seriously. Let's get going. How did all of this start for you? How did you come across White Date and what made it stand out from the other dating sites? So I did not start to investigate dating sites for themselves because it's not like a topic I'm instruced in usually.

4:38Eva Hoffman:before the last elections in Germany I started scraping right-wing networks or right-wing websites and I stumbled upon it and like went on the website it kind of to get my interest like first of all because they were like really secretive like when you join them they directly one of so-called anti-white infiltrators and you you have to like answer a few questions and then they approve you or they don't approve you. What I did is I gained access to the complete database of the website, meaning I was able to see all the messages that users send back and forth between them. And once I was in, yeah, like I had like a few funny ideas for what could be done with it.

5:23Eva Hoffman:I mean, I guess there's all kinds of different dating apps, aren't there, for pretty much every different sector of society and interest. But is it basically the same that you have a username a picture and then what else do people have on their profiles so yeah and generally it's like a lot of people have like user pictures and self descriptions are usually like really really long because it's often men who like to speak about themselves and then for strips like the normal stuff that adult taking profile has for example like the age like seeking a woman the location if they have children if they if they want children what's the astrological sign but But then also like the political orientation that a lot of the users openly speak about that they're like national socialists, that they are openly racist.

6:12Eva Hoffman:They play around with imagery of the Third Reich and then that they speak about Europe pits rather than white people. Because like the term Caucasian, which is more often used in English, would include Jews or Turkish people. And they want to exclude themselves from that. But yeah, it was just really crazy what people wrote. I've never heard that term before, Europids. P-I-D-S, is that how you spell it? Euro-P-I-D-S. Exactly, yeah. So, for example, I right now have a profile open and seen pictures of a bearded guy. He writes about his ancestry in a self-description. He says he has blue eyes and black, brown, dark hair.

7:00Eva Hoffman:He loves history. And then they say about their political orientation that he's pro-white, fully red-pilled traditionalism, ethno-nationalism, ethno-tribalism, national socialism and fascism. So details on the profits get a little bit different than, for example, compared with Tinder. Oh my goodness. And so you managed to download a huge amount of data from the user base. What can you tell us about the makeup of people who were on there, who were using White Date? Where are they from and who are they? So the data that I have from a website, those were 6 ,600 users. All in all, the large majority came from the US and Canada, followed by Germany and the UK and other European countries.

7:48Eva Hoffman:The average age in this data is 38. And the gender ratio is also quite imbalanced. It's 88 % MEM and 12 % WLN in the data. that I scraped in October 25.

8:06Eva Hoffman:Okay, so you hacked into White Date and downloaded more than 6 ,000 user profiles as well as DMs that they were all sending each other. What did you do next? So I wrote AI bots, which then interacted with those users. The main idea in the beginning was basically to just waste those people's time. Like if they chat with a robot, They cannot do Nazi stuff. So they basically in the beginning just existed. And in the moment where users, mostly men, wrote them, they started answering.

8:37Martha Root:Guten Morgen. I don't really speak German, but I'm learning. Are you open to dating a man from America? Most of my ancestors are German. Good morning. Yes, I'm open to a relationship with an American man with German roots. I've only been living in Germany for a short time and I'm still learning German.

8:54Eva Hoffman:This is Ellie, one of Martha's AI creations. She's 34 years old and recently moved from the UK to Germany for work. She's looking for something slow and serious. And her username, brace yourself, is Lil Miss Ethnostate. We've used actors to play her and her suitors.

9:13Martha Root:Your profile is a bit sparse. Tell me more about yourself. I'm looking for wife material and want to build the best life with her. Hi there. Thanks for reaching out. It's great to connect with someone who appreciates traditional values like I do. Your analogy about men building strong structures and women filling them with life resonates deeply. Maybe we could meet up for coffee or something if we hit it off.

9:39Eva Hoffman:And are you typing in these questions or is the AI just inventing? Have you just set the AI off to do its thing? They were basically prompted that they should behave like traditional or really conservative women who want to save the white race. and that's why they are on the platform, that they should ask questions regarding the political orientation.

10:00Martha Root:I'd like to learn more about you and whether you truly share similar views to mine. That Nazi time was by far the best we had in Germany. The time was so much better and cleaner without all the disgusting races which now are living in Germany. Would be great to meet up for coffee and get to know each other. Best regards.

10:16Eva Hoffman:What was like part of the prompt that they should not proactively go into like pushing towards a political thing because it would have been like a real problem if my bots would have radicalized people or if my bots would have told people to do, I don't know, like some kind of activism on the streets or whatever or harass some foreign or some whatever. So in the beginning, I had to supervise them a bit, meaning I had to read out manually what they were doing. But in the end, they were running fully automatically. Do you have any big plans for this summer? Smiley face.

10:52Martha Root:Invade Poland, winky face.

10:55Eva Hoffman:Ha ha, that is indeed a big plan, laughing face. What other interests do you have besides planning invasions?

11:02Martha Root:I'm really looking forward to summer too.

11:04Eva Hoffman:It's a great time to get outside and enjoy nature. And did you ever think about meeting up with any of them in real life? One user wanted to have a date with Ellie. He wrote the weirdest stuff ever. So he's living in a city in southern Germany and that he is writing on little pieces of paper to his neighbours, which are not white, that they should go home, please. And to the neighbours who hang out with people who are not white, that they, please, should stop hanging out with people who are not white. Gosh, and this is him trying to seduce this woman saying, guess what I do in my free time. yeah like look look look what what kind of quick i am um in the end my bot i wanted to have a date but then there were like really really sad messages that my pop did not show up oh goodness so yeah and did no one figure out that they were talking to a bot actually so one one of the bots was banned and then what what are you going to do when i get banned i basically wrote the support and said, hey, I'm banned.

12:12Eva Hoffman:And they said like, yeah, we think you're a bot. Please verify yourself. And they have this thing on the website called white verification, which means that you have to make a review on Telegram and send it to a Telegram account and hold a paper with your email address in front of you. And I basically did that using a deep fake software, meaning I just exchanged my face with the face of Ellie. the deep fake worked and shortly after becoming white verified ellie received a message from an american guy he's a big anti-vaxxer and an anti-semite who writes on his profile that jews want us all to mix together until the world becomes a brown dumbed down mass of low iq half wits clueless that purebred high iq jews have come to dominate everything he's looking for a like-minded and creative white woman to bear multiple children.

13:05Eva Hoffman:Someone who still values tradition, family, and truth above all else. His big claim to fame is that he says he knows Liv Hyde, the woman who runs White Date.

13:15Martha Root:Greetings, miss. I'm trusting that you are a genuine white woman in profile because Liv Hyde, the founder and administrator of White Date, has already processed your white verification. If you reside in Lubeck, you're less than a two-hour drive from her and I'm going to visit with her and her daughter next week. So I'm writing to you with interest in whether you would like to meet with me and or us in person anytime during May 8th through May 11th. Some curiosities I already have would be how you became racially conscious and how you discovered WipeDate. But we can chat later, respectfully.

13:46Eva Hoffman:It sounded a bit weird. I think he just wanted to brag with the fact that he knows the founder of this platform. From that moment, I stopped using a bot and basically started writing. Hamburg this weekend? That could work. I'd prefer to meet just the three of us first, too.

14:05Martha Root:Are you flying in via Hamburg?

14:07Eva Hoffman:Martha realised this was a huge opportunity to find out who this mysterious live-hider was. They agreed that Ellie would travel to northern Germany to meet up.

14:16Martha Root:Let's see how it goes. Catch you at 11 sharp unless something crazy happens. In the meantime, I'll be investigating what it means to place X at the end of a message. LOL. well.

14:28Eva Hoffman:Now obviously Ellie isn't real so at the last minute Martha made excuses on behalf of Ellie the bot. The idea was that we basically say that there was a car crash on the way and Ellie has to take care of her friends so we let's meet another day. But in reality Martha teamed up with another activist and together they spied on this American guy and Liv Haider. We followed them First they did like a little Nazi road trip through Northern Germany. Like they went through a Viking village, looked at really, really boring things for the whole day. And in the end they stopped at a, yeah, like quiet, expensive house.

15:07Eva Hoffman:And when I started looking up who lived there, I found out that a person lived there who has a company. And that company owns the trademark for White Date.