I wonder if he also infiltrated under a fake name (possibly the same fake name).

I think the “albeit” is just an aside. It isn’t necessarily enhancing his ability to create distrust. It is slightly confusing though because one could of course imagine a way of writing the report anonymously that would add additional distrust; if he was vague enough it could be hard for anybody to know that he wasn’t talking about their organization. But he’d have to be pretty vague.

Furthermore, the journalist explicitly encouraged suspicion toward Williams:

> Remarkably, the AP3er defended Williams’ loyalty each time I asserted he’d secretly tried to undermine the group.

Is this how journalists protect sources? Seems strange to me.

I am guessing that his threat model includes people involved in these militias (or others) but who he didn't interact with directly. It probably also includes action by people merely sympathetic to them, for example maybe local law enforcement.

There can be a difference between revealing identity to some and revealing it to all. I'm not sure how much difference there is in this case specifically but it's not my life, not my call.

Do you know his name after reading the article?

I am not the one that would be a threat to his life or have context to reverse engineer his identity.

Right, and random readers it's irrelevant to. The ones who care and have context would be able to figure out who this is in their organization if this isn't the real name unless it's entirely a fabricated story. I'm not sure what you're trying to say.

What answer do you want? The answer has already been told to you twice. They don't want more people to know who they are. If you had read carefully you'd seen that in the article they say the group already knows who he is and he is on the run. It's natural he doesn't want more people to know him. But you seem to want some other answer that satisfies you.

Those details are not necessarily his firsthand account of things. I mean, in your own comment you quote something where Williams is posing as something else in order to take someone else down, why should it be any different in the case of providing these details?

Because the journalist is claiming to have validated the elements of the story. If the journalist is also lying about that or intentionally helping their source in lying that’s a huge breach of public trust and should be immediately blacklisted from working as such in the future. There are other ways the source could be protected without actually lying about things they’re claiming are true.

I don't think that source can really be protected, nor does he expect to be. He's pretty clear on 'I want the militias to know what I did and to live in fear that anybody they trust could be another me, ready to betray them'.

To some extent, the FBI has at least sometimes done just this. It's possible that some new leader like Kash Patel can remove the threat of the FBI infiltrating and betraying militias, but then what about moles infiltrating the FBI once they become effectively the same thing as the militias?

There's a fundamental difference between acting as a law enforcement agency, and acting as a militia seeking to wage secret war on a class of citizens, where if your intent is to STOP various humans from planting bombs etc. you're acting like law enforcement, and if your intent is to plant the bombs you are the militia even if you're wearing a law enforcement name.

This is shown in the struggles of the mole: would've been morally easier for him if he was just looking to rack up a body count. He wanted to protect what he saw as innocents, and so he had to calculate to what extent his infiltration was causing collateral damage, and when he acted on that he fled, cover blown as far as he knew. If he was more interested in just body count he might have been more blase about how things were going.