In the fall of 2016, Keegan Hankes, an analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Center, paid a visit to the neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer.This was not unusual; part of Hankes'job at the civil rights organization was to track white supremacists online, which meant reading their sites. But as Hankes loaded the page on his computer at SPLC's headquarters in Montgomery, Alabama, something caught his eye: a pop-up window that announced "Checking your browser before accessing ... Please allow up to 5 seconds." In fine print, there was the cryptic phrase "DDoS protection by Cloudflare." Hankes, who had worked at SPLC for three years, had no idea what Cloudflare was. But soon he noticed the pop-up appearing on other hate sites and started to poke around.
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