Dees started the center in 1971 to bring desegregation suits in Alabama. Expanding his reach, he found that data helped bring hate groups to justice. He sued the White Aryan Resistance for inciting two Oregon skinheads who beat a black man to death with a baseball bat. After the Ku Klux Klan torched its building in 1983, and police broke up plots to assassinate Dees, the SPLC went full force into information gathering. The work can be drudgery.
Cops call with tips, too.
The trick is to catalog it, retrieve it, and connect the dots. Investigators clip about 1,000 newspaper articles a week and read 150 hate magazines, which are received through disguised addresses. Deep in their computers was the information about Furrow's life at the Aryan Nations' Idaho compound. But even with this monitoring arsenal, private groups are limited in what they can accomplish. If society next time wants them there three minutes before, then they need infiltration.