On Sunday, Yahoo News said that the computer of Newtown, CT shooter Adam Lanza could be "crucial" in the investigation. Lanza had two bedrooms in his spacious suburban home, one for sleeping and one to stash all his computer equipment.
A law-enforcement source indicated what they would look for:
"If he visited certain websites, they are going to glean whatever information they can from that and see what it means," said the source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to discuss the investigation publicly. "Does he have friends he communicates with online? Was there a fight with somebody?"
The source also indicated some working hypotheses of the police:
"You don't know if this kid was put up to this by somebody else," the source said. "You don't know if there was a conspiracy of sorts. You don't know if there wasn't somebody who wasn't goading this kid on."
So most importantly, this law enforcer was curious and kept an open mind -- and seems to indicate that he was aware that there's already a tidal wave of political correctness, where a concerted autism lobby and as well as the pro-gaming lobby and their Internet fanboyz and the very voluble and high-traffic tech press were already working overtime to make sure that no one ever wound up implicating them in any way, or restricting any of their freedoms over association with this tragedy. He said:
"Has he been seeing a child psychologist throughout his lifetime? Was he on medication?" the law enforcement source said. "These are a zillion logical who, what, whey, why, where questions that need to be answered. They need to be asked without any fear of any stigmatism … and you can't be politically correct in asking those questions."
No, you can't.
Fear of stigmatism is what the various lobbies hate experiencing, and understandably, if there is any kind of prejudicial profiling. But this cuts another way, too: there is fear of getting to the truth because doing so may stigmatize something and there will be a lot of resistance to that.
Today, of course, the investigation has advanced, and now we're being told briskly by the tech press (and probably with great relief) that we "may never know" what was ever on Lanza's hard drive and that it may be impossible to reconstruct forensically because Lanza, on the day he murdered his mother and 25 other people, even while ostensibly mentally ill or in a rage, he still had the foresight to smash his hard drive. It may be unrecoverable.
Of course, the forensics will call the Internet Service Provider, and try to get email, and social media and all the rest. So far, nobody has come up with any avatar names or handles of Adam Lanza. If his brother or anyone else knows, they aren't talking. At that raucous Internet forum where the kids talk obsessively about shooting and guns and popular culture, a particularly disliked mod had gone missing and some thought might be him. Now, he has shown up again. Or at least, somebody has shown up again using that account.The horrid comments continue, creating the climate of nihilism and hate...
And there might be forums all over in the geeky netherworld of IRC channels and pop-up PHP forums and Pastebins and all the rest. Somewhere, there are some people asking where D3dL& C@D^K has gone because he's been missing, and seemed to be just like the killer....
As Computer World reported, citing an expert:
"They're going to try to find a reason why...he went from fanaticizing about this to doing it," said Marc Rogers, chair of the Cyber Forensics Program in the Department of Computer and Information Technology at Purdue University. "Were there any early indications that he was getting ready to act these fantasies out? In some cases there are and in some there aren't."
Lanza's rampage was likely done for "maximum media impact," Rogers said, so investigators will also be looking for a manifesto or some other statement the 20-year-old may have left on his computer or communicated to someone electronically.
Of course, even if this killer organized a tinny Anonymous-style Youtube incoherently describing his thoughts about accelerating the Mayan Calendar and revenge on kids who picked on him in first grade by killing their counterparts today, there will be a sturdy bastion of those who claim, as they do for James Holmes, the Colorado killer, that he just played Guitar Hero on line -- no violent games here, m'am, we're just good kids.
Why is it that I feel as if I already know Adam Lanza, and you do, too? Because you feel as if it could be the story -- even if the outcome is very rare -- of so many nasty nerds online. Maybe Adam Lanza was an altruistic furry with a free sandbox in Second Life, or the most reliable team player in the World of Warcraft guild. But maybe he clicked on and shared and liked all the ugly and stupid memes and snickered like Beavis and Butthead.
Of course, there's a striking resemblance between Adam Lanza and Tizzers Foxchase, not only in RL but in the feel of "psychotic" that Tizzers emanates with all his obsessive griefing and harassment. But even I wouldn't figure Tizzers -- as bad as he and his noxious little friends are -- as school shooters even remotely. Griefers online and those steeped in the awful 4chan culture may talk sarcastically and cynically about massacres and other "something awful" sort of stuff, but that doesn't mean they are likely to take it off line.
Even so, let me put it this way: if ever Tizzers biggest friends and companions like Alyx Stoklitsky or Joanna Falmer (who may be him, too) or Yeehaw Ragu or Korpov Korpov or whoever would hear suddenly that Tizzers was arrested in connection with a mall or school shooting, they would say they were not surprised. Everyone knows they would say that. The readiness with which the members of that forum jumped nervously to the conclusion that their nasty mod was the shooter lets us know that.
The person incessantly harassing and griefing me in Second Life for more than four years, including with grisly and very creepy RL effigies showing me dead and so on, may not be the kind of person who would shoot schoolkids.
But he is the kind of person who helps create the substrate of culture some other lowlife would swim in who *would* be capable. That's just it. They do indeed egg each other on as a ritual and a rite of passage, and perhaps even this is the result.
I suppose the police are looking at any connections between the student planning a shooting the exact same day who was arrested in Oklahoma, or perhaps they are scouring everything from gun forums where people chat about their "man card" renewed -- the Bushmaster. Or just those Redditt and 4chan type fora where people may have obsessively talked about the Colorado shooting, and then among them was Adam who turns out to be a copycatter.
Why should police bother with all this when the shooter has already killed himself and his mother and the school officials who might know something? Because there might be more than one of them...There's the story of the arrest of someone in the woods which has dropped out of the news and has become great fodder for conspiracists, who have worked themselves now into a frenzy where even the Rothschilds and the Trilateral Commission if not the Zionists have cooked up these school shootings to...take over banks...or something. I think the reason it dropped out is likely that the person in the woods was just one of the people escaping or a parent looking for their kid, and it's nothing.
But we still don't know what Ryan Lanza has told police -- no leaks there -- and the reason why he didn't see his brother for two years, yet he had stolen his ID. And "progressive" publications like Salon are making sure that no one ever asks any awkward questions -- and gets told they are politically-incorrect and harming someone's privacy if they do. Matt Bors at Salon joins other pious types like Poynter acting as if some horrible privacy-outing crime was commited because for a day, people thought Ryan Lanza was the shooter -- because, duh, his ID was found on his brother. You would think there was no relationship at all to the case, so indignant do some social media pearl-clutchers get. Most media or blogs (including mine) were in fact careful to say that they hadn't confirmed the identity, but here's what *police said* (it was POLICE who made this ID covered by AP and other wire services that sent the "social media hunters" to hunting).
Yet for all the intense scrutiny, and all the amateur sleuths out there combing Google and social media. we don't know anything much more than the fact that Adam Lanza was a member of his school's technology club -- apparently because adults basically pushed him into it to give him some kind of activity -- and that one friend of his mother's described him as a practicing vegan because he had a philosophy that he didn't want to hurt animals. That's going to surprise many people and be fodder for many a comment, but it doesn't surprise me, because the PETA mania, in putting people second after animals, already reveals their "end justifies the means" concept and their contempt for humanity that is common to totalitarian belief systems like communism and fascism.
And if Lanza developed a set of beliefs like that, he got them from the Internet. What else did he get from the Internet? What groups was he in or pages did he like -- although he wasn't on Facebook and was probably a CryptoParty kid hiding himself online even as he moved in there.
Interesting, I re-confirmed recently with a Norwegian that the killer Breivik was not found to actually have any organization, and that it is believed that he made it up. It was called the European Defense League or something similar, and had the Knights Templar as a symbol -- there's a 1,000 page manifesto to go with the loony hatred and conspiracy theories. Remember when some "progressives" thought that because Pamela Heller, the Atlas Shrugs blogger obsessed with Islam, and other American right-wing bloggers were mentioned in this manifesto a few times, that meant that they were somehow implicated in the shooting? That was nuts, as there was no connection and the Norwegian authorities never claimed one -- and everyone from Putin to Jesus Christ is mentioned in the manifesto, which has a lot of cut-and-paste and brainy incoherence like all conspiratorial stuff.
For the computer genius Lanza, there might be a manifesto still to appear, like the Unabomber or Breivik, or maybe only a Youtube channel showing some conspiracy beliefs as for Jared Loughner who shot Congresswoman Giffords, but there might be nothing at all. Or nothing that is coherent.
But we're told to focus on gun control and mental health only as a function of free medical care, and not ask any other questions -- by the autism lobby and gaming lobby, of course.
Even so, one expert wants us to keep an open mind:
Nor should the public be shy about discussing whatever is learned about Lanza's life and what prompted him to act, forensic psychologist Kris Mohandie told CNN.
"The opportunity is nearly always there to discover and disrupt," he said.
Dr. Mohandie said warning signs can include self destructiveness, hopelessness, desperation, interest in other mass shooters and a dysfunctional interest in weaponry.
Adam Lanza attended LAN parties via his technology club notes the Internet Post, yet none of the people interviewed have mentioned any particilar game or MMORPG. In fact, you wonder, if one surfaces in connection to this case, like "Mass Effect" appeared on Ryan Lanza's Facebook page, that there will be a wall of deniers to discount any possible influence of this or any MMORPG or video game on the killer's consciousness.
Blogger ajfloyd writes:
Many articles, including witnesses’ accounts, have described Adam Lanza’s advanced skills with computers, a skill-level common with Asperger’s sufferers. Indeed, many computer hackers have Asperger’s syndrone — Adrian Lamo, Ryan Cleary, and Gary McKinnon, for example. And yet, Adam Lanza ‘left no online footprint?’
In fact, Gary McKinnon structured his legal defense on hacking charges on his condition as anAsperger's patient; Ryan Clear is also described in this fashion.
The lack of an online footprint for Adam Lanza -- although it has only been less than a week since this atrocity -- has already proven fodder for conspiracy news sites which have reprinted the TIP story on numerous other sites -- either authorities scrubbed it after bagging it, or he himself knew how not to leave a trace -- a skill, by the way, that groups like the CryptoParty are increasingly spreading and demanding in their counterculture.
It's easy to say in retrospect that "all the signs were there" -- a neighbour recalling that Lanza tantrumed when he babysat him, and the tech club member saying they were the nerdiest in town. Yet lots of people have those signs and not only don't commit mass murder, but don't even kick their dogs. Even so, there is nothing wrong with looking for how patterns might fit together to try to figure out how this tragedy could be prevented in the future. The same geeks who insist on "science" and "impartiality" for everything else, and get into a rage fit about Mike Huckabee don't want to apply impartial science to this if it implicates any of them.
If I heard Tizzers was arrested in connection with a mall or school shooting I’d be shocked. He’s the last person I’d ever expect to do something like that. I understand you hate him for all the griefing in the past. I also get you’ve confused him with other griefers and you believe he’s some sort of schizophrenic stalker that’s spent half a decade griefing you 24/7; but if you actually knew Tizzers you’d realize even hinting he’d do something like that is pure insanity.
Posted by: Korpov Korpov | 12/21/2012 at 11:58 PM
If Korpov were placed at the scene of a school shooting, no one would be surprised, either.
Posted by: Catherine Fitzpatrick | 12/22/2012 at 05:04 AM
I’d be surprised and I’m pretty sure anyone that knows me would be as well. Just because I griefed Second Life when I was younger that doesn’t mean I want to kill people, especially students.
Posted by: Kоrpоv Kоrpоv | 12/22/2012 at 04:20 PM
you won´t get out of that rabbit hole catherine, won´t you?
Posted by: Doctor Yootz | 12/22/2012 at 04:28 PM
Er, I'm not in any rabbit hole. I'm fine, and identified in Second Life and real life as who I am, with an online reputation.
You aren't.
And meanwhile you kids, whether you're 20 or 40 or grown up or not, keep buying land near me or even on my sims, putting up grief builds, and griefing me with creepy effigies, so it would seem you're in the rabbit hole not me.
Posted by: Catherine Fitzpatrick | 12/22/2012 at 06:23 PM
Last I checked Doctor was the only one that had land near you and he abandoned it. Second, nobody in our group is rezzing those weird ass effigies. Everyone stopped logging in regularly after we got Sandvich banned.
Posted by: Kоrpоv Korpоv | 12/22/2012 at 06:42 PM
I actually meant your mind, that still seems to be trapped in a wonderland, where everyone else is some kind of communist, terrorist, hedonist, sociopath or psychopath.
Every time i read one of your articles it seems to get worse, and i honestly feel sorry for you, and hope you do better in real life than on the internet.
Posted by: Doctor Yootz | 12/22/2012 at 07:36 PM
Actually, anyone who would spend as long as you and your creepy little friends on your various alts making grief builds and putting dead chickens on my land, etc. can hardly be telling anyone else they are "trapped in a wonderland" or "in a rabbit hole".
I have a perfectly fine and rich first life and second life. Apparently you don't, as you spent years harassing me and still do, even now. One of your little sick friends whom you played with continues to harass me in particularly creepy ways, you know it, I know it, and you pretend I'm the problem lol.
People who continue to build grief builds with Soviet themes and harass others for years on end on their server *are* communists, terrorists, sociopaths and psychopaths. Creepy RL effigies of people dying or being eaten or burned or chopped in increasingly creepy ways -- this *is* psychopathy.
All I do is report it, and move on. I report it. And that's what bothers people -- that I record it and abuse-report it.
Too bad.
Posted by: Catherine Fitzpatrick | 12/23/2012 at 01:52 AM
Our group could care less about you. Everyone’s moved on from Second Life and they’re playing other games, working on getting their degrees or starting their careers. The only reason Doctor and I are here now is because someone sent me a link to this post and you stated I wouldn’t be surprised if Tizzers pulled a mass shooting, which was incorrect.
I’m pretty sure Joanna (which isn’t Tizzers btw Wut was trolling you) and Wut Moorlord have been the ones constantly harassing you over the past 2 years, although I can't say that with certainty because I haven't talked to either of them in ages.
Do you really think griefers are bothered by being reported and recorded? If they were worried about that they wouldn’t be griefing in the first place. Griefers aren’t communists, terrorists, sociopaths or psychopaths they’re attention whores. You write about griefers on your blog with the notion that they’ll be banned faster. In reality they want you to blog about their griefer attacks. They also think the novel sized rants you write about them are hilarious and they’re worth losing an account over. Why do you think Joanna (or whoever’s) effigies are getting weirder and weirder? They get your attention, you respond by writing a blog post about them, they read it and laugh at how ridiculous your post is and then they attempt to get an even crazier response by making weirder effigies. All you’ve done over the past eight years is create a cycle of griefing that’ll continue as long as there’s a supply of bored 15 year olds in Second Life and you continue to give them attention.
Posted by: Kоrpоv Korpоv | 12/23/2012 at 06:05 AM
The goal of Anonymous, which is a modern form of totalitarianism, is first of all to distract from its true nature and pretend its just a fun-loving group committing meaningless pranks, and that people who object to their methods are old, out of touch, not cool, fussy, etc.
Anyone who continues to document that their methods in fact are relentless and cruel and hugely damaging then is singled out for further persecution to try to discredit their accurate reports. This is a deliberate method.
Anonymous and its offshoots in Second Life make a special sport of trying to convince the people they victimize that it's their own fault, that if only they wouldn't abuse-report their violations of the TOS, or publicize their wild and nasty antics, why, all would go well with them. This is just like the omerta that the mafia wants to throw over everyone, perpetrator and victim alike.
It's an old thugs' technique and one constantly used by the secret police of Russia, Iran, China, etc. -- "stay silence, and maybe we'll go easy on you".
These latter-day totalitarians seek absolute, total and blanket control over the Internet by themselves. This fact can be disguised by the appearance of "anarchy" or "loose-knit networks" or "funny memes," but in reality, they want to make sure that no one uses the Internet for purposes they disapprove of -- whether commerce or political expression or religion or even in maintaining a liberal democratic state. All of it is relentlessly undermined and those who report on it are incessantly harassed in the hopes that they will be bullied into silence.
I see absolutely no reason why people and movements like this shouldn't be publicized. For one, not publicizing them doesn't do any good. Many people in fact try that method. At times, simply because I was busy or travelling, I'd try that method myself. It doesn't work. It's not meant to work. What's meant to happen is that the online bullies convince you to play their game of not fighting back and not revealing their true nature to the wider public.
Nothing any bully says in a totalitarian movement can be believed as to who they are, who their alts are, who somebody else's alts are. And it doesn't matter. The formula they are trying to impose by brutal force is this: be silent, and it will go well with you, why, you gave us so much attention, and all we did was up the ante.
This logic is being proposed by the psychologist constantly displayed by Anonymous -- as Total Biscuit, the anti-SOPA mass propagandist and agitator, who is claiming that the way to deal with school shootings is to muzzle the media and not let them report them as they see fit. They exaggerate how the media in fact covers these tragedies and makes false claims that they are "in it for the money" or "creating murder reality shows" blah blah. They claim that the coverage glorifies the shooters or exaggerates their carnage -- when in fact that's not even the case. And even if it *were* the case, Total Biscuit and other Bolsheviks can't explain what their plan is to remedy this -- um, a socialist committee that gets to have clearance over all TV shows? "Guidelines" prepared by an authoritarian state that tells producers how they should cover stories? Because that's what they are suggesting, if not voluntary "politically correct" muzzles that would be decided by a gang of anonymous thugs who want to cover the tracks of the result of violent gaming and nihilist online culture. Why should we help them with that?
A sicko Internet stalker who gets his sense of self-worth and entertainment by making increasingly sick and gory effigies may have no shame, but by publicizing what he's doing -- naming and shaming -- the bar is set for what is not acceptable and what the community find abhorrent.
The people doing this are psychopaths and cunning manipulators, and they aren't interested in finding a way for themselves to stop; they're interested in trying to silence you and bully you. I see no reason why they should be indulged in this manipulation.
Posted by: Catherine Fitzpatrick | 12/23/2012 at 03:46 PM
On my Second Thoughts blog, I have a rule: no one can post unless they provide an SL or RL valid name, and no one can post if they incite or cause damages in RL or SL.
If someone shows up here who used to relentlessly grief me in SL by their own admission, and which the record amply shows (Korpov in particular on a variety of alts, some of which are still in SL), if he claims he is outside of SL and no longer griefing, and especially if he claims he wants to clear his name and deny that he thinks anyone would be a school shooter, I'd be inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt, as they are identifiable at least as SL avatars, and in their posts, they aren't inciting or causing damages.
But with this last one, it's clear to me that the purpose is in fact to incite damages and to blame the victim. The purpose is to whistle to all the 15 year olds -- and BTW, more likely 45-year-olds -- and say "Hey, here's an easy target who won't do what we say and shut up about our griefing, go get them."
And when people do that, I see no reason not to invoke my rule that you can't use comments to keep inciting damages to me or others.
Good bye.
Posted by: Catherine Fitzpatrick | 12/23/2012 at 03:49 PM