Here's a summary of the events to date:
As you can see from past blogs in the last week or so, I've been under a barrage of assault from Anonymous, the hackers' collective which far from doing good and bringing justice is really quite sinister.
And every bit of the harassment and heckling I've endured in the last week only confirms even more in spades how much of an escheloned cadre organization Anonymous and its various "ops" and hashtag operatives like #JusticeSec are. It's a secretive, rigidly ideological and harshly hierarchical organization, not just some loose-knit group. Even if it only has "disconnected cells," like the mafia or the communist party, or any other conspiratorial or criminalized group, it has operatives who recruit, train, and move the cadres up the ranks based on their knowledge, learning of habits, memes, and ideological precepts as well as actual deeds and exploits against selected targets or new improvizations. Anyone who has followed how I have been harassed and by whom can figure that out.
One of the ways that #JusticeSec performed #OpCatzHunt as the operation was dubbed (to silence my blog) was to attract and instruct various "bag men" or cutaway accounts of theirs to heckle me, in the most obscene and awful ways, in a series of bannable (and therefore banned, of course) accounts. These accounts were kept organized with followers and search attention through several
"social binders," i.e. accounts that do not engage in harassment and don't show themselves associated even sometimes, but who support openly or tacitly the one doing the heckling.
So in this way the notoriously foul-mouthed @Supersteve2dope account harassed me viciously, with the most vile sexualized comments and misogyny, and then as he was abuse reported, would form new accounts, bragging all the while. I only AR'd him on two of those accounts, but since he bragged he had something like six suspended by the Twitter management, other persons, possibly even Roseanne Barr's social media managers, had AR'd him -- he had dragged her account into this harassment as well by CCing her to the attacks on me and trying to make it seem as if I was someone she should target around Steubenville. I saw how her account stopped following him, and he complained about that, and later sent him the same message I got, "don't smear me or I'll sue you".
In any event, I persisted in documenting and protesting this harassment of me, and then announced that I was going to a conference of 300 Internet officials and activists and would be telling everyone I met about this Anonymous harassment, and also reported it to both national and international authorities to document the increasing ways in which this criminalized hacker cult is trying to silence journalists and bloggers. I made the point that the continued Anonymous harassment of me discredited its claim that it was doing good around the Steubenville case.
Then at this point, the tactics began to shift. The original "doxers" of me (accounts @Anonymity47 and @anonloverz) kept trying to dox me, but Pastebin kept removing their doxes when I filed complaints. They continued to harass me, but some of the others who were most vociferous began to fall quiet.
Now some other Anonymous operatives higher up in the command chain stepped in, with names like Archangel (spelled all l33t-like) or @MindSec or other types of names and insignia and memes revealing their higher status.
Those Anon higher-ups then proceeded to bully those lower-down Anons who had bullied me, and then proceeded to dox them.
Thus the unfortunate SuperSteve2dope was outed -- supposedly -- as one Stephen Haines in Richmond, VA.
Meanwhile, oddly enough, I was able to confirm some of these claims completely independently, but not with a name.
I have no idea whether the dope who is SuperSeve is also the real Stephen Haines -- I don't have the capacity to find that out nor is it relevant. Because he is either a cutaway, a distraction, or a sacrificeable bagman who is either created to harass people and then disappear, or who is set-up and incited to harass people and then doxed and made to go away when Anonymous commanders need him to do so. It's all very obvious.
Another of the chief persecutors was @luxecunt -- she is known as a "newfag" or a new recruit -- see just how lovely these folks are in their abusive use of language against women and gays, all the while insistenting that they have created new, special meaning for these old terms of abuse. I'm not buying it.
Now this woman was pleading for her life in the Anonymous cadre organization with these older and more senior bullies. They also doxed her, submitting her to a sort of "tribunal" where they queried her and tested her loyalty and found her failing as an operative, and too desirous of fame, or being an "egofag" as they put it.
So these awful people in this awful movement are now harassing the people who either took the initiative on their own to heckle me, as a way of "gaining their spurs" in the cadre organization, or are now sacrificing people they had in fact originally incited and instructed to harass me (either or both could be true).
The reality is, doxing people is wrong, whether it is to silence bloggers or to punish people who have wrongfully silenced bloggers.
And the speech of all the Anonymous accounts that have persecuted me is in fact all protected speech. That is, possibly if the links to Pastebin persisted and weren't removed, it might be possible to try to get a harassment case going or a libel case, but that would be extremely difficult.
That's the reality of free speech on the Internet -- I practice free speech that Anonymous doesn't like, and their harassment of me to try to chill my free speech is protected speech as well -- at least until it reaches "incitement of imminent action" -- but a threat to kick me with pink stilettos if they ever meet me in real life doesn't rise to that test.
And the exposure of private information even doesn't rise to that test in most cases until the stalker attempts to steal from your credit card or hack into your accounts or DdOS your server, but even then it is hard to build a case. The FBI is motivated to go and find Sabu who was behind the Stratfor hack, but they aren't going to be bothered to find who is attacking me over my blog.
Even so, the moral of the story is that people, especially journalists, bloggers, those involved in cases, should not be intimidated by Anonymous but should document and report their bad behaviour assidulously. Far from "not feeding the trolls," this is the time to rebut, reply, document, flush out, abuse report.
If the people in the "operations" are honest about what they are fighting for, i.e. justice for a rape victim, then they will not want to associate with bad behaviour like heckling bloggers on Twitter and doxing and persecuting journalists.
I don't believe they *are* serious at the top, as I believe these "ops" are just about giant social hacks trying to take over society and gain power. I'm not interested in these thugs doing that and taking away our freedom and rights.
But in the short term for tactical reasons they need to appear as if they are sincere and therefore the harassment of people like me by their lower-ranking recruits isn't in their interests.
We are no better off when one group of thuggish hackers controls another group of thuggish hackers who are just not as skilled at what they do. Thuggish hacking, whether white or black, is the problem.
eating the young... yep.
Posted by: c3 | 02/18/2013 at 02:06 PM
I don't think that age has anything to do with it. Looks more like a crab that amputates its own broken arm. Like a lizard that lets a predator have its tail so that the main body can escape. Like a pack of wild animals where those that anger the ones above them often get the capital punishment, or even those on their own level attack them in order to get a better position in the pack. Usually wolf packs have enemies that are actively hunting and killing pack members. In such a pack only the most ferocious can survive and rise in ranks:(
Actually, even after reading only the organized crime article that Wikipedia has, it would be quite hard not to see how much does Anonymous resembles a crime organization:(
Posted by: Rex Cronon | 02/18/2013 at 03:00 PM
I've been reading Bruce Sterling's book about hackers, and then I just watched "The Godfather" again. Great movie. You get how it works. Mafias. Hackers. LOL.
Posted by: Catherine Fitzpatrick | 02/18/2013 at 08:23 PM
now my "boardwalk empire" comments about the net generation comes into view.....
we got guns, you got guns, we all got guns! ---
welcome to 1921
Posted by: c3 | 02/19/2013 at 12:23 AM