@LibertyLynx on Twitter
Rachel Marsden
As I've been documenting, I've been under vicious attack by Prof. Craig Pirrong at the University of Houston, and his close Twitter buddy, @LibertyLynx who he claims is not his alt, but is a separate person.
It's been a puzzle to figure out why they are so driven to attack me, given that we are supposedly on the same side of many issues, particularly Russia and Snowden, but there it is, they have turned on me like vicious junkyard dogs.
Some people think Craig Pirrong *is* LibertyLynx, but he vigourously denies it, even as he says that he knows who it is. The two do indeed seem very close -- in views, and in friendship, i.e. they seem to have met each other in real life.
Ordinarily, I don't have any "need to know" who LL's real identity is, but when it reaches this level of sinister crazy, with a person constantly writing nasty and false things about me, and even threatening me with lawsuits (!) I think it's important to keep publishing my findings.
I would like to think that in harassing me in this wild fashion, both Craig and Liberty are consumed with some kind of falsely-planted information, that they have a case of mistaken identity. They both have outrageously charged me with being the stalker Mr. X (senorequis776) who in fact harasses both of them -- and me. They keep reiterating this theme that they think I deliberately "grief myself" as some kind of plausible decoy. But that's insane -- I don't have time for such nonsense and have never done such a thing in my life. I'd like to hope that if only the facts were found, they'd back off. Now I have to wonder if they are simply contriving this merely out of spite or ideological difference.
Both of them seem particularly pre-occupied with my known avatar Prokofy Neva, linked to my real-life name for the last 10 years, which they think is some dark, mysterious and sinister figure. That's insane, because my blog under the name Prokofy is an open book, as is everything else I do. The people I criticized in Second Life were hackers and griefers and people with ideologies antithetical to liberal governance and human rights -- I stand by my critique.
So in an effort to get this harassment to stop, I've written to Pirrong and asked not only him, but LibertyLynx to stop their false accusations and to remove them from their website. This has only made them double down, and go further to claim that my very emails or communications are somehow "forensic proof" that I am their stalker Mr. X.
So I've tried out various hypotheses about who this could be, and tried to understand the motive. And I think I have a good hypothesis now about the real identity of @LibertyLynx:
Rachel Marsden, the columnist for the Chicago Tribune, conservative writer, former Fox News commentator. (See also the Wikipedia talk and a list of articles here.)
I came to this conclusion finally yesterday, when various factors came together and I noticed, looking at various feeds and common re-tweets that there were three simultaneous attacks under way on Twitter yesterday all day--
1) against me and Edward Lucas, by Cryptome, Jacob Appelbaum and the other Flying Monkies (such an apt term -- h/t Tom Nicholas) from the hacker set;
2) attacks just on me from @streetwiseprof (Craig Pirrong's account) and @LibertyLynx; and
3) attacks on th3j35t3r (the Jester), a popular Twitter hacker character, who tweeted that Rachel Marsden, with whom he had clashed in the summer of last year, was trying to "climb up the flagpole of his followers" close to him to out his real identity.
Now, comments, as your mileage may vary:
th3j35t3r has me blocked. I don't care for this figure. I have no idea who he is, I forget to read his feed for months at a time and I'm not "up" on all his lore lately so someone else can bring me up to date if they like. I get the general gist. I'm aware that a lot of effort goes into finding out his identity -- including by Rachel Marsden, who wrote what seemed to me at the time to be a fairly valid and candid column -- although now, I'm not so sure. This led her to make police reports which he claims are false.
My own communications with th3j35t3r have been sparse, but I've asked him some hard direct questions, like why he appeared, like a law enforcement agent, to have pictures of the Boston Bombing within minutes of the first eye witness' report, and why, on the day before the Boston Bombing, he said he suspected Al Qaeda might infiltrate Anonymous push it to direct action attacks offline like terrorist bombs.
th3j35t3r has been declared to be Tom Ryan -- I simply have no informed opinion on this subject. I think it's unlikely, as Tom Ryan (whom I don't know, either) looks to be smarter than the th3j35t3r. Hey, note that this article written in May 2012 has Ed Snowden as an author -- yuck yuck. But it's tied to a banned Twitter account that impersonated him AFTER the real Snowden revealed his identity on June 9, 2013, and was ultimately banned; I don't think the real Snowden wrote for chronicle.su (sigh) back in 2012, but I think some prankster put that name in later.
th3j35t3r spends endless hours poking at and skirmishing with various script kiddies and the stay-at-home moms on the IRC channel playing Wendy to the Lost Boys and endlessly planning attacks on his enemies or cackling at their failures. I don't find this the most effective way to fight hackers. th3j35t3r is supposed to be fighting hackers, but I suspect he is/was one of them and uses their same methods -- except not quite, and its the fact that @AsheraResearch and others called him out on that reality that has made him angry.
Here's the discussions about and th3j35t3r and Rachel Marsden.
I have no idea why Rachel Marsden took up writing a column about the th3j35t3r, but there it is. At the time, it seemed to say more about him than her -- but if it is made up of falsehoods, it wouldn't, it would say more about her. I have no knowledge to confirm or deny any of this. Thoughts?
Rachel Marsden's columns, taken alone without the fable of her colourful life, seemed normal and within the realm of the conservative/libertarian right to me. She is productive and writes about all the topics that definitely need writing about -- Syria, attacks on capitalism, Russia and the Olympics. I never saw anything terribly "off" on them, i.e. loony, but some of them were "not for us" as they more conservative. Being a Fox news commentator as she was wouldn't be a disqualifier for me, although I don't watch Fox News (and only two million people do).
The string of accusations made against Rachel Marsden about stalking might be true, but look where they come from -- the left.
They might have some basis, but might not, as one of the most common things that hackers do when they stalk and harass women is try to turn the tables with an Eddie Haskell routine and claim that they are the ones being stalked, and then cry "victim." I've seen this numerous times. On the other hand, there's at least one case in her public record of her stalking an ex-boyfriend that has court papers that go with it, although it appears not to involve a conviction but some kind of warning for a period of probation or something. Then there are several others -- and it's a case of he-said, she-said.
th3j35t3r has compiled a lot of this, judge for yourself.
As noted, Rachel Marsden's life has been very colourful -- she had an affair with Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales, who is a certifiable ass -- his Randian Objectivism and manipulation of people and the horror that is the creation of Wikipedia all speak for themselves. Her affair went sour -- no surprise there. Apparently she was trying to get her Wikipedia entry fixed or de-vandalized -- hey, I know what's that like, as mine is constantly vandalized.
In re-reading Wales' entry on Wikipedia, I was struck by something interesting -- he was in Chicago, and working in a company doing finance, when he wanted to contribute an entry to the precursor of Wikipedia, Nupedia, and was embarassed to do so, because he feared that his peer reviewers, real finance professors, would show him up. Doesn't that say it all? At the very heart of Wikipedia is an insecure Objectivist asshole's desire not to face the music with his inadequacies and accept someone might be more of an expert than he, so he decided the entire system had to be constructed on anonymous fucktards writing tripe about people and events about which they aren't experts -- and no one can fix it, because of the pseudo-science of the arcane editing process itself, in which you must "be an expert."
But that brings me to the touchpoints on Rachel Marsden and LibertyLynx: Chicago and finance. Rachel doesn't live in Chicago, but she writes for the Chicago Tribune regularly, so maybe she travels there. And somehow, she may have come into contact with Craig Pirrong in person, when he taught there -- or maybe they merely met on line. Perhaps they simply go to the same conservative talk shows or conferences or meet-ups.
She's a widely-travelled journalist, and has been everywhere, evidently even to Moscow. So let's go through the list of clues that have been compiled (and many of them in fact not by me, but others just as disturbed as me at the whole LibertyLynx persona and its viciousness):
o has lived and worked in Russia and has Russian relatives
I have no idea if Marsden has any relatives in Russia -- I don't see any reference to it -- but she seems to have gone to Russia to interview or write about people. Except, she could have done this from Paris.
@LibertyLynx has made repeated references to relatives (in-laws? Distant cousins?) in Russia but does not appear to be Russian herself, and almost never makes links to Russian web sites as if she doesn't read Russian.
It does not seem readily apparent that Marsden went to Russia, although she has written about it a lot.
Marsden worked for the Free Congress Foundation in 2002, headed by Paul Weyrich. She was said to be fired when her harassment law suit in Canada came to light (we have no idea if this is true given propensity of the left to oppo-research the right). The FCF was involved in a conference in 2002 in Moscow. Weyrich himself did not attend a forum in Moscow, but he sent a "stand-in". Was that Marsden, and is that when she took the photo of herself on Red Square in the Russian hat? Or did she go some other time? Who knows? Some people think that photo is "photoshopped" from an Angelina Jolie movie. Maybe it's actually Marsden with a scarf over her mouth and a hat pulled down so you can't readiliy recognize her? The nose looks the same (if looked at from a certain angle if her head is tilted down -- otherwise, not the same. The eyes are also similar -- but it depends on the angle. Any of the photos may have been photoshopped as well.)
o has been to a Russian closed city
@LibertyLynx's tweets about visits to a closed city were deleted but have been archived. It's not easy for foreigners to get into closed cities, i.e. places where traditionally classified/secret work has gone on, or near sensitive military installations or borders, and if she did this, that alone could get her in trouble with the authorities and earn her warnings from the FSB. @LibertyLynx has repeatedly invoked threats from the FSB as a reason for her pseudonymity -- but we don't know that this is even true for that typist, or even for Rachel Marsden.
o obsessed with the Snowden case -- of course @LibertyLynx writes about Snowden constantly and Marsden she has written numerous columns like this one.
o critical of Russia and Putin -- but doesn't love overly love opposition
Most of LL's tweets are anti-Putin. Marsden, too, is critical of Putin's PR blitz.
Here Marsden criticizes Pussy Riot in much the same way I would.
I don't recall @LibertyLynx criticizing Pussy Riot, however, she seemed to retweet the news about their imprisonment like every other critical Russia watcher.
o Ukraine
@LibertyLynx has been steadily obsessed with the Maidan protests for weeks. But Rachel Marsden seems to be jaded about Ukraine - and makes some good points about how you can't manufacture revolution off Facebook.
o attended or covered the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City and had some incident related to Canada house
A clue that @LibertyLynx has dropped a number of times is that she was at the 2002 Sochi Olympics and followed skating closely, and hung out with people by Canada House one night.
These tweets may have been deleted, but here is one, and and you can see some of the people having conversations with LL about this still. In Google cache, you can see the reference to the "bad experience."
Since Marsden is Canadian, and wrote an article about the 2002 Olympics, and was reported as travelling to the US in 2002, this seems to fit. This very specific clue that doesn't fit for a lot of other Russia hands, emigres, pundits, etc. who might seem to be LL -- but it fits for Marsden. As noted, LL seems to have deleted some of these tweets; we recall them. There's this, too.
o dislikes Wikipedia and the Silicon Valley culture
LL frequently makes comments against various figures, notably Elon Musk, the electric car inventor, and has also said she has lived in, or visited San Francisco, and happened to go to a funders' dinner where there were some big Silicon Valley people she met
This could be consistent with Marsden's soured romance with Jimmy Wales. That might be Marsden meeting Wales or others related to him.
o concerned about hackers attacking infrastructure
The last fight that I had with @LibertyLynx and @Streetwiseprof last was about his claims that hackers are attacking the stock market and infrastructure, and my skepticism not about the fact that hackers do this -- of course they do -- but skepticism that Jacob Appelbaum/Snowden etc are the ones specifically doing this; and then @LibertyLynx's fury at me for disagreeing somewhat on this point.
As it happens, Rachel Marsden wrote a column recently this month about hacker attacks on infrastructure.
o Boston terriers
Neither LibertyLynx nor Rachel Marsden appear to have written about Boston terriers.
There seems to be enough there of a "match" to make a hypothesis that Rachel Marsden is indeed LibertyLynx (and there are other very similar "Liberty" accounts like @LibertyTango and @LibertyImages and they even talk to each other that sound the same).
There are a few key details that LibertyLynx herself has told me about her ostensible life experience that can't be matched, but not everything is on the Internet, she may not be telling the truth, and there may be an effort to drop false clues. For example, the bit about the tennis -- when maybe the issue is that Marsden was a swimmer, not a tennis player.
When the left attacks people it doesn't like, it's happy to drum up all kinds of vicious falsehoods or exaggerations about them. This type of article about Marsden is typical, from the Daily Kos. So I'd be inclined to cut this person slack, simply because I know what leftists and hackers do to females they don't like on the Internet, I've been through it.
Even so, the viciousness of LibertyLynx to me for no reason merely because I disagree on a few points and don't care for her harassment of ideological opponents; the curious recurring obsessiveness that Marsden appears to have for her targets; the pictures' striking similarity; the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics coincidence; and a few other things stand out for me. I think we have a match.
Yet, I pose this only as a question and a hypothesis simply because I've seen it happen before where things seem to match -- and then fall apart. You can select out characteristic information from anyone, and then match it selectively to other information and it seems to "fit."
I also can't rule out that the enemies of Marsden who see her as a stalker might then decide she "must be" @LibertyLynx who has been harassing me, and thus pin LL's bad behaviour on this Canadian columnist for the Chicago Tribune. And no doubt, in order to preserve her pseudonym, if LL *is* Marsden, Marsden would simply ignore this post or any speculation about her relationship to Pirrong or would deny it.
Ultimately, if any of these characters claim to have some "kompromat" on me, they should publish it rather than merely invoking it as a threat or threatening lawsuits. Then we could judge what it is. They could also contact a reputable journalist about it, if they really believe in their material, and subject it to scrutiny. They don't seem to be willing to do that.
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