I don't think I've ever been harassed so much in my life before as I have been by Prof. Craig Pirrong and his alt or sock puppet or "associate" LibertyLynx, an anonymous account on Twitter. There is a vicious, creepy edge to it that I don't think I've ever seen, and believe me, I've seen lots of harassment online as a female blogger criticizing the largely male tech world.
Unlike people in various online communities like Twitter or Second Life who have harassed me only there in virtual reality, Pirrong/LibertyLynx have tried to discredit me in real life and try to completely blacken my reputation in real life to undermine me with colleagues and generally in the communities I write in. That's really spooky. Why?
I've had people in my field -- the Registan bunch -- attack me if I criticized their views, and relentlessly harass me and even complain to a boss -- but it is nothing like the venom, the energy, and the persistence -- for weeks on end -- that Pirrong and LibertyLynx have brought to this task. Why?
I can't imagine why that would be necessary for an only moderately well-known professor at the University of Houston and his alt or associate, who is known for his foul-mouthed blogging even in his own field to go after me -- especially if his libertarian views would supposedly be protective of free speech. I'm not in his field and pose no threat to him; he blogs further afield on other topics like Russia, but there, too, my little Minding Russia blog probably gets less readers than his does, even if Wired State probably gets many more. Still, it is no big deal. None of this makes any sense.
Yes, we're supposed to believe that LibertyLynx is a different person than Craig Pirrong, but I am not the only one who thinks they are likely the same person.
LibertyLynx tells us that there are "all these people" who knows who she is and it's just that *I'm* not being told, so that she won't "become my victim" -- as if my only purpose in publicizing their harassment is to out her real identity.
Pirrong, who blogs by the name Streetwise Professor (@streetwiseprof) has constructed an entire set of myths that he is using now to endlessly heckle and harass me and attempt to discredit me to other people. These outright falsehoods are:
o that I am in fact Mr. X or @senorequis1776 or @Fire20Committee or other sock puppets that have been harassing him, me, John Schindler and others.
o that I'm jealous of other people who are cited or publishing on Snowden, and therefore I've set up these attack accounts
o that I have some sort of discredited past in Second Life as someone who ran various sock puppets harassing other people
o that I have been "doxed" or "outed" on my Second Life accounts and have "made lemonade out of lemons" with this situation.
To this, add the heckling of LL:
o that I had a good career "30 years ago" (when I was 27? lol) but then "something happened to me".
o or I have "spent the last 10 years living a virtual life as a man in Second Life"
o that I have "misrepresented my work record" or somehow haven't been properly "vetted" and am "not who I seem".
o that I "hounded into death" a hacker who was dying of AIDS and somehow did something wrong in covering his story on my blog.
And lots more in this vein.
The reason why I keep this section of my blog regularly updated and include a very long biography is to address and refute handily these recurring concoctions that hackers make against me -- and the opportunists like LibertyLynx who pick up their silly themes.
So let me refute these insane, vicious smears once again:
1. My life is an open book, my work life is online in my publications. I haven't misrepresented anything at all about my work life. Everyone in my community of Eurasia watchers knows me, my employers, and my colleagues. I have never been fired from any job except a waitress job about 35 years ago. I've always moved from one job to another voluntarily and have always been fully employed.
2. I have never committed any crime, I have never been investigated for any crime, and this insinuation is particularly damaging to my character. I don't drive and have no driving offenses. I pay taxes on an installment plan. I have never incurred any fines. In Second Life, a group of anonymous people who used to harass me claimed falsely I was guilty of plagiariasm because they had a case of mistaken identity -- it was a journalist with the same name, no relation to me.
3. I don't have sock puppets used to heckle or blog furtively without accountability whatsoever. I want all the credit on my own name. My Second Life avatar is linked to my real name and has been for 10 years of its existence.
4. As everyone who has followed my popular Second Life blog for years know, before I had the name "Prokofy Neva" in Second Life, I had the name "Dyerbrook" in the Sims Online (2002). I made a critical comment to the New York Times under my real name about Peter Ludlow (Urizenus Sklar), a professor of linguistics with a constantly changing history of universities, who is an avid supporter of hackers in movements like Anonymous. He detected I was the same person because I wrote for his newspaper, the Alphaville Herald, back then. Since Dyerbrook and Prokofy were always linked between the two worlds, he then gave my identity to others and they published my real name, occupation and location on the Second Life forum because they didn't like my criticism of hackers and favoured insider geeks. The mods -- Linden Lab employees -- who colluded on this on the IRC channel as was later discovered, did nothing about this grotesque violation of my privacy against their terms of service, and I continue to be harassed a decade later by people because I use my real name.
I preferred to blog about virtual worlds under the name Prokofy but there was never any mystery about my identity, and it was always linked.
5. I have not lived the last ten years somehow "lost in a virtual world". I had a small business in Second Life and was active in the community to follow the issues there with are replicated in the wider Internet. I'm proud of my tenure in virtual worlds and very happy with the knowledge I have gained from them and interacting with some of the most important technologists of our age from Philip Rosedale to Will Wright. There is no shame in having an avatar and participating in a virtual world whatsoever. It is a creative and interesting endeavour. While I have had this avatar, I've raised two children as a single mother and always stayed fully employed and involved in my own community. The volumes of books translated and articles written and human rights causes I have taken up over this time speak for themselves as real, not virtual.
SWP's and LL's obsession with my avatar Prokofy and my blog is odd. Perhaps it's because he/they, too, fear they will be outed? I have no need to learn the identity of this person and hey, Craig, no one is going to out your little toon. When you persist in such outrageous behaviour, however, attacking me, I'm not the only one who wonders what is really going on and what this is about and who is behind it.
6. As noted before, I didn't harass any AIDS "journalist". A hacker and griefer in Second Life named Deadly Codec (Joshua MacCracken), who used to fly around with a group called the Patriotic Nigras (4chan offshoot) and spew racist, anti-gay spam and textures, and who used to crash servers and harass people for years, claimed to have a change of heart. He then revealed his real name, and revealed that he was in love with the supposedly female editor of the Alphaville Herald, Pixeleen Mistral, who was eventually outed as a man, a famous Internet pioneer named Mark McCahill (who, BTW, has been silent about this entire story for years). Joshua MacCracken claimed that when he discovered Pixeleen was a man, he decided that he might be gay, and began going to gay and trans clubs and contracted AIDS.
Given how quickly he then died of AIDS within months of this revelation. we have to wonder if his story of the beginning of his gay experimentation and the timeline of his contraction of AIDS was true. But more to the point, reporting on his antics was normal and legitimate, distrusting his narrative was required. I expressed doubts about the sincerity of this man -- who used to spew banners against blacks and Jews and claimed they were weeping about AIDS at the Wailing Wall -- and rightly asked if in fact he was making up stuff. It was legitimate. It was necessary in a virtual world where people lie and hide their identities -- you know, like LL is doing now.
Interestingly, the Wrong Hands, a group of SL griefers related to the old 4chan and said to be associated with LulzSec, picked up one of their fake themes of "the outing of their privacy" the fact that a member of the JLU (who used to abuse-report their violations of the TOS and keep a database about them) contacted the sister of McCracken to express condolences. She had an open Facebook account, with an open notice about her brother's death, and yet this was somehow trolled into "a violation of privacy" which TWH endlessly manipulated as they did my "harassment of an AIDS journalist."
This person made a video claiming that I was terrible for not believing him, in which other people (who had harassed me and crashed my servers) joined in, in order to create a fake story of me as some kind of persecutors of gays -- in the manner in which hacker movements do culture jamming and use psy-war on people. Of course I support gay rights and have nothing but compassion for those with AIDS and donated to the Gay Men's Health Crisis for years. It's an insane accusation and only in the madness of Second Life and Twitter could you find such a false and contrived claim.
It only got more weird, as this man then refused to take his medications for some reason, and then was falsely reported as dead when in fact he was not dead, but only very sick. Precisely because of the false reports and rumours, I behaved completely like a normal, legitimate reporter and called up the funeral home to make sure that the ad online was real, and not a hack, to confirm there was a death. That's all. It might distress his family that their relative was a notorious griefer and teller of tall tales in Second Life whom people didn't believe, but he was a public figure (he published a few articles in the local free shopper, advocating for medical marijuana and also telling about his sad Second Life love affair). I didn't do anything wrong except report on a story of a colourful figure in SL, just as I had done with scores of others -- some of whom didn't like my critical reports. The end.
7. That brings me to other cases that LibertyLynx images are cases of me "stalking" or "harassing" people. This is truly bizarre. In fact, there's been a handful of people stalking me from Woodbury University's digital arts department. Several of them have aged out of that university by now, but the dean, who was among the griefers -- yes, he thought it was a great idea to practice "transgressive behaviour" in order to study it -- may still be there. Everyone in the Second Life community gets it about these people -- they were banned multiple times from SL as they kept returning on alts; their servers were seized 4-5 times over as many years, and they finally had lawyers to deal with. The reasons they were banned is because they harassed not only me, but others in the community and also engaged in all kinds of offenses from copyright theft to unleashing malicious scripts and crashing servers. My abuse reports of their bad behaviour were among many filed by numerous people in that community. I was never banned from SL and remain in good standing. While I was banned for a period of about two years from the company forums when some of the employees colluded with the hackers, after they were let go I was restored and remain in good standing.
8. There are a few other people I've written about critically in Second Life, some of whom mercilessly harassed me for years (Benjamin Duranske, and Dale from IBM, for example) merely because I continued to criticize the geek culture they purveyed and tried to use as a grounds for online governance. I've always just taken the attitude that such harassment is something you just abuse-report, document, and move on. I do believe in publicizing it rather than "not feeding the trolls" because I think it helps create the record needed to defeat it. Given how these characters delight in Fisking and word-salad and culture-jamming, it's just useful to keep documenting what they really do. One of their classic claims is that someone who criticizes them stalks them, when in fact, they are the actual ones harassing people. The hate-page that Duranske and his supporters maintained to harm my Google results for year and years is testimony to the pettiness of mediocre minds on the Internet that become entranced with Big Ideas like the Singularity.
9. In the context of the Central Asian field, where I have also been writing for years, LibertyLynx also repeatedly mentions two people she has befriended from somewhere, Joshua Foust and Sarah Kendzior (Nathan Hamm is another one) and claims falsely about me that I stalk, them, too, and have "ruined their careers." Neither of them have made this claim themselves and are now employed. If they were let go from previous jobs, it had nothing to do with me, or even their bad behaviour or dubious ideological positions, which others noted, but because the funding for the field of Central Asian studies has been shrinking.
In point of fact, it wsa Sarah Kendzior who went to *my* employer to completely hysterically complain about *me* because I criticized her theses in academic papers. No kidding. These thin-skinned geeky Internet kids can dish out the hate, often behind sock puppets, but they cannot take the most basic criticism of their own work. It really does boggle the mind. Both she and her colleagues Katy Pearce and Nathan Hamm spent months on end heckling me and undermining my writing for EurasiaNet -- it was a sight to behold. The energy and vehemence that Foust, Kendzior, Hamm and Pearce put into their attacks on me seemed orchestrated by something beyond their own force. I've never been able to understand it, or who/what LibertyLynx is then in hooking up with this particular gang.
I repeatedly criticized their blog posts because I felt they were justifying the regimes of Central Asia and denigrating the opposition and human rights movements in a sophisticated but creepy way. I didn't start my blog Different Stans to "stalk them"; I started it to create a record of criticism against this particular school of thought, International Relations Realism. This is a perfectly legitimate, legal, and necessary activity. My blog is filled with many kinds of posts, some about their views, some about the people in the countries themselves, some about the US government's poor positions -- this is all on the record and easily evaluated.
10. Both SWP and LL claim that they have "forensic evidence" that they are going to use to "get me". I can't imagine what they are talking about. A page that LibertyLynx keeps linking to is one called "Invalid Interlocutors" which actually, I need to update and republish, it's a great page! It explains the methods and means by which various hackers and their enablers argued -- i.e. the "fallacies" argumentation -- in order to suppress criticism and dissent.
Among the ways in which LL says she has "forensic evidence" is that she claims to have a script -- a new "styology" program that examines semantics and determines whether two people writing under different names are the same person or not. This program, a version of others that claimed the same thing in past years, was presented at 30c3 -- which lets us know something about its legitimacy already. I can't imagine that a program of this nature could be reliable, or be admissible in court, but I can only say: bring it. I'd be curious if I fed in the texts of a wide range of people whether they'd all come out as the same person merely because they were all from the mid-West or all Americans born in the 1950s or some category like that.
Apparently SWP and LL also claim to have some other "forensic evidence" (URLs?) that prove I am Mr. X. I can't imagine how this could be, and I can only state again that I turned over all the URLs I had for Mr. X to Craig when he said his university was investigating the attacks on him. They may prove nothing or they may be helpful, who knows. At that time, he claimed that "he knew who it was" and made no claims that it was me. Very odd.
It's also odd that SWP was so eager to be my friend, that he reported to me in a personal email that Foust had lifted my blog ideas and insights. Since I couldn't read the text, SWP ended up buying a $50 a year subscription to Talking Points Memo, then sending me a paste-up of the text of Foust's article so I could see that it copied me. THAT is evidence of how he friendly he was to me back then -- too friendly? -- and how he viewed Foust at the time (and may still view him, I have no idea; meanwhile, his sock puppet or sidekick LibertyLynx is friendly to Foust and claims I "stalk" Foust).
11. Unfortunately, the relentless ranting and raging of these two printing falsehoods day after day about me on Twitter and on SWP's blog, has gotten some of their Twitter friends to accept lies about me. They lie on big things, i.e. claiming I've misrepresented who I am or have been involved in some dark activity in SL, and little things i.e. claiming I must be "drunk" or "crazy" if I just happened not to notice a certain blog post was in August, not January (!) -- a fact I quickly discovered myself when I began googling for information about stock market attacks -- duh.
12. Most ominously, both SWP and LL claim they are going to sue me and tie me up with litigation with their "forensic" evidence. LL claimed that she had files of "ten years of evidence" and SWP said that this was due to my own "graphomania." Sigh. It boggles the mind. I don't know how people can be this sick and creepy -- perhaps it is out of fear?
Craig Pirrong has been under enormous stress lately because the New York Times has criticized his academic work -- a far more serious critic than me about his little blogs unrelated to his job per se. And I think that's part of what is making him frenetic when he thinks his LibertyLynx alt could be facing having her cover blown. I think either LibertyLynx is important to him as an alt, or, if actually a real, separate person, important to him as a soul mate who can be even more candid and vulgar than he can on various issues under his own name.
I can only say -- keep your little toon, Craig, or keep your little mysterious "associate". Leave me alone. I will go on feeling as free as I always have to criticize your blogs on Snowden and any other issues just as I do with any other blogger.
False accusations of stalking and harassing -- when in fact there is a real stalker and real persecutor out there harming people -- is really over the top. I don't know what is driving this, but it should stop.
What is this REALLY about? I try to figure out what "incorrect" view I have in the libertarian monoverse than has to be "stamped out and discredited". Or is it merely provincial spite and jealousy over the fact that I self-published a book that got a few nice mentions from journalists? Surely someone who is a respected professor with multiple publications could not be jealous in this fashion? It makes no sense.
I can't spend too much more time on this, especially because my "About Me" and "Advice to Google Witch-Hunters already has lenghty rebuttals to the idiotic falsehoods purveyed about me by hackers mad at my critique of hacking in the pass.
Recent Comments