Hackers on Steroids (10 page)

If people who have been badly affected by the actions of these vile cretins are wondering how I can make humour out of these same trolls I’d just like to explain that the only way which I and others could face it all on a constant basis exactly was to mine humour out of them. Not humour from their deeds on RIP pages, but humour from them themselves, from their follies and their idiocies, from their crazy delusions and their epic personal inanities and insanities.  And, by god, they are rich pickings for anyone who wants to find humour in all of that. For one thing they hate even more than being doxed is being humiliated, becoming figures of fun. Because for a great many of them they have been figures of fun for all of their whole entire lives. Something I’d normally have great sympathy for, but not in these cases, not when they react to it by doing what they do.

They have lived their whole lives as either a Hunter Mello, or a Paul Baloney, or as a Sean Duffy - outcasts, clowns, victims of society - and then found on the Internet an escape from that where they could act out their dark fantasies and have power over people, where they can make the most vulnerable people they can find feel their pain. And then I and other anti-trolls came along and reminded them of what they really are, and I believe that it is because of that for which they truly hate us more than for anything else. Like Dennis Hopper’s equally-as-psychotic-as-them character in
Blue Velvet
, they hate to be looked at straight in the face. It causes them to scream in anger. Evil never likes to be looked at right in its eyes.

This RIP troll breed are the type of nutjobs some of whom could likely end up as serial killers in the not too distant future, or failing that, getting married to their sisters on the Jerry Springer Show. There is nothing that can be done about individuals like that. They are as much a fact of life as cancer or diarrhoea. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t laugh at them. Laughing at them is, I feel, part of the tonic. Hunter Mello, the ridiculous, hapless Hunter Mello, posted on his real Facebook profile that he was getting his friends - meaning ‘Anonymous,’ meaning Paul Baloney - to sort me out. His friends were, he said, ‘kind of like the Mafia.’ Only, as he went on to explain, even less forgiving.

So there you have it: you should take your chances with a Paulie Walnuts before taking them with a Paulie Socash.

This sort of thing, these delusions of mafia, cannot be allowed to go without severe mockery. These kinds of trolls have built up the most absurd views of themselves, from cyber Mafia dons to Swiftian satirists, and it all needs to be ridiculed out of existence. Pull away the Guy Fawkes masks that some of them like to sport and replace them with red clowns noses, because they desperately need to be reminded of just who and what they are. Many of them are so far gone and stupid that they have become dangerously deluded about their supposed powers, forgetting totally that they are not really ‘kind of like the Mafia.’

If ever you encounter an RIP troll desecrating a tribute page for a child you can just about be totally assured that in real life they are guaranteed to be seriously mentally disturbed, sad, and otherwise totally ridiculous individuals like, for example, the alcoholic, self-loathing basket case that is Colm Coss; or the friendless, epically obsessive, and reportedly very evil-smelling fantasist that is Paul Baloney. Individuals who will be taking the frustrations of their pathetic selves out on the most innocent and the most vulnerable people whom they can find in order to empower the ground zero sites that are their minds. They are individuals who will find it hard to fit in in any way in real society. They will have little if any real life friends and they will have lived lives plagued by self-torture and confusion wrought by their unfixable, hellish psyches. ‘One thing you can’t hide is when you’re crippled inside,’ sang John Lennon, and you certainly can’t hide it when you do psycho-trolling. Happy people don’t do that sort of stuff. Look right straight through the illusions of their fantasy online identities to see what is on the other side of them and take comfort knowing the pain and misery that they are in, and most likely always will be in. Miserable little worms that don’t have the balls to just kill themselves and instead choose to take it all out on the bereaved.

There is a saying that goes: ‘On the Internet, no-one knows you are a dog.’ Well that is not true here at all. For RIP trolls, you can know exactly what they are.

The sheer size of the delusions these beings have of themselves are immeasurable. After the British television news producers ITN done a couple of reports into the RIP trolling on Facebook, over 100 of the usual suspects gathered on a page created especially to threaten Chris Choi, the journalist who had done both of the reports. To them, he had no idea of what he had just messed with and now his career and even his life was in pieces. Paul Baloney even posted on it to tell him that only he could get him out of this ‘sorry mess.’  As Baloney knew that I had been involved in one of the reports I suspect that he was expecting to be able to cut a deal with Chris Choi in exchange for what he knew on me. They were genuinely convinced that they were going to ruin his career for daring to report on their squalid little world.

To give the reader another idea of how deep their sad little cybermafia fantasies have taken root in their minds, I will reproduce an utterly terrifying ultimatum that I received in 2010 from a troll calling itself ‘WeAre Legion.’ It was sent to me not long after I had returned from my short absence that followed the Oliver episode and it captures perfectly the delusions of mafia which they hold of themselves.

WeAre Legion   

April 19, 2010 at 1:40pm

Subject: Your Efforts.

Dear Mr. Lonston, and all would-be troll ousters,

We have been recently been made aware that your ‘anti-trolling’ efforts have garnered some self-perceived success. Your outing of several Facebook trolls’ real identities has once again reminded us that stupidity garners rewards for those that wait. We have further been made aware that you offered a ‘peace offering’ of sorts, wherein you promised to stop outing the identities of Facebook trolls, and in exchange we would stop harassing Oliver Jackson. You stated if I am correct, ‘I never once foreseen that someone else would get the blame for my actions,’ and there it is that I must direct your attention. Indeed, you have not foreseen the consequences of your futile efforts, but it was always going to come to this. Everyone is fair game. You can out as many trolls as you wish, for any that are capable of being ousted are of no use to us. They are as disposable to us as ‘innocents’ such as Oliver Jackson.

But I digress. Our purpose here is to respond to your proposed ‘peace-offering.’ Your claim that you will stop trying to oust our ‘true’ identities if we cease to target Oliver Jackson is predicated on our belief that you will not create another account, and continue your efforts there. Frankly, whether you do so or not is of little consequence to us. Let me then state our own actions should more attempts to oust us continue: If one of us is ousted or we learn about such efforts to do so, regardless of whether or not you personally were involved, we will target an ‘innocent’ person at random, such as we have with Oliver Jackson, and ‘harass’ said person until you personally, using your current account, convince the ouster to cease their efforts (confirmation of which will only be accepted in the form of a message sent to one of us stating they will cease their efforts, much in the way you currently have).

As for coming after you personally, you think we don’t already have your information? We have no real desire to use it however, we save our serious efforts for ‘special people.’ Of course, that is subject to change pending your compliance with our terms.

You said before, ‘Others will inevitably continue to out you.’ We understand this. We expect this. We will also hold you responsible for this. You can no longer just walk away from this. You wanted to be a part of this, now you are. On our terms.

We await your response.

Post Script,

By now I suspect you are wondering who ‘we’ are. Allow me then to grace you with the knowledge of who we are: We are anonymous. Anonymous is legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget.

Expect us.

Oh the drama!

If I recall correctly I may just have wet myself after I read that, but it wasn’t through fear. I especially liked the ‘And don’t bloody think we don’t know who you are, mate. We’re just not bothered enough to say it. So there’ bit. In the event, this cyber Corleone made up a fake account by the name of Terry someone-or-other and sent me messages begging me to stop whatever it was I was doing as some terrible people were ruining his life on the Internet over it.

WeAre Legion IP-ed to the State University of New York at Buffalo (as, amusingly, did ‘Terry’). The style of WeAre Legion, though, could be said to be a straight-up carbon copy of Paulie Socash’s style, right down to the ‘But I digress’ line, a line ole Paulie is very fond of using himself both in and out of his troll skin, and indeed when I Google for it along with Paulie’s real name dozens of instances of that particular individual using that line come up.

Paulie has also at another time referred to this same troll as a ‘close associate.’ It seems likely that ‘Paulie’ wrote out that message and asked his troll ‘associate’ to send it to me, perhaps believing that I would respond better to someone whose name bared part of the feared Anonymous motto. Consider this from Paulie, posted publicly on his profile the day before I received that bone-chilling ultimatum:

Paulie Socash

I am disappoint

It has come to my attention that the whole ‘problem’ of some idiot named ‘Mike Lonston’ ousting people has ended (for now) in a most unsatisfactory way. I’m not privy to the conversation as whole, and correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems a number of trolls caved to the demands of someone who really poses little or no threat. The agreement, as I understand it, is one only those who entered into it can keep for themselves (to protect themselves) and holds no real bearing on the efforts of ‘Mike Lonston,’ regardless if he deleted his former profile (you all know how easy it is to make a new one and go about as if nothing happened) OR the rest of us.

Now, I don’t care what you see as your role here, but I do think, no, KNOW, that you should distance your IRL info from what you are doing no matter what. All the ousted trolls that I saw were documented due to stupid, careless shit that involved letting slip their real info. There was no Jedi tracking you though proxies, much less hacking Facebook’s logs. While I may like working alongside you, this is stupid and unacceptable.

Truth be told, if you are looking for the guilty, you need only look in a mirror. I know why you did it. I know you were afraid. But in engaging in any agreement with a featherweight bully like this you weaken all of us.

In closing, I’m not interested in compromise with faggots like Lonston. I’m also not willing to cede anything because people haven’t learned to protect themselves (and I hope you all have by now). Nothing changes due to your appeasement efforts unless it is a new understanding that attacking bystanders like Oliver Jackson will only help shut down self-proclaimed ‘hunters’

Under this he had posted the Anonymous symbol of a headless man in a black suit and surrounded by the group’s logo. Just to really hammer home that he meant business, you see. He and some of the other little pretend mobsters then went on to confer at length in the most serious and matter-of-fact terms about ‘terror campaigns’ against anti-trolls, and indulged themselves by referring to ‘negotiations’ and ‘appropriate measures.’

Thus what we are up against: severely mentally disordered space cadets who have indulged themselves so deeply in a delusion of mafia that they really do begin in themselves to believe that they truly are ‘kind of like the Mafia’ (but only less forgiving, let us not forget) and so start to act kind of like the Mob too in the belief that their tactics of fear and intimidation will have no consequences for them.

But for many innocent people their psychotic fantasy games certainly do have consequences that they bring with them from the computer and into their lives. The delusional psychopaths that are these trolls force the most vulnerable and innocent people imaginable to become part of their insane online game world, for they do see it all as a game world and the people whom they haunt and torture as things put there only for their enjoyment. So I and some of the other anti-trolls decided to turn the tables on them and bring it all back into their real worlds and so was born the idea of what came to be known as ‘the packages.’

This was something that I came up with when I talked to the trolls about leaving them alone if they left old Oliver alone (and, yes, I know that the image of troll/anti-troll peace negotiations is completely ludicrous and like something which the satirist Chris Morris would come up with, as well as I am fully aware that being a ‘troll-hunter’ is a lot less cool than it sounds, but when you decide to jump down into the rabbit hole you sometimes have to play by the Mad Hatter’s rules). When at first they weren’t willing to back down I thought up of something that I believed would make them think again: any trolls whose real identities were known were going to have large envelopes filled with screencaps of the very sickest examples of their paedophilic RIP trolling sent out to their families, to their work or college, and to 20 of their neighbours. This so scared some of them that they begged the rest of the trolls into agreeing to leave Oliver Jackson alone. Well, most of the trolls agreed but - even apart from the absurd Paulie Socash - one in particular, then an extremely active and particularly unfunny RIP troll who went by the names of ‘SirAlex Ferguson’ and ‘Carl Johnston,’ was acting as Paul Baloney’s voice on the matter and so was totally against the idea. Baloney had trolled this drooling cretin into believing that this Oliver fellow was absolutely and without doubt indeed me, and ‘SirAlex’ wanted his blood.