Hackers on Steroids (26 page)

He would, too, leave comments on the tribute pages in question, such as one that he knew was visited by the mother of Lauren Drew, a 14-year-old girl who died from an epileptic fit. ‘Help me mummy, it’s hot in Hell,’ and: ‘I can’t get out of my coffin, I’ve scratched my nails to the bone,’ were messages that he wrote specially for the attention of Lauren’s mother. On Mother’s Day, he left on the page a video that he had made which ended with the text ‘Happy Mother’s Day’ beside a picture of a coffin. The girl’s mother told a newspaper that she went to her child’s grave and sat down beside it. ‘I sat down next to her and told her I couldn’t protect her. I couldn’t stop this person hurting us,’ she said.

Some of his campaigns he carried on daily for months. Some he revisited again after years away from them. If he could, he would privately message the relatives of the dead person in question, just to terrify those vulnerable victims even more. One woman told me of how he had almost put her 12-year-old daughter over the edge by messaging her that the person who had knocked down and killed her young cousin was going to come and get her whenever he got out of jail. He also advised this vulnerable and hurting child to kill herself before this could take place. Other times he would message his victims under his real name and offer his support to them over the trolling, sometimes even building up ‘friendships’ with them and getting them to open up to him about the effect that his evil was having on them. One friend of Sophie Lancaster, a murdered 20-year-old who Duffy had trolled about obsessively for years, spoke on one Facebook group of how he had befriended her over a period of months even as the trolling about her friend was going on, and how he had seemed like a ‘decent, caring person.’ We can only imagine the secret pleasure that all of this gave to him.

So of course he understood perfectly the effect of what he was doing, as that is precisely why he was doing it in the first place. The argument put forward by some on the Internet after his jailing that his autism doesn't allow him to understand that his victims will be negatively emotionally affected by his actions even when he was clearly carrying out those same actions exactly to gain an emotional response from them - as tapes of his police interviews plainly show him admitting - is so stupid and ill-thought-out that it boggles the mind. Yes, Sean Duffy – like the rest of his ilk – is mentally ill, but like them not so mentally ill that he didn’t know exactly what he was doing, and clearly he done all of this with complete malice in his intentions. And therein lies the crux of the situation: Mental illness – and I am not saying that it is his Asperger syndrome which means that he is mentally ill, he is mentally ill in other ways - certainly inspired him to do what he done, but not being of too sound a mind inspired Robert Hull and Shane Pattison and Paolo Gheldardini from the previous chapter too. That still doesn’t mean that they didn’t know exactly what it was that they were doing. Like them, Duffy’s evil actions were no sudden loss of control committed in one moment of lunacy; they were soberly plotted and carried out over time, and tried to keep secret from the world by Duffy precisely because he knew how evil they were. I remember him as ‘Truth’ saying that he had went along with his friends to sign a book of condolence and all the while he was laughing inside of himself as his friends didn’t know what he was really like (contrary to media reports, Sean Duffy wasn’t a total loner - although in all likelihood he is something of one now).

I could accept that it was the social exclusion which he experienced because of his Asperger syndrome that very possibly drove him down into the depths to which he sunk, but it certainly didn’t compel him to act as he did. Many millions in the world have been diagnosed with Asperger’s yet we don’t see them acting as he did, which should lead any reasonable person to conclude that there must be more to his actions than ‘having autism.’

But like Colm Coss, Bradley Hampson, Jesscia Cook, and so many other RIP trolls, a fair part of it was probably him taking out the frustrations of having been bullied – something well-documented about Duffy - onto the most vulnerable people that he could find as part of a pathetic but seriously damaging Internet power game to make himself feel like the one in charge for a change. But many, many people are bullied and don’t then go and act like that, along with all those millions in the world with Asperger’s who don’t seek out the innocent to torture. I am quite sure that most with Asperger’s would resent the idea that it possesses its sufferers with dark yearnings to inflict pain on the innocent. Quite simply, Duffy is a sadist without hint of human compassion, and whether he was born to be that way by cruel nature or changed into it by a cruel world is neither here nor there: he chose his actions freely. And now his life is ruined and ruined beyond repair. Let it all be an example to others of his ilk: grieving people are not your playthings and when the world bites you back for this sort of diseased behaviour you are going to really feel those teeth tearing you apart.

So it was nice to see him on the day of his jailing lose around 50 people off his Facebook friend list, almost half of the total number of people that he had as Facebook friends. When I doxed Duffy I had messaged a number of these same people to warn them of what he was like, and all apart from one of them thought me the troll. Now indeed it was they who were attacking him and calling him all the scum of the day, and it was most satisfying to behold. The disgust at him shown on his own Facebook profile reflected the consensus across Britain, which was that Duffy’s jailing had been well-deserved. To most people, this was not a case of freedom of speech rights being taken away, this was some of the vilest harassment imaginable being rightly punished. Case closed, at least for most.

But, almost inevitably of course, there were those across the Internet and in the media who thought that the case should not have come to court at all, and that Duffy’s ‘human rights’ had been violated by taking away his right to harass vulnerable people. Others hinted that Duffy’s victims shared much of the blame for not simply ‘logging off,’ including Catherine Bennett of the Guardian who compared Duffy’s actions with bullying in the physical world and concluded that punishing the latter should always take priority over the former (as if it is a choice of choosing one at the total exclusion of then being able to tackle the other). She seems to have trouble understanding that the torturous harassment campaigns which are conducted through the medium of the Internet by the likes of a Sean Duffy actually do carry on very much into the lives of the people affected by them, and how a parent who has just been assaulted with a photoshopped image of her dead child with Nazi swastikas on her eyes and blood spurting out of her mouth is supposed to ‘log off’ from that Mrs Bennett doesn’t elaborate on. How the young girl who was wrongly blamed for the trolling done against the name of Lauren Drew and who took an overdose in an attempt to take her own life because of the pressure this put her under was also supposed to just log off from all of that was also not made clear to us.

But Bennett is typical of those who see the Internet as a magical playground where nothing is really real and where the laws of the ‘other’ world just don’t apply. If Duffy had carried out his onslaughts against bereaved people by sending to them letters mocking their child’s death, or by ringing them up daily to shout sexual slurs at them about their recently departed loved one, would his jail sentence even have been an issue for Bennett and all those others who expressed similar thoughts? Absolutely not, it would have passed off without any sort of a debate at all. But the Internet is just another medium of communication, no different in that sense from the telephone or the letter. It would be hard to imagine a journalist in a newspaper opining that the hypothetical victims of a ghoul who had targeted them through their phone or by poison pen letters should just simply stop answering telephone calls and cease opening any mail addressed to them.

But just one moment, one comment, one image can be enough to do the damage anyway. Like Robert Mullaney says, one photoshopped image that he saw of his son Tom has now become imprinted in his brain. A mother of one of Duffy’s trolling targets from 2011 – not one of those he was jailed for, but one he did admit to - spoke of how she was affected terribly by seeing just one image that he had digitally manipulated of her dead 17-year-old daughter. ‘I was distraught when I saw he had defaced her school photo as it's the most recent picture we have of her,’ she said to one newspaper, while explicitly then telling the BBC that Duffy had ‘destroyed memories’ of her daughter. She also said of being targeted by Duffy that: ‘He had found out so much information, where she lived, what school she went to and even where she is buried. I was too scared to go to her grave in case he was there or had damaged it.’

This is the awful process by which the troll can become on some level an individual of even more importance to the bereaved person than that person’s much-grieved-for family member as the nightmarish depictions of the deceased vomited forth from the mind of the sadist begin to become, perhaps only for a short time but perhaps for longer, stronger and more dominant in the victim’s mind than cherished memories of the smiling happy child now gone from the earth. The empowerment gained from this by an otherwise pissed-on and laughed-at nobody becomes for such his or her own secret paradise on earth, and the troll becomes addicted to the drug of its own sadism. New victims are sought out and their minds invaded then too as the thoughts and images from the depths of the troll’s hellish psyche are sent racing towards them through the fibre optic highways of the Internet, like midnight riders in their trucks and their sheets coming in the darkness to burn a cross on the lawn of their victims.

Free speech this is not in any way, shape, or form. Indeed, what sort of a drooling, hollow-headed, pants-soiling imbecile could believe that this is the idea behind freedom of speech at all?

The answer seems to be too many of the people on the Internet. I don’t mean that there was widespread sympathy for Duffy or his deeds being voiced by too many in online forums and in newspaper comments sections after his much-discussed jailing, most of everyone who commented on his actions thought them and him repulsive. But still there were many among those same people who thought it an outrage that someone could be prosecuted for what they thought was nothing more than him speaking his mind. From exasperated howling that Britain had now officially become a police state (because the Stasi used to delight at locking people up for RIP trolling); to inquiries as to whether the year had been changed from 2011 to 1984; to dire and obviously heartfelt warnings that the whole of civilisation would collapse if sadists were denied their basic democratic right to harass the families of children who had died.

‘As horrible as what he done was, people died fighting Hitler to win him the very freedom to do his trolling!’ were the words, more or less, of one erudite commentator, making me glad that people did fight Hitler to win that particular Internet contributor his freedom of speech, because otherwise he couldn’t have expressed that opinion and I couldn’t have subsequently laughed at it.

I love freedom of speech. Freedom of speech gives me the right to describe as dribbling simpletons people who think that freedom of speech actually means freedom of harassment (notice please that I’m not ringing you up four times a day to scream at you about how mentally challenged you are, as that would be harassment). And without freedom of speech we wouldn’t have the chance to laugh at the idiots who expressed the following, all opinions that I remember being put forth on the Web in the aftermath of Duffy’s jailing. The exact words may not be as they are as I am simply recalling, but the gist was the same:

‘This is how North Korea works! I am telling you this NOW!’

‘They’re locking people up for having different opinions now. Shows they’re scared.
This is the day Britain died.’

‘This is all part of the New World Order plot to stop people like me telling citizens the truth about the Illuminati control of everything. The truth I tell is too dangerous to be heard. First they came for the trolls … Remember Niemöller!’

But that’s part of the beauty of real free speech - without it we’d have less Internet postings warning us that the New World Order was behind the plot to jail trolls, and therefore less colour on the internets. To paraphrase that famous quote popularly attributed to Voltaire: ‘I disapprove of your idiocy, but I will defend to the death your right to be a simpleton.’

Now, though, I want to try and enlighten those same sorts of simpletons of something, should they be reading: No country anywhere in the world protects your ‘right’ to say anything you want to anyone you want. Truth. Perhaps, to you, a shocking truth, but a truth nonetheless. You can believe that you have that right, and you can even express the idea that you have that right. But you cannot, not in Britain, not in Australia, not in Canada, not in America, not anywhere free or unfree, be protected under the law from using speech - illustrated, spoken, or indeed written – with which to menace and harass people.

Isn’t it amazing to know that? There you were living in North Korea all this time and you hadn’t even noticed - until now that is! Just how oppressed are you now feeling having learned that?