Hackers on Steroids (29 page)

But the Malicious Communications Act wasn’t passed with something like RIP trolling in mind, and when you have a law on the books as nebulous as one that prohibits sending ‘by means of a public electronic communications network a message or other matter that is grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character’ then it is open to abuse and misinterpretation.

I’d say the big problem is with the term ‘grossly offensive.’ Everything is grossly offensive to somebody or other. As can many things be considered to be obscene. I consider the unspeakable desecration of Bob Dylan’s magnum opus
Desolation Row
by the emo band ‘My Chemical Romance’ to be both grossly offensive and utterly obscene. And I myself trolled and trolled hard on a Facebook page set up to celebrate the deeds of a dead serial killer; while also creating on the night Osama bin Laden went to meet his 72 maidens an Internet poster that consisted of his photograph above the caption, ‘Oh noes I got doxed!’ I’m sure there are a few who would find those things offensive and obscene too; myself, I would consider it more of a crime not to troll about the likes of those two. (And don’t try and say that this is the same thing as RIP trolling about dead children; I think when you decide to indulge in a bit of the ole serial killing like those two did you leave yourself open to more than ridicule, living or dead).

Perhaps what is really needed to protect true freedom of speech while not letting the likes of a Colm Coss off with his crimes is the scrapping of the law containing those terms and the bringing in of a law specifically against publishing words or material lacking artistic, political, or other merit and that have been designed or conceived for the sole purpose of terrifying and otherwise mentally assaulting without reasonable provocation emotionally vulnerable people, or material promoting paedophilia against a named or otherwise implied living or dead person. (If you’re going around writing vile things about innocent children on tribute pages made in their names it could be quite reasonably argued that you were doing so with the intention of causing hurt to the bereaved, whether they seen it or not. It would be like pasting posters of the sick photoshops and remarks all around that family’s home area and then claiming that the intent was to annoy everyone who saw them except for the family in question).

I want now to reproduce some of the comments that got Colm Coss sent to jail, something which may even have, in a way, set in motion that whole landslide of prosecutions in the first place. As horribly evil as these comments are, I feel justified in reproducing them as I do so not with the intent to hurt, which was the intent with which they were originally conceived and posted. Instead, I just want to show people exactly what sorts of things are being said to the families of dead people – mostly the families of dead children – day after day on the Internet, and then each person can make their own minds up as to whether or not this sort of thing is what people died fighting Hitler to protect. In all cases I have removed the names of the dead kids they were made about. While the context now is different, all of these comments were originally made on pages operated by either family members or close friends of the dead people in question.

On a page operated by the friends of a 15-year-old girl who was stabbed to death:

Colm Coss
This crackwhore is sitting on my cock now in hell.

When I have finished with her every other denizen of the place will play with her corpse for all eternity.

On an RIP page operated by the family of a dead four-year-old boy:

Colin Upson
I ripped his eyeballs out and fucked the bloody dripping sockets. He never saw it coming.

On a page run by the family of a two-year-old boy who died of leukaemia. His parents had set it up to ask for prayers before his death:

Colin Upson
I raped his fresh corpse the day he died.

And on the same page:

Colm Coss
His parents are AIDS ridden crack whores, that’s why
[name removed]
had to die. They need to harvest his corpse for organs to sell on the black market.

On a page made by the friends of a 17-year-old boy who died in a car smash:

Colm Coss Bomford
Sorry I’m late to the group guys! I just got here from a 3 day session of fucking
[name removed]
in every orifice he had (and some he didn’t know he had). My balls are as tight and shrivelled as walnuts and twice as hard.

Firstly, I smashed the teeth out of his skull (this is surprisingly easy to do after a couple of days in the grave) then fucked his throat. I took each nasal cavity then turned to his ears.

Second I slit the remains of his throat and fucked the bloated oesophagus until I had filled his lungs with spunk.

The third round was the usual anal penetration and rape of the urethra (callipers are recommended).

I took him between each of his toes and fingers – but who wouldn’t – and the back of his knees.

There are a lot of things that comments like that can rightly be described as, but satire and humour are not among them; and if anyone can find a point of view being expressed somewhere in any of those then they should let the rest of us know. The only real joke to be found in them at all is Colm Coss himself, pushing the send button on his spewings as he downs another vodka while crying silently and hopelessly to himself. While it is still important to bring in some way to book the very worst of these RIP trolls, perhaps it is the case that the harshest sentence which a troll like that can be given is to be sentenced to live its life. 

So many people are jealous of Tylor. They see in Tylor what they wish was true about themselves.

Peter Partyvan

Once upon a time, in a magical faraway world of their own imaginings, there lived these nasty little trolls.

Said one of the trolls, Peter Partyvan, to some girls once
who were making fun of him on Facebook: ‘You mean stupid
drunken
sluts who can’t form proper sentences. You cunts are a dime a dozen. And trust me, the sluts I fuck aren’t fatties who cover themselves in makeup to hide the fact they look like men.’

But then some other trolls who didn’t like Peter hacked into some private conversations of his and found out that he is a virgin.

‘Ha ha ha ha’ went everyone back in the real world, before all wishing upon a falling star that the trolls really were just make-believe, just like Peter Partyvan’s sluts.

And then all of the trolls lived very unhappily ever after.

People whom these trolls haunt and harass are fond of telling them to just go and die and burn in hell, but they must bear in mind that RIP trolls died a long time ago in their lives and are burning in hell every second of their days. In fact, the only time that their flames become somewhat doused is when they see that they have become worthy of being told to go to hell, because even that is more than the nothing which they would otherwise receive from humanity at large. Imagine how unspeakably miserable and weak someone would have to be to feel a need to escape that by filling their days torturing bereaved people on the Internet. Like Peter Partyvan, their online lives are just big, easily seen through illusions.

‘Do not feed the trolls,’ runs the advice, and to an extent that is the greatest advice which can be given on the matter. Certainly when they come crawling onto a memorial page do not pass comment at all either to them or on them. No matter how personal it seems – and nothing could seem more personal than the taunting of a mother about her dead child – always remember that you and all the rest of the people whom they are trying to incite are just objects to them, and that if they don’t get any fun out of these objects then they will soon go away. Don’t talk to them, don’t tell them to leave, and definitely do not rage at them or let them know how much they may be hurting you and how awful that you think they are. Rage and hurt from those they prey on are the petrol that keeps their engines burning; starve them of that fuel and they will break down and rust, not just on the Internet but back in their real lives too. Simply just report their profiles and then put them on ignore, taking quiet solace in the sure and certain knowledge that once they crawl away from that memorial page and back to their hateful realities that the flames will begin to lick again at them. They are already living in that place which you wished them banished to.

So to that extent I say to ignore them totally and absolutely and to not give them what they want, which is for you to play at their game. Saying all that, there is one sort of attention that they don’t like and that is for their real lives to be so rudely intruded into, just like they themselves intrude into the lives of others. Oh you should see how precious they get about receiving that sort of attention, and so that sort of attention I say then that they should be given in abundance. Piss on the smoke of their illusions and leave them standing there naked for the world to point and laugh at. Bring reality crashing right back into their lives with a vengeance and let everyone see the sorry little creature who is standing behind the curtain while presuming to roar at the world in the trembling voice of the Great and Powerful Oz.

Taking away someone’s Internet anonymity should only be done in the very most extreme of circumstances. Anonymity on the Internet is a basic Web freedom that everyone should be able to enjoy, unless they seriously abuse it. I myself used several pseudonyms during my anti-trolling days, the main ones being ‘Mike Lonston’ and ‘Michael Fitzpatrick,’ and so I sympathise totally with the right to privacy on the Internet. Unless, of course, you’re using the powers that privacy grants you to bully and harass in the most horrible ways innocent people. Then you’ve misused your gift of invisibility and it is only right then that society pulls from your finger Tolkien’s ring and reveals the Gollum-like creature cringing and muttering curses from the dark shadow-land of its own makings. When you delve deep into that abyss of perverted and hopeless creations which is the online fantasy-world of any one gathering of cyberpaths who are using recognisable pseudonyms, you are going to come back out holding the scalps of more than a few of them. If you have the eye for it, along with the patience, you can reach into the Internet and pull out the dox of just about any nominally anonymous person who regularly uses anything like social media or Internet forums. There is usually a way, if you stick at it.

For instance, I was able in 2010 to dox one ‘Soveri Ruthliss,’ a then quite infamous troll (the highlight of his life, he was fond of endlessly repeating, was getting a bit of his RIP trolling shown on US television for three seconds), just by him being careless enough to post a link onto Facebook to the Myspace page of a band by the name of
The Suicide Kings
. Realising that this obviously meant that he had a profile on their Myspace page, I just looked through the member list of that same page then for anyone from Columbus, Ohio, which is where that troll’s IP address went to. Finding only one individual fitting that specification, I then Googled his name – his initials are ‘TF’ - and city and came up with some comments he had made on a number of Facebook groups and which fitted in exactly with the style of ‘Soveri.’ I then made a fake profile and added him on Facebook, and after satisfying myself that he was the troll took all of his details and photos and got ready to release them. First though, I messaged him with the info and got him to admit being the troll, and as a bonus convinced him that another troll had sold him out and got him to lead me to that troll in turn (yet another nerdy-looking little being who obviously wouldn’t say boo to a fly in real life, he trolled mostly as ‘Winston Darfor.’ His surname is Ripley).

After having TF act as one of my informers then for a little while, I released his info to some people and before I knew it he was getting the blame for being just about every troll on the Internet, while I just sat back and laughed at his hassle. And that is how easily and right out of the blue which you can be doxed on the Web; and knowing that I some time ago scrubbed any traces of myself from the Internet, leaving no trail which would lead to me. Only some trolls have I observed being clever enough to stay truly undoxed in any way; but only trolls who hang out exclusively on some place like 4Chan have a real chance of staying forever anonymous, as a social network demands that its vacuum be filled with the egos of its users, and the longer a troll stays in such a social network, the more likely that individual’s real life is to become entangled up in it. The best weapon that the trolls have against those seeking to dox them is the sheer tedium which their world inspires in normal people after a while. After 2010 I could hardly bring myself to try and dox any more of them, such was the boredom that trudging through their painfully unfunny world of witless memes and petty bickering caused in me. (My absence from their world led to a widespread belief among them that I had at last been jailed for bullying trolls, with Paul Baloney assuring his dribbling minions that he had harnessed his extensive contacts in the underworld to get me attacked multiple times in prison).

‘I just like to grant the universe its one thing that makes it go on. Chaos. Man was not supposed to be bound by law and order,’ was TF’s reply to me when I asked him what made him troll. And after that deep-voiced intro, on stepped to the stage the heaviest band in all history – Spinal Tap. TF
is
metal.

Have I mentioned yet how ridiculous these creatures are?

All around the same time in late 2011 I got asked to help with the making of not one but three different UK television programs that wanted to out the real identities of some of the trolls. This all came along after I had talked to Britain’s Daily Mail newspaper about the subculture of RIP trolling on Facebook. The Daily Mail is a right-wing newspaper and I am a leftie socialist anti-imperialist liberal so on most things we would hardly see eye to eye, but things like RIP trolling are way beyond politics. In the 1980s the same newspaper ran a ‘moral panic’ campaign against ‘video nasties’ - that being the name given to overly grotesque horror films like the infamous Cannibal Holocaust and the like. Personally, I think such films are nothing short of hilarious, but that’s because they’re not real. If ‘video nasties’ were actually filled with gruesome photoshops of real deceased children, then that would be something else entirely. Anyone who thinks that real RIP trolling is as harmless as some stupid horror movie and so nothing to make a fuss about is just a plain psychopath. On this subject, the Daily Mail is completely correct.

*For the article in the Mail I used the name ‘Michael Fitzpatrick,’ the first time I had used that particular nom de guerre. Soon after the Mail article appeared, two of the hackers on steroids were on Facebook at different times to exclaim excitedly that they had, using only their troll superpowers of detection, doxed me at last. The name they gave: Michael Fitzpatrick.

Unfortunately, one of the proposed programs didn’t materialise, one that was to be presented by a well-known and actually funny comedian who wanted to knock on the doors of some seriously unfunny RIP trolls. When I told the producer after he had approached me that the BBC were making something similar the proposed program then didn’t get made, which is a pity. The two that did though really helped to get the message across, and I am very glad to have helped in them.

Richard Bacon is a well-known BBC presenter who was at that time having his own problem with a troll. Well, actually more of an obsessed cyberstalker than a troll, although the two terms are hardly mutually exclusive. At any rate ‘Dick Bacon Boom’ as this character called himself (assuming it is a ‘he’), was a cyberpath of some sort and exact terminologies aren’t really important here. This troll/stalker/nutcase had been sending Richard nasty, crazy tweets and making Facebook pages and posts fantasising about his death for two years; which, as Richard himself admitted, goes somewhat with the territory, even if such a strange and in one way violent obsession is disturbing for those on the end of it. But for the presenter it crossed the line whenever the same nutter began contacting his family, actually going to the trouble of finding his wife and his mother on Twitter to rant at them his insanely intense hatred for him. And all this because the stalker didn’t like Richard Bacon’s radio show. Worryingly for Richard Bacon, this person was maybe more than a little unhinged.

This all led to the presenter wanting to make a program then on Internet abuse, and when the program makers approached me to ask me to provide them with info on the RIP trolling scene, I was - after first checking out they were legit and not trolls – more than happy to oblige.

‘Do you know of any troll who would agree to come to our studios and do a TV interview?’ one of the producers asked me.

So which one of the trolls would actually be stupid enough to do that? thought I to myself.

‘Ah yes, I have just the one for you’s,’ I replied. ‘His name is Damon Evans, he’s 20, and this is how you can contact him.’

And, sure enough, I wasn’t mistaken about the utter non-wit of Damon Evans, who jumped at the chance to appear on TV to talk about his trolling. The producers didn’t tell him that he was going to be asked about his RIP trolling and Evans thought he was just going along to answer questions about trolling in general, with him telling the producers before he went to do the interview in early 2012 that he had no part in such a thing as RIP trolling and only lightly trolled celebrities. Much to my amusement, he actually privately messaged me on Facebook to boast that he was going to be a TV star. ‘Oh?’ I replied. ‘Really?!?!’

‘Shit is going to be so cash,’ wrote Evans on Facebook just before he left his home in Wales to travel to Manchester to do the interview. Not that he was actually getting paid for it; he was just using that 4Chan meme to express his excitement. I got the impression that he thought it was going to be the first step on the ladder of his comedy career.

And a comedian Damon is, just not intentionally so. I convinced him once, when he was posing as an anti-troll and trying to trick me - in an ironic case of the anti-troll trolling the troll pretending to be an anti-troll - that an Aussie troll who called himself ‘Stuntman Mike’ had been doxed by me as being a secret transvestite, and that in turn for me not releasing the video I had of him gyrating about in bra and knickers that he had been acting as one of my very many spies. ‘Stuntedmind’ as I called him – and who at one time shared an online romance with the delicious Jessica Cook - was another severely mentally challenged troll specimen, and another who lived entirely for trolling. ‘I want respect for the serious hard trolling I have done. I DEMAND MORE FUCKING RESPECT FROM YOU ALL AND I WILL HAVE IT!!’ he exclaimed one day (god give me strength). I’ll get you your respect, thought I, and so made up the story about him being a secret tranny. ‘Please keep this info secret at all costs!’ I begged of hapless Damon, who as planned ran straight to the rest of the trolls with it and soon gone were the glory days of Stuntedmind. Even over a year later Damon was still referring with venom to ‘that fat tranny.’ There’s none so easy to troll than trolls themselves.