Hackers on Steroids (3 page)

And who am I? I am nobody, really. I am an at least half-mad Irishman (well, if I wasn’t half crazy when I started all of this, then I probably am now) of no importance. I am merely a narrator and documenter of certain things that have taken place, the veracity of much of which can be checked through media reports. My name is Oisín (pronounced Oh-sheen) and I live quite a boring existence, far too much of which is spent online. Oh, and I hate RIP trolls, many of whom in turn hate me with a vengeance, something which amuses me immensely.

After some days then of sifting through their vileness and having made a number of unsuccessful attempts to interest the main UK national dailies in what was going on, I decided that the best course of action for my sanity would be to look away and to try and forget what I had seen happening. Dealing with one of these disgusting beings was one thing, but this was all too much. I had been lying awake at night thinking about it, feeling the utter hatred boiling in me, wanting to lock them all in a barn and burn it. I realised that I had been shocked by what I had witnessed going on and that in turn that shock was creating very many bad feelings in me, all of which were doing no harm to anyone except to my own self. So look away I did, putting it slowly out of my head over the course of the next week. In mid-December though I began thinking of it again and decided to have another look at this digital monstrosity. What I saw then was something so unspeakably depraved that it disturbed me even more than the Megan Moore trolling.

My return to this netherworld had coincided with the sexually-motivated murder of Millie Martin, a 15-month-old girl from my own country. Her killing was being widely reported on in the Irish media, and I remember well the little toddler’s face being shown on the headline news. The creatures of the night that were this crowd of trolls had also picked up a news report about her murder and were inspired by it to set about making groups celebrating her sexual abuse and subsequent death. Trolls with fake names like ‘Dale Angerer’ - a child pornography fan from Australia later to become infamous as the first individual jailed for trolling; ‘Prince Az Lives’ - a father of three in his late 30s who works as a handyman for a Lord in Yorkshire, England, and whose full identity is known to me; and ‘Vicky Edward’ - an exceptionally depraved husband and wife trolling team with the surname Martel, originally from the UK but now living in France and that can still be seen on Facebook to this day writing their sexual fantasies under the photographs of children, were spewing out unspeakable sexual slurs about the little child. One of them, an admitted paedophile who trolled for a long time under the pseudonym ‘Frankie Desmond,’ even posted on one of the groups a pornographic photograph of a baby girl’s genitals. The actual picture I did not see, having arrived on the page only after he had taken the image down, but I have the outrage caused by it captured in a screengrab, and was told by two witnesses as to what he had done. The next day, the Belfast Telegraph reported on what was going on and under a link to their online version of the story I observed some of those trolls conveying a genuine ecstasy that what they had done had made the papers and so caused even more distress to the tot’s family.

‘Prince Az,’ who was also trolling on these groups as ‘Luciano Pavaroti’ and whose real initials are RC, said that he was ‘so very, very happy’ at the reporting of this in a newspaper. The same creep some two years later took a mental breakdown when he was almost exposed in a national British newspaper for his years of sadistic harassment against bereaved people (he especially liked to target the mothers of dead babies and toddlers). This loathsome little toad, who begged and pleaded with me and offered to rat on all the rest of the trolls so as not to be exposed, was only saved from appearing in the newspaper by the very skin of his teeth (and certainly not because of his pleading). Nevertheless, it all caused him some severe mental and emotional anguish and fear in his real life, something that made me so very, very happy.

A blackness followed me through the days ahead as I delved deeper and deeper into their dark pool. I wanted to find out the identities of all of them and expose them to their families, to their victims, to the world. I trawled through as many of their open profiles as I could, searching for little clues as to their real-life details. After a couple of days I was eventually then able to get the real info - or ‘dox’
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- on a troll who was using the name and photograph of the actor Steven Buscemi. I was led to his real-life account after seeing an old posting he had made on a female troll’s wall about how he had started out by trolling with his real Facebook profile on a page about a restaurant, which he helpfully named. He was a 19-year-old from Minnesota with the initials CS and he had been very active in the Megan Moore trolling, even sending out a ‘troll alert’ as he called it for other trolls to come and desecrate the page. Finding his real profile on that named page I then fooled my way onto it via the use of a fake account of my own, and after satisfying myself that he was the troll I took all of his details - from his small town to his two email addresses - and made a page outing him as someone who happily boasts of his sexual appetite for children. The link to my open page I then spammed all over any Facebook group I could find related to his home town. Maybe he has a real sexual appetite for children, maybe he doesn’t. But that’s what he claimed on the countless RIP pages he attacked, and if it was a joke then I wasn’t laughing. I didn’t label him as a paedophile, just simply crucified him with his own nails. Let the cunt explain his ‘jokes’ to those who know him in real life.

*
Internet slang for finding the real name, location, picture, and other such personal details of an up-until-then anonymous citizen of the Web, and derived from an incident in which a hacker placed someone’s private documents - or ’docs’ - onto 4Chan

So I had found myself acting as some sort of online vigilante on his own stupid crusade. Part of why I was doing this was to visit some sort of retribution onto the heads of the guilty, part of it was to show the other trolls that it could come into their real lives. But mostly it was to vent my intense hatred of what they were doing.

Someone linked my page to the trolls and they subsequently flooded it with bleating and complaints, leading soon to warnings and threats. CS himself came on from his real and troll accounts to admit he was the troll, but expressing outrage that I was misrepresenting his comedy genius. Unbelievably, after all they had done and were doing, I got a sense from them that they were genuinely feeling that they were being picked on by me, that one of their number was having a terrible injustice done to him. This was a baffling pattern that I was to see again and again from these shameless little entities, something which must betray real personality disorders and the sense of completely skewed realities. After my doxing of Sean Duffy I had messaged many of his friends on Facebook and told them about what he was doing. This, I later learned, led to him actually contacting the police and a team of solicitors to make a complaint about me, telling them that an awful online bully was causing him to become suicidal.
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My mind was completely blown.

*
But not suicidal enough in my opinion

The trolls here were threatening me with something called ‘Anonymous,’ a group of hackers apparently and whom they were claiming could get inside anyone’s computer and ruin anyone’s life. A quick Google search for this group seemed to prove its existence, and I spent all of that night lying awake in a sweat wondering just what the hell I had gotten myself into. I tossed and turned in the dark all night, unable to sleep with worry at what was coming for me though the phone cables that reached into my house. I had visions of some gang of uber-nerds sitting in a basement in New York reaching their digital hands into my computer, pulling out my own ‘dox’ and then mercilessly going to work on it.

Eventually, come six o’clock in the morning and still having slept none, I jumped out of bed, ran into my living room, switched on the computer and deleted my outing page along with the account that went with it, one ‘Billy Gruff.’ After much torturous debate with myself as to the rights and wrongs of backing down from such evil, panic had overtaken me and I reasoned with myself that I would still try to do something, but not that. I would try again to get some media interested, maybe even American media. But I was never going up directly against this ‘Anonymous’ again!

I laugh at that now. I was an innocent then taking his first steps into a bigger world full of unknown terrors. Yes, there is a group/movement/idea/cult/whatever known as Anonymous, and yes it is responsible for all sorts of computer attacks and even real cyber-hacks, but the good news is that even though that many of the Internet’s RIP trolls may style themselves as ‘Anonymous,’ all is not as it seems. A somewhat tangled subject of which I will return to in more detail later. But here now is basically all that you need to know - the Anonymous which has been making the headlines worldwide for their organised attacks on computer systems and their hacking into police emails are very unlikely to be the same individuals as are in the RIP trolling gangs, some of whose members also wear that now familiar Guy Fawkes mask, symbol of that ‘movement.’ If this were not so, then I and others would probably have had some conflict with them by now. 

So for the next two or three months I dipped in and out of their world, promising myself that I would never forget about it but being too fearful of what I may be taking unto myself to begin trying to dox any of these bastards again. I made some more approaches to newspapers but none of them were interested. Around early March, though - and perhaps because of my failure to get the media to take an interest - something snapped in me and, disgusted with myself for having backed down on that occasion, I began making a real effort to dox some more of them. I knew this sort of tactic wasn’t going to stop all of them but CS did seem to stop his trolling very shortly after I outed him, and at least for the first several months after Sean Duffy’s doxing he too also appeared to have ceased his campaign of persecution against the families of dead teenagers. This was a small something and a small something is better than a nothing.

My efforts paid off when I was soon able to discover the identity of one very active RIP troller who was then going under the name and picture of the composer Dmitri Shostakovich. He had posted on his completely open Facebook profile a screengrab taken from his real account. It was a discussion about Doctor Who that he had earlier had with some friends of his and something in it seemed so important to him that he had felt the need to post it up for his trolling buddies to see. ‘Dmitri’ had used a paint program to scribble out the names of the people in the screengrab, but the ‘sad clown of Facebook’ as he was later memorably described as hadn’t done a good enough job of making his own name unreadable and after 10 minutes of careful study I was able to piece it together. It read ‘Hunter Mello,’ and that one little badly scrawled-out name led on to a shitstorm of doxing and drama which was to see numerous trolls having their dirty little secrets exposed to their families and neighbours, and eventually even leading to 36-year-old Colm Coss from Manchester being handed the UK’s first jail sentence for RIP trolling.

Uh huh huh huh

Butthead

Uh huh huh huh huh huh

Beavis

To understand how and why a whole subculture has sprung up online that is dedicated to inflicting more pain upon those suffering bereavement we must look to the ‘asshole of the Internet’ as it is called, the 4Chan.org ‘/b/’ board.

Here anonymity is taken to its most extreme with not even pseudonymous handles being used by its contributors. Instead, everyone on /b/ is encouraged to post totally anonymously, the idea being that no one has anything to live up
to and that all can be let hung out.

Started in 2003 by the then 15-year-old ‘moot’ as the owner Christopher Poole likes to be known as, 4Chan quite quickly exploded into the Internet consciousness. What had originally began as a messageboard to swap Japanese Anime art on somehow became a Web phenomenon used by millions and out of which has grown many of the - mainly painfully unfunny but sometimes slightly amusing - Internet memes that you will find popping up all over the place. If you don’t know what an Internet meme is, it is still a given that if you use the Web - or even if you don’t - you will have bumped into one or most probably more than one of them at some time or another. A meme itself is a cultural unit or idea that spreads like a virus and takes root among the wider population, in many cases adapting itself to changing circumstances and mutating in order to survive and thrive. Only the strongest memes will survive. Words are memes, and so ‘meme’ is a meme in itself, being started by evolutionary biologist (and famous atheist) Richard Dawkins to describe the process of how ideas take form and shape themselves among the peoples of the world. The word comes from the Ancient Greek word
mimeme,
meaning to replicate, and was shortened by Dawkins to rhyme with gene. A very clever bit of wordplay actually and so its popularity is a great example of how the best memes can spread widely throughout the general population. Another example of a meme is the idea that is crop circles, something which spread quickly over the world after two Englishmen made the first of them in the 1970s. The always-changing and evermore elaborate designs of these sometimes beautiful works of the prankster’s art may be compared to the memes generated on 4Chan in that both kinds of memes can baffle the outsider, being generated and built-on by those immersed in a quasi-secret culture. Although no Internet meme has come even close to achieving the brilliance of crop circles, or gotten anywhere near to being as gloriously entertaining, the machinery that moves them is basically the same.

A prime example of an Internet meme - although not beginning on 4Chan - is ‘LOL,’ the most famous and widely used of all Web memes. An actual 4Chan meme would be the LOLCats, those cute Web images people make of cats with sometimes slightly amusing captions in them. 4Channers both on and off the site will often talk among themselves in their own little 4Chan meme code words, using phrases such as ‘Over 9000,’ ‘All your base are belong to us,’ ‘Cool story, bro,’ and the like, the origins and meanings of which are far too tedious and unfunny to go into. The most famous 4Chan meme – and one which has risen way above most of the rest of them in terms of significance - has to be the idea that is the cult of Anonymous, which began its life on 4Chan but which now has spread out of the Internet itself. Adherents to Anonymous signify association with it by the wearing of Guy Fawkes masks, an idea carried over from another meme made popular on 4Chan, which is Epic Fail Guy: a cartoon stick figure wearing the mask and who fails at everything. The original idea for the mask is borrowed from Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s brilliant 1980s comic series ‘V For Vendetta,’ or as is more likely from its inferior film adaptation, as the mask began doing the rounds on the Internet not long after the time of the film’s 2005 release, being firstly made popular on Web forums before finding its way onto Epic Fail Guy’s face (for reasons unknown to the author). In V For Vendetta, the mysterious ‘V’ takes on the Nazi-like rulers of an imagined dystopian England and all while wearing a Guy Fawkes mask. During the anti-capitalist protests that took off worldwide in 2011 the media focused in on demonstrators who were wearing these masks and it became something of a symbol of the protest movement. In the wearing of these masks the Anonymous protesters can play out a fantasy that they too are dangerous subversives like V. 

But most of what appears on /b/ is total and absolute bollocks. And some of the stuff again is really, really vile. By far the most popular of the 4Chan boards, other boards ranging from places to swap cartoon art of Japanese girls being penetrated by tentacles to a board to go and discuss science and mathematics, /b/ sees millions of visitors per month. Many of its users, who refer to themselves as ‘/b/tards,’ seem to think of themselves as belonging to some edgy and dangerous underground movement, which is unspeakably tragic, really. Some of the sad little fantasists who live full-time on the board even like to try and harass journalists who write in either positive or negative terms about the place, this to keep up with that deluded and wretched fantasy-play that /b/ is a secret underworld place governed by Omertà and which should be spoken of only by the elite (that is, friendless little psychopaths who masturbate over cartoon tentacle porn). Or maybe they’re just scared that their mammys will get to read about it and stop them hanging out there. These types of trolls are fond of accusing people of taking the Net too seriously but they take themselves and their grubby little online base more seriously than they will ever have the mental capacity to realise.

There exists on it also a tediously adolescent culture that is all about trying to shock, whether that be with gruesome pictures of corpses of people who have died in some kind of violent way (quite common on the board); to all sorts of porn: from men and women covered in excrement (again, quite common on /b/), to extreme kinds of violent torture porn featuring, for instance, women having their mouths ripped wide open as far as they can go and with a penis being pushed in as far as it will go (very common on /b/).

If Beavis and Butthead had a favourite place to go on the Internet it would be /b/, although it would probably be erroneous to believe that the majority of those users of the board who post and get off on that kind of material are teenage boys as one might expect given the level of the ‘humour’ displayed. It is impossible to know for sure given the completely anonymous nature of the site, but in my experience most trolls to be found elsewhere on the Internet but who subscribe to 4Chan culture are well into their 20s, with many of them again in their 30s, and some even in their 40s (one Facebook RIP troll was rumoured to be well into his 60s). Age is no real pointer of maturity in the world of those trolls and I find no reason to believe that the situation is any different on 4Chan than it is on Facebook. Nor should it be assumed that all those immersed in 4Chan culture are male as females make up a small but significant percentage of the 4Chan-inspired trolls of Facebook. Saying all of that though, teenage boys do make up a very significant number of the Facebook troll population; although it is my finding that they are not in the majority.

There also appears quite frequently on /b/ so-called ‘softcore’ child porn pics that are of prepubescent girls or boys wearing almost nothing and posing in ways obviously designed to turn a paedophile on. It is not unknown, too, for extreme child pornography images of children being sexually abused to appear. Just about one of the only rules on /b/ is ‘no cp,’ cp being Internet shorthand for child pornography, but still it appears.

Whenever someone begins a topic on /b/ the popularity of it decides how long it stays up, as the board uses a ‘survival of the fittest’ system that sees posts drop off into oblivion soon after people have stopped replying to them. (4Chan has no archives and once a thread is gone, it is gone from 4Chan for good, although some of the most popular threads will sometimes be archived by other sites). Almost inevitably, it is the topics that contain the most shocking or controversial content which get the most attention most of the time. In 2011, for instance, I reported to the US police a thread on /b/ that started off with a picture of a girl of about nine in a bikini and who was being made to pose ‘provocatively’ and below that text from a man claiming to be a paedophile and who said he was close to abusing his first child and claiming that he wanted to be stopped. There were about 200 replies on that thread, some from others who were also claiming to be paedophiles and who were going into great detail on how to groom a child for sexual exploitation; to many others who were telling him not to do it; along with a host of other replies again from trolls who were telling him to go ahead, apparently because they found the idea of a child being potentially sexually abused to be funny. 

Mostly though, /b/ is just random and mainly harmless nonsense and crap, and indeed the full title of the board is ‘/b/ - Random.’ Although a check as of the time of writing, 11.47am GMT on Sunday 24th June 2012, finds on the third page, after some of the usual nonsense pics, inside jokes, and cartoon porn, a thread started by a user who has written ‘CP Thread anyone?’ and posted a photograph of what appears to be a girl of about 13 being sexually molested with a vibrator. Below it another user has posted ‘Disgusting, reported.’ Below that again someone has posted a picture of a man actually excreting onto a squealing baby, along with the text, ‘look at this horny mother fucker.’ Under that are a few other comments from different users, some lauding the posters of the cp and one saying ‘gross,’ and then a stream of pictures below those comments where other /b/tards have posted photos of dead babies in various states of decay, along with a post which again has that photograph of a man excreting onto a baby. In the 4th post from the bottom, someone has put up what appears to be a photograph of a little girl being tortured by a paedophile. In it, a girl of around 10 who is naked from the waist down is being held up with a rope around her neck by a man whose face cannot be seen. The individual who has posted this has written beside the image: ‘that little slut loves to get strangled’.

Just a random look on this hugely popular and much discussed board has brought that up. I report this to the Internet Watch Foundation, a UK-based charity that reports illegal content online directly to the police. Then I close down the tab on my browser that I had accessed 4Chan from, fucking glad to be away from it. That, folks, is the wild and wacky 4Chan in all its glory.

It was in this digital dungeon that in 2006 were sown the seeds which grew into the bitter harvest that is the wider RIP trolling subculture of today, and it was the family and friends of Mitchell Henderson, a 13-year-old boy from Minnesota who in the April of 2006 took a rifle and shot himself dead with it, who were the first targets of 4Chan’s most morbid and black-hearted contribution to the world.

Why Mitchell Henderson killed himself is not known to the Internet. Some reports do say that he was a troubled kid and talk of bullying being suffered by him. A few months after his death, someone posted onto /b/ a link leading to a Myspace memorial page for him that his friends had set up. Almost obsolete now, Myspace is a social networking site along the same lines as Facebook and that allows people to share comments and photographs and such with each other. Mitchell’s friends had turned their page into a virtual shrine for him and among the comments, prayers, and pictures they were leaving in memory of the child one young friend had written on it to tell the dead boy that he had found his lost iPod. The /b/tards picked up on this and so was birthed the enduring Internet myth that Mitchell Henderson committed suicide over a lost iPod. This is established 4Chan and RIP trolling lore now and this invention can be found on countless troll-made pages dotted around the Internet.

Another of Mitchell’s friends had written that he was ‘an hero to take that shot, to leave us all behind.’ The comment itself can be read as nothing but heartfelt but for /b/ there was something fall-over-funny about the comment - and especially the grammatical error contained therein - and so was born the ‘an hero’ meme, something that is widely used by trolls now to refer to people who have committed suicide. Whenever trolls come calling on a tribute page made about someone who has taken their own life, the meme won’t be too far behind. How this phrase has spread throughout the general RIP trolling populace and gained the level of popularity that it has says a lot about their level of wit.

For many of the less-than-human morons on /b/ this whole thing was something all too beautiful and they began harassing the young kids on Mitchell Henderson’s tribute page, eventually even going on to making something of a game out of harassing his family about his death. For some, I imagine it was and shall remain the very highlight of their entire lives. It is hard to understand as to just why they took such a delight in this one particular tragedy, but delight in it they did and soon it became a competition among them to see who could cause the most hurt to the boy’s family and friends. Whole hordes of them began trolling about his death - it had quickly turned into a free-for-all for the most malign users of /b/. One of the trolls hacked into his personal Myspace account and defaced the pictures of him on it; others still made fake Myspace pages in his name that featured other gruesomely doctored images of the deceased child. Some made videos mockingly re-enacting his suicide; and so it went on and on with /b/ and other places filling up with an endless parade of pictures and videos featuring his face beside iPods or in pornographic scenes. It is likely that many hundreds joined in on this, with many, many more showing their approval. The blueprint for the future RIP trolling scene had just been drawn up.