Spam Kings (2 page)

Susan Gunn's first personal computer seemed preloaded with an endless supply of junk
email. Almost from the moment she first signed on to America Online, even before she had
given her newly minted email address to friends and relatives, Gunn began receiving
electronic messages from total strangers who wanted to sell her all manner of products she
didn't want, including pornography, body-part enlargement, and software that would enable
her to enter the exciting and rewarding business of junk email.

Who are these people and how did they get my address?
wondered
Gunn, a resident of Stanton, California, a small, palm-tree-studded city built on land
originally intended as a sewage farm for neighboring Anaheim. Gunn had bought the PC
ostensibly to computerize some of her work as the property manager of a condominium complex
owned by her father. But for Gunn, divorced and in her mid-forties, the computer was also a
link from her sometimes too-quiet home office in the gated community to the brave new world
known as the Internet.

It was late 1998. AOL had recently acquired its rivals Netscape and CompuServe and
boasted around 15 million members. The dot-com bubble was still inflating rapidly, as new
users such as Gunn swarmed online and began making purchases. But e-commerce wasn't only
being conducted by high-profile dot-coms such as eBay, Amazon, and Yahoo!. Entrepreneurs of
all types were trying to cash in on the information superhighway, including, apparently, the
anonymous folks who had somehow gotten her email address, which they felt entitled them to
barge through her virtual front door whenever they wanted.

At first Gunn blamed AOL for the messages. She assumed the online service had sold her
name as soon as she signed up. But when she phoned the company to complain, a customer
support representative assured her that was not the case. The rep said to forward any
unwanted messages to a special email address, and AOL would investigate. For a few weeks,
Gunn dutifully obliged, but the junk email kept on coming. In some cases the incoming spam
stated that if she wanted to be removed from the sender's list, she needed to visit a
special web page and type in her email address. But that had no effect. And whenever she hit
the "reply" button and told the spammers to knock it off, her replies went unanswered or
were returned as undeliverable. Either the return address on the original message didn't
exist, or the mailbox on the other end was crammed to capacity.

Gunn's previous computer experience had consisted of plugging numbers into spreadsheets
during a stint in an accounting firm. So she had no way of knowing that her mysterious spam
problem was likely a consequence of having wandered into AOL's online chat rooms while they
were being harvested by spammers. Using special "spambot" programs, junk emailers were able
to pluck thousands of AOL addresses out of the service's chat rooms in minutes. Similar
harvesting programs were designed to automatically scour web pages and online bulletin
boards looking for telltale "@" symbols and add the addresses to a database.

Then again, Gunn might have been the target of a dictionary attack
, a technique used by junk emailers to guess their way into Internet users'
in-boxes. Most spam mailing programs could blast out millions of messages to automatically
generated addresses. By compiling various combinations of common names and numbers, followed
by the domain of a big Internet service provider, such as "@aol.com," spam software could
generate a small percentage of actual working addresses.

Little did Gunn know that by replying to junk emails that arrived in her in-box, she was
actually making the problem worse by confirming to the senders that they had found a live
body, thus becoming what is known to junk emailers as a "verified" email address. Because
she had responded, it was likely that her address had been added to mailing lists marketed
to other spammers. She even received a junk email advertising a CD-ROM claiming to contain
91 million verified email addresses
(almost one third the population of the United States). Spammers, it seemed,
had no use for target marketing.

Gunn wondered if there was some official agency charged with dealing with spam
complaints, such as a Better Business Bureau for spammers. She asked about it in an AOL chat
room where PC users could get real-time help for their computer problems from more
sophisticated users. No one there had heard of such an agency, although someone provided her
with an email address at the Federal Trade Commission to which she could forward copies of
spam.

"Frankly, I just delete the stuff. It's not worth the trouble to report it," he told
her.

But Gunn wasn't able to ignore her junk email problem. The type who went ballistic over
people who litter, she would chase down and give a tongue lashing to anyone who tossed a
crumpled up McDonalds bag on her property. To her, spamming was the same kind of
anti-social, selfish act. In their efforts to reach a handful of interested customers, bulk
emailers were blithely leaving their trash all over her part of the Internet. But the
cowards, with their fake return addresses, left Gunn no way to run them down and share a few
choice words.

One self-proclaimed computer expert on AOL suggested that Gunn get advice from an
Internet bulletin board frequented by Internet system administrators and other sophisticated
computer users united in their hatred of spam. The group was known as Nanae
(pronounced NAH-nay), short for "news admin net-abuse email," and was one of
the thousands of topics available from a free Internet discussion service called Usenet.
Using a program called a newsreader, which was also built into the AOL software, Usenet
participants around the world were able to read and contribute to online discussion
newsgroups dedicated to everything from raising ferrets to practicing Far Eastern
religions.

"But watch your step. There can be some real kooks in Nanae," he warned, noting that
angry spammers sometimes dropped in on the newsgroup too.

By early 1999, the ratio of junk to legitimate email had made Gunn's AOL mailbox
practically unusable. Fed up, she decided to pay Nanae a visit and seek advice. At the
start, she treaded cautiously, reading but not joining the discussion. (One of the first
messages she read warned that Nanae denizens did not suffer fools easily: "Wear your
flame-proof underwear...never go Nanae-ing without 'em!") Unlike some hobby-related Usenet
newsgroups she had frequented in the past, Nanae was very busy, often receiving hundreds of
new postings every day. Some of the participants used their real names, but many posted
under aliases such as "Dark Jedi," "Sapient Fridge," "Morely Dotes," and "Tsu Do Nimh." Most
of the Nanae folk seemed to be men, although there were apparently a handful of women who
frequented it as well. Few seemed to be fellow AOL users and instead posted their messages
from obscure Internet service providers (ISPs) she had never heard of.

It wasn't clear to Gunn what exactly these people did for a living. From the technical
jargon they slung around, she assumed most were either computer programmers or longtime
Internet users. A few seemed to be fighting spam in an official capacity as system
administrators: an anonymous user who went by the online alias Afterburner, for example,
ended all of his postings with a signature line, or sig, that stated he handled spam
complaints for Erols, a mid-sized ISP in the Washington, D.C. area. Later, she learned that
Afterburner was one of the chosen few Nanae regulars who had received a Golden Mallet
Award
, a tongue-in-cheek honor given to longtime spam fighters for meritorious
conduct. A special site known as the Pantheon listed the names of recipients and featured an
illustration of a large gilded hammer smashing down on a map of the world.

Nanae had no official charter as far as Gunn could tell. The closest thing she could
find to a mission statement was a message posted by Afterburner that summed up Nanae's
purpose as "a cathartic release mechanism and a clearinghouse of info." Most of the postings
contained businesslike reports of spam sightings or matter-of-fact complaints about ISPs
that were slow to deal with spammers using their networks. But some messages were playful,
such as one she spotted with the subject line "Confirmed Kill," which gleefully reported on
an ISP that had responded to complaints by cutting off service to a junk emailer.

While Gunn easily picked up the Internet lingo used in AOL's chat rooms and instant
messaging programs—overused shorthand such as
LOL
for "laughing out
loud" or
BRB
for "be right back"—she was unprepared for the jargon in
Nanae. The private slang of participants apparently wasn't developed for speed typing so
much as to solidify spam fighters as a clique, or at least to add humor or spice to their
postings. Several messages discussed the proper way to use a
LART
—code
for "loser attitude readjustment tool," which she learned was another name for an email
notifying ISPs of customers who were spamming. A LART was also referred to as a "mallet,"
since it was sometimes used to clobber delinquent ISPs into action against spammers. (Hence
the Golden Mallet awarded to top anti-spammers.)

The newsgroup was also full of talk about
UCE
(unsolicited
commercial email) and of spammers who were violating the
TOS
(terms of
service) or
AUP
(acceptable use policy) of an Internet service
provider. (Almost all ISPs specifically forbade their customers from sending spam.) Other
postings discussed the various ways to
munge
one's email address in
Usenet postings—such as by adding the phrase "nospam" next to the "@" sign—to thwart
harvesting efforts by spammers.

Especially puzzling were messages whose subject lines were prefixed with the letters
C&C
. One poked fun at Alaska Senator Frank Murkowski, whom
the message referred to as a "Congress critter." In 1998 Murkowski had proposed legislation
governing bulk email, and many Nanae participants were vehemently opposed to the bill,
fearing that it might actually legitimize some forms of spam. Weeks later Gunn learned that
C&C was Nanae shorthand for "coffee and cats
" and was a warning to others that a humorous message followed that might
produce sudden laughter and thus the spilling of coffee and upsetting of cats near the
reader.

After following Nanae discussions over the course of a few days, Gunn stumbled onto a
web site that contained answers to common questions about junk email. The spam FAQ
(frequently asked questions), as Internet gurus called it, provided a gold mine
of information on how to analyze spam messages to determine the true Internet address of the
computer that sent them. There were also tips on how to track down the owners of web site
addresses or domains by using a service known as whois, which provided phone numbers and
other contact information for the individual who registered the domain. Gunn also read up on
how to file a complaint with an Internet service provider when one of its customers was
sending spam.

But perhaps the most important anti-spam weapon she discovered was a specialized
Internet search engine called Deja News
. Gunn had been using AOL's search service, as well as a site called Google, to
find material published on web pages. But Deja News was different; it gave users the ability
to search a complete archive dating back to the 1980s of nearly every newsgroup in
existence, including old Nanae discussions. For spam trackers, the newsgroup search engine
enabled them to sift through old spam sightings and determine, for example, whether a
spammer was a repeat offender, or whether an ISP had been warned in the past about chronic
spammers. (Deja News was acquired by Google in 2001 and renamed Google Groups
.)

But, as Gunn soon discovered, junk email opponents didn't confine themselves to filing
complaints with ISPs. Some also resorted to more militant tactics.

In a matter of days, orders from Davis Hawke's eBay auctions started to roll in. He
found that buyers, caught up in the excitement of the auction, were often willing to bid
more than double the price he'd charge for the same item at the KOF site. And since eBay was
brokering the deal, there was less of a chance of someone ripping him off with a bad check.
The new, tax-free cash flow helped allay his fears about having to take a humiliating
civilian job that summer, such as flipping burgers at McDonalds or mowing lawns for the
ground crew at Wofford.

As classes finally ended in mid-May 1999, Hawke turned his attention to drafting what he
called the Millennium Plan—a long-term strategy for turning the Knights of Freedom into a
mainstream political party. The first step would be a new name, the American Nationalist
Party (ANP)
, and a new web site, ANParty.com. To broaden the movement's appeal, Hawke
decided he'd drop the Nazi graphics and replace them with American flags, bald eagles, and
other patriotic symbols. He'd phase out using the Bo Decker
moniker. To cap off the change, that summer ANP members would assemble at the
group's to-be-built training camp on some property owned by a comrade in Virginia. They'd
spend a weekend setting up a shooting range and an obstacle course. And there would be time
for camaraderie with other proud Aryans. Then, by the end of the summer, the ANP would stage
a massive rally in Washington, D.C., where he would give a speech in front of the White
House.

In preparation for the event, Hawke had been on the phone with city police and the
National Park Service about getting a demonstration permit. The bureaucrats seemed confused
by the name of Hawke's group; he had to correct them several times when they referred to it
as the American Nazi Party or the Nationalist Movement. The city, apparently still jumpy
from a Ku Klux Klan
march down Constitution Avenue in 1990 that resulted in injuries and arrests,
wanted an accurate estimate of how many protestors would assemble and a detailed plan about
where they would march and give speeches.

Since the
White Pride News Service
e-letter had over 1,600 subscribers, Hawke figured conservatively
that 300 members would be at the rally. That was the estimate he gave D.C. police anyway,
but Hawke secretly had his doubts. His top lieutenants—who comprised five people, including
Patricia—were gung ho about the event. But Hawke wasn't sure about the rank and file. The
party's member rolls had swollen quickly. But he had met only a handful of them face to
face. Would these people take an active interest in promoting the interests of the White
Race?

The previous November, Hawke had sent email to members announcing a January rally in
Andrews, North Carolina, in support of serial bomber Eric Robert Rudolph. Rudolph, whom
Hawke referred to in the email as an "Aryan Hero," was a suspect in the 1996 bombings of an
abortion clinic and a gay nightclub and was thought to be hiding from federal authorities in
the woods surrounding Andrews.

"It's time to stop talking and start acting!" Hawke had written, asking for an
electronic show of hands from those who would attend. "We MUST make it known to the citizens
of that town and to all the world that they are not alone in their struggle against world
Jewry and federal tyranny, that an organization FINALLY exists which will not allow these
crimes to continue!"

Hawke had been hoping for 200 volunteers to answer the call and make the midwinter trek
to Andrews. But when only a few emailed him to say they could come to North Carolina, he
quietly told them the rally for Rudolph had been called off.

One day in late May, Hawke was at his desk, musing about the logistics of the March on
Washington. What if, despite all his careful planning and propaganda, only a couple dozen
people showed up? What if the "Greenbaum development," as he referred to all the bashing he
was taking from other neo-Nazis and the liberal media, had truly undermined his
leadership?

Hawke pushed those doubts out of his mind. Instead, he tried to focus on a more
manageable matter—a plan for boosting his income online. The eBay auctions had been
labor-intensive, and Hawke was curious about running his own Internet shop, without eBay's
constraints and commissions. He typed the address of a domain registration service into his
web browser. Once there, he checked whether the name KnifeDepot.com was taken. Besides being
something of a fetish for Hawke, knives were the items doing best in his eBay auctions. But
the domain was already registered, as were KnifeMarket.com, KnifeShop.com, and nearly every
other variation.

Then he tried Knifed.com. It was still available, so Hawke pounced, registering his
first domain not connected to the white-power movement. To protect his image as the ANP's
leader, Hawke listed Patricia as Knifed.com's owner. His plan was to develop it into an
online megastore for all sorts of personal weaponry, including high-margin collectible
items.

The American Knife Depot
, as he named the site, was little more than a list of items and their prices,
with a few pictures he had found in a clip art collection and some he had copied from other
sites. Shoppers couldn't order online—they had to send a check to a post office box he had
opened in Chesnee. But it was a start.

Next, it was just a matter of letting the world know the knife site was there. Drawing
on a technique he had learned from promoting the Knights of Freedom site, Hawke seeded
several online discussion groups with messages about the American Knife Depot. The
messages—Hawke's first batch of spam—were terse and largely in uppercase, a far cry from the
loquacious and colorful junk emails Hawke would broadcast by the millions a few years later.
"WE'VE GOT THEM ALL AT THE AMERICAN KNIFE DEPOT! Lowest prices in the industry, quick
shipping, top-quality - ABSOLUTELY GUARANTEED," shouted Hawke's nascent spams.

With Patricia's help, Hawke spent the early part of June getting the Knife Depot
operational while managing his eBay auctions. Only a few orders came in from the Knifed.com
web site, but Hawke's auctions were buzzing. His office in the trailer had become a shipping
and receiving center, with his desk buried under cardboard boxes, bubble wrap, and rolls of
packing tape.

Despite the distractions, in late June Hawke finally managed to nail down a date for the
rally with the D.C. police—Saturday August 7. In just over a month, he would take the full
measure of the movement he had built. The prospect both thrilled and terrified him. None of
his white-power heroes—Metzger, Richard Butler, or Ben Klassen—had ever attempted such a
daringly public display of Aryan pride and unity. Then again, Hawke reminded himself, none
of them had harnessed the Internet the way he had. If all went well, the rally might even
draw members of other groups, and provide a coalescing point for all American
racialists.

In an email announcement, Hawke phrased the March on Washington as a challenge to ANP
members: "I'm going to be there whether one person stands by my side or whether one thousand
rally behind me. I'm going to be there whether I'm threatened, whether I'm shot at, whether
I'm ridiculed, or whether I'm slandered. I'm going to be there—no matter what."

Hawke's police-approved plan was to assemble party members in James Monroe Park at three
o'clock sharp. The comrades would greet each other with firm handshakes and salutes. There
would be drummers or perhaps bagpipes to inspire the gathering. When the assembly reached a
critical mass, with Hawke leading the charge they would march the six blocks or so down H
Street to Lafayette Park, just across the street from the White House. They'd probably face
heckling and even physical attacks along the route, but the police had promised to provide
flanking protection the entire way.

At the park, the crowd would pause in front of the statue of President Andrew Jackson,
and Hawke would give his speech, using a bullhorn to address the throng. Other party leaders
and representatives of other groups would follow. Finally, participants would cross
Pennsylvania Avenue and end the march with a picket directly in front of the White House.
Hawke had obtained a three-hour demonstration permit, so they would need to disperse by six
o'clock.

Word of the ANP's rally traveled quickly throughout the Internet, and not just among
neo-Nazis. Several anti-fascist groups swung into action, putting their members on notice to
be ready. Everyone from the NAACP
and the American Jewish Committee to the Latino Civil Rights Center was abuzz
with plans for counterdemonstrations advocating racial and religious tolerance.

A few days before the big weekend in August, Hawke and Patricia shipped some final
orders for jewelry and knives. Hawke did a couple of phone interviews about the upcoming
rally, including one with the
Washington Post
. Then he and Patricia
packed a suitcase and made the six-hour drive to Fredericksburg, Virginia. There, they would
stay at the home of "Doc" O'Dell, a party officer who had a farm about an hour from downtown
Washington. The farm was to become the ANP training compound and would be the layover for
demonstrators from out of state. With Patricia at the wheel, Hawke practiced reading his
speech aloud several times.

Upon their arrival, Major O'Dell
, despite being some thirty years Hawke's senior, dutifully pulled Hawke's old
suitcase out of the trunk and carried it into the house. As O'Dell was setting the suitcase
down in the entry hall, Hawke saw him check the name on the luggage
tags—
Greenbaum
.
^[
2
]
Hawke winced when he realized he had neglected to update the labels, but O'Dell
didn't mention the matter.

Following Hawke's instructions, O'Dell had set up a camping area in the fields beside
his house and had brought in food and drinks and even a rented Porta-Potty for the campers.
Two large rental vans stood in the driveway, ready to taxi demonstrators into D.C. Many of
the protestors would join them at a designated staging area at the edge of the city, from
which the D.C. police would bus them downtown. But on the eve of the march, only three party
members had arrived.

Just after two o'clock on the afternoon of August 7, over 2,000 D.C. police officers
took their positions, in full riot gear, along Pennsylvania Avenue and around Monroe Park.
Over 300 National Park Service police, with the support of Secret Service agents, also
patrolled the area. Even D.C. Police Chief Charles Ramsey was on the scene, wearing a helmet
and carrying a riot baton, seriously bothered by the million dollars the special police
force was costing the city.

More than a thousand counterprotestors surrounded the twenty-block area that had been
cordoned off by the police. The demonstrators were chanting and holding anti-Nazi, pro-love
signs. Many of them wore bandanas around their necks in anticipation of tear gas. Scores of
media people, who had staked out Monroe Park with their cameras, satellite uplink trucks,
and boom microphones, were taking it all in.

When the appointed hour arrived and the ANP still hadn't made its appearance at the
park, everyone began to grow restless. Had the neo-Nazis decided to move their rally to
another location to avoid counterdemonstrators? Chief Ramsey stepped into the middle of H
Street, surrounded by media. He told them his department was ready, but the ANP might not
be, and he planned to give them all the time they needed to get to the park and hold their
rally.

But at the parking lot designated as the pick-up spot, city busses idled empty when a
lone American Nationalist Party member pulled up in a car just after three p.m. No sign of
anyone except a few bored police officers sipping iced coffee outside their vehicles.
Dressed in an SS uniform, the ANP member
^[
3
]
walked up to the policemen and asked whether Davis Hawke and other party members
had been transported to the park yet.

The officers looked the neo-Nazi up and down. Then one replied with a smirk, "No sign of
your people, but there's plenty of company waiting for you at Monroe."

The policemen watched as the ANP member returned to the car. After a few minutes, the
vehicle pulled out of the lot and quickly headed away.

When word that the march had been called off reached Lafayette Square, counterprotestors
began to celebrate. In one section, a group of several hundred people joyously chanted, "Ho,
ho, ho, the Nazis didn't show," while others banged plastic drums and blew whistles.

By that time, Hawke and Patricia had already been back in Chesnee for hours. They had
climbed out the window of their first-floor bedroom in O'Dell's farmhouse at three in the
morning, so Hawke wouldn't have to face the humiliation. They drove straight home, stopping
only once for a fuel break. As the miles rolled past, Hawke had composed his letter of
resignation. He tried to channel the anger and embarrassment he felt into eloquence.
"Whether through laziness, cowardice, or lack of commitment, almost all of you have let down
the Party and the white race itself," he chided the members who didn't show up for the
march.

"The Party has failed to achieve the standards that I set forth one year ago, and as a
man of honor I must therefore resign my position as Leader and Party Chairman," Hawke told
them. He closed by saying he would disable the party's web site and his email account within
a few days.

Hawke posted the letter at the ANP site and emailed it to his list that evening. By the
time he went to bed, Hawke was already feeling better about the day's events. It had been an
amazing twelve months since he first announced the Knights of Freedom on the Internet. He
believed he might someday reemerge on the political stage. But until then, he would step out
of the spotlight and turn his full attention to his Internet businesses. Freed from the
constraints of being a public persona, Hawke could finally allow his online ingenuity to run
wild.