“Arrogant sociopathic punks think they can go around threatening people and if you dare say a word back to them, you’re the bad guy.”
— Robert Stacy McCain, Sept. 4, 2012
A basic problem of online life: People Who Don’t Understand How the Internet Works, No Matter How Often You Try to Explain It to Them.
Back in the day you could — and, in many places on the Internet, you still can — say anything you want to say in the comments. People who habitually frequent such places become accustomed to unleashing their id at will, and believe that this is a basic First Amendment freedom, which it is — as long as the proprietors of the site don’t care what people say in the comments. But one way or another, that online space is owned by someone, and the proprietor makes the rules.
Try going over to Democrat Underground or Daily Kos, spewing out GOP talking points, and see how long it takes them to ban you.
Trolls don’t understand this. They believe that having access to the Internet confers on them the inalienable right to say anything they want anywhere they want to say it, and any site operator who refuses to acknowledge that right is a fascist totalitarian.
To which I customarily reply: Get your own damned blog.
Here in my space, I will say what I want to say and — while disagreement and criticism from commenters is tolerated — there are clear limits to what can be tolerated without destroying the value of the site as a community of readers. Some of our regular commenters regularly disagree with me, and disagree with each other, and that’s OK. But what is not permitted is intentionally disruptive behavior, or personal attacks impugning the character of the hosts or the integrity of the site, which is inevitably the kind of “argument” trolls want to make.
This rule is a matter of hospitality and courtesy. You don’t accept an invitation to a party then show up and start harassing your fellow guests, complaining about the food and saying rude things about the hosts. Well, maybe you do that, but decent people don’t.
If you hate me, there are lots of places on the Internet where you are free to express that hatred. The comments of this blog are not such a place.
In the free-for-all environment which the proprietors of Reddit seemingly encouraged, Violentacrez’s domineering id-monster act flourished. There were no limits he would not transgress, no sensibilities he failed to offend, and anyone who tried to get in his way was denounced as a crybaby, a “pussy.”
Well, it was anonymous, you see?
Except for a few trusted friends, nobody knew who Violentacrez actually was, and so there were no consequences for his deliberately vile behavior until, one day, consequences happened.
Last Wednesday afternoon I called Michael Brutsch. He was at the office of the Texas financial services company where he works as a programmer and he was having a bad day. I had just told him, on Gchat, that I had uncovered his identity as the notorious internet troll Violentacrez (pronounced Violent-Acres).
“It’s amazing how much you can sweat in a 60 degree office,” he said with a nervous laugh.
Judging from his internet footprint, Brutsch, 49, has a lot to sweat over. If you are capable of being offended, Brutsch has almost certainly done something that would offend you, then did his best to rub your face in it. His speciality is distributing images of scantily-clad underage girls, but as Violentacrez he also issued an unending fountain of racism, porn, gore, misogyny, incest, and exotic abominations yet unnamed, all on the sprawling online community Reddit. At the time I called Brutsch, his latest project was moderating a new section of Reddit where users posted covert photos they had taken of women in public, usually close-ups of their asses or breasts, for a voyeuristic sexual thrill. It was called “Creepshots.” Now Brutsch was the one feeling exposed and it didn’t suit him very well. . ..
“My wife is disabled. I got a home and a mortgage, and if this hits the fan, I believe this will affect negatively on my employment,” he said.
There are many words to describe Brutsch’s online behavior, but the important word is antisocial — a hostility to rules, a defiance of authority, an unwillingness to cooperate with others. Rules exist for a reason, and if you have a problem understanding why “distributing images of scantily-clad underage girls” is against the rules . . .
September 2012: Barrett Brown threatens an FBI agent in video
Missed this news earlier: There was apparently a hearing Wednesday in which an attorney for former “Anonymous” spokesman Barrett Brown, who had been scheduled to stand trial later this month and in April on federal charges, was granted a continuation pushing the trial back to September. It’s important to make the point this delay was at the request of Brown’s own lawyer, because here’s the inflammatory headline:
This makes it seem like it’s the government’s fault, which it’s not, nor is it the government’s fault that nobody will go Barrett’s bail.
Doug Morris, a public defender appointed to serve as Brown’s defense counsel, asked for an extension in order to evaluate the evidence against his client, the Associate Press reports. US District Judge Sam Lindsay obliged on Wednesday this week.
The AP adds that Brown’s trial for one indictment is now slated for September 3, 2013, with trials for his second and third indictments scheduled to start on Sept. 23. Brown was arrested on Sept. 12 last year and has been in law enforcement custody for the nearly six months since.
I’m not sure what Barrett’s bail would be, but he might be considered a flight risk, given that “Commander X” (Christopher Doyon) jumped bail and is now a fugitive, and other members of Anonymous have reportedly fled the United States.
Anybody who’s seen the immortal YouTube rant in which Barrett threatened to “destroy” an FBI agent (and it helps to read the indictment that mentions an unnamed co-conspirator who helped “dox” the agent) knows that the feds have got Brown dead to rights on that charge, even if they can’t make anything else stick. The logical thing would be for Barrett to cop a plea, but apparently the U.S. Attorney’s office in this case isn’t in a mood to let Brown off with a wrist-slap, so he’ll sit in jail and wait for his trial while his lawyer from the public defender’s office “evaluates the evidence,” and good luck with that, eh?
Something else: Barrett was in custody for more than four months before the court determined he was sane enough to stand trial — just barely, perhaps — and it’s certainly not the government’s fault that Barrett Brown is crazy, unless . . .
Look, I hate to feed into anyone’s paranoia here, but everybody knows about how Neal Rauhauser helped push Barrett over the edge. And there are those who have long suspected that Rauhauser wasn’t just bragging about having FBI connections. If you had a conspiratorial worldview (as many Anonymous members do), and you knew about that unindicted co-conspirator (“another person known the grand jury“), wouldn’t you be tempted to suspect maybe Rauhauser was part of some kind of elaborate set-up, an agent provocateur who helped the feds bust Barrett?
Not that I believe that myself, you understand. But if some crazy paranoid Anonymous types believed it, who could really blame them? Because why has the unindicted co-conspirator not been indicted?
Sept. 12: Barrett Brown rants on YouTube about his plan to ‘destroy’ an FBI agent
Ever since former “Anonymous” spokesman Barrett Brown freaked out on video and got himself arrested, various kooks have floated conspiracy theories to explain Brown’s arrest in terms of the paranoid delusion that Brown was an “enemy of the state” who got too close to the hidden truth about government wrongdoing. He’s like the pasty-white geek version of Chris Dorner or something.
No matter how often I’ve pointed to the far more mundane and obvious explanation — that Neal Rauhauser as “Carlito2000” provoked Brown’s final meltdown — Brown’s defenders keep pushing conspiratorial explanations that reflect their anarchist worldview wherein (a) shadowy government secrets are protected by illegitimate means, and (b) threatening to “destroy” an FBI agent is no big deal.
Some of the charges against Brown are related to the hacking of Stratfor by the Anonymous splinter known as LulzSec. (The trial of the lead suspect in that crime, Jeremy Hammond, will reportedly “focus on the alleged theft of around 60,000 credit cards from which, say the prosecutors, charges of more than $700,000 were illegally made.”) McGuire pushes the “hidden secrets” theory of the hacking:
It’s obvious by looking at the most recent posts on Barrett Brown’s blog that while he is highly interested in Stratfor, it wasn’t the credit card information that motivated him. When those five million emails leaked, a product called TrapWire, which was created by a company called Abraxas, was revealed to the public at large. And it caused a media sh-tstorm. In 2005, the founder of Abraxas and former head of the CIA’s European division, Richard Helms, described TrapWire as software that is installed inside of surveillance camera systems that is, “more accurate than facial recognition” with the ability to “draw patterns, and do threat assessments of areas that may be under observation from terrorists.” As Russia Today reported, one of the leaked emails, allegedly written by Stratfor’s VP of Intelligence, Fred Burton, stated that TrapWire was at “high-value targets” in “the UK, Canada, Vegas, Los Angeles, NYC.”
TrapWire has since largely been dismissed as nothing to “freak out” over, and that hopefully is the case. However, far beyond what the surveillance software itself can or can’t do, the revelation that TrapWire exists has caused a chain reaction of discoveries that have seemingly revealed a mob of very powerful cybersecurity firms.
Barrett Brown was doing some very serious investigating into a company called Cubic from San Diego, that was alleged to own TrapWire as a subsidiary of their firm. This is an allegation that they officially denied. However, these tax filings from 2010 that Barrett uncovered clearly state that Cubic had in fact merged with Abraxas Corporation.
“Barrett Brown was doing some very serious investigating” — and, to finish McGuire’s insinuation, that’s why the feds busted him!
All this scary Big Brother-ish noise about “surveillance” and “threat assessment” — and OMG! the CIA! — permits McGuire to portray the merger between two software firms as a dark secret the feds are so eager to keep under wraps that they would arrest and prosecute Barrett Brown on a bogus pretext, because he was getting too close to the hidden truth. McGuire extends this theme:
Barrett started ProjectPM, a wiki that is completely dedicated to piecing together all of this information about surveillance companies in the United States. . . . Without Barrett Brown, tons of this research would likely have gone unearthed. Besides a few journalists, not many people have been looking into this information. The one other group that does is called Telecomix . . . They operate the Bluecabinet Wiki, and they worked very closely with Barrett Brown to uncover more information about the network of cybersecurity firms.
I talked to one of the volunteers at Telecomix, who strongly believes in the work that Barrett did to connect all of these very confusing dots: “I haven’t seen reporters really taking a hard look at what Barrett Brown, the investigative journalist, was researching and where it leads to. His discovery that TrapWire = Abraxas and that there is CIA involvement is very important. Do you know in Berlin right now a game was started to destroy surveillance cameras in public places? Barrett apparently was reading through the emails of HBGary and Stratfor, linking the data to the specific surveillance companies and contractors . . . It is an extremely time consuming task.”
Here’s a simple question: Who do you suppose, apart from avid civil libertarians, would be interested in uncovering “more information about the network of cybersecurity firms,” especially those firms working to protect government computer systems?
Here’s a simple answer: Criminal hackers, cyber-terrorists and hostile foreign governments, that’s who!
Even if you are willing to accept protestations of noble “information freedom” motives by the Anonymous hackers, you have to recognize that there are reasonable limits to how much penetration of computer systems the feds can ignore without risking truly serious consequences, perhaps with national security implications.
So there are good reasons why law enforcement would take the activities of Anonymous and LulzSec seriously, and why illegal intrusions targeting a “network of cybersecurity firms” might arouse especially intense law-enforcement scrutiny. Nevertheless, the indictments against Barrett Brown do not charge him with being an “enemy of the state,” but rather specify three sets of crimes:
Threatening harm to an FBI agent and the agent’s family;
Illegally accessing credit card information from the Stratfor hacking; and
Obstruction by attempting to conceal evidence.
The fact that the cumulative potential prison time for these federal crimes amounts to 100 years behind bars may seem shocking, but (a) it’s highly unlikely that Brown would be put away for the maximum term, and (b) don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time.
You don’t need a lawyer, Barrett. You need a psychiatrist, or perhaps a priest to exorcise your demons. You are traveling a road to destruction, as harmful to yourself as to any of your chosen enemies. Get help.
Obviously, he didn’t listen, and it was therefore scarcely surprising to learn from his hearing in federal court last month that Barrett is being treated with Zoloft, an anti-depressant, and another drug, Risperidone, an anti-psychotic medication used to treat symptoms of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Didn’t I tell you he was crazy? Maybe not legally insane — he was, after all, ruled competent to stand trial — but certainly it would not be libelous to describe Brown with the colloquial term “cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.”
The unabashed media love affair with Anonymous — their depiction as crusading progressive activists — plays into the heroic fantasies of demented people like Barrett Brown, who saw this movement as his best shot at that big narcissistic payoff, the Moment of Glory.
Some people have seen too many spy thrillers in which the evil government/corporate conspirators are exposed and brought to justice by the Misunderstood Lone Protagonist, and the Internet is a convenient vehicle by which they can pursue that heroic fantasy.
It’s never enough for these Moment of Glory chasers to do mere reporting or commentary. No, they’re conducting an “investigation” that will expose the Hidden Evil and Corruption! A sort of outlaw-vigilante mentality grips their imagination. They exaggerate their own importance and, as confirmation of that delusion, cherish the idea that sinister powerful forces are arrayed against them.
This narcissistic fantasy is inspired by elements of popular culture — The Last Honest Man as a heroic ideal — and also involves the paranoid fears that were stoked by the Left after 9/11: Endless scaremongering about “warrantless wiretaps,” portraying the Bush administration as engaged in unconstitutional domestic surveillance. A 2005 Daily Kos headline, “Echelon, the NSA, and Bush’s wiretapping initiative,” captures the climate of fear engendered by the Left in the post-9/11 era. We are therefore not surprised that the amateur enthusiasts who nowadays play-act the role of “investigative journalist” are mostly found on the Left.
Memo to the media: Stop indulging their fantasies.
Jay Liederman, an attorney who has represented a number of high-profile hackers, accused the government of employing the [Computer Fraud and Abuse Act] to stifle dissent.
“It’s as if with the explosion of hacktivists and activism, this is the government’s new toy. It seems like they took a new look at the CFAA and realised they can chill this type of activism that they don’t like,” he said.
Liederman has represented Commander X, a hacker who is on the run from the FBI for an attack on a website in Santa Cruz, California, and Raynaldo Rivera, a suspected hacker from LulzSec, accused of stealing information from Sony last year. He has described illegal hacker activities such as Distributed Denial of Service attacks (DDoS) as “digital sit-ins” or ” the equivalent of occupying the Woolworth’s lunch counter during the civil rights movement” and has called for the law to be changed.
He sees a common thread running through prosecutions of activists for DDoS attacks and those of Swatrz, Auernheimer and Barrett Brown, a former affiliate of hacktivist collective Anonymous currently in prison facing charges under the CFAA, whose prosecution has also attracted criticism.
“They are very closely related,” said Liederman. “It is one rich tapestry of prosecutorial overreach and government oppression.”
Brown faces 45 years in prison and $3m in fines for charges relating to a Christmas Day attack in 2011 against Stratfor, a US intelligence-gathering firm, in which Anonymous hackers stole 5.5m emails, some of which were later published on WikiLeaks.
Brown was not involved in the hack, but allegedly facilitated it by posting a link in a chatroom, thereby providing others with credit card information and identities of thousands of individuals in the Stratfor database.
He has also been charged with internet threats to FBI agents, relating to his Twitter and YouTube feed. All three were “popular, free-thinking information activists” facing “stunningly abusive” prosecutions, according to Liederman.
“With [Aaron] Swartz, with Weev [Andrew Auernheimer] with Barrett, there was no hacking, yet they are being prosecuted by statutes that were made for hackers.”
Each took a “contrarian notion” against established principles, he said.
“Aaron Swartz had the outrageous notion that information should be free, and that future generations should be allowed to enjoy and learn from academic articles. Weev had the outrageous notion that companies like AT&T, because they are sloppy with your information, should be called out on it. Barrett had the outrageous notion that governments and those private security companies that act like the black hand of the government should be transparent and the public should have the right to know.
“These were virtues extolled by our forefathers in this country and all of a sudden they are lost to us.”
What a load of self-serving bovine excrement! And oh, “private security companies that act like the black hand of the government” — that is to say, firms hired to help the government protect information that might be very dangerous in the wrong hands — do the names Julius and Ethel Rosenberg ring a bell here, Liederman?
Is it not possible that the technology that protects government computers, or which enables the government to detect terrorist threats, would be as valuable to America’s enemies as the secrets of the atomic bomb were to Stalin’s Soviet Union? And isn’t it therefore a valid analogy to say that hackers targeting private firms which develop this cybersecurity technology are engaged in crimes as potentially serious as the espionage that sent Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to the electric chair?
Now, I don’t mean to say that Barrett Brown deserves the death penalty, but I’m sick and tired of people trying to pretend that Anonymous is just a bunch of harmless pranksters, or that attacks on “private security companies” are benign civil disobedience.
Perhaps a more relevant criticism, however, is the simple fact that Barrett Brown is nuttier than squirrel farts. Just in case you’ve forgotten what a lunatic in full rant mode looks like, here’s the 13-minute YouTube meltdown that landed Barrett in jail:
Yeah, he had an “outrageous notion” or two, but what the public really has the right to know is, Barrett Brown is a dangerous kook.
If you have the stomach to read the vile things Schmalfeldt was Tweeting about Lee Stranahan’s family, you will notice that Schmalfeldt portrays himself as a Courageous Seeker of Truth. This is a common pose — The Last Honest Man! — favored by a certain type of Internet harasser who engages in a Walter Mitty fantasy of being an “investigative journalist,” thinking of himself as exposing the Hidden Evil he attributes to the Sinister Enemies he fanatically pursues.
The Last Honest Man posture is, of course, deeply ironic because Schmalfeldt is habitually dishonest (he got canned by the Examiner for his compulsive lying, and he’s persona non grata at Daily K0s) and this is where the factor of psychological projection figures so prominently in the bizarre vindication fantasies of such cyberstalkers: By exposing the Hidden Evil of Sinister Enemies, the cyberstalker seeks to prove himself heroically trustworthy: “See? They are the liars — not me!”
Schmalfeldt’s persistence in directing this kind of anti-social harassment at his chosen scapegoats (he’s been stalking Aaron Walker since June) reveals the insane depths of his obsession, because no amount of negative feedback can dissuade him from this behavior. He is incapable of restraining his impulses. A tendency toward sadism is intrinsic to Schmalfeldt’s disordered personality; he uses the Internet as a means to indulge his sick craving to inspire fear in others.
Most mental health experts agree that the link between mental illness and violence is not imaginary. Studies suggest that people with an untreated severe mental illness are more likely to be violent, especially when drug or alcohol abuse is involved. And many rampage killers have some type of serious mental disorder: James E. Holmes, accused of opening fire in a movie theater in Colorado in July, was seeing a psychiatrist who became alarmed about his behavior; Jared L. Loughner, who killed 6 people and injured 13 others in Arizona, including former Representative Gabrielle Giffords, was severely mentally ill.
You don’t need a lawyer, Barrett. You need a psychiatrist, or perhaps a priest to exorcise your demons. You are traveling a road to destruction, as harmful to yourself as to any of your chosen enemies. Get help.
About a week later, Barrett Brown melted down and was arrested after recording a bizarre YouTube rant in which he threatened an FBI agent. And it was scarcely surprising to learn, from Brown’s appearance in federal court this week, that he is being treated with the anti-depressant Zoloft and the anti-psychotic drug Risperidone, used to treat symptoms of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Like I said: Get help.
The problem with crazies like Barrett Brown and Bill Schmalfeldt is that they are able to persuade some people that what they are doing is politically motivated “activism” or “journalism,” and their political allies act as enablers who validate their dangerous delusions.
“You people who kicked me to the curb because of my lifestyle, you’re doing the same thing that you’re fighting against. . . . You want these people to get out of prison and . . . you want them to be ridiculed, laughed at, made fun of. . . .
“I still have a hard time with what I did. I know I’m guilty. . . . The coke whore that I picked up promised me a blow job if I gave her coke and then she tried to renege on it, and I said, ‘No, you’re going to do it.’ . . .
“I’m a f–king true freedom fighter. I’m not one of these f–king wannabes. . . . You want to grow some f–king cojones and be a true freedom fighter? Stand up like Jesus did. Stand up to these kings and these so-called f–king religious leaders. . . [Tell them] ‘You’re not speaking for God.’ I don’t care who you are — Obama, Putin, on and on — I don’t care. You’re speaking for the Devil, man.
“You ain’t speaking for the people. You’re speaking for the Rothschilds and the J.P. Morgans and the f–king banks of this world.”
Diagnosis: Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. I joke about it, but people like that can be seriously dangerous, and ignoring them won’t make them go away.
In a brief hearing this morning, United States District Judge Sam Lindsay found former self-proclaimed Anonymous spokesperson Barrett Brown mentally competent to stand trial. . . . At the same time, Brown was arraigned and pleaded not guilty to his newest charge, concealing evidence, for which he was indicted last week. . . .
In response to questions, Brown told the judge that he understood he was there in order for the court to determine his mental competency after a prison psychologist at the Federal Correctional Institution in Fort Worth recently issued a report recommending he be found competent. . . .
Brown told the judge that in Fort Worth he was “under the sporadic care of a psychologist,” after spending a week and a half under medical supervision while undergoing withdrawal from Suboxone, a drug used to treat opiate addiction. “I was addicted to Suboxone,” he told the judge.
Brown will face two separate trials, one in April and another in May, on the federal charges against him. More reporting from the Dallas Morning News and the Associated Press/KFDM.
In a brief phone conversation, Lee Stranahan — who attended today’s hearing in Dallas — told me that the question of competence was essentially uncontested by Brown’s public defender. Brown is reportedly being treated with Zoloft, an anti-depressant, and another drug, Risperidone, an anti-psychotic medication used to treat symptoms of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.
Attorney for Barrett Brown describes Brown’s mental condition as much better currently that it was at the time of his September arrest
Is it possible that, while not contesting Brown’s current mental health condition as competent to stand trial, his attorney is prepared to argue that Brown was psychologically impaired at the time he recorded his threats against the FBI agent?
The video rant that led to Barrett Brown’s September arrest:
“Clearly they’re more worried about what they perceive as his egging people on to go after defense contractors and secret spy organizations. . . . Barrett believes in privacy for individuals and transparency for corporations and government. The government doesn’t like his belief system. And Barrett was effective in expressing that belief system.”
Leiderman compared Brown to Aaron Swarz, the Reddit co-founder who committed suicide after being prosecuted for hacking an MIT database:
“I would have thought in the wake of Aaron Swartz that the government might have learned something and might have thought twice about bringing the weight of the entire [United States] down upon someone when it wasn’t warranted,” says Leiderman.
Brown is due in court again next Wednesday, in the case related to his alleged FBI agent-threatening. At that time, U.S. District Judge Sam Linday will rule on a prison psychologist’s recommendation that Brown be founded mentally competent to stand trial.
The video rant that led to Barrett Brown’s September arrest:
John Tiessen, ranting on YouTube about Nixon and Jesus and the Rothschilds
Where do all these crazy people on the Internet come from, and why do they always seem to end up obsessively stalking me? Maybe I should write a book, Troll Magnet: How to Become an Irresistible Scapegoat for Every Deranged Lunatic With a Twitter Account.
Tiessen associates himself with Anonymous, and also claims affiliation with the defunct “Project PM” started by former Anonymous spokesman Barrett Brown, who notoriously got arrested after a September online video meltdown in which Brown threatened an FBI agent’s family.
After seeing my Tweets with Stranahan and the person from Anonymous that Stranahan was writing about, Tiessen called me a “racist pig” in a message that was, for some unknown reason, also CC’d to the anti-Anonymous hacker known as “The Jester.”
Uh . . . bad move, Mr. Tiessen.
At some point in the past, it seems, Tiessen got the brilliant idea to falsely accuse Jester of being a child pornographer. This cheap smear was apparently an attempt by Tiessen to make himself a hero to the Anonymous movement, whose members all hate Jester.
John Tiessen’s Excellent Adventure, however, had the effect of making him a target for Jester and — wouldn’t you know it? — the Jester discovered that John Tiessen is a convicted felon himself:
I think at the very least, we have a classic case of something called ‘projection‘ — Psychological projection or projection bias is a psychological defense mechanism where John Tiessen subconsciously denies his or her own attributes, thoughts, and emotions, which are then ascribed to the outside world, usually to other people. Thus, projection involves imagining or projecting the belief that others originate those feelings.
Something about John Tiessen and a 1992 sex offense. While I can’t vouch for the accuracy of that “dox” — what is it with these people always doxxing each other? — Tiessen admitted that he’s a convicted felon in his weird 17-minute YouTube rant against Jester. A few excerpts:
“I do have a lot of things going on . . . Been down to Occupy Minnesota. I’ve got a lot of things going on there. . . .
“Nixon was bombing Cambodia long before Obama ever thought about bombing people. . . . And he was doing the same thing Obama’s doing today. . . . To me, nothing has really changed. . . .
“When I got out [of prison], I joined a lot of [Web] sites of ex-cons, prison groups and prison rights groups and ex-con rights groups . . .
“Most control freaks are either rapists or child molesters . . .
“I still have contacts in law enforcement. . . . I don’t lie. I have no reason to lie . . .
“Some people blocked me — ‘Anonymous.’ Some people denied knowing me — ‘Anonymous.’ Some people said some things about me — ‘Anonymous.’ . . .
“I’m a Christian. I’m not the kind of Christian you see on TV. . . . People are bashing gay people or bashing Muslims. . . .
“I’m a true Christian. . . .
“You people who kicked me to the curb because of my lifestyle, you’re doing the same thing that you’re fighting against. . . . You want these people to get out of prison and . . . you want them to be ridiculed, laughed at, made fun of. . . .
“That’s just one of many things that I’m accused of and today I still have a hard time with what I did. I know I’m guilty. . . .
“The coke whore that I picked up promised me a blow job if I gave her coke and then she tried to renege on it, and I said, ‘No, you’re going to do it.’ . . .
“Don’t ostracize people who are coming out of prison. . . .
“I’m a f–king true freedom fighter. I’m not one of these f–king wannabes. . . . You want to grow some f–king cojones and be a true freedom fighter? Stand up like Jesus did. Stand up to these kings and these so-called f–king religious leaders. . . [Tell them] ‘You’re not speaking for God.’ I don’t care who you are — Obama, Putin, on and on — I don’t care. You’re speaking for the Devil, man.
“You ain’t speaking for the people. You’re speaking for the Rothschilds and the J.P. Morgans and the f–king banks of this world.”
Those are merely excerpts, of course, and if you’re a graduate student working on a thesis about abnormal psychology, maybe you’ll want to watch the whole 17 minutes of pure crazy-talk:
Notice how Tiessen lacks the self-awareness to realize that this video completely undermines his avowed purposes:
To convince people in Anonymous that he’s not worried about having his criminal record exposed; and
To establish his credibility so that people in Anonymous will take his word — as a “true Christian” and a “f–king true freedom fighter” — that Jester is actually a child molester, because Tiessen’s law-enforcement sources told him so.
When he ends up crazy-talking about God and Obama and the Devil and the Rothschilds, everybody can see that Tiessen is a deranged wacko. Even if you’re OK with Tiessen’s method of dealing with dishonest coke whores, it’s hard to say, “Yeah, I’ll take this guy’s word that he’s got solid sources in law enforcement,” once he starts spewing lunatic gibberish about God and Jesus and the Rothschilds, with an f-bomb or two in every other sentence, just for good measure. Continue reading Convicted Felon John Tiessen: Crazy? Certainly, But Is He Also Dangerous? →
Like Richard Dawkin’s attacks on religion — completely irrational and hateful but he justifies it by claiming that he’s opposing something hateful and irrational.
Is the hatred of religion a coincidental aspect of this problem? Let us recall that Barrett Brown, the former “Anonymous” spokesman who was arrested in September after an online video meltdown, was once the communication director of the atheist group Enlighten the Vote (a/k/a, Godless Americans Political Action Committee). Brown’s atheism and his insuperable arrogance were hand and glove: Assuming that religious people are ignorant bigots, to whom he was infinitely superior, Barrett then proceeded to a series of assumptions that seemed to him equally plausible, ultimately including the erroneous assumption that he could get away with threatening to “destroy” an FBI agent’s life.
Neal Rauhauser is the reason I was SWAT-ted.
Your girlfriend is friends with Neal. . . .
You have a long-standing war with Jen Emick and the only reason that she was thrown into the mix was because again of what Neal Rauhauser did with the Michigan Police Department.
Stack was the first victim of SWATting in the wake of the WeinerGate scandal. Rauhauser became obsessed with the idea that Weiner was the victim of a hoax, eventually focusing on Patterico as the alleged mastermind of the (wholly imaginary) conspiracy against Weiner. In the comments of Stack’s post today, someone linked to a Pastebin document from August, transcribing an online chat in which Rauhauser (using the alias “BangoSkank”) was trying to gather information on his enemies. A few key excerpts:
20:59 you want a Maltego graph of this stuff? . . .
21:00 yer smack in the middle, I started with nachash dox
21:00 and melded it into my other stuff . . .
21:11 This Maltego graph is sort of the top level map
21:11 for the last two years, for me
21:12 There is a federal grand jury in D.C. and I presume one attached to the cyber task force in Chicago . . .
21:12 this graph contains what I know about the subjects, and I have left a number of their associates who appear only due to social media link analysis . . .
21:23 New York grand jury, too. Forgot that one.
21:23 So that’s a map of those I think may be culpable, their close associates, and then a ring of Twitter accounts that are well connected enough that they are interesting for comparison’s sake when I get new information . . .
22:19 I did this in an iterative fashion for the cluster of groups I watch
22:19 and then one day one of those connected eggs
22:19 matched a twitter account that pulled up when I brought a mailing list into Gist
22:20 and then the light came on, because it was the third time a specific funding source had popped up on the graph . . .
22:21 NY grand jury, DC grand jury, Chicago cyber task force
22:21 and it all come back around to the same central place
OK, you’re asking, “What the heck is Rauhauser talking about?” And I can’t fully answer that question, however (a) Rauhauser has repeatedly claimed to have high-level law enforcement contacts, (b) Rauhauser has routinely asserted that his enemies, including Patterico and others, are the targets of federal investigations, and (c) this particular online chat took place just a few weeks before Barrett Brown’s meltdown.
What Rauhauser seemed to be focused on in that particular chat were a number of enemies of “Anonymous,” including Emick, William Welna and various of their supposed associates. At one point, Rauhauser made this comment about “White Hat” hacker Thomas Ryan:
22:50 I catch Ryan from behind, he gets a skull fracture with something good and heavy
So whereas Neal Rauhauser was allied with the “Occupy” thugs, Ryan was allied with Andrew Breitbart and opponents of “Occupy.”
In August, Neal was claiming that his enemies were under investigation by federal grand juries and a Chicago-based federal “cyber task force.” What happened instead? Within a matter of weeks, after Rauhauser tried to sic Barrett Brown onto his enemies, Brown melted down and was arrested on federal charges. At one point during his 13-minute video rant, Brown accused Thomas Ryan of being an “FBI informant.”
Think about this for a minute: In Barrett Brown’s perverse worldview, being an FBI informant — i.e., helping law enforcement investigate crime — makes someone an agent of evil.
Similarly, in Rauhauser’s worldview, Thomas Ryan deserves a “skull fracture,” while Patterico (who is himself an agent of law enforcement) can be falsely accused by Rauhauser of criminal wrongdoing — a “perp“! — and yet Rauhauser, having shown himself willing to lie to accomplish his purposes, expects his political allies to view him sympathetically as the victim of a “wingnut” conspiracy.
People like Brown and Rauhauser inhabit an inverted moral universe, where those who obey and uphold the law are the villains, while criminals — including Rauhauser’s associate, “Speedway Bomber” Brett Kimberlin — are noble and heroic warriors against “wingnuts.”
