Category: Neutral Objective Journalism

Dear @Twitter Security: Kill These Fake Accounts (Real People RT, Please)

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“Chadrick Shmitt MD,” “Melisa Howe II,” and roughly 5,000 more such accounts — zero Tweets, zero followers, names mismatched with handles, fake avatars, generic bromides as profile info — came swarming onto my account Wednesday night, following me in batches:

“You have 58 new followers!”

“You have 38 new followers!”

Go out to smoke a cigarette, come back 10 minutes later and there’s the message: “You have 863 new followers!”

Inquiries were made, and it turns out that this same troll-tactic harassment phenomenon has also been used in recent days against the Twitter accounts of John Hoge and Aaron Walker, who happen to be my co-defendants in a lawsuit filed by Brett Kimberlin.

Just a coincidence, I’m sure.

Evidently, this tactic is used to try to get someone’s account suspended: A troll buys fake followers for his targeted enemy’s account, which then makes it easier to then get the target account suspended. Considering that I’ve got 20,000+ real Twitter followers and run a high-activity feed, the troll had to buy thousands of fake followers in this sabotage effort, and they need to be deprived of this resource.

So, if you are one of my real Twitter followers, please re-Tweet the headline and link to this post, so that Twitter can delete the fake accounts: Roughly the 5,000 most recent accounts to follow me are all fakes. These fake followers were piling up faster than I could block them, even with mass-blocking software programs, and it should not be incumbent on the target of such vicious tactics to go through this trouble. Twitter security needs to delete these fake accounts as soon as they are exposed as such.

Twitter should delete these  5,000 or so fakes — which would re-set my follower count to around 23,000 — for starters, and then undertake an investigation to find who is responsible for this. Some people are so evil they should never have access to the Internet.

UPDATE: The do-nothing policy of @TwitterSecurity:

Twitter’s official impotence and apathy about these problems have permitted criminals to terrorize law-abiding users. They should be ashamed of themselves for tolerating — nay, actively abetting — the commercialization of fraudulent online criminal behavior.

It will not be enough for them to delete these fake accounts, although they can and should do so immediately. Twitter must investigate the persons responsible for creating such accounts — who evidently broker them — and take legal action against these fraudulent menaces, so as to prevent anyone else from profiting from this kind of evil.

 

Alex Pareene’s ‘Sources,’ Perhaps Named Brett Kimberlin and Neal Rauhauser?

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“Especially important is the warning to avoid conversations with the demon. . . . He is a liar. The demon is a liar. He will lie to confuse us. But he will also mix lies with the truth to attack us. The attack is psychological, Damien, and powerful. So don’t listen to him. Remember that — do not listen.”
— The Exorcist (1973)

“As for [Brett Kimberlin], and his claims of libel and character assassination, I seem to recall he was convicted of perjury in federal court before he got out of high school. I seem to remember his other claims seemed to vanish under close scrutiny.”
— Joe Gelarden, October 2010

“[Brett Kimberlin] claimed he was secretly exonerated by the powers that be. A record of this surreptitious pardon is bound to surface any day now, delivered by a leprechaun in a unicorn-pulled stage coach.”
— Matthew Vadum, Sept. 5, 2013

The most important fact about Brett Kimberlin and his associate Neal Rauhauser is that they are liars. Brett Kimberlin’s dishonesty, as a convicted perjurer, is a matter of public record. Neal Rauhauser’s status as the foremost “Weiner Truther” — he named Patrick “Patterico” Frey as the alleged mastermind of the 2011 “hacking” of Anthony Weiner’s Twitter account, which we obviously now know never happened — should be sufficient to establish Neal as fundamentally untrustworthy.

On May 17, 2012, my plan had been to cover the G-8 Summit at Camp David, Maryland, but then I saw Aaron Walker’s account of how he says Brett Kimberlin attempted to “frame” him on a bogus assault charge. While I had never before heard of Brett Kimberlin, the involvement of political social-media consultant Neal Rauhauser in that story suggested a direct connection to the Democrat Party campaign apparatus, so I scrapped my G-8 plans and instead started digging in on the Kimberlin story. Four days later, on Monday, May 21, 2012, Brett Kimberlin contacted my wife’s employer, ranting about how I was “harassing” him and, when they realized that they were dealing with a convicted bomber, this created security concerns that led me to leave Maryland in order to continue reporting the story from “an undisclosed location.”

Even while law enforcement was alerted to the concerns at my wife’s workplace, while my then-13-year-old son was sleeping with a loaded shotgun beside his bed and I was a sort of journalistic fugitive, however, the liars began telling their lies, which I ignored because:

  1. I will not help publicize falsehoods told by liars;
  2. The situation involved innocent third parties who had no role in this conflict, whose privacy and safety I could not jeopardize; and
  3. “Avoid conversations with the demon.”

A few friends and a couple of reporters, whom I could trust to maintain confidentiality, know what happened and why I have not discussed the details. There are witnesses to everything, including witnesses to my little daughter’s tears on the evening of May 21, 2012.

Knowing the truth, and knowing that the truth is known by others, I never paid any further attention to the Kimberlin/Rauhauser lies, except to notice them as a sort of dye-marker of who is listening to the false version of events told by Team Kimberlin. And this morning I noticed Bill Schmalfeldt — who just yesterday was begging to be ignored — Tweeting out rececycled lies including a  link to a July 2012 article by Alex Pareene of Salon that quoted at length the Kimberlin/Rauhauser lies, an article that included this remark:

Mr. McCain never responded to my email requesting comment, though he did write a bunch of blog posts about how I’m horrible.

Dude, it was July, by which time I was living in another state and preparing to go back on the road to cover the presidential campaign. And if you had any interest in the truth, Alex, you would never repeat anything that Brett Kimberlin or Neal Rauhauser said about anything, much less the lies they told in an attempt to discredit the guy who put his entire livelihood into telling the truth about them.

Fuck you, Alex Pareene. And fuck you, Bill Schmalfeldt.

Brett Kimberlin is a lying criminal. And this story isn’t over yet.

 



 

 

 

Deranged Cyberstalker Bill Schmalfeldt: Why Can’t He Explain His Cyberstalking?

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Bill Schmalfeldt ranting, 2011. (Image via Thomas Anderson at Vimeo)

Monday, the state’s attorney’s office in Maryland announced that it would not prosecute Bill Schmalfeldt for violating the peace order that prohibits Schmalfeldt from directly contacting John Hoge. And so this afternoon, Schmalfeldt sent this message on Twitter:

Isn’t that rather a specific list of people in whom Schmalfeldt now claims to have lost interest? Need I remind you that this list is in fact the list of defendants in a lawsuit Brett Kimberlin has filed claiming “DEFAMATION, MALICIOUS PROSECUTION, HARASSMENT, STALKING, CONSPIRACY, INVASION OF PRIVACY AND INTENTIONAL INFLICTION OF EMOTIONAL DISTRESS.”

This confirms what Bill Schmalfeldt said last November:

Everything that Bill Schmalfeldt has done to harass Aaron Walker, Lee Stranahan, Ali Akbar, Patrick Frey, Ken White or John Hoge in the past 15 months, he has done on behalf of Brett Kimberlin.

Why is defending Brett Kimberlin so important to Bill Schmalfeldt?

Out of all the causes on the planet that Bill Schmalfeldt might have chosen to support for the past 15 months, why Brett Kimberlin?

Good luck getting Bill Schmalfeldt to provide a rational explanation for why he has made this his life’s work.

Did you notice the similarity of language? In November — at a time when he was relentlessly harassing me — Bill Schmalfeldt declared he would stop “investigating” (which was a term he used to describe his harassment) if everybody would “forget Brett Kimberlin even exists.”

Now that Brett Kimberlin has sued several of the people Schmalfeldt has harassed? Bill Schmalfeldt says he wants us to “forget I exist”!

Quite a convenient coincidence, I’d say.




 

Brett Kimberlin Lies About His Crimes

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‘Speedway Bomber’ Brett Kimberlin was sentenced to 50 years in 1981

Matthew Vadum reminds us of something we should never forget:

“One of the blasts horribly maimed a man so badly that it directly led to that man’s suicide a few years later, which was proven when the widow of that bombing victim successfully sued and won a civil judgment against Kimberlin for $1.6 million . . .” Of course Kimberlin not only failed to pay the woman, but denied doing anything wrong. His refusal to cough up what he owed his victim’s wife led to a revocation of his parole.
He also claimed he was secretly exonerated by the powers that be. A record of this surreptitious pardon is bound to surface any day now, delivered by a leprechaun in a unicorn-pulled stage coach.

Kimberlin has never admitted guilt for the crimes he committed and, instead, has attempted to deceive foolish people with claims that “he was secretly exonerated,” and has gone so far as to depict himself as a “political prisoner.” Some people were never deceived:

“Kimberlin seemed to be the only one with a possible motive — to distract police attention from the Scyphers murder and delay or halt their quiet investigation of him.”
— R. Joseph Gelarden, Indianapolis Star, “Kimberlin case a maze of murder, deceit,” Oct. 18, 1981

“Kimberlin seemed to be the only one with a possible motive”?

But why would anyone want to murder a little girl’s grandmother?

Did you know that Craig Richard Gillette, a spokesman for Brett Kimberlin’s 501(c)3 Justice Through Music Project, pleaded guilty to a federal child pornography charge in 1999? Did you know that convicted felon Craig Richard Gillette is also involved with Brett Kimberlin’s band Op Critical? Probably just a coincidence, like that time when Brett Kimberlin was interviewed for City Paper in 1996:

Not all the songs on his album … have political overtones … others, like “Waiting to Meet” and “Teen Dream” (both about having sex with teenage girls) are lacking in subtlety and tend to make one squirm. But this is exactly what Kimberlin wants.
“I say things a lot of people are afraid to say. Yeah, ‘Teen Dream’ is about f–king a teenage girl. Every guy who’s seen a good-looking teenage girl has thought about it. I’m talking about that lecherous quality that every man, though he won’t act on it, has.”

So many coincidences, really. Reviewers of Mark Singer’s 1996 book, Citizen K: The Deeply Weird American Journey of Brett Kimberlin describe Kimberlin as “a top-flight con man” (Publisher’s Weekly), “a fairly typical hustler” (Library Journal) and “a man whose idea of the truth is utterly malleable . . . a dangerous smooth talker” (Kirkus Reviews).  Wonder how he got so good at lying?

“For three consecutive summers, 1974 through 1976, they took vacations of a week or longer in Disney World, Mexico, and Hawaii. Sandi couldn’t get time off from work, so on these summer trips it was just the two of them — Brett and Jessica.
“Eyebrows levitated. A drug-dealing colleague had memories of conversations with Kimberlin that struck him as odd: ‘We’d see a girl, who was pubescent or prepubescent, and Brett would get this smile and say, “Hey, what do you think? Isn’t she great?” It made me very uncomfortable.’ Another recalled Kimberlin introducing Jessica as ‘my girlfriend,’ and if irony was intended, it was too subtle to register. To a coworker . . . Sandi confided that Kimberlin was ‘grooming Jessica to be his wife.’ To another, Sandi explained that although Kimberlin’s relationship with Jessica was chaste, he intended ‘to wait for her and would marry her.’”
— Mark Singer, Citizen K: The Deeply Weird American Journey of Brett Kimberlin, Page 78

 

 


Popcorn! Amazon Sells Delicious Popcorn!

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Headline at “Kimberlin Unmasked”:

Proof That Writing Truthfully About
Brett Kimberlin Could Make You A Target

One of five named defendants in the lawsuit Kimberlin has filed in Montgomery County, Maryland, the identity of Kimberlin Unmasked so far remains unknown, but you can follow him or her on Twitter.

Brett Kimberlin could have been sentenced to 230 years in federal prison

Our co-defendant John Hoge is encouraging his readers to buy the book Citizen K via Amazon. Me, I’m selling popcorn.

 

 

You might be surprised (but I doubt it) that Kimberlin’s associate Neal Rauhauser has published an elaborate assertion that this is all about a conspiracy against . . . Neal:

I realized in early January of 2011 that these people weren’t going away without extraordinary effort. I spent the next two years leading them into one pratfall after another, which culminated in 87 House offices sending a letter to the Department of Justice over something a right wing provocateur had done to some of their foot soldiers in an effort to frame me. I thought that a letter to the DoJ’s Office of the Inspector General in November of 2012, which triggered an angry eighty minute call with an FBI agent the next day, would have been the last of it, but they keep dreaming up nonsense and trying to put me in the middle of it. . . .
I outed all the stuff I did in late March of 2012. Delusional, paranoid people kept ‘investigating’ me, which is code for committing crimes and trying to make it look like I was involved. I set them up a few more times, outed all of that in November of 2012, and the response was people committing a crime so ridiculous and yet so high visibility that I think some of them may face federal indictment for it. You would think that an enormous public humiliation like what happened in January of 2013 would finally scare a little sense into them, but in June of this year they were back with another halfassed ‘sting’ that promptly blew up in their faces. . . .
This is the first of two civil actions by Brett Kimberlin, another favorite target of rightwing fabricators. Caught between Kimberlin and the revelations of the Groundswell leak, I don’t think these guys are going to have much fun between now and the 2014 midterm. And nobody is taking their crazymaking seriously any more, which is a big relief to many people.

Neal Rauhauser was a speaker at the 2010 Netroots Nation conference

Does any of Neal’s paranoid gibberish make sense to you? If so, seek psychiatric help immediately, because Rauhauser is nuttier than a Snickers bar. An article from July 2012:

Rauhauser’s life reads like James Bond or Inspector Jacques Clouseau.
What is known for sure is that a family in Iowa adopted him as a child. He married, sired two children, his wife divorced him, he rarely had or has contact with his children, he owes between thirty and thirty five thousand dollars in back child support (a federal and state criminal offense), and is involved with Speedway Bomber, Brett Kimberlin.
Rauhauser is a master of black operations and political dirty tricks, especially political cyber warfare. Like Kimberlin, he uses lawfare, abusing the legal system to get revenge on his perceived enemies. Like Brett Kimberlin, Rauhauser’s enemies are people who try to expose him, have an opposing political point of view, or disagree with him.

My June 2012 report about Neal Rauhauser — “‘A Faint Whiff of Vigilante Hysteria’: Weinergate’s Kimberlin Connection” — explains the events that brought Rauhauser into Kimberlin’s orbit:

In February [2012], Rauhauser published a bizarre eight-page document (“Andrew Breitbart’s ISR Cell?”) expressing the belief that he and Kimberlin were targets of a conspiracy involving Andrew Breitbart and many others, including Mike Stack, who played a key role in exposing Democrat Rep. Anthony Weiner’s online sexcapades.

Under his alias “Stranded Wind” at Daily Kos, Rauhauser declared on July 27, 2011, that conservative blogger Patrick “Patterico” Frey “looks to be a pretty good candidate for the planner/operator behind Weinergate.” In June 2012, Rauhauser falsely accused Brandon Darby of obstruction of justice. And using the online alias “Carlito2000,” Rauhauser was subsequently involved in the strange events that preceded Barrett Brown’s September 2012 arrest for threatening an FBI agent. Rauhauser also evidently helped encourage Nadia Naffe’s frivolous lawsuit against Patterico: “Rauhauser proudly trumpeted his silly but telling hope that the lawsuit would accomplish his (and Kimberlin’s) long-held goal of costing me my job.”

To quote Da Tech Guy: “Discovery should be interesting.” And to quote myself, the Five Most Important Words in the English Language are:

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!



 

 

UPDATE: Oh, my, isn’t this just classic? Neal Rauhauser attempts to persuade journalists covering the Barrett Brown case that Brown was a victim of Neal’s enemies:

Anyone who wants to understand what happened to Barrett Brown really needs to read “The Kook Who Knew Too Much.”

 

BRETT KIMBERLIN SUES BLOGGERS

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The following joint statement has been authorized:

Convicted felon Brett Kimberlin has filed a Maryland lawsuit naming bloggers Aaron Walker, W. J. J. Hoge, Robert Stacy McCain, National Bloggers Club President Ali A. Akbar and the anonymous blogger “Kimberlin Unmasked” as defendants.
The defendants believe that the suit is without merit and is part of Kimberlin’s continued effort to use lawfare to silence journalists and bloggers who have written about Kimberlin’s criminal past. The defendants will not be made available for comment until they have finished initial consultations their respective legal counsel.

– – – – –

Media seeking comment may e-mail me (contact info is on the “about” page) and reporters who know my number can call, but as the statement says, I can make no comment for the record without advice of legal counsel. Of course, regular readers already know the Five Most Important Words in the English Language:

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!

 

 

UPDATE: John Hoge has also published the statement. The suit was filed Aug. 30. An initial hearing has been scheduled Nov. 27 in Montgomery County Circuit Court, before Judge John W. Debelius III.

UPDATE II: Linked by Kathy Shaidle — thanks!

UPDATE III: Linked by Da Tech Guy — thanks!

UPDATE IV: The Lonely Conservative calls Brett Kimberlin “evil,” so maybe the Speedway Bomber will sue her for . . . accuracy.

UPDATE V: Linked by Matt Ross at Conservative Hideout — thanks!

UPDATE VI: Patterico has done some research:

A search of court records reveals the complaint is for “DEFAMATION, MALICIOUS PROSECUTION, HARASSMENT, STALKING, CONSPIRACY, INVASION OF PRIVACY AND INTENTIONAL INFLICTION OF EMOTIONAL DISTRESS.” It sounds like “accuse the accusers” on steroids, doesn’t it?
It will be fascinating to see how Kimberlin tries to assert that his reputation has been damaged — given that he has been convicted of setting off multiple bombs, one of which blew off a man’s leg, causing him to commit suicide. Doesn’t that tend to harm one’s reputation quite a bit more than stuff said by bloggers on the Internet?

No comment at this time.

UPDATE VII: Headline by Zilla of the Resistance:

Perpetually #ButtHurt Free Speech Hating
#ConvictedTerrorist #SpeedwayBomber
#BrettKimberlin Sues Bloggers — AGAIN

You forgot to mention “evil.”

UPDATE VIII: Welcome, Instapundit readers!

And, no, if “unwanted Internet attention” is your problem, trying to sue bloggers into silence is perhaps not a clever strategy. Maybe you could ask Charles Carreon about that.

UPDATE IX: Linked by Maetenloch in the AOSHQ Overnight Thread — thanks! — and now a Memeorandum thread.

UPDATE X: Linked by Donald Douglas at American Power and by Jeff Dunetz at Yid With Lid — thanks!

UPDATE XI: Jeff Quinton reminds me of something I’d forgotten:

I previously blogged about Brett Kimberlin admitting to the sabotage of military equipment and a federal lawsuit that Walker filed against him.

Kimberlin sabotaged military equipment — he said so himself — but then again, Kimberlin is a perjurer, so maybe he made that up.

UPDATE XII: Linked by Evil Blogger Lady and Batshit Crazy News — thanks!

 

Kimberlin v. Kimberlin: Tetyana’s Lawyer Defeats the Perjuring Criminal Sociopath

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John Hoge has a brief preliminary account of today’s Maryland court hearing in the dueling actions between Tetyana Kimberlin and her estranged husband, convicted felon Brett Kimberlin.

Full transcripts of the proceedings and relevant background will be published in due time, but the most important lesson of today’s hearing is this: Kimberlin, a cunning and manipulative amateur “jailhouse lawyer,” is often able to get his way in court, not matter how wrong he is, but is generally unsuccessful against any client represented by an attorney who has studied Kimberlin’s legal tactics.

Zoa Barnes has beaten Brett Kimberlin before. Today, while the hearing could be called a draw — neither plaintiff got the protective orders they sought against each other — it was really a defeat for Brett in his persecution of Tetyana, who managed to put this in the record:

Zoa Barnes presented Tetyana’s case by calling her to the stand and having her explain how she met Brett at age 14 in Ukraine and how their relationship and marriage had flowed over the succeeding years. . . . When Brett tried to cross examine her, he kept stumbling over the rules of evidence and proper procedure.

Brett was a 40-year-old federal parolee when he went to the Ukraine and met the 14-year-old girl who became his wife. This is now a matter of public record, uncontradicted sworn testimony. How do Brett Kimberlin’s few remaining supporters expect to justify and defend such behavior by a “progressive activist”? Or did I overlook the part of the progressive agenda that endorsed Ukrainian child brides?

Do you want to see Tetyana Kimberlin vindicated? Do you want her to have the best possible legal assistance against Brett Kimberlin?

TETYANA’S FUND

Yeah, I’m pretty sure you do.

 

LOL! @NealRauhauser’s Demand to @Twitter: ‘No More Fun of Any Kind!’ UPDATE: Neal Deletes His Plan (Lulz)

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What a buzzkill this guy is, huh? So there I was, having stirred up a hornet’s nest with my “atheist sex scandal” post. My quarrel with a young renegade Baptist named Sarah Jones had just reached the point where the whole “neo-Confederate” thing came up and — boom! — somebody sends me a link to a Pastebin document in which Neal Rauhauser outlines his plan to ban all his enemies from Twitter:

Step 1. Don’t tweet much for over a year
Step 2. Build enormous Twitter Recording Machine, capture 2.8 million tweets
Step 3. Apply analytics using Maltego, Gephi, SplunkStorm, and JGAAP, nowhere to hide
Step 4. Build tweet to screen shot system, capture images of over 9,000 keyword hits.
Step 5. Wait patiently for long rumored Twitter rule change:

https://support.twitter.com/articles/18311-the-twitter-rules

Targeted Abuse: You may not engage in targeted abuse or harassment. Some of the factors that we take into account when determining what conduct is considered to be targeted abuse or harassment are:
* if you are sending messages to a user from multiple accounts;
* if the sole purpose of your account is to send abusive messages to others;
* if the reported behavior is one-sided or includes threats

Step 6. Publicly identify just some of the lucky permaban sweepstakes finalists

Then the list, which begins with Aaron Walker and Ali Akbar and continues on to include EVERYBODY NEAL RAUHAUSER HATES, among them Patterico, John Hoge, Mandy Nagy, and of course, me, followed by the completed plan:

Step 7. Provide a sample of 5,200 file names, watch the frantic deletion begin.
Step 8. Wait for dawning realization that deletion doesn’t matter when there is a long evidence trail.
Step 9. Record all the panic. Because lulz.

“Panic,” Neal? “Lulz”? Coming as it does from the notorious perpetrator of TwitterGate, and considering that several of the accounts you list have thousands of followers, compared to the 11 people currently following @NealRauhauser, I’m guessing that maybe the folks at Twitter won’t need much help figuring out who is the prime candidate for the “lucky permanban sweepstakes.”

Now, you gentlemen will excuse me, but there’s a young renegade Baptist — a regular spitfire — who simply demands to know my opinions on 19th century history. It’s so hard being me.

UPDATE: I’m told that the Pastebin of Rauhauser’s Sooper Sekrit Plan to Ban From Twitter EVERYBODY NEAL HATES has now been deleted, which is something you learn to expect. The dude has deleted more Internet content than most people create in a lifetime.

Notice how Neal expected that, by “publicly identifying” his enemies (as if we didn’t already know Neal hates us) he would inspire “frantic deletion” and “panic.” Instead, within an hour or so of my calling attention to his list of “lucky permaban sweepstakes finalists,” it was Neal who did the panicking and “frantic deletion.”

“Because lulz,” indeed.

Oh, also, Neal’s now up to 12 Twitter followers.