Category: Neutral Objective Journalism

‘Deeply disturbed … narcissism … sociopathic’?

“Please think about your family. This story is not worth it. I can assure you that. . . .
“I am trying to help you, a lot of people are very disappointed that this story has continued.”
— “Alicia Pain,” June 23, 2011

“Another possible outcome would be a two digit body count from some mosque in Virginia after Aaron goes full tilt Jared Loughner on the congregation. . . .
“I continue to be the sort of guy who can get a counter terror [special agent] in the D.C. area on the phone in short order.”
— Neal Rauhauser, Feb. 16, 2012

“In a message posted in the comments of a blog in October 2011, Rauhauser explained that he and someone he describes as ‘a very big dog from the Anonymous pen’ conspired to use Brett Kimberlin’s non-profit Velvet Revolution as a vehicle to exact vengeance on (a) his personal enemies, (b) the security firm HB Gary and (c) ‘Breitbart associates.'”
— Robert Stacy McCain, June 15, 2012

FROM AN UNDISCLOSED LOCATION
SWATting victim Mike Stack accused Brett Kimberlin’s associate Neal Rauhauser of criminal harassment. On May 24, the day he was due to appear at a New Jersey courthouse for a meeting intended to resolve that case, Rauhauser sent an e-mail to Stack that included this:

Given that Doug [Stewart] was in court with us, as well as others who may not have spoke up, I think it’s very dangerous that we should appear together at a known time. You haven’t faced this stuff yet, but Gabbie [Giffords] took a bullet through the back of the head and Gabe Zimmerman died along with five others in Tucson. What McCain & Walker are doing is *way* more intense than the stuff that [led] up to that mass shooting. I am truly worried we could end up caught in the middle of a gunfight between deputies and some extremist group. It’s never been made public, but there were members of Michigan Militia periodically patrolling the Occupy Lansing camp because they got a hint I was there, and before that it was some League of the South guy in South Carolina who got interviewed by FBI hate crimes squad.

These insinuations are either (a) insane or (b) dishonest, or perhaps (c) both insane and dishonest. There is no other possible explanation for Rauhauser’s bizarre claim that Aaron Walker’s defense against Brett Kimberlin’s intimidation tactics — and my reporting on Walker’s plight — were likely to lead to a massacre comparable to Jared Loughner’s criminal rampage in Tucson.

Please note that I reported on Loughner’s crime both on my blog and at The American Spectator. In point of fact, “the stuff that [led] up to that mass shooting” was Loughner’s slow-motion descent into psychosis, a mental deterioration influenced by the atheist 9/11-Truther conspiracy cult “documentary,” Zeitgeist.

What other “stuff” does Neal Rauhauser mean to say caused Loughner’s murder spree? Sarah Palin’s “target” map? “Incivility”? Rauhauser doesn’t say, nor does he acknowledge that Loughner was a paranoid psychotic deluded by left-wing conspiracy theories.

” I am truly worried we could end up caught in the middle of a gunfight between deputies and some extremist group”? What deranged nonsense is this? Who could possibly take Neal seriously?

Only a handful of people knew or cared about the Stack-Rauhauser case. There were some people working behind the scenes trying to get somebody — anybody — in New Jersey or New York media to cover that story, and nobody was interested, even though it involved Mike Stack, who played a key role in exposing the Anthony Weiner cybersex scandal.

Yet here was Rauhauser, the defendant in a criminal harassment case, sending a private e-mail to Stack — the plaintiff in that case — attempting to convince Stack that they were both in danger of dying in a violent attack by an armed gang of right-wing extremists.

The Michigan Militia! The League of the South! All these shadowy menaces, Rauhauser wanted Stack to believe, were such a looming threat to public safety in Somerset County, N.J., that it was dangerous for Stack and Rauhauser to “appear together at a known time.”

And why? Because of Aaron Walker and me!

Rauhauser then went on in his e-mail to Stack to cast a penumbra of suspicion around Patrick “Patterico” Frey who, like Stack, had been targeted for SWATting in the wake of WeinerGate:

If Frey or anyone around him can shift blame to you for anything that has happened they will try that.
The FBI agent in charge of counter-terror for NYC was interested after I told her a bit about what you had been close to, but after some consideration I think it is unwise for you to approach them on your own. I also think you might have some sort of claim against Frey, but it’s not as clear as what Nadia [Naffe] has.
I will write a note introducing you and Jay Leiderman. He is Nadia’s lawyer, he is not mine, so you would be talking to him as if he were going to be your counsel in a civil suit against Frey, and he will advise you on the particulars of talking with the feds after what you have seen. . . .
We’ll look what I have over — you, me, and qritiq, then we’ll share it with Allyn Lynd, the FBI agent who is most known for dealing with stuff like that. I think this is a separate issue from Frey and so forth – we can do this without either of us being exposed to any trouble.

This is such a convoluted wad of misleading lunacy I scarcely know how to begin unraveling it. How is it, for example, that Rauhauser imagines Patrick Frey would want to “shift blame” to Stack?

Blame for what? What crime is Frey alleged to have committed for which he would, according to Rauhauser, want to falsely blame Stack?

How does this relate to Nadia Naffe, nemesis of James O’Keefe? What does Rauhauser claim Frey or O’Keefe (or their unknown accomplices) have done that would be of interest to “The FBI agent in charge of counter-terror for NYC” or “Allyn Lynd, the FBI agent who is most known for dealing with stuff like that”?

Stuff like what? What horrific criminal malfeasance does Rauhauser know of, that would require the intervention of these authorities?

Uh . . . SWATting by a member of a notorious computer hacking gang?

Why was Rauhauser name-checking FBI Agent Allyn Lynd in this private e-mail in May 2012 when, in October 2011, Rauhauser was boasting of his connection with “a very big dog in the Anonymous pen”? How is it that Neal was pushing this disjointed crazytalk at Mike Stack, barely six months after Rauhauser himself was proud to proclaim his association with hackers linked to an international criminal conspiracy?

Can you say, “consciousness of guilt,” boys and girls?

While I hate to put any more crazy ideas into Neal Rauhauser’s demented mind, I wonder if the FBI might soon be reading this blog post.

To put it a bit more plainly, I wonder if some of my sources — who tell me they’ve been talking to the FBI — would e-mail the agents a link to this post, so that the agents could ask the clever folks at the Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico to ponder a few hypotheticals.

Suppose there was a certain person (we’ll call him “UnSub”) who knew himself to be implicated in serious crimes. Suppose that UnSub displayed an obsessive interest in secrecy and deception. Furthermore, suppose that UnSub believed himself to be under investigation.

How would such a person behave? Is it possible — and I’m just throwing this out there, as a hypothetical possibility — that UnSub would attempt to deflect attention from himself by making accusations of wrongdoing against others? Would UnSub try to destroy or conceal potential evidence? Could we, perhaps, expect UnSub to taunt his victims or send veiled threats to potential witnesses against him?

Just kind of thinking out loud here, you understand. Purely a matter of abstract speculation, perhaps of interest to the BSU analysts at Quantico only as an exercise in psychological theory.

Maybe the BSU analysts could factor in some other variables. Say, for instance, if UnSub liked to brag about his connection to law enforcement officials, or exhibited the kind of sadistic personality that would brag about using martial arts to inflict pain on a woman.

Do you think FBI criminal profiling specialists would be interested to learn that UnSub had previously engaged in behavior “disturbing enough to result in a court-ordered psychiatric evaluation“?

What the psychiatrist found was a man who was deeply disturbed, possessed of the worst narcissism he’d ever seen. [UnSub] had reactive attachment disorder. He was sociopathic, and his behavior resulted in [UnSub] facing various difficulties socially and professionally.

Like I said, sort of an abstract hypothetical we’re talking about here, the type of case study that might interest FBI-BSU strictly as the subject for what you might call a “clinical exercise” or something.

Maybe it would come in handy to law enforcement officials who had spent an entire year trying to solve a mysterious crime. Also, I think it might be helpful to FBI agents who were ready to apprehend a deviant “sociopathic” criminal like that: How would UnSub react if he thought he were under surveillance and the feds were about to move in? Would this kind of psychological stress make him a potential threat to himself and others? Shouldn’t law enforcement agents be informed that UnSub had boasted about carrying a concealed handgun?

Glock 19, the 9x19mm compact frame, fits my hand like a glove. When I used to carry this I’d load half a dozen frangibles — Glazer Safety Slugs — which are safer in urban environments. The rest of the stack would be Remington Golden Sabers — the right stuff according to FBI barrier tests.
Today what I have is not so potent, but it’s much more concealable.

The customary phrase, I believe, is “armed and dangerous.”

– Robert Stacy McCain, Whereabouts Unknown

FROM AN UNDISCLOSED LOCATION
The Brett Kimberlin story — necessarily involving the activities of Kimberlin’s associate Neal Rauhauser — keeps moving forward every day. This brings us now to a follow-up on two recent stories:

• June 21: Recording: Leader of Anti-Limbaugh Effort Brags About Obama Campaign Ties
• June 22: E-Mails Expose MSNBC Host’s Involvement in #StopRush Boycott

Neal Rauhauser turns up in those stories as a trusted associate of “Stop Rush” leader Matt Edelstein (aka “Shoq”), who assigned Rauhauser to investigate “Randy Hahn,” a Texan suspected of being an infiltrator of their anti-Limbaugh boycott group.

Those stories were based on interecepted e-mails and recorded phone conversations published by Brooks Bayne at The Trenches.

How do we know that the story was legit? The proof is in the statement issued this week to The Trenches by attorney Imani Gandy.

Gandy was eager to disavow having been closely involved with the “Stop Rush” leadership, and similarly eager to deny having anything to do with the recorded phone call. Why this eagerness? Because if Shoq was in Florida when he recorded that call, the recording would be illegal under Florida law and, as Gandy is a lawyer, it would be a clear-cut ethics violation for her to be complicit in such a crime.

Yet in the process of making those denials, Gandy ended up confirming the authenticity of both the recording and the e-mails published by The Trenches — and this is important why?

Because (a) it confirms that my reporting is accurate, (b) this has the collateral effect of confirming Rauhauser’s involvement with the “Stop Rush” boycotters, and (c) Shoq’s defenders cannot deflect blame by discrediting “Randy Hahn.” Nobody involved in the story trusts “Randy,” and discrediting him does nothing to detract from the legitimate news value of the story. It was the attempt to discover and expose this infiltrator in their midst which revealed key facts about the anti-Limbaugh conspiracy — including the roles played by Edelstein, Rauhauser and MSNBC host Krystal Ball — and the actual identity (or moral character) of “Randy Hahn” is irrelevant to those facts.

This illustrates something basic about journalism that readers need to keep in mind: Facts are facts, and the story is the story, independent of who is telling the story or how the facts are obtained. I don’t have to like my sources — or even trust my sources — in order to obtain facts from them, and you don’t have to like me or agree with my politics in order to accept the credibility of my reporting.

If the stories I report turn out to be false, OK. But if the facts check out and the stories withstand close scrutiny, then whatever credibility is thereby obtained must be extended to the next story.

Only once during the course of this 37-day story have I chased any wild geese: On June 13, I linked and quoted an e-mail sent to Brooks Bayne claiming to identify the perpetrator of the “SWATting” calls. Patterico immediately disputed that claim, and maintains his own clear suspicion that Ron Brynaert was responsible.

Here’s the thing: I don’t claim to have any idea who SWATted Patterico or Mike Stack or Erick Erickson. I’m not a cop, a lawyer or a detective. All I can do is report what’s out there — including assertions by people who may or may not know what they’re talking about — and leave it to the cops and lawyers to do their jobs.

So it doesn’t matter whether I share anyone’s suspicions about the identity or motives of the SWATter. If Britney Spears sent me an e-mail and blamed it on Kevin Federline, I’d report the fact of the claim without pretending to know whether the claim was indeed factual.

That’s something that people need to be clear about, because there’s a lot more of this story left to report, and readers have to exercise judgment just the same as reporters have to exercise judgment.

– Robert Stacy McCain, Whereabouts Unknown

FROM AN UNDISCLOSED LOCATION
What kind of creep publicly accuses his ex-wife — an accomplished professional academic administrator — of being an addict? What kind of creep would brag about using martial arts against a woman?

Read the shocking story of how Neal Rauhauser maligned the mother of his two children using his “Iowa Boy” alias at Daily Kos.

When you’re through reading that, permit me to remind you of the vicious harassment Rauhauser’s “beandogs” inflicted on Tea Party activists in the 2010 TwitterGate scandal. And did I mention that Neal once wrote that he would “pop a cap into Dick Cheney”?

You really must read the whole thing.

– Robert Stacy McCain, Whereabouts Unknown

 

“I’ve been all over Patterico for the last several weeks, as he looks to be a pretty good candidate for the planner/operator behind Weinergate, but the other players have been getting attention, too.”
— Neal Rauhauser (aka, “Stranded Wind”), July 27, 2011

FROM AN UNDISCLOSED LOCATION
Brett Kimberlin became a “client” of Neal Rauhauser in 2011. Rauhauser has described his specialty as “solving problems in the social media work space for political campaigns and causes,” and Kimberlin had distinct “problems in the social media work space,” namely how to stop bloggers from writing about Kimberlin’s criminal past.

Kimberlin had sued Seth Allen, threatened to sue Patrick “Patterico” Frey and, I am told, engaged in various forms of harassment against Mandy “Liberty Chick” Nagy, whose October 2010 article about Kimberlin was unimpeachably factual.

Clearly unable to “win” his fight against truth by suing for libel, and evidently fearful that widespread exposure of his vicious criminal history would hinder fundraising for his two non-profits (Justice Through Music Project and Velvet Revolution), Kimberlin seems to have seen a need for someone with Neal Rauhauser’s skills.

Exactly when Kimberlin put Rauhauser on his payroll, we don’t know. Amid his obsessive Daily Kos blogging about the WeinerGate scandal — which Rauhauser portrayed as a hoax perpetrated by Andrew Breitbart and other shadowy right-wing conspirators — Rauhauser declared (under his alias “Stranded Wind”) on July 4, 2011, “someone forwarded me the complaint [made by Kimberlin] regarding Frey running a cyberstalking campaign in conjunction with South Easton, Massachusetts resident Seth L. Allen.”

Rauhauser announced plans to move to Washington, D.C., area on July 7, 2011. Rauhauser represented himself as an agent of Kimberlin’s Velvet Revolution in a September 2011 e-mail to organizers of “Occupy Boston.” And as previously explained: “In a comment posted at a progressive blog in October 2011, Rauhauser described being contacted by a ‘very big dog from the Anonymous pen’ who agreed to assist Velvet Revolution in an apparent plan to attack enemies of Rauhauser and Kimberlin.” Rauhauser accompanied Kimberlin to the May 29 hearing in Maryland at which Aaron Walker was arrested.

What has Rauhauser been doing online for the past year? What services does he perform for Kimberlin or whatever other clients are paying him? The archive of material Rauhauser attempted to “scrub” from the Internet offers important clues, including one Scribd.com document from earlier this year entitled, “Persona Management Methods: Secure & Portable Persona Management Version 3.0.” The full document is nearly 2,000 words; the following excerpts are about 1,000 words. I urge readers to examine this very carefully:

The internet is becoming increasingly dangerous for everyone, and in particular there are targeted attacks aimed at activists and organizers. If you are running a specific persona for any reason, say interacting with a specific social media community, it’s probably best that you compartmentalize it from your other activities by encapsulating it in a purpose built virtual machine. . . .
We keep a copy of TAILS, a hardened, read-only version of Linux in which all applications are configured to use TOR, for truly radioactive environments. Coupling a TOR only virtualized OS with a host OS running a VPN is proof against a variety of ills in the world today, and the subject of another write up of ours entitled Double Secret Internet.
The whole idea is to encapsulate an online persona in a safe environment. The VM is the container for the personality, but what if your laptop is stolen, or if you’re arrested and questioned? We run http://truecrypt.comsoftware to make encrypted file containers. Our first test involved creating a 4 gig space, binding it to drive W:, and installing Windows in a VM there. The persona in the VM is now perfectly safe if the machine is lost or stolen, so long as a strong password is used. . . .
The most basic means of IP address concealment is to install The Onion Router (TOR) and the bundle of tools that come with it. . . .
We tested Hotspot Shield in our initial build and it seems to work fine, but it requires that you recall you need to start it, and only protects browser traffic. . . . If everyone who uses this settles on the same service that means banning a handful of IP addresses functionally shuts everyone out. We probably need to figure out how to provide our own endpoints using a rotating set of VPS in other countries, but that’s a job for the infrastructure people. . . .
This cannot be stressed strongly enough: we have only protected against the following threats. Disclosure due to loss/theft/seizure of host computer
Disclosure due to spearfish or other compromise of browser
Disclosure of IP address due to log examination or subterfuge
Monitoring of traffic by your ISP or a compromised machine on your network
You might face a loss or theft, you could run into a technically advanced opponent, but it is almost certain that if you try to approach a venue where you are already known by an existing name or pseudonym that you will get “made” in short order.
You have habits that include:
The time(s) of day you are active
The language you speak
The situational knowledge you have when interacting with a certain group
The software you prefer to use
Quirks of spelling, punctuation, and other subtle hints as to identity
Whatever objective you have in approaching the venue
The following are some failure modes we’ve personally experienced over the years:
Used a pet phrase from a persona in a venue we frequented — instant outing
Used bit.ly link shortened from a known account via Twitter — instant outing
Disclosed specific software preferred during conversation, not a full outing but it brought scrutiny that made the effort fail eventually
Use of phone number that had a single obscure Google hit — instant outing.
We often feel we’re being clever in constructing a persona but we generally fail miserably due to time constraints. We’re always goal oriented when in character and that is an instant tell to those with situational awareness. If you don’t have time to “be” someone else and remain in character your results will be limited. . . .
Web Brain – powerful mind map facilities, no sense of timeline, team functions permit easy sharing. Contents are discoverable if you use the web sync, stick to BrainZips in encrypted containers for safety. . . .
Maltego –Open source intelligence collection platform, heavy on data visualization, mostly for Twitter-centric things. . . .
Sentinel Visualizer — industrial strength social network analysis/data visualization with temporal and geospatial analysis. . . .
The whole concept of persona management was getting a lot of attention during 2009 when I was still active with Project Vigilant. There were a bunch of half baked solutions going around, really expensive things that I felt would only serve to train smart opponents as they watched their less swift peers fall for the subterfuge. Fast forward to 2012 and now the internet is so toxic I’ve corralled my actual social media presence in a couple of VMs to stick a wrench in the constant profiling and intrusion attempts, and those VMs live on a machine that doesn’t touch anything important.
There is a lot of drag as I move stuff back and forth, certainly, but I’m not keen on uninvited visitors. More and more Twitter and Facebook serve only as channels for introduction and venues for public theater. Anything of consequence has vanished into OTR encrypted chat, or SILC servers, and new contacts have to run the gauntlet of my quizzing those who introduce them, then getting them on the phone so there is a voice and a callable number to go with. A sloppy social network only betrays maybe 25% of what is important to an intruder lacking subpoena power. . . .
Commit to trying to run a persona for a while if for no other reason than to understand what will and won’t work; your situational awareness will be dramatically enhanced. Stick to it until it becomes second nature and you can simply disappear when needed, or protect your friends from unwanted attention with a fog of disinformation. You have the natural rights of free speech, free association, and free assembly. There are many private entities, from the lone obsessive stalker to the largest corporate entity that will interfere in all three of these fundamental human rights. You commit a courageous, moral act when you do these things we suggest, leaving those who do not respect you pounding their keyboards and crying with frustration.

Clearly this suggests that Rauhauser is employing at least one deceptive false “persona” for secretive purposes which anyone with common sense would suspect might be criminal in nature. The mystery of what exactly Rauhauser has been doing online that would require such elaborate protections for his “persona” should not, however, lead to unsubstantiated speculation. But you rather doubt Neal was merely haunting Web forums as a blog troll, eh? Continue reading ‘Persona Management’ for Wackjobs: Rauhauser’s Methods of Deception →

FROM AN UNDISCLOSED LOCATION
What service is Neal Rauhauser providing to his clients, including Brett Kimberlin’s tax-exempt 501(c) Velvet Revolution? Is Rauhauser paid to sit around all day playing with his Twitter sockpuppets, plotting revenge against Greg Howard, obsessing over Patterico and ranting about how a “Christian Infowar Militia cell” took down Anthony Weiner?

Rauhauser’s profile for the 2010 Netroots Nation conference described his work: “He applies his background in software development and telecom network engineering to solving problems in the social media work space for political campaigns and causes.”

What does that mean? Sunday, I published a sample of writings by Rauhauser that he had “scrubbed” from the Web, demonstrating his obsessions with his various enemies, as well as his penchant for online secrecy and deception. But there was much more in that vast 179-page cache, including a January 2012 post entitled “Maltego, FOCA and Shodan,” referencing three computer programs Rauhauser uses. His description of Maltego is particularly interesting:

I’ve been fooling around with open source intelligence and forensics application Maltego for some time now. I read an article about it in 2010, got an eval, and the very first search I ran led to a phone call with the FBI that actually got some people interviewed over their behavior. I was a bit freaked out at the time, worried that my world was going to burst into flame every time I clicked the little black icon, but instead it’s turned out to be a tool that comes out about once a week and does in minutes what would take me days to do by hand.

Hmmm. What does this software program do?

Maltego is an intelligence and forensics application. It allows for the mining and gathering of information as well as the representation of this information in a meaningful way.
Coupled with its graphing libraries Maltego allows us to identify previously unknown relationships between information, persons and information about persons. As such, it is a useful tool in the IT security field to map an organization’s people and relationships. A valuable aid in exploring the social-engineering attack vector in pen-testing investigations.

Exactly how did Rauhauser’s use of Maltego lead to “a phone call with the FBI that actually got some people interviewed over their behavior”? Which of his chosen enemies did this creepy paranoid freak identify using Maltego? We don’t know. What we do know is that Rauhauser also referenced Maltego in a March 2012 post entitled, “Regarding Andrew Breitbart,” excerpts of which I share here, urging readers to examine carefully:

I am not making any statement to the press for fear of screwing up existing investigations, but as a courtesy I will collate and describe a few things that are already available onthe net for the bewildered journalist trying to understand that last exchange between us.
The True History Of Andrew Breitbart’s Hatred For Neal Rauhauser is a fourteen page PDF of screen shots collected right around the time of the 2010 midterm election. … [T]he timeline is jumbled and you’d need to see inside sauce-jar.aes256 to understand exactly what transpired.
sauce-jar.aes256 is a 563 meg encrypted archive that was included in the Kookpocalypse torrent. This was released 2/6/2012, the anniversary of the HBGary break in, and it contains screen captures, PDFs, Maltego graphs, timeline files, and other data that support my conclusion –portions of the Team Themis project may be at work among the people who contribute to Breitbart’s BigGovernment site. There are some sample files in the torrent that are interesting. State and federal authorities have already seen the unencrypted version of this.
I have been pursued since the 2010 midterm by a woman who used the now defunct Twitter screen name @ZAPEM. The ZAPEM Libel SuitScribd collection is an as yet unfiled civil action against this person. She seems to have persecution delusions and this led to the massive non-scandal of Twittergate during the 2010 election. …
I have written about Persona Management Methods. I am deeply weary of crazy people following me around injecting their mental illness into my life, so I do really mean things to them –see Geolocation Lulz-a variety of network oriented pranks intended to keep them hopeful of locating me, yet thoroughly frustrated. If you read the nealrTumblr you will see a lot of fact, some ARG-ish posts, and a few that are obviously meant to convey one message to the overactive pattern matching of paranoid, delusional stalkers, and quite another to coherent readers.
There has been quite a bit of ephemera in and around Twittergate, Weinergate, and the Kookpocalypse.

What you see here is, among other things, a repetition of the claims asserted in a bizarre eight-page document (“Andrew Breitbart’s ISR Cell?”) that Rauhauser published in February 2012: TwitterGate was a hoax, Anthony Weiner was framed, HBGary was working for Breitbart, and all of these things were somehow part of a vast interconnected conspiracy. (I analyzed that document June 2, “When Neal Rauhauser Complained About ‘Menacing’ and ‘Cyberstalking’.”)

Rauhauser has apparently succeeded in getting that document taken down from its server, but the 575-megabyte torrent download is still available online, if you’d care to wade through a gigantic steaming pile of paranoid crazytalk. Of course, Rauhauser scrubbed all the other stuff — including his “as yet unfiled civil action” against @Zapem — which is one of his remarkably consistent habits: Every time people start taking an interest in whatever madness Neal has been doing lately, he begins deleting files, closing accounts, etc.

The guy’s deleted more Web content than most people have ever created, and why? Consciousness of guilt. Rauhauser’s obsession with secrecy is consistent with his habit of deleting anything that anyone might employ as evidence that he’s up to no good.

When his “beandogs” scam blew up into the 2010 TwitterGate scandal, Neal immediately shut down his operation and started deleting stuff, which has enabled him to tell people — at least those unfamiliar with the now-deleted evidence — that it was a “non-scandal” caused by “the persecution delusions” of one woman, @Zapem. She’s crazy, Rauhauser says, while insisting that he is both innocent and sane.

Only fools are deceived by this, especially when Rauhauser talks about his obsessive quest to find @ZapEm:

First, for background, we’re talking about An Inconvenient Kook, a woman I’ve tentatively identified as Michelle Lessick aka ZAPEM. All I had to start was:

• The Twitter username @ZAPEM (now @Repository1) and a now defunct WordPress blog
• Records of various streams of tweets and writings, which are a fairly distinct personality showing delusions of persecution
• An email from Patrick Read aka @SwiftRead naming her as Michelle
• A tip that her last name was Reilly, perhaps Nagy-Riley, which I believe to be incorrect
• A tip that her name might be Lessick
• Assertions that she was a police dispatcher and her husband a police officer
• Many indications she lived in northern New Jersey

I did quite a lot of digging with Google and finally did locate the connection to the name Lessick, which can be seen in the link containing her name. I chased various permutations of this name and the Jascawow alias using a variety of search tools and came up empty.

Not since Humbert chased his doppelgänger Quilty cross-country has anyone so persistently stalked an enemy, real or imagined. And while there is a real person behind @Zapem, the vast conspiracy in Rauhauser’s demented mind is wholly imaginary. But as he sits down with his Maltego software and maps online connections, Neal’s paranoia tells him that this data-mining holds some hidden clue to how all these evil people — from Greg Howard to HB Gary to Patrick Frey to the ghost of Andrew Breitbart — are plotting against him.

And who are we to say that they’re not, huh?

– Robert Stacy McCain, Whereabouts Unknown