The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

‘The Gaped Crusader’: Brett Kimberlin Associate Neal Rauhauser Stalked and Taunted SWATting Victim Patrick Frey

Posted on | June 27, 2012 | 21 Comments

Neal Rauhauser: Democrat consultant at 2010 Netroots Nation conference

FROM AN UNDISCLOSED LOCATION
A Democratic political consultant harassed the victim of a SWATting hoax, employing the online alias “The Gaped Crusader” to taunt popular conservative blogger Patrick “Patterico” Frey and others.

Neal Rauhauser became obsessed with Frey during the 2011 Anthony Weiner cybersex scandal, declaring in a July 2011 post at the Daily Kos blog that Frey “looks to be a pretty good candidate for the planner/operator behind Weinergate.” Both Frey and Mike Stack — a New Jersey resident who helped expose Weiner’s online activities — were targeted by so-called “SWATting” hoaxes in June and July 2011.

Frey published a 3,000-word post at his Patterico.com site Wednesday morning that provides extensive evidence showing Rauhauser, a consultant who has previously worked for Democratic politicians including Rep. Raul Grijalva, used the “Gaped Crusader” alias in a two-month cyberstalking campaign in November and December 2011.

The dates of the “Gaped Crusader” online harassment of Frey, Stack and others are important because Rauhauser has boasted of his connections to Brett Kimberlin, director of the tax-exempt 501(c) group Justice Through Music Project (JTMP), and to another non-profit group, Velvet Revolution (VR), co-founded by Kimberlin and progressive blogger Brad Friedman. Rauhauser has described Kimberlin as a “client” and represented himself as an agent of VR in a September 2011 e-mail to leaders of the Occupy Boston protests. Rauhauser accompanied Kimberlin to a May 29 Maryland court hearing where blogger Aaron Walker was arrested for having written about Kimberlin’s criminal past.

Kimberlin has become the subject of widespread controversy since May 17, when Walker published a 28,000-word account of how he says Kimberlin tried to “frame” him for an assault charge earlier this year. Walker, a Virginia attorney, had provided legal assistance to Seth “Socrates” Allen, a progressive blogger who criticized Kimberlin, Friedman and VR in postings at a variety of liberal Web sites, including Daily Kos and Democrat Underground.

Kimberlin is a convicted felon who in 1981 was sentenced to 50 years in federal prison for a weeklong bombing spree in Indiana that maimed a Vietnam veteran and blew up a police car. Released from prison in 2001, Kimberlin founded JTMP and VR in 2005; the two groups have since raised more than $2 million in tax-exempt contributions.

Rauhauser, a founder of the Democrat political consulting firm Progressive PST, was a featured speaker at the 2010 Netroots Nation conference organized by the Daily Kos blog. He described his specialty as “solving problems in the social media work space for political campaigns and causes.”

Rauhauser’s reputation was damaged by his role in the so-called “TwitterGate” scandal in 2010, when he was accused of organizing an online harassment campaign against Tea Party activists. The association between Kimberlin and Rauhauser evidently began in July 2011, when Rauhauser used his “Stranded Wind” account at Daily Kos to write, “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 has called himself a computer “hacker,” and is a known associate of Gregg Housh, a figure connected to the “Anonymous” hacking conspiracy. 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.

In a May 25 blog post at Patterico, Frey described how he was “SWATted” in July 2011, handcuffed in a police raid prompted by a fake phone call. Frey identified Kimberlin, Rauhauser and former Raw Story editor Ron Brynaert as those he suspected of complicity in that incident.

In identifying Rauhauser as “The Gaped Crusader,” Frey noted multiple similarities between Rauhauser and his online alias, including an obsession with the 2011 WeinerGate scandal, which forced a formerly popular New York congressman to resign in disgrace.

Rauhauser claimed that Anthony Weiner was the victim of a conspiracy, and elaborated his theories in multiple postings at Daily Kos under his “Stranded Wind” psuedonym. On July 4, for example, Rauhauser claimed — without citing any evidence — that a “Christian Infowar Militia” had attacked Weiner. Rauhauser then repeatedly attacked Frey in a series of Daily Kos posts:

Rauhauser has boasted of his contacts with law enforcement — including the FBI — and routinely accuses his enemies of criminal activity. Among the targets of Rauhauser’s accusations was an Alabama man, Greg W. Howard, who was viciously harassed during the 2010 TwitterGate scandal. In August 2011, Rauhauser filed a criminal complaint against Howard with the Alabama attorney general’s office, saying that Howard “has constantly menaced me via the Internet.”

In fact, Rauhauser had described in two August 2010 articles at the Open Left site his plans to use “a synthetic presence” — i.e., false identities colloquially known as “sockpuppets” or “trolls” — against conservative activists online, to “penetrate their anonymity,” in order to ”get up inside their network and collect actionable information.” Rauhauser explained that he hoped to be able to bring civil lawsuits or criminal charges against his political enemies:

“People engaged in provocative online conduct feel insulated; they’re in the comfort of their own home, if they’ve engaged in a little bit of caution they may feel completely anonymous, and this emboldens them. Specifying the strategy we’ll use to break their anonymity won’t permit any mitigation on their part without adjusting their behavior, which counts as a win for us. We’re dealing with people who have likely had no interaction with the court system beyond a traffic ticket; the potential for a pro se litigant to force them into expensive, long distance, lengthy, discovery laden litigation doesn’t seem to cross their minds.”

Rauhauser was subsequently accused of recruiting a number of individuals whom he called “beandogs,” who used Twitter to engage in an orchestrated campaign “to harass, threaten, provoke, disparage, intimidate, verbally assault, berate & employ hate-speech against those not in agreement with his brand of politics,” as conservative logger Patrick Read described it in September 2010.

The use of Internet aliases was the subject of an article Rauhauser posted online, describing “Persona Management” methods for maintaining online secret identities in order to avoid detection by others, including law enforcement agencies.

One of the targets of Rauhauser’s online activities was a conservative activist who uses the Twitter handle “@ZAPEM,” who Rauhauser believed to be a New Jersey woman named Michelle Lessick. ZAPEM played a key role in exposing Rauhauser’s role in the TwitterGate scandal.

Frey’s exposure of Rauhauser’s “Gaped Crusader” persona highlights the ways in which Rauhauser has employed deceptive methods in his online activities. In February, Rauhauser sent to law enforcement agencies (including the FBI) a bizarre document titled, “Andrew Breitbart’s ISR Cell?”

This document described a far-fetched conspiracy theory involving Frey, Andrew Breitbart, Mike Stack and the HBGary firm, among others. Rauhauser’s accusations, which seem implausible, may have succeeded in confusing officials responsible for investigating the SWATtings of Stack and Frey, crimes that have remained unsolved for the past year.

Red State editor Erick Erickson was SWATted in May. Georgia Sen. Saxby Chambliss, Texas Rep. Kenny Marchant and more than 85 House Republicans called on Attorney General Eric Holder to investigate these crimes. Despite increasing pressure, sources say, the federal investigation has lagged, perhaps because of the indifference of political appointees in the Justice Department.

Meanwhile, Kimberlin has continued filing a series of lawsuits and criminal complaints against bloggers in an attempt to silence his critics. In a Maryland court hearing Tuesday, Judge Nelson W. Rupp Jr. issued an emergency ruling that lifted a gag order that had prevented Aaron Walker from blogging about Kimberlin, who responded by filing his own motion that accused Walker of inciting harassment against Kimberlin. The same day Walker scored his courtroom victory in Maryland, he was targeted by a SWATting attack.

PATTERICO: Brett Kimberlin Associate “Gaped Crusader” — And the Evidence Connecting Him to Neal Rauhauser

(Note: This report was originally posted in a series of updates. The “update” notations have been removed for ease of reading.)

– Robert Stacy McCain, Whereabouts Unknown

 

 

 

THE KIMBERLIN FILES:

 

 


Category: Aaron Worthing, Patterico, Terrorism, The Kimberlin Files

World’s Youngest Blogger
Can Has Cheezburger?

Posted on | June 27, 2012 | 16 Comments

by Smitty

Why, yes: yes, he can.


11 months old, doing fine as the Minister of Cute.

Reference

Update: apropos nothing, I present:

Category: World's Youngest Blogger

Instapundit Recovered From The Incident

Posted on | June 27, 2012 | 11 Comments

by Smitty

As I was joking on Twitter earlier:

He has also noticed the S.A.L.V.E. project, which can also be purchased in dead tree format here.

Category: Instapundit

Best Paragraph I’ve Read All Year

Posted on | June 27, 2012 | 4 Comments

by Smitty

Randy Barnett’s retrospective on the ObamaCare decision buildup over at Volokh is awesome, but if you have only time for one paragraph, read this:

I especially want to thank Orin Kerr for his unstinting and unflagging skepticism from day one. I admit that, at times, I found his posts personally annoying, and my one regret over the past 2+ years of litigation is in sometimes letting my annoyance show. But this was entirely my problem, not his. His indefatigable resistance to every argument offered against the constitutionality of the individual insurance mandate was essential to the growth and improvement of these arguments, especially in the first year of their development. He was a one-man moot court testing every claim, refusing to be brow beaten into concurring with a conclusion he simply could not accept. There is no question in my mind that our theories would not have developed as well as they did without his intellectual combativeness and persistence. If the challenge happens to succeed tomorrow, he will merit some share of the credit for that outcome.

It takes a mature person to admit that firm criticism was a big help, but it takes a full-on giant to deliver that firm criticism consistently.

Thank you, Orin Kerr, for your work here, and thank you, my own “Orin Kerr” figures the world over.

Category: Blogging

Garbage In, Garbage Out (GIGO) Legitimizes Obfuscation

Posted on | June 27, 2012 | 8 Comments

by Smitty

Daily Pundit points to GIGO and its effect on global warming research:

Nobody in climate science knows what GIGO means anymore?

Dude, without GIGO, the notion of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming couldn’t even exist. Which would eliminate a lucrative honeypot for a lot of “scientists.” So GIGO is a feature, not a bug.

Hey, don’t forget their spokes-twit, Saint Albert of Gore (emphasis mine):

Over the years, as the science has become clearer and clearer, some industries and companies whose business plans are dependent on unrestrained pollution of the atmospheric commons have become ever more entrenched. They are ferociously fighting against the mildest regulation — just as tobacco companies blocked constraints on the marketing of cigarettes for four decades after science confirmed the link of cigarettes to diseases of the lung and the heart.
Simultaneously, changes in America’s political system — including the replacement of newspapers and magazines by television as the dominant medium of communication — conferred powerful advantages on wealthy advocates of unrestrained markets and weakened advocates of legal and regulatory reforms. Some news media organizations now present showmen masquerading as political thinkers who package hatred and divisiveness as entertainment. And as in times past, that has proved to be a potent drug in the veins of the body politic. Their most consistent theme is to label as “socialist” any proposal to reform exploitive behavior in the marketplace.
From the standpoint of governance, what is at stake is our ability to use the rule of law as an instrument of human redemption. After all has been said and so little done, the truth about the climate crisis — inconvenient as ever — must still be faced.

Yuv got ta buh-LEEV, children!

Category: Democrats

LIVE AT FIVESIX: 06.27.12

Posted on | June 27, 2012 | 3 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho


TOP NEWS
Hatch, Rangel Beat Back Primary Challengers

Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY)

Elsewhere in New York, David Duke-endorsed former Black Panther goes down in defeat

Turkey Warns Syrian Military To Stay Clear Of Border
Military response promised

Mediation Fails, Stockton City Council Votes For Bankruptcy
Biggest city to file for bankruptcy



POLITICS
Senator McCaskill To Skip Democratic Convention

Senator Claire McCaskill (D-MO)

Also stayed home to campaign in 2004

Local Police Step Up Immigration Enforcement

GOP Goes Long Vs. Gillibrand

Appeals Court Rules Against States In Challenge To EPA Greenhouse Gas Rules

Condoleeza Rice Nixes Romney VP Talk


Obama, Marc Anthony Appeal For Latino Votes In Florida Campaign Stop

Tea Party Claims Another Scalp As Bridenstine Defeats Sullivan In Oklahoma

Pentagon Holds First Gay Pride Event



THE ECONOMY, STUPID
Oil Below $80 For Fifth Day As US Stockpiles Continue To Rise: NYMEX $78.99, Brent $92.58
Obama To Allow More Arctic Drilling…In 2016
Merkel Vows “No Euro Bonds As Long As I Live”
Best Buy Jumps On Buyout Rumors
US Consumer Confidence Falls To Five-Month Low
IRS Offshore Tax Programs Pull In $5 Billion
Are The BRICs Cracking?
Apple Wins Samsung Galaxy Tab Sales Ban
Google To Launch Android Tablet At I/O
Zynga Shares Drop As New Games Unveiled
Google’s Artificial Brain Learns To Find Cat Videos
Apple Shuts Out PRC, India In Expansion Of iTunes Music & Video
Iran Trade Sanctions Get Personal In Apple Stores



SPORTS
Darvish: 10 Ks, 10 Wins

Rangers starting pitcher Yu Darvish

First major league pitcher to win first seven home starts as Detroit falls 7-5

BCS Gets Boot; Four-Team Playoff In For 2014

Giants Shut Out Dodgers 2-0


Kenseth To Leave Roush Fenway Racing After 13 Seasons

Rizzo’s Two-Hit Debut Helps Cubs Top Mets

Red Sox Rally Late To Beat Toronto 5-1
Related: President Booed In Boston For Bringing Up Youkilis Trade

Bustin’ Out: Nats Offense Comes To Life In 12-5 Thrashing Of Rockies



FAMOUS FOR BEING FAMOUS
Screenwriter Nora Ephron Dead At 71

Nora Ephron, 1941-2012, RIP

Oscar nominee for Sleepless In Seattle, others

Jennifer Lawrence Rescues Girl Who Collapsed On Her Front Lawn

50 Cent “Doing Fine” After Accident

Who Is Savannah Guthrie, Besides Ann Curry’s Replacement?

Feds Say Scarlett Johansson Deserves $66K From Hacker

Spice Girls Reunite To Announce West End Musical

James Cameron To Film Three “Avatar” Sequels Simultaneously

Charlie Sheen Parties In NY, Hotel Room Not Trashed

James Franco Still Pursuing Amanda Seyfried Even After “Lovelace” Wraps

Rielle Hunter Says She & John Edwards No Longer A Couple



FOREIGNERS
Fierce Fighting Rages Close To Damascus, Assad Admits Country Is At War
120 Rescued As Asylum-Seekers’ Boat Sinks
Morsi Names Six VPs Including Woman, Christian; Resigns From Muslim Brotherhood Party
Officials In PRC Forced Abortion Case Made To Resign
Heavy Rains, Mudslides In Bangladesh Kill 50
Tower Housing Big Ben To Be Renamed Elizabeth Tower To Honor Queen
Abu Hamza Confession Proves Pakistani Involvement In Mumbai Terror Attack
Lords Reform Fractures Tories As Backbenchers Dissent



BLOGS & STUFF
WyBlog: One Step Closer To Skynet
Nice Deb: Steny Hoyer Indicates Contempt Vote Will Be Bipartisan
Hit & Run: CNN Contributor, Journalist Of The Year Asks “Why Do People Need to Know So Much Darn News that the Government Would Rather They Didn’t Know?”
Doug Ross: Holder Also Withholding Documents He Shared With Terrorists
Rush Limbaugh: Regime Refuses To Enforce Border, Tells Arizona To Go To Hell
Sarah Palin: “Death Panel”, Three Years Later
Ed Driscoll: Convention Clusterfark Bad Omen For Dems?
Atlas Shrugs: Women In The New Egypt? “Please God. Please Make It Stop.”
Lonely Conservative: Obama Prepping Thousands Of Lawyers For November Election
American Thinker: Chicago Homicides Leap 38% In One Year
Jawa Report: Jay Carney Pretends Obama Not Booed In Boston Despite Transcript
Weekly Standard Blog: We’re From The Government, And We’re Here To Help You Lose Weight

Category: Live at Five

Professor Glenn ‘Exhibit E’ Reynolds

Posted on | June 27, 2012 | 34 Comments

FROM AN UNDISCLOSED LOCATION
The Lonely Conservative took a glance at the ridiculous motion Brett Kimberlin filed Monday in Montgomery County (Md.) Circuit Court, pointing out that “Exhibit E” is a photo of Instapundit wielding a very large gun. Exactly how Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a University of Tennessee Law Professor, is supposed to represent “death threats” to convicted felon Kimberlin, I’m not sure.

Fortunately, it seems Judge Rupp was not impressed by Kimberlin’s claims to victimhood (and apparently didn’t realize that Professor Reynolds is notorious for drinking puppy smoothies).

If you’ll look at Exhibit D in Kimberlin’s motion, you’ll notice on Page 10 that he quotes a Tweet of mine, made on May 21. That was the day Kimberlin caused a security panic at my wife’s employer by calling up and claiming that I was “harassing” him. (As contrasted to the manner in which Kimberlin “harassed” Carl DeLong, you see.) After I posted “Never Doubt That God Answers Prayer” — announcing my departure to an Undisclosed Location — someone on Twitter sent me a message:

Buy a gun and learn to use it if you don’t already know.

To which I responded:

Pump-action 12-gauge is very simple to operate. Just sayin’ …

The intent of Brian’s message was clear: “Be prepared to defend yourself.” And the intent of my reply was equally clear: “Don’t sweat it.”

How is it a “threat” to Brett Kimberlin for one of his intended victims — a law-abiding citizen whose home and family this notorious criminal had menaced — to indicate that he doesn’t intend to be a victim?

In point of fact, a 12-gauge shotgun is highly recommended as a home-defense weapon and, as I told Brian, is simple to operate. You don’t really have to aim it, really. Just point it in the general direction of an intruder and pull the trigger and the godawful roar of the thing will put the fear of God into him, even if he’s not hit.

Of course, if he’s hit, he’s likely to be dead PDQ.

And I specified a pump shotgun for this simple reason: Imagine you were an intruder trying to sneak into a house in the middle of the night and you heard that racking sound of someone chambering a round in a pump shotgun. Wouldn’t you immediately run for your life?

A few years ago, a knife-wielding crackhead broke into my younger brother’s house in Georgia and made the mistake of not running when he heard that sound. The crackhead ruined the carpet when he bled out.

My younger brother is still alive and well.

End of lesson in home defense.

“Better to be judged by twelve than to be carried by six,” folks say down home. And as the science-fiction writer Robert Heinlein once astutely observed, “An armed society is a polite society.”

Being a peaceful man by nature, I regret that matters have escalated to the point that I have been reminded why the Second Amendment is the surest defense of the First Amendment.

Brett Kimberlin is a lying cowardly punk who in 1981 was sentenced to 50 years in prison and who, by all rights, should still be in prison, rather than attempting to intimidate honest citizens.

I said “attempting to intimidate honest citizens,” because I am not intimidated in the least by Kimberlin’s lies and threats, and I will not be silenced. “Truth is great and will prevail,” as Thomas Jefferson said.

Remember that this is still a Shameless Capitalist Blog, and keep in mind The Five Most Important Words in the English Language . . .

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!

— Robert Stacy McCain, Whereabouts Unknown

 

 

Category: The Kimberlin Files

Ain’t Braggin’ If You Can Do It

Posted on | June 26, 2012 | 9 Comments

by Smitty

Via Mataconis and Andrew Sullivan is a Yet Another Post Bemoaning Internet Communication (YAPBIC):

Enter?—?ambiguously?—?Twitter. The strict 140-character limit (shorter if you want retweets), established at the length of a text message, has defined the service since its launch in 2006. The tweet is a literary form of Oulipian arbitrariness, and the straitjacket of the form has determined the schizophrenia of the content. A tweet is so short that you can get right to the point?—?but so short, also, that why should it have one? Twitter’s formal properties bend, simultaneously, in opposite directions: toward the essential but also the superfluous, the concise but also the verbose.
There’s not much point in deploring the over-tweeters of the under-important. Just unfollow them. (Except, of course, where the elaborate social politics of Twitter forbid unfollowing.) But two-faced Twitter has also brought about, in its opposite aspect, the very last thing to have been expected from the internet: a renovation of the epigram or aphorism, a revaluation of the literary virtues of terseness and impersonality.

Twitter:

  1. Is a tarted up/down variation on the theme of IRC.
  2. Is just a means to an end: communication. Bemoaning the constraints of the form is like whining about the rules of the sonnet.
  3. Has already been used for stories and books.

In other words, N+1 has no substantial complaint that I can find. This is all pure stylistic whinging. Of the sort you engage in when you’re, you know, getting thrashed in the hash tag games. If N+1 could wield a tweet with the virtuosity of the Iowahawk, would they carry on like this? Doubt it.

The Beckett reference in the N+1 post does remind me that I need to tout my own little Amazon effort:
Stacy and I get our Estragon and Vladimir on for two scenes mocking the Obama Administration in “Waiting for O-Dough”, plus one bonus scene stuck into “Czar d-Oz”. With the opening “OediPOTUS Wrecks” and the closing creepy CTHULHU story, S.A.L.V.E. is one answer to the question: What sort of debris will the fallout from the higher education bubble burst look like?
At least one reader isn’t feeling ripped off:


S.A.L.V.E. is also available in dead tree format for just a few pennies more.

Category: Andrew Sullivan
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