While Wofford's dedication to principles of free speech prevented administrators from expelling Hawke, they were eager to relax the college rules and allow him to move off campus. In early March, he signed a lease for the cramped trailer in the woods, fifteen miles from the college. Hawke knew he was finished with Wofford; he'd complete the semester, but that would probably be the end of his college career. Bigger things awaited him. The publicity train started by the local paper was chugging along. The Boston Globe published a story about him in late February that put the Knights of Freedom on a national stage. Even Rolling Stone wanted to send a reporter to interview him.
There was a silver lining to Hawke's move off campus. A woman he had met in an online chat room offered to move to South Carolina and serve as party secretary. Her name was Patricia Lingenfelter. She was a beautiful Aryan, smart and tough—a green belt in karate—and ten years older than Hawke. Once he was out of the dorms, Hawke invited her to stay with him in Chesnee. To keep up appearances, he insisted that she still refer to him as "Commander" around other party comrades, but everyone knew Hawke and Patricia were lovers.
In late March, Hawke decided it was time to host an assembly of comrades in Chesnee. He wanted the First Party Congress to happen on the one hundredth anniversary of Hitler's birthday, but April 20 didn't coincide with Wofford's spring break. So he scheduled the meeting the week before the Fuhrer's 100 th. While fewer than a dozen party members showed up, the atmosphere was charged by the presence of a camera crew from ABC News's Hard Copy program, which broadcast a snippet of Hawke's rousing speech, along with footage of party members marching around outside his trailer in their Nazi regalia.
Meanwhile, out in Colorado two kids at Columbine High School celebrated Hitler's birthday by going on a shooting rampage, killing twelve people, including themselves. Suddenly, TV news producers were grabbing for their Rolodexes, and Hawke's name, after his strong performance on Hard Copy, was coming out on top. A crew from the Fox Files television news program showed up at the trailer the next day to interview Hawke about the Knights of Freedom and his insights into the killings.
The media likes to buy and sell fear, Hawke thought as he and Patricia watched the Fox report on the TV in his trailer that evening on April 22. The program was trying to spin the Columbine massacre as a racially motivated hate crime, but Hawke wouldn't play along. At one point in the program, the Fox interviewer asked Hawke, who was wearing his Nazi uniform, if he ever hugged his father.
Hawke said no, and added that he didn't hug his mother either.
"Why not?"
"I never felt the need for physical contact of that sort," said Hawke.
"Did you feel the need for human affection?"
"Human affection is not something that I value at the moment, or then, or ever."
"Do you believe in love?"
"Sure, I believe in love, but I don't believe that I can ever have time for that. That's a human emotion," replied Hawke.
"Do you think that people would see that as sad or unfortunate, that here's a young man that says that he never felt any love for anyone growing up, or never hugged his mom or dad?"
"I don't really care what they have to say," Hawke answered.
When the program was over, Hawke switched off the TV. Patricia said she was going to head into town for a quick food run and to gas up the car. Hawke turned on the computer on his desk and was waiting for it to boot up when the phone rang. It was his mother. He hadn't spoken to her for several months.
"Are you happy now?" she yelled at him.
"What do you mean?" he replied.
Peggy Greenbaum said she had seen the Fox Files segment. "How do you know your web site didn't cause those boys to go crazy in Columbine? It makes me sick to think that you might have spurred them on," she said.
Hawke considered her question. To him, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris were probably just disgruntled teens taking revenge against a school system that was force-feeding them the same old liberal nonsense day after day, year after year. But before he had a chance to explain this to his mother, she interrupted.
"I hope you're happy now," she hissed again, and hung up on him.
Hawke sat down at his desk. His parents had been paying his tuition and living expenses, but it was obvious he could no longer rely on them for anything. Yet he knew that if he was going to realize his dream of building the Knights of Freedom into a major political movement and creating an Aryan homeland out west, he'd need a lot of money. Hawke's personal savings—acquired through generous holiday gifts from his parents and other relatives—would carry him for a while. He was pretty certain that his grandparents on both sides of the family would someday will him a small fortune, maybe close to a million dollars. But in the meantime, there were bills to pay.
Hawke started up the web browser on his computer and typed in the address of the eBay auction site. He occasionally visited the site to check out auctions of Nazi paraphernalia—he'd picked up one of his SS uniforms that way. But this time he wasn't going to the site to shop. Instead, he surfed to the section of the site for creating a new account, and began rapidly filling out the form.
Hawke paused when he got to the section asking him to specify a username. After some thought he typed in "antiqueamerica"—a sturdy name that wouldn't provoke any suspicion. Then he launched himself machinelike into the repetitive task of setting up auctions for the knives, buckles, pendants, uniforms, and other Nazi gear he'd been selling at KOF.net.
When Patricia returned to the trailer an hour or so later, the change in Hawke wasn't visible. But he had begun his transformation from neo-Nazi organizer to Internet spammer.
* * *
[1] As reported by Thomas Farragher in "Top Westwood Student, Now Supremacist, Denies His Past" (Boston Globe, 28 February 1999, page A1).
The Education of an Anti-Spammer
Susan Gunn's first personal computer seemed preloaded with an endless supply of junk email. Almost from the moment she first signed on to America Online, even before she had given her newly minted email address to friends and relatives, Gunn began receiving electronic messages from total strangers who wanted to sell her all manner of products she didn't want, including pornography, body-part enlargement, and software that would enable her to enter the exciting and rewarding business of junk email.
Who are these people and how did they get my address? wondered Gunn, a resident of Stanton, California, a small, palm-tree-studded city built on land originally intended as a sewage farm for neighboring Anaheim. Gunn had bought the PC ostensibly to computerize some of her work as the property manager of a condominium complex owned by her father. But for Gunn, divorced and in her mid-forties, the computer was also a link from her sometimes too-quiet home office in the gated community to the brave new world known as the Internet.
It was late 1998. AOL had recently acquired its rivals Netscape and CompuServe and boasted around 15 million members. The dot-com bubble was still inflating rapidly, as new users such as Gunn swarmed online and began making purchases. But e-commerce wasn't only being conducted by high-profile dot-coms such as eBay, Amazon, and Yahoo!. Entrepreneurs of all types were trying to cash in on the information superhighway, including, apparently, the anonymous folks who had somehow gotten her email address, which they felt entitled them to barge through her virtual front door whenever they wanted.
At first Gunn blamed AOL for the messages. She assumed the online service had sold her name as soon as she signed up. But when she phoned the company to complain, a customer support representative assured her that was not the case. The rep said to forward any unwanted messages to a special email address, and AOL would investigate. For a few weeks, Gunn dutifully obliged, but the junk email kept on coming. In some cases the incoming spam stated that if she wanted to be removed from the sender's list, she needed to visit a special web page and type in her email address. But that had no effect. And whenever she hit the "reply" button and told the spammers to knock it off, her repli
es went unanswered or were returned as undeliverable. Either the return address on the original message didn't exist, or the mailbox on the other end was crammed to capacity.
Gunn's previous computer experience had consisted of plugging numbers into spreadsheets during a stint in an accounting firm. So she had no way of knowing that her mysterious spam problem was likely a consequence of having wandered into AOL's online chat rooms while they were being harvested by spammers. Using special "spambot" programs, junk emailers were able to pluck thousands of AOL addresses out of the service's chat rooms in minutes. Similar harvesting programs were designed to automatically scour web pages and online bulletin boards looking for telltale "@" symbols and add the addresses to a database.
Then again, Gunn might have been the target of a dictionary attack, a technique used by junk emailers to guess their way into Internet users' in-boxes. Most spam mailing programs could blast out millions of messages to automatically generated addresses. By compiling various combinations of common names and numbers, followed by the domain of a big Internet service provider, such as "@aol.com," spam software could generate a small percentage of actual working addresses.
Little did Gunn know that by replying to junk emails that arrived in her in-box, she was actually making the problem worse by confirming to the senders that they had found a live body, thus becoming what is known to junk emailers as a "verified" email address. Because she had responded, it was likely that her address had been added to mailing lists marketed to other spammers. She even received a junk email advertising a CD-ROM claiming to contain 91 million verified email addresses (almost one third the population of the United States). Spammers, it seemed, had no use for target marketing.
Gunn wondered if there was some official agency charged with dealing with spam complaints, such as a Better Business Bureau for spammers. She asked about it in an AOL chat room where PC users could get real-time help for their computer problems from more sophisticated users. No one there had heard of such an agency, although someone provided her with an email address at the Federal Trade Commission to which she could forward copies of spam.
"Frankly, I just delete the stuff. It's not worth the trouble to report it," he told her.
But Gunn wasn't able to ignore her junk email problem. The type who went ballistic over people who litter, she would chase down and give a tongue lashing to anyone who tossed a crumpled up McDonalds bag on her property. To her, spamming was the same kind of anti-social, selfish act. In their efforts to reach a handful of interested customers, bulk emailers were blithely leaving their trash all over her part of the Internet. But the cowards, with their fake return addresses, left Gunn no way to run them down and share a few choice words.
One self-proclaimed computer expert on AOL suggested that Gunn get advice from an Internet bulletin board frequented by Internet system administrators and other sophisticated computer users united in their hatred of spam. The group was known as Nanae (pronounced NAH-nay), short for "news admin net-abuse email," and was one of the thousands of topics available from a free Internet discussion service called Usenet. Using a program called a newsreader, which was also built into the AOL software, Usenet participants around the world were able to read and contribute to online discussion newsgroups dedicated to everything from raising ferrets to practicing Far Eastern religions.
"But watch your step. There can be some real kooks in Nanae," he warned, noting that angry spammers sometimes dropped in on the newsgroup too.
By early 1999, the ratio of junk to legitimate email had made Gunn's AOL mailbox practically unusable. Fed up, she decided to pay Nanae a visit and seek advice. At the start, she treaded cautiously, reading but not joining the discussion. (One of the first messages she read warned that Nanae denizens did not suffer fools easily: "Wear your flame-proof underwear...never go Nanae-ing without 'em!") Unlike some hobby-related Usenet newsgroups she had frequented in the past, Nanae was very busy, often receiving hundreds of new postings every day. Some of the participants used their real names, but many posted under aliases such as "Dark Jedi," "Sapient Fridge," "Morely Dotes," and "Tsu Do Nimh." Most of the Nanae folk seemed to be men, although there were apparently a handful of women who frequented it as well. Few seemed to be fellow AOL users and instead posted their messages from obscure Internet service providers (ISPs) she had never heard of.
It wasn't clear to Gunn what exactly these people did for a living. From the technical jargon they slung around, she assumed most were either computer programmers or longtime Internet users. A few seemed to be fighting spam in an official capacity as system administrators: an anonymous user who went by the online alias Afterburner, for example, ended all of his postings with a signature line, or sig, that stated he handled spam complaints for Erols, a mid-sized ISP in the Washington, D.C. area. Later, she learned that Afterburner was one of the chosen few Nanae regulars who had received a Golden Mallet Award, a tongue-in-cheek honor given to longtime spam fighters for meritorious conduct. A special site known as the Pantheon listed the names of recipients and featured an illustration of a large gilded hammer smashing down on a map of the world.
Nanae had no official charter as far as Gunn could tell. The closest thing she could find to a mission statement was a message posted by Afterburner that summed up Nanae's purpose as "a cathartic release mechanism and a clearinghouse of info." Most of the postings contained businesslike reports of spam sightings or matter-of-fact complaints about ISPs that were slow to deal with spammers using their networks. But some messages were playful, such as one she spotted with the subject line "Confirmed Kill," which gleefully reported on an ISP that had responded to complaints by cutting off service to a junk emailer.
While Gunn easily picked up the Internet lingo used in AOL's chat rooms and instant messaging programs—overused shorthand such as LOL for "laughing out loud" or BRB for "be right back"—she was unprepared for the jargon in Nanae. The private slang of participants apparently wasn't developed for speed typing so much as to solidify spam fighters as a clique, or at least to add humor or spice to their postings. Several messages discussed the proper way to use a LART—code for "loser attitude readjustment tool," which she learned was another name for an email notifying ISPs of customers who were spamming. A LART was also referred to as a "mallet," since it was sometimes used to clobber delinquent ISPs into action against spammers. (Hence the Golden Mallet awarded to top anti-spammers.)
The newsgroup was also full of talk about UCE (unsolicited commercial email) and of spammers who were violating the TOS (terms of service) or AUP (acceptable use policy) of an Internet service provider. (Almost all ISPs specifically forbade their customers from sending spam.) Other postings discussed the various ways to munge one's email address in Usenet postings—such as by adding the phrase "nospam" next to the "@" sign—to thwart harvesting efforts by spammers.
Especially puzzling were messages whose subject lines were prefixed with the letters C&C. One poked fun at Alaska Senator Frank Murkowski, whom the message referred to as a "Congress critter." In 1998 Murkowski had proposed legislation governing bulk email, and many Nanae participants were vehemently opposed to the bill, fearing that it might actually legitimize some forms of spam. Weeks later Gunn learned that C&C was Nanae shorthand for "coffee and cats" and was a warning to others that a humorous message followed that might produce sudden laughter and thus the spilling of coffee and upsetting of cats near the reader.
After following Nanae discussions over the course of a few days, Gunn stumbled onto a web site that contained answers to common questions about junk email. The spam FAQ (frequently asked questions), as Internet gurus called it, provided a gold mine of information on how to analyze spam messages to determine the true Internet address of the computer that sent them. There were also tips on how to track down the owners of web site addresses or domains by using a service known as whois, which provided phone numbers and other contact information for the individual who registered the domain. Gunn also read up on how to
file a complaint with an Internet service provider when one of its customers was sending spam.
But perhaps the most important anti-spam weapon she discovered was a specialized Internet search engine called Deja News. Gunn had been using AOL's search service, as well as a site called Google, to find material published on web pages. But Deja News was different; it gave users the ability to search a complete archive dating back to the 1980s of nearly every newsgroup in existence, including old Nanae discussions. For spam trackers, the newsgroup search engine enabled them to sift through old spam sightings and determine, for example, whether a spammer was a repeat offender, or whether an ISP had been warned in the past about chronic spammers. (Deja News was acquired by Google in 2001 and renamed Google Groups.)
But, as Gunn soon discovered, junk email opponents didn't confine themselves to filing complaints with ISPs. Some also resorted to more militant tactics.
Ho, Ho, Ho, the Nazis Didn't Show
In a matter of days, orders from Davis Hawke's eBay auctions started to roll in. He found that buyers, caught up in the excitement of the auction, were often willing to bid more than double the price he'd charge for the same item at the KOF site. And since eBay was brokering the deal, there was less of a chance of someone ripping him off with a bad check. The new, tax-free cash flow helped allay his fears about having to take a humiliating civilian job that summer, such as flipping burgers at McDonalds or mowing lawns for the ground crew at Wofford.
As classes finally ended in mid-May 1999, Hawke turned his attention to drafting what he called the Millennium Plan—a long-term strategy for turning the Knights of Freedom into a mainstream political party. The first step would be a new name, the American Nationalist Party (ANP), and a new web site, ANParty.com. To broaden the movement's appeal, Hawke decided he'd drop the Nazi graphics and replace them with American flags, bald eagles, and other patriotic symbols. He'd phase out using the Bo Decker moniker. To cap off the change, that summer ANP members would assemble at the group's to-be-built training camp on some property owned by a comrade in Virginia. They'd spend a weekend setting up a shooting range and an obstacle course. And there would be time for camaraderie with other proud Aryans. Then, by the end of the summer, the ANP would stage a massive rally in Washington, D.C., where he would give a speech in front of the White House.
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