Hackers on Steroids

  In March 2011, the announcement by Facebook that it was employing a Microsoft-developed technology called ‘PhotoDNA’ to identify and block known child pornography images being posted onto its site was met in some media circles with much fanfare, as if it were the end of child porn on the site. The program is meant to automatically find the unique digital fingerprints of known child porn images from a huge police database and either block them from coming onto the site in the first place, or quickly delete them once they have. How successful this has been can be gauged by referring to the WND.com article cited earlier in this chapter and which came out a full 14 months after this technology was deployed by the company, and it seems that all that has to be done to bypass it is to crop off a certain amount of the image or else alter it in another way. It also does not seem to work with video, nor does it stop paedophiles posting links up. Not that it would stop ‘people’ like John Huitema uploading material which they are making themselves anyway. But what is available to view on Facebook – and Twitter, and MSN Messenger, and socialgo.com, and grou.ps, and just about any other large user-generated and interactive social website like them – is only a symptom of a sick world that tolerates the likes of a Richard Wareham getting a smack on the wrist in court, or a Shane Pattison with his desires to take and murder small children being allowed out to walk the streets again after only a few years in jail. Paedophiles are known to have been openly networking with each other on the Internet from as long ago as the late 1980s, using a long-established user-made forum system called Usenet. How organised and cocky they now are is perhaps best illustrated by this: I have learned from one of the Anonymous report groups that the offenders on Facebook now have what is called ‘Pedo Hour,’ in which some will post up their worst images for collection by others at a set hour every day and then take them down afterwards.

  Mankind would rather keep fighting in its endless litany of global civil wars that lead only on to other cycles of endless wars (because ethnic and national hatreds feel really, really good) than really wage a much-needed but less exciting worldwide ‘war’ against demons like Paolo Ghelardini, who let us remember walked the earth as a very active paedophile for years before that creature’s arrest. Just about everyone hates paedos - of that there is no doubt - but still an all, they get caught and get let out to do it again and again, and indeed have become so empowered by the relative lack of action against them by society that they now openly organise to trade their evil material. Dear god, there are even pro-paedophilia campaigners out there in the world openly preaching the message of child abuse. Why aren’t they instead all living in petrifying states of fear? Because the whole subject is too messy, the details are too disgusting, because they know that the world doesn’t really want to notice them and their workings (of which they are not ashamed in the slightest), another obscenity like First World poverty and Third World famine which is tutted about but mostly left as it is. The horror that makes people turn away and quickly forget is the paedophile’s greatest weapon in allowing their world to continue to flourish.

  Someday, when societies becomes wiser and bolder, creatures like Richard Wareham will simply be put to death once found guilty, or at the very least sentenced to be locked up for forever and a day. There’s nothing liberal about being nice to paedophiles. Any major political party that campaigned on a promise to lock convicted paedophiles up for life without parole – including those convicted of ‘just’ possessing child pornographic material - would in all likelihood mobilise and awaken the people in their country on the subject and subsequently romp home in an election, but it’s never an election issue. It’s not as if the world will miss the offenders, for without their demand for it the abomination that is child pornography would not flow through the poisoned veins of the Internet, nor exist at all in magazines and video discs. It is the Richard Wareham’s of the world, sitting in their abysses demanding to be nourished with a never-ending series of images of children being exploited and tortured who are as responsible for this holocaust of innocence as those who actually physically carry out the abuse itself. Richard Wareham and those millions like him are just as guilty of these crimes against humanity as the black-hooded monster I saw in that photo torturing the little boy on the rack.

  If an alien using an ultra-powerful telescope were looking directly at Earth from a point in space some 70 light-years away and had a clear view of the planet he could, if he pointed the telescope at the correct spot, see the people being marched into the gas chambers at Auschwitz. That crime scene will forever beam through space, a permanent record of evil. Those who wish to seek out and view other scenes of crime from the past equal in evil to the gas chambers of Auschwitz need not be light-years away from the planet, or be in the possession of telescopes of immense power. Every photographic capture of child abuse sent into the inner space of the Internet can itself too be found beaming forever through infinity. Once that scene of crime has been released into the Internet’s endlessness, there is no real chance of it ever truly coming back out.

  My days of talking to the paedophiles of Facebook and reporting about them to the cops came to an end in March 2011 after the police told me and the rest of the group to stop, and glad I was for that too for I couldn’t have taken any more anyway. It was only after I met with the cops that day and was told that it had been decided that the group I was part of was skirting far too close to illegality by even being around child porn swappers and that we had to quit, that I realised how mentally and emotionally wrecked the previous several months had left me. Anyone who can deal with doing that – and much, much worse - for years on end deserves some special kind of a medal. Speaking for myself, my reason for doing it all was more out of shock than anything, it was basically just screaming out: ‘Look – here are lots and lots of paedos! Won’t somebody please do something!?’

  After that meeting I remember that I went home and slept for 17 straight hours and when I slept I dreamt that I saw Paolo Ghelardini standing in a schoolyard and at his feet was a dirty and bloodied teddy bear. In the yard was a factory machine with a conveyor belt running and that I knew never stopped and it fed into a black hole which could never be filled, it was a beast’s belly that could never be satisfied. I could not see what Ghelardini was putting onto the belt but I knew that it was the essences of children and that they were being given in sacrifice to this endless black hole, and I knew that some of the children he was feeding onto the belt were seeded and watered by paedophiles just so that they could be abused, and that some had been taken. I knew that this machine would never stop moving so long as the species which bred its operator existed. Ghelardini turned and looked at me, his face deathly pallid and bad and instantly I wanted to kill him. Then he was in a hole the size of a small pool in the middle of which grew a tree and the fruit of the tree was maggots blood red and bloated that I watched dropping like butchered children into the hole, and I thought that they would fill that space and then eat on him forever and suddenly I felt like an arrow of made of bliss had been shot into my head.

  Photographic section2: The paedophiles

  Paolo Ghelardini (1). The horrific paedophile became, in my mind, Satan.

  Paolo Ghelardini (2)

  Shane Pattison.

  John Huitema. Also known as ‘Barry’ and ‘Ben’ during his time on Facebook.

  Richard ‘Knobby Knobson’ Wareham leaving court.

  Symbols which are used by paedophiles to mark themselves out to others of their ilk.

  Chapter Seven. The Notorious Case of Sean Duffy and the Limits to ‘Freedom of Speech’

  "Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil"

  Thomas Mann

  Just as in 2009 Sean Duffy had been my introduction to the subterranean netherworld of the RIP trolling subculture, so did the very same creature two years later cause millions more people to become aware that there exists on the Internet collections of shrieking ghouls dedicated to seeking out bereaved families on whom to inflict further to
rment.

  In August 2011 I had heard from my contact at the MP’s office that Duffy was to be sentenced in the coming weeks for his serial RIP trolling, and, needless to say, I was over the moon. What a small Internet it is, for just as he had served to bring to my attention the hellish landscape of RIP trolling and so set me forth on my journey into the black heart of the Internet, so too had his evil little pursuit brought the office of this MP into looking at the same matter. When I had contacted this MP’s office it was because of a news report that I had read about a statement she had made in the House of Commons regarding how an individual had been using Facebook to torture the family of a teenage girl who had the previous year died in a car crash. Discussing then the whole subject with her personal assistant, who as I have mentioned previously had taken a great concern at what was going on, I mentioned that a Mr Sean Duffy from the city of Reading in Berkshire had led me into the abyss, and lamented the fact that even though it had been two years since his name had been brought to the attentions of the police, still nothing had been done about him.

  ‘I have no doubt at all that he is still at it,’ I said to her.

  And, sure enough, still at it he was, as this lady was able to tell me that the very same Sean Duffy from Reading had been tracked down by the police and charged over the harassment that family had endured about their deceased daughter, as well as some other harassment campaigns which he had been carrying out against the families of other departed kids in the period from 2010 to 2011.

  And wonderful as it was that he was at last going to be brought to book for his crimes and be exposed to the world as he was so, if that exposure had happened two years earlier when it could have it would have saved those very same families from becoming unwilling parts of his nightmare. For while one police detective from outside Duffy’s area had been trying from 2009 to get the police in Reading to investigate the troll for an harassment campaign that he had waged against the family of a teenage girl who had died, he wasn’t having much luck in getting them to take action. This campaign against the girl’s family was started by Duffy in 2008 and had been revisited by him again in 2010. The girl’s family had been bombarded during a period in 2008 with a Youtube video that Duffy had made featuring the girl with her eyes replaced with swastikas, a trait of Duffy’s psycho-trolling attacks. He had also gone to the bother of learning what kind of a coffin the child was buried in so as to include that in the video, just to really rain down the psychological blows on his intended victims. A newspaper reported in 2008 on the trolling and when I doxed Duffy the following year I reported it to the police in this girl’s home city. But in the end it was as late as 2011 when the police in Reading quizzed him on all of this, and the evidence seems to have been gone then from his computer. However, it is accepted that he was the guilty party.

  Another chance to really nail him came in late 2009 when he began another harassment campaign against – once again – the family and friends of a teenaged girl who had recently died, this girl a 14-year-old whose death had made the national news in Britain. Calling himself then ‘Godbless GaryGlitter,’ he had once more went to the trouble of tracking down the people known to this girl and bombarding them on Facebook and Youtube with videos he had made mocking both her and the nature of her death, along with gross sexual comments about the child. How I had learned of this one was by visiting his real-life Facebook account one day and seeing that he had joined a memorial page for the girl which her friends had set up, firstly to ‘offer his condolences’ and then to attack the ‘vile and evil’ troll who had been placing onto the site images of the girl with Nazi swastikas over her eyes. As I have previously mentioned in another chapter, joining pages he had trolled and attempting then to befriend the family and friends of the dead person he was trolling about was another of Sean Duffy’s psycho traits.

  A virtual lynch mob had formed on two separate Facebook pages, with thousands liking one alone that was calling for the blood of the troll known only to them as Godbless GaryGlitter. The boiling hate on that page was real and I have little doubt that some of the people on the page would have paid Mr Duffy a visit then had they known who he was. The police themselves had to come onto the pages and call for calm.

  When I contacted the police then to give them Duffy’s details they were able to tell me that they had already travelled to Reading to arrest a 23-year-old man for carrying out the harassment. While they didn’t give me his name, me and the cop I was speaking to were at an understanding that it was the same 23-year-old man in question, and of whom, the policeman informed me, had been let off with an official caution, it being conveyed to me that the individual in question was just too pathetic and disturbed to take further action against. The police from this area seemed to think that the scare had put all the badness out of him.

  ‘Ok, but he’ll be at it again soon as,’ I said, wearily.

  The policeman replied that he really didn’t think that he would. It was only the next month that Duffy led me into viewing the Megan Moore trolling, which he was obviously a full part of (once again showing his insane pathological fixation on deceased teenage girls).

  After learning of the caution that I knew full well would not deter him, I did for a moment consider dropping his name and address onto that hate page but resisted from doing so. It was certainly not out of any concern for his wellbeing but only out of respect for the girl’s family, who had more than enough to deal with. I also worried that someone might end up doing time for what would have been nothing different to my mind than flushing a particularly nasty-smelling piece of shit back down the toilet from which it had crawled out of.

  It wasn’t until Tuesday 13th September 2011 that Sean Duffy was finally forced to face a true justice when news footage of his bloated and obviously mental self sorrowfully waddling to court in a red check shirt to be sentenced to the maximum 18 weeks in jail for his offences was beamed out to millions of television news watchers, with the story of his jailing making the next day all the national UK dailies, including the front page of the tabloid Daily Mirror, a paper read every day by millions (the full page headline read simply, in capitals, ‘The troll’). His jailing was even being talked about in American, Australian, and German media outlets, altogether making the coverage and opprobrium Colm Coss gained for his crimes look negligible by comparison and starting conversations about RIP trolling all over the Web and beyond. Sentenced under the Malicious Communications Act for the trolling that he had done about four deceased teenagers, nevertheless the fingers of dozens of dead children were pointing accusingly at him from their graves as he walked to court on that beautiful late summer’s day. Sean Duffy had caused unimaginable distress to the families of dozens of dead kids – most probably well over one hundred – before this moment of everlasting infamy; and now that the rock had been well and truly turned over, the squirming, hideous, and pathetic creature underneath it was exposed in the glaring sunlight to the hard gaze of the world. This was a day for which I had long hoped for, when that which had previously been known only to a few would become known to all. Whatever the rights and wrongs of his relatively short prison sentence (right that he was jailed, wrong that he couldn’t have been so for longer), Sean Duffy was handed another sentence that day, one which he will serve forever in his life. Sean Duffy became that day the official and everlasting face of Internet RIP trolling, a fate which he done his very best both to earn and to deserve.

  Real justice had been served at last, and that day somewhere in the universe a karmic wheel had finished turning full circle as Duffy became, as well as the source of immense loathing and anger, the source too of much laughter and mockery as Internet users on countless forums and in newspaper comments sections laughed at him not for being dead, but for being alive - a fate seen to be worse than death for Sean Duffy and his ilk. Truly the loathsome and worthless subculture of RIP trolling had been fully embodied in one sad, bad, mad, and utterly defeated lump of dreadful, hoggish flesh sent out now forever into
the wilderness with a leper’s bell fastened around its neck, an anathema to human society. Sean Duffy had suddenly found himself falling straight right through the surface of the world of shit that he had worked so hard to create for himself and becoming totally submerged beneath it. This fate too inevitably awaits more members of his subspecies; granted, not nearly enough of them, but still, when it happens it all happens with a vengeance. The ‘game’ becomes for the disgraced troll the brutal reality that it always was in the first place for the victims of its sadism.

  Looking at Sean Duffy’s real-name Facebook profile for the week before his court appearance, I don’t believe that he had any clue of just how much attention was going to be paid to his sentencing and how that the following Tuesday was going to be the beginning of the end of his life as he knew it. He didn’t seem concerned at all, and he certainly gave his Facebook friends no forewarning of what was coming. I think he was imagining that scant attention would be paid to it all - and certainly none of any attention by the media.

  Although he bloody well knows different now.

  It was said by Duffy’s defence at his sentencing that he is diagnosed with Asperger syndrome, a form of autism, and that because of this he didn’t understand the effect which his trolling was having on the people whom he targeted. But Duffy had even admitted to the police that his intention was to hurt and harass those whom he targeted; and one of the police officers who led the case, Detective Chief Inspector James Hahn, said on the news that evening that Duffy ‘by his own account’ was trying to gain attention by upsetting the families of people who had died.