Hackers on Steroids

by Oisín Sweeney

  Because even in America, which has fought a lengthy and only partially successful battle to stop the real-world RIP trolls of the Westboro Baptist cult from using the 1st Amendment as an excuse for intruding very rudely into people’s grief, can you be prosecuted for using speech in harassing or even, in extreme cases, obscene ways. I say ‘even in America’ as, reading through many of the Internet postings from people in the US on Duffy’s jailing and referring back to many statements made by American RIP trolls, it would seem that many in the States believe that their 1st Amendment guarantee of freedom of speech gives to them the right to say anything at any time to anyone and in any way. Watching how the Westboro cultists have been allowed on many occasions to at least try and turn funeral processions into their own profane pantomimes, you could be forgiven for thinking that they are right, but the cult claims that they are genuinely protesting and doing so with the aim of making their religious and political views known - even when they are really and clearly just engaging in acts of harassment and sadism. If they were to admit that their so-called ‘protests’ are nothing of the sort then US authorities may have an easier time in stopping such displays, but they keep claiming ‘legitimate’ reasons for their cuntery and that is hard to disprove in court. Some states have indeed brought in laws aimed at stopping them getting anywhere near any of the funerals that they wish to disrupt and that is a start; but like their counterparts on the Internet, the Westboro cultists are playing with very big balls of fire and it would be easy to imagine that someday someone is going to ensure that the only funerals they will be getting near again will be their own. And of course if someone did plug a few of them, that would be nothing less than Jehovah’s will and striking evidence of their secret gayness, wouldn’t it, Fred? Don’t think that the Great Eye doesn’t see you looking at that man’s biceps. His will be done.

  In the days following Duffy being sentenced to prison, I also observed the baffling phenomenon of countless Web commentators from America who seem to believe that American law and constitution has writ everywhere in the world, and who were lamenting how this case, brought in England, had broken US constitutional laws guaranteeing what they perceive to be the right to say anything at all to anyone they want to.

  ‘So much for the 1st Amendment and freedom of speech! This president’s term will see the American way finally destroyed!’ screeched one.

  So much for your fucking brain, thought I.

  But if people are thinking that if Sean Duffy had committed his crimes from America that he couldn’t have been punished for them, then they may just be very much mistaken indeed. There are laws against cyberstalking and online harassment in many American states, and although they have yet to be tested on RIP trolls they can carry prison terms of a lot more than 18 weeks, even with a guilty plea. I would imagine that it could be reasonably proven that the private messaging of victims by an RIP troll, as in the Duffy case as in many other RIP trolling cases, constitutes cyberharassment, with such messages clearly being sent with the intention of tormenting the recipient. Cyberharassment can also apply to Internet postings made on open webpages and that have been placed there with the sole intent of tormenting a targeted person. So, for example, Sean Duffy’s ‘Help me mummy, it’s hot in Hell’ Facebook posting, or the video that he posted up publicly with the ‘Happy Mother’s Day’ message, would definitely seem to fall under that category. America certainly protects the putting across of one’s views; but at harassment speech where no views are being expressed, it draws a line. It is also interesting to wonder if people who have been harassed by American psycho-trolls would be able to take civil cases against said trolls for inflicting on them mental and emotional distress, something which the victims of such might like to think about and maybe then seek advice on. A much-publicised 2012 case in which Englishwoman Nicola Brookes won a court action forcing Facebook to hand over for the purposes of civil litigation the IP addresses of the trolls – many of whom are linked to the same trolling web of which much of this book is about - who had been stalking and harassing her may act as an inspiration to anyone considering doing the same.

  The utterly ludicrous yet madly psychotic Hunter Mello, who likes to claim that he trolls on a ‘deeper’ and ‘more philosophical’ level than most, was investigated by the police in Texas back in 2010 over some deep philosophical remarks which he made to the father of a dead baby about that deceased infant. Mello was arrested in the March of 2010 after he and the infamous Bradley Hampson – he as ‘Dmitri Shostakovich’ and Hampson under his usual guise of ‘Dale Angerer’ – had the previous month attacked an off-Facebook blog belonging to an American man and that he had set up to raise awareness about the type of heart defect which had killed his baby son. The actual comments themselves are not worth repeating, they can best be imagined by the reader (or, even better still, not imagined at all). They were driven to this, Mello would later explain, because the owner of the blog had on Facebook posted up the links to some of the profiles that the RIP trolls were using and asked why Facebook hadn’t banned them. Among Mello’s psychotic little trolling clique it was agreed that this outrage gave full justification for him and Hampson to attack that man over his lost son. The genuine indignation they expressed at this man for daring to do this and how they all felt that this fully justified – as if they have ever needed justifications anyway – harassing him in such a brutal manner is enough to make the jaw drop, and says more about their psychopathic personality disorders and demented little Internet power fantasies than almost anything else which I can think of. This is what RIP troll moral outrage looks like.

  Their indignation reached boiling point then when Mello reported that the campus police at his college, Sam Houston State University in Texas, had opened an investigation into him after the blog owner was able to trace ‘Dmitri’s’ IP address back to a university computer being used by Mello. This stirred the cultural critics to then begin a mass harassment campaign against the wronged man, the charge in part being led by Swiftian satirist and troll intellectual ‘Paulie Socash’ (the puppeteer of Paulie is different from the rest of the trolls, you see. The puppeteer of Paulie reads books and knows big words. Oh well done there, you. ‘Paulie’ says satirist; I say sadist).

  Mello was being investigated under a Texan anti-cyberbullying law that makes it a third degree felony punishable by 2 to 10 years prison time for someone to use ‘the name or persona of another person to create a webpage on or to post one or more messages on a commercial social networking site … with the intent to harm, defraud, intimidate, or threaten any person.’ Whether Mello had broken the law by using the name of a dead composer to do this was something that was up for debate, as was whether an interactive blog could reasonably be called a social networking site, but in the end the Christian man bringing the charges dropped the case after Mello contacted him and convinced him that he had turned over a new leaf (he most definitely had not, for the record).

  Nevertheless, Mello admitted to the campus police that he was the ‘Dmitri Shostakovich’ who attacked that man through his blog, and added to the IP evidence which I have against him in still-existing email accounts – along with a ton of other evidence – I have been advised that I am more than safe enough in identifying him in this book. Hopefully now he will get some more of that attention which he so desperately craves. Happy to have helped you out on that score, Mells. Just like old times.

  I also have still-existing email accounts that can trace ‘Paulie Socash’s’ IP addresses back to the University of Oregon at Eugene, as well as other places too in Eugene, as I have already said; and if the university wants to contact me I will be more than happy to let them look in those email accounts to see all of this for themselves. Perhaps they may want to strip that particular student of any degrees or doctorates awarded, as that particular student had been using university computers to torture and intimidate the bereaved, and I imagine the university would be able to quite easily check who the student was that was using
those particular computer terminals at those particular times. Oh yes, I have plenty of stuff on these trolls, although most of it I can’t possibly put in this book for fear of libel. If the cultural critics are unhappy so far with what I have said about them, then they should see the material and the names that I have had to leave out. Oh my. Who, for instance, is the extremely well-known RIP troll whom I can’t name in this context but who had his real-name email account hacked only for it to reveal that he had booked a session at the ‘Foot Fetish Party,’ which he was to travel the quite short distance to London to attend. His preferences: ‘Smelly feet please,’ with his lady of choice being the lovely Katya.

  But, like the puppeteer of Paulie, I do digress.

  The point is that many of those American RIP trolls are dicing more closely with the law than they might imagine, so let us hope that it won’t be too long until we see the first American Bradley Hampson or Sean Duffy having his or her life ruined for their online savagery. My mind still explodes when I picture the absurd Hunter Mello having to explain to the hardened convicts inside a Texan jail that he is in for ‘Trolling about dead people, man. Although, on a deep level.’ He’ll know all about ‘butthurt’ then.

  It is also the case that many trolls will steal a living person’s identity with which to do their trolling, and that is certainly prosecutable in the US and can carry prison terms for anyone convicted of it. There are, too, recent cases of prosecutions that have been taken in America against offenders for publishing words and images the likes of which have prevalence in the 4Chan-inspired RIP trolling subculture. For instance, Neil Geckle of Pennsylvania was in April of 2012 charged with the making and distribution of child pornography images after taking photographs of underage girls from their Facebook profiles and photoshopping images of his penis into them, before then posting the doctored images back onto Facebook. Photoshopping pornographic images into photographs of children both living and dead is quite a common psycho-trolling practice. Some prosecutions in the US for self-declared trolls who are making and distributing – or even ‘just’ distributing – such materials would be a very welcome occurrence.

  But even written material that is sexually explicit about children can be prosecuted in America, and by now I don’t need to remind the reader as to how ubiquitous such writings are among the cultural critics. Phillip Greaves of Colorado was prosecuted in 2011 under US anti-obscenity laws for self-publishing a book with the name of: ‘The Pedophiles Guide to Love and Pleasure: A Child-Lover's Code of Conduct,’ which contained, as you may have already guessed, advice as on how best to groom children for abuse, as well as sexually explicit stories about children.

  At least as far as I am aware, real free speech in America has not collapsed since the conviction of Mr Greaves on obscenity charges, and neither do I foresee it collapsing if a ‘Pro Fessor’ or a ‘Nashton Nigma’ were ever to be brought up on the same. And there certainly seems to be a mood among many in American to bring to task a few of the worst of the Internet’s trolls. Witness the delight among many Americans in the media and across the Web at the 2012 media unmasking and subsequent crucifixion of ‘Violentacrez’ a.k.a Michael Brutsch, the notorious Reddit.com cretin and pervert behind such groups as ‘Incest’ and ‘Pics of Dead Kids.’

  It is safe to assume that the great majority of us couldn’t murder a child. We wouldn’t have it in us to do something like that; it takes the mind to be removed to a horrific degree from sanity and be ‘squirming like a toad’ before its owner could even contemplate such an act. But for the likes of a sadist that spends its days seeking out bereaved families on whom to inflict further torment, the question shouldn’t be if they could commit ever more terrible acts, but how long will it be until they do. Their minds have already crossed the boundary between human and subhuman. I am not saying that all RIP trolls are going to then progress on to murdering people, that would make nothing but a joke of the whole thing. But I am saying that there certainly is the very real possibility of some of them getting bored with their online sadism and deciding then to take things a step further. Because I have no doubt whatsoever that many of them would love to take and murder the innocent for their own depraved enjoyments, it is just their general offline weaknesses and fears which stunt them from carrying out their very darkest desires. And I have no doubt about what their desires are as many of them have tried to drive vulnerable people to suicide for their own fun, or attempted to incite murder against the innocent just to prove, I would imagine mostly to themselves, as to how powerful they are. These are the kinds of creatures who only feel anything approaching alive at the news of others’ deaths and the sinister games these deaths can allow them to play.

  These psychos will only do what they know, or think they know, they can get off with. RIP trolling is easy, taking it into the physical world carries many more dangers for themselves. But nevertheless, RIP trolling gives them real confidence, allows them to feel all-powerful in themselves and perhaps buoyed up by such they may then, even if this is just a very, very small number of them, feel as if they can take things a step further, and then a step further again still. The classic image of a serial killer beginning by pulling the legs off insects as a child before progressing on then to ever more and more greater extremes to satisfy his sadistic yearnings is one that should be borne in mind. True online sadism such as that practised by the RIP trolls – aggressive and predatory - should serve as a severe warning if nothing else. I can easily imagine another Brady and Hindley, Manchester’s infamous serial child killers, finding each other through their shared love of RIP trolling and falling in love with one another, reinforcing then each other’s depravities and finding between themselves the power to create their own hell-formed universe where they are the gods and the people of the world mere objects to fulfil the needs of their killing cult as they act to give greater form to their sadism. Because of such creatures as RIP trolls are the Brady’s and the Hindley’s of this world made, and who knows what evil things could take root and grow from the damp soil of the dark land that RIP trolls till together. If such monstrosities are not nipped in the bud before they grow in their minds the idea that they are too strong to be stopped, very bad things may manifest then in the physical world.

  And that is one reason why police forces should start to take this whole subculture of predatory RIP trolling much more seriously and seek out and prosecute in any way they can the very worst of the trolls. Australia made a flying start on this front by bringing a severe dose of reality into the life of Bradley Hampson with his extensive fantasies about tortured and murdered children, and very shortly after that bringing to book then too his grotesque admirer Jessica Cook, but ever since then there have been no more prosecutions of RIP trolls down under. In Britain, things have taken the opposite direction, with prosecutions for online remarks under the Malicious Communications Act in 2012 reaching the level of absurdity and threatening a backlash that would serve to let the worst of the offenders escape sanction for their crimes.

  Some of the police actions have certainly been fair enough. During the Olympics, 17-year-old Reece Messer received an official police caution after going to the trouble of seeking out on Twitter Olympic diver Tom Daley to send him a tweet referencing his dead father after Daley had failed to win a medal; the tweet itself reading: ‘You let your dad down I hope you know that.’ Not the most extreme example ever of RIP trolling, and Messer seems to be more of a hyperactive imbecile than anything, but he did deliver that remark personally to Tom Daley, along with another threatening to drown him, all of which is harassing speech any way you look at it. A police caution would seem the correct thing to do.

  In May, a 15-year-old boy from Norfolk also received a police caution for trolling on a page about Masie Baxter, a 13-year-old girl who hanged herself. The trolling was severe enough to have made the national television news in Britain, but considering the age of the troll a police caution was probably the right choice to make. Hopefully his parents will now
get him the psychiatric help that he so clearly needs. In August, 26-year-old Daniel Corcoran from Chorley, Lancashire, was handed a suspended prison sentence over some trolling he done about the murder of two-year-old Jamie Bulger, whose death many Internet ghouls obsessively troll about, with Coss, Duffy, Mello, and Hampson all having at times joined in the ‘fun’ there. Corcoran was said in court to spend 12 hours a day trolling on Facebook. I am not aware what if any pseudonyms he used while doing this, or if he was linked to the same nest of rats that I have had my little adventure with.

  Another police caution was handed out in September to the troll who set up a fake Facebook account in the name of the recently deceased 16-year-old Jordan Agar and used it to taunt his mother with in the aftermath of his death. While his mother Bridget demanded that the creature in question be taken to court for the trauma he caused her, the police disagreed and said that they believed cautioning the unnamed 21-year-old man from Burton would suffice. The police believed the very same thing about Sean Duffy in 2009, and look what that eventually led to.

  Our old friend Sean Duffy was back in court in March, this time in Scotland to plead guilty to posting a gruesome photoshop of a 16-year-old girl onto her tribute page, something that was seen by distraught relatives of the girl. He had carried out this attack during his 2011 trolling spree. I had hoped that he would have been sent down again and would be doing his time with some Glasgow hardcases who wouldn’t have taken too much of a shine to him considering what he was in for, but instead he got 300 hours community service, again pleading that his autism had made him do it.