Taking away someone’s Internet anonymity should only be done in the very most extreme of circumstances. Anonymity on the Internet is a basic Web freedom that everyone should be able to enjoy, unless they seriously abuse it. I myself used several pseudonyms during my anti-trolling days, the main ones being ‘Mike Lonston’ and ‘Michael Fitzpatrick,’ and so I sympathise totally with the right to privacy on the Internet. Unless, of course, you’re using the powers that privacy grants you to bully and harass in the most horrible ways innocent people. Then you’ve misused your gift of invisibility and it is only right then that society pulls from your finger Tolkien’s ring and reveals the Gollum-like creature cringing and muttering curses from the dark shadow-land of its own makings. When you delve deep into that abyss of perverted and hopeless creations which is the online fantasy-world of any one gathering of cyberpaths who are using recognisable pseudonyms, you are going to come back out holding the scalps of more than a few of them. If you have the eye for it, along with the patience, you can reach into the Internet and pull out the dox of just about any nominally anonymous person who regularly uses anything like social media or Internet forums. There is usually a way, if you stick at it.
For instance, I was able in 2010 to dox one ‘Soveri Ruthliss,’ a then quite infamous troll (the highlight of his life, he was fond of endlessly repeating, was getting a bit of his RIP trolling shown on US television for three seconds), just by him being careless enough to post a link onto Facebook to the Myspace page of a band by the name of The Suicide Kings. Realising that this obviously meant that he had a profile on their Myspace page, I just looked through the member list of that same page then for anyone from Columbus, Ohio, which is where that troll’s IP address went to. Finding only one individual fitting that specification, I then Googled his name – his initials are ‘TF’ - and city and came up with some comments he had made on a number of Facebook groups and which fitted in exactly with the style of ‘Soveri.’ I then made a fake profile and added him on Facebook, and after satisfying myself that he was the troll took all of his details and photos and got ready to release them. First though, I messaged him with the info and got him to admit being the troll, and as a bonus convinced him that another troll had sold him out and got him to lead me to that troll in turn (yet another nerdy-looking little being who obviously wouldn’t say boo to a fly in real life, he trolled mostly as ‘Winston Darfor.’ His surname is Ripley).
After having TF act as one of my informers then for a little while, I released his info to some people and before I knew it he was getting the blame for being just about every troll on the Internet, while I just sat back and laughed at his hassle. And that is how easily and right out of the blue which you can be doxed on the Web; and knowing that I some time ago scrubbed any traces of myself from the Internet, leaving no trail which would lead to me. Only some trolls have I observed being clever enough to stay truly undoxed in any way; but only trolls who hang out exclusively on some place like 4Chan have a real chance of staying forever anonymous, as a social network demands that its vacuum be filled with the egos of its users, and the longer a troll stays in such a social network, the more likely that individual’s real life is to become entangled up in it. The best weapon that the trolls have against those seeking to dox them is the sheer tedium which their world inspires in normal people after a while. After 2010 I could hardly bring myself to try and dox any more of them, such was the boredom that trudging through their painfully unfunny world of witless memes and petty bickering caused in me. (My absence from their world led to a widespread belief among them that I had at last been jailed for bullying trolls, with Paul Baloney assuring his dribbling minions that he had harnessed his extensive contacts in the underworld to get me attacked multiple times in prison).
‘I just like to grant the universe its one thing that makes it go on. Chaos. Man was not supposed to be bound by law and order,’ was TF’s reply to me when I asked him what made him troll. And after that deep-voiced intro, on stepped to the stage the heaviest band in all history – Spinal Tap. TF is metal.
Have I mentioned yet how ridiculous these creatures are?
All around the same time in late 2011 I got asked to help with the making of not one but three different UK television programs that wanted to out the real identities of some of the trolls. This all came along after I had talked to Britain’s Daily Mail newspaper about the subculture of RIP trolling on Facebook. The Daily Mail is a right-wing newspaper and I am a leftie socialist anti-imperialist liberal so on most things we would hardly see eye to eye, but things like RIP trolling are way beyond politics. In the 1980s the same newspaper ran a ‘moral panic’ campaign against ‘video nasties’ - that being the name given to overly grotesque horror films like the infamous Cannibal Holocaust and the like. Personally, I think such films are nothing short of hilarious, but that’s because they’re not real. If ‘video nasties’ were actually filled with gruesome photoshops of real deceased children, then that would be something else entirely. Anyone who thinks that real RIP trolling is as harmless as some stupid horror movie and so nothing to make a fuss about is just a plain psychopath. On this subject, the Daily Mail is completely correct.
*For the article in the Mail I used the name ‘Michael Fitzpatrick,’ the first time I had used that particular nom de guerre. Soon after the Mail article appeared, two of the hackers on steroids were on Facebook at different times to exclaim excitedly that they had, using only their troll superpowers of detection, doxed me at last. The name they gave: Michael Fitzpatrick.
Unfortunately, one of the proposed programs didn’t materialise, one that was to be presented by a well-known and actually funny comedian who wanted to knock on the doors of some seriously unfunny RIP trolls. When I told the producer after he had approached me that the BBC were making something similar the proposed program then didn’t get made, which is a pity. The two that did though really helped to get the message across, and I am very glad to have helped in them.
Richard Bacon is a well-known BBC presenter who was at that time having his own problem with a troll. Well, actually more of an obsessed cyberstalker than a troll, although the two terms are hardly mutually exclusive. At any rate ‘Dick Bacon Boom’ as this character called himself (assuming it is a ‘he’), was a cyberpath of some sort and exact terminologies aren’t really important here. This troll/stalker/nutcase had been sending Richard nasty, crazy tweets and making Facebook pages and posts fantasising about his death for two years; which, as Richard himself admitted, goes somewhat with the territory, even if such a strange and in one way violent obsession is disturbing for those on the end of it. But for the presenter it crossed the line whenever the same nutter began contacting his family, actually going to the trouble of finding his wife and his mother on Twitter to rant at them his insanely intense hatred for him. And all this because the stalker didn’t like Richard Bacon’s radio show. Worryingly for Richard Bacon, this person was maybe more than a little unhinged.
This all led to the presenter wanting to make a program then on Internet abuse, and when the program makers approached me to ask me to provide them with info on the RIP trolling scene, I was - after first checking out they were legit and not trolls – more than happy to oblige.
‘Do you know of any troll who would agree to come to our studios and do a TV interview?’ one of the producers asked me.
So which one of the trolls would actually be stupid enough to do that? thought I to myself.
‘Ah yes, I have just the one for you’s,’ I replied. ‘His name is Damon Evans, he’s 20, and this is how you can contact him.’
And, sure enough, I wasn’t mistaken about the utter non-wit of Damon Evans, who jumped at the chance to appear on TV to talk about his trolling. The producers didn’t tell him that he was going to be asked about his RIP trolling and Evans thought he was just going along to answer questions about trolling in general, with him telling the producers before he went to do the interview in early 2012 that he had no part in
such a thing as RIP trolling and only lightly trolled celebrities. Much to my amusement, he actually privately messaged me on Facebook to boast that he was going to be a TV star. ‘Oh?’ I replied. ‘Really?!?!’
‘Shit is going to be so cash,’ wrote Evans on Facebook just before he left his home in Wales to travel to Manchester to do the interview. Not that he was actually getting paid for it; he was just using that 4Chan meme to express his excitement. I got the impression that he thought it was going to be the first step on the ladder of his comedy career.
And a comedian Damon is, just not intentionally so. I convinced him once, when he was posing as an anti-troll and trying to trick me - in an ironic case of the anti-troll trolling the troll pretending to be an anti-troll - that an Aussie troll who called himself ‘Stuntman Mike’ had been doxed by me as being a secret transvestite, and that in turn for me not releasing the video I had of him gyrating about in bra and knickers that he had been acting as one of my very many spies. ‘Stuntedmind’ as I called him – and who at one time shared an online romance with the delicious Jessica Cook - was another severely mentally challenged troll specimen, and another who lived entirely for trolling. ‘I want respect for the serious hard trolling I have done. I DEMAND MORE FUCKING RESPECT FROM YOU ALL AND I WILL HAVE IT!!’ he exclaimed one day (god give me strength). I’ll get you your respect, thought I, and so made up the story about him being a secret tranny. ‘Please keep this info secret at all costs!’ I begged of hapless Damon, who as planned ran straight to the rest of the trolls with it and soon gone were the glory days of Stuntedmind. Even over a year later Damon was still referring with venom to ‘that fat tranny.’ There’s none so easy to troll than trolls themselves.
Mild-mannered Damon, who comes from a tiny Welsh village, likes to post up on the Web pictures of himself striking gangsta poses while holding what are presumably imitation guns. He’s like a member of the spoof Welsh rap band Goldie Lookin Chain, but without the intended irony.
Shit is so white trash.
But as anyone who has seen The Anti-Social Network will know, Damon Evans was straight-out lying about not being an RIP troll. Before his interview I had provided the producers with screencaps of Evans RIP trolling in a few of his guises, and as himself; along with admissions he had made to me of his guilt. He really had no clue of what he was walking into.
When confronted by Richard Bacon during the interview with some of the screencaps that I had supplied of his extremely vile RIP trolling, Damon didn’t miss a beat in denying that he had actually done the trolling, claiming instead that he had been ‘cloned’ by someone else (the stock excuse used by all of them whenever the heat is on. If ever I get the one bad troll who is cloning all of these good trolls I shall take in my hand a sword of the finest steel and cut lumps out of him). But I had got Evans to admit his RIP trolling to me just before he went for the interview, including which pseudonyms he had used, and Richard brought out that evidence (Damon helpfully seemed to miss the fact that I had supplied that evidence, something which later proved to be a stroke of luck). During those moments you can see the dreams Damon Evans had for his comedy career dying in his scared little eyes and his ever-greying face. Still, though, he denied ‘100%’ being an RIP troll, before slinking out the door utterly defeated and home to Wales to lick his wounds. When the producers told me of his flat-out denials made all throughout the interview I decided to test my luck with him one last time, because, and I think this may be clear by now, poor ole Damon is hardly the sharpest knife in the drawer. So I rang him up and asked him about how the interview had went. Incredibly, or not so incredibly I suppose, he still hadn’t cottoned onto the fact that I had anything to do with it all and so he admitted to me on the phone that he had lied to Richard Bacon about his RIP trolling, helpfully even going through a short list of some of the people he had done such about. I sent the recording of this phone call on to the producers who then emailed Damon about it, receiving back an email from him finally admitting his very obvious guilt (although trying to blame it on the ‘grief tourists’) and promising that he had now mended his ways.
I almost felt sorry for Damon in all of that. Almost.
I just had to turn my lovely wee Irish charm on and pretend to make ‘friends’ with Damon and a number of other trolls and get them to do over-the-phone or Skype talks with me at that time, which I said were ‘interviews’ for a book I was writing about trolls, an idea I came up with when the BBC asked me if I had any evidence which could implicate any of the RIP trolls (I just want to stress that I done these ‘interviews’ off my own bat, and was not put up to them by the BBC). Yes, trolls, go and confess everything on tape to someone who is trying to ruin your lives - ah sure what could go wrong with that?
Many of these needy little creatures jumped at the chance to be part of a book, even when the person who was writing it was someone who had expressed a fervent wish to boil alive all of them for the purposes of making glue out of their horrible little selves. In the immortal words of Homer, Doh! Another reminder I was given of how ridiculously narcissistic many of these trolls are was when I made the announcement that I was writing a book on trolling and was looking some trolls for ‘interviews’ for it, a few members of the species whom I hadn’t even noticed before were proudly exclaiming that at least half of the book would be devoted to any one of them, such was the importance each of them attached to their own trolling. ‘Who exactly are you and what horse did you ride in on?’ I had to ask of a few of them who begged me to do ‘interviews’ with them. At least one of them was terribly wounded that I hadn’t even noticed him before, as he seemed to think that he was the number one target of all anti-trolls.
‘You ALL fucking ARE after me Lonston! I KNOW that I keep you all awake at night!!’ he exclaimed.
Aye, mate. Aye you do.
But the only ‘interviews’ I was seeking were of trolls that I knew the real identities of. Sad, silly Colm Coss was another who was all too willing to spill everything to me on the phone, and the producers of The Anti-Social Network were delighted to receive a recording of this as Coss began RIP trolling again almost as soon as he got out of jail and they wanted to confront him about it. He wasn’t trolling at near the intensity that he was before his prison sentence, but he was still doing it and that was all that mattered. The producers had that recording of him admitting his post-prison RIP trolling to me on the phone, and sent him a letter informing him of this and asking for a face-to-face television interview with him to discuss as to why he was still haunting RIP pages. Colm wouldn’t play ball, but armed with such damning evidence of his guilt the makers of the program were able to satisfy the strict BBC guidelines for door-stepping members of the public and after waiting patiently for the hermit-like Coss to appear in public, they finally cornered him coming out of an Internet café.
Coss, dressed in a red coat and wearing a woolly hat and in the words of one Internet commentator looking more like a garden gnome than a troll, was initially clearly not far from bursting into tears as Richard Bacon fired off a barrage of questions at him about some of the trolling he had been doing after being released from prison. ‘I really don’t wish to be interrogated by you or anyone,’ pleaded the meek little garden gnome troll, before cycling away on his bicycle. Later in the day the serial RIP troll would come onto Facebook using a fake profile he had made of Richard Bacon to complain of being ‘harassed.’ Irony has no place at all in the minds of these trolls.
The program was a triumph, and as well as showing what really was hiding behind the masks of RIP trolls it carried a very moving interview with the family of Tom Mullaney. If you can watch that and still think that attacking RIP pages is funny then you are not fit to live among human beings.
The other BBC program being made at the same time about the issue of RIP trolling and other forms of cyberbullying was an episode of Panorama, the primetime BBC documentary series. The episode was titled Hunting the Internet Bullies and for this one I handed over two separate
hour-long ‘interviews’ that I had done with Darren ‘Nimrod Severn’ Burton and in which he talked candidly about being a long-term RIP troll. The BBC sent him an email then informing him that they had evidence of his trolling and asking him to appear on their documentary program. Like Damon, dunce Darren didn’t put two and two together and messaged me on Facebook to actually seek out my advice on whether to do the interview or not, helpfully putting himself even further in the crapper by some of the things he said, all of which I was passing straight on to the BBC producers.
In the end, Burton refused to appear on the program but like Coss the evidence against him was overwhelming, and so the BBC sent their crew along to confront him in his home area of Cardiff. Burton messaged me right after that confrontation, telling me that he knew I had given him to the BBC (at last!) and letting me know of his disappointment that I had done so (while promising that the ‘angry’ police were going to put a stop to the BBC’s plans to broadcast the program, he then launched into a bizarre rant about how he isn’t gay and won’t ever be forced to into marriage with another man).
Hackers on Steroids Page 25