Re: Chapter 3
Subject: Re: Chapter 3
From: Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com>
Date: 3/20/12, 17:07
To: Daniel Conaway <dconaway@writershouse.com>
CC: Gregg Housh <greggatghc@gmail.com>, Stephen Barr <sbarr@writershouse.com>

I'm sorry. I'll use some other material to fill it out and do these edits a bit later. In the meantime, here's a portion of chapter four - please let me know if any of this is on the right track.

“Hi, you’re on the Hal Turner Show. Who are you, where you calling from?”

“Hola, I’m Pedro... Diego.”

“Uh huh. Is that right?”

“Hola, Hal. Aym calling to say... aye got me a job. Aye... aye peek onions... for a leeving. Aye like it but, it’s so hot outside. Aye don’t like.”

“Why are you listening to this show? This is a show for white people. You’re not white.”

“Aym not white.”

“Then you’re definitely not talking on the show. Get out of here, you spic.”

Hal Turner has never been big on Hispanics. Nor is he fond of blacks. But he loves white people.

Turner got his “start,” so to speak, in the early ‘90s, as a regular caller to an ABC radio program hosted by Sean Hannity and Bob Grant. Identifying himself as “Hal from North Bergen,” Turner’s on-air discussions with the two hosts brought him a degree of prominence sufficient to land him a gig as a local coordinator for Pat Buchanan’s failed 1992 presidential run. He would go on to serve in similar roles for a Libertarian candidate named Murray Sabrin before going into both politics and radio on his own accord, with mixed results.

By late 2006, Turner was best known for his internet-based and listener-sponsored radio program The Hal Turner Show. Freed from all constraints, Turner now gave free reign to his “pro-white” impulses - to the delight of America’s white nationalists, who must elsewhere settle for dog whistles.

But Turner wasn’t so popular that he was able to attract sufficient financial support. In late December of 2006, he announced that he would be going off the air due to lack of funds. This may have been a fib, something on the level of a publicity stunt intended to attract sympathy and, more importantly, donations. In any case, he ended up getting quite a bit of publicity.

7chan had come about some time earlier as a more raid-oriented alternative to 4chan, 4chan having become subject to more and more restrictions of the sort that made the site less and less viable as a staging ground. There were other dynamics at work in these days as well - conflicts and demographic trends and disinformation campaigns and boredom - that spawned the creation of several other “chan sites.” But 7chan was the most formidable of these. And so when a 7chan user posted a thread on /i/ - the raid board - explaining that Hal Turner was about to do his final radio broadcast and would be taking calls as usual, he could count on his fellow /i/nsurgents, as they were known, to do what clearly needed to be done.

Turner’s “final” broadcast consisted of little else than prank calls from 7chan enthusiasts - 7chan enthusiasts posing as Mexican immigrant laborers, 7chan enthusiasts posing as fellow white nationalists but dotting their made-up accounts of minority perfidy with memes, 7chan enthusiasts yelling “faggot” and hanging up. The proceedings were recorded, new memes were developed, and all of this was catalogued at Encyclopedia Dramatica and, less formally, within the pseudo-oral history of the chans.

But then Hal Turner, who had figured out the nature of his antagonists, struck back. Many of those who called had done so from landlines or cell phones, and Turner used those numbers to compile the names and addresses of a few of the callers, with the resulting information being posted on his website. Turner bragged of this on his next broadcast (his “last show,” of course, was nothing of the sort). Someone from 7chan called in again and gave him an ultimatum - take down the info or face a host of consequences starting with the publication of his own personal details. Turner declined, and event went so far as to announce that he had reported certain of these individuals to the Newark office of the FBI. Someone else called the office to check on this and posted the resulting phone recording in which this assertion was denied. Thereafter a teenage girl called in to Turner’s program.

“Hi, welcome to the Hal Turner Show, you’re on the air, what’s your name, where’re you from?”
“My name is Rebecca.”
“Hello, Rebecca.”
“Um, I have proof that you never filed any legal action, because the FBI says you’re full of, um, BS.”
“Oh,  they really did, did they?”
“Yeah, they did. And it’s on - it’s on 7chan, that somebody called them and said that you’re lying.”
“Is that right?”
“Yes, it is, that’s what they say, but I don’t know if it’s true or not.”
“Is there a reason why I should care what anybody on 7chan said?”

Soon afterwards, Turner’s phone number, address, and other bits of private information were posted on dozens of venues, prompting hundreds of prank calls to his home. With the likely spurring of his wife - whose understandable irritability shone through in the various recordings that were produced from these calls - Turner took down the phone numbers of his original antagonists. By this point, though, he had gained thousands more, none of whom had any interest in tamping down a conflict with such obvious promise. And then his website was hit with a distributed denial of service attack, costing Turner some considerable sum due to a setup whereby he had to pay his provider for “hits” to his site - and the nature of a DDOS attack is such that the hundreds of thousands of page requests entailed are perceived as “hits,” and draw upon the same resources as would be required if those page requests were legitimate attempts by real people to enjoy the offerings of, say, Hal Turner’s website.

Turner brought colleague Artie Wheeler on to his show to assist him in mocking his adversaries; Wheeler had been looking at Encyclopedia Dramatica, where Turner’s wacky behavior was being continually documented, and sympathetically explained to the host that the “encyclopedia outfit you mentioned is a FAG encyclopedia company. They are FAGGERY DAGGERY DOO!” A new and fantastic meme was born.

Turner wasn’t finished quite yet. He claimed to have “reached out” to some fellow white nationalists who had tracked down one of the 7chan raiders and beaten the kid to a pulp; as evidence, he posted a picture of a teenage boy with a bloodied face. Back on 7chan, this picture was quickly shown to have been taken several years earlier in another context entirely; it was among the first results if one searched Google images with the term “bloody face”. Turner reconfigured his website so that it would lead to a page with text to the effect that the user was being re-directed to the FBI; this barely required a refutation. Turner claimed that he was being extorted; that the e-mail addresses and passwords of his subscribers were being used by 7chan for nefarious purposes after having been hacked from his site; that 7chan had contacted his “data provider,” claiming to be him, and had asked for his server to be rebooted; that he had received death threats; that 7chan had burned down his mother’s home.

Unsurprisingly, his natural constituency - white supremacists frequenting message boards such as Stormfront and belonging to organizations like National Vanguard - were gotten increasingly irritated with Turner’s behavior, particularly those portions of his behavior that entailed getting caught in repeated lies and otherwise discrediting the entire hooray-for-honkey movement of which he was an unfortunately prominent representative. Turner probably couldn't help but be aware of the downward swing in his hard-earned popularity, and so when 7chan.org suddenly disappeared for a few days - redirecting in the meanwhile to another page that purported to be something on the order of law enforcement - he proudly proclaimed that he himself had been 7chan's undoing, and that his antagonists had indeed been defeated forever.

And then 7chan.org came back up, functioning as usual. At the top, there was a message from the site's administrators which read as follows:

As many of you know, a certain "raid" that was started here has gained lots of attention over the past few weeks. This "raid", targeted at Hal Turner of Hal Turner Radio, was actually a plan that was devised by Buri-chan, former 7chan admin, and Hal Turner himself. The details of the plan are that 7chan offered Hal Turner notoriety with the *chan communities [as most of them are filled with white supremacists anyway], and, unknown to us, donations, in exchange for an extra server to ease the pressure on our current, overtaxed servers.

As the community is open to pretty much any type of discussion, we couldn't exactly stop this so-called raid from happening, so we decided to play along. Couldn't hurt, right?

What we didn't count on was the few "out of the loop" raiders attacking other sites, such as Bill White's [aka overthrow.com owner]. Apparently, Bill White took offense and ordered his own fans [ps3 hueg numbers] to take down our site, which, as you know, has happened.

Apologies to all parties unintentionally harmed by this mixup. We are no longer in this with Hal [since, apparently, this is a scam on his part, since he received over $1,000 in donations].

-Matt

Now, the white supremacists were infuriated. Turner could never be trusted again.

Of course, there had been no such agreement. The post by the 7chan admins was a disinfo operation intended to finish Turner off, to the extent that any such person can really be "finished off." And aside from making Turner look bad in front of the other crackerjacks, the post had the effect of alienating those of 7chan's readers and posters who didn't immediately see it for what it was. This was good, because such people would now get upset and leave.

But things weren't over quite yet. Because Turner wasn't lying when he claimed that his computers and e-mail accounts had been infiltrated by hackers associated with 7chan. And among those e-mails was found correspondence between himself and his FBI handler.

Turner had served as an FBI informant for a number of years, likely providing the law enforcement agency with tips on individuals who were likely to commit violent acts. This was confirmed a few years later, when Turner was arrested and charged with incitement to injury after having called upon his listeners to go after several judges and politicians. When the allegations were first made, Turner denied them in the strongest possible terms. At such time as he found himself facing a prison sentence, his lawyer provided the court with documents proving this relationship and summarized it all thusly:

My client was trained by the FBI as an agent provocateur. He was told where the line was — what he could say. His job was basically to publish information which would cause other parties to act in a manner which would lead to their arrest.

Various documents to this effect were produced by the defense, confirming a log yet strained relationship in which Turner would throw the FBI some actual criminals every once in a while and the FBI would agree not to kill any prominent rappers and frame Turner for the deed (or something to that effect; I didn’t really follow the case). But none of this saved Turner from being sentenced to 33 months in prison for inciting to violence. The FBI has never publicly commented on the matter.

**

There are several lessons to be learned from this whole sordid affair. But there is also one straightforward eventuality that happened to contribute to the profound change that was to be seen in Anonymous over the next year or so.

When 7chan - and thus Anonymous, which had by this point become a catch-all term encompassing the chans and other, related parties - was seen going after a prominent racist, many got the idea that Anonymous was a force for good. A protest organized by Anons in front of Hal Turner's residence was heavily attended by members of several anti-racist organizations who believed that they were joining a crusade against hate. What they didn't realize was that the individuals who began the crusade did so for entirely non-ideological reasons having nothing to do with opposition to racism and everything to do with something else entirely.

And how were these anti-racist activists to know?

There is, after all, no reliable method by which to discern what Anonymous is, what is is doing, of who it is composed, what the personal and political agendas of those people might be, whether or not these agendas can even be said to be political, and what one can reliably say about an amorphous non-organization that has no charter, and thus nothing that would even approach any sort of collective character. And this is all doubly true when many within the sphere we call "Anonymous" thought it would be amusing to confuse things further.

Suffice to say that when message board postings started to appear across the internet proclaiming that a heroic group of internet denizens had taken on a prominent white nationalist and driven him to insanity, and that this had been done out out of entirely noble inclinations, many within Anon were scandalized. A second group of individuals found it hilarious that the first group was scandalized by this, and actually went so far as to promote the false belief in various ways.

And a third group supported the second group in this - the third group realizing that Anonymous could be transformed into an actual ideological force simply by proclaiming it to be one. Because if Anonymous were to be widely depicted as a group of earnest goodie-two-shoe types, actual earnest goodie-two-shoe types would flock to its banner, and those who were more interested in causing harm to as many people as possible would be scandalized even further, and would leave. And then Anonymous would become a force for good.

That was the theory, at least. In truth, those who had already committed so much of their time to Anonymous out of a desire that it would  collectively-held power-for-the-sake-of-power were not going to give up their meta-banner without a fight.

But at this early point, there was still little threat of Anonymous being re-rendered as a force for positive change. That would all come soon enough.

***

It was January 2008, and I was sitting in front of my computer. I had some coding to finish up for a client, but it wasn’t due for a couple of days. So I had a document open in which to jot down code, refine code, check for errors. But I also had some other things open, time being on my side.

One browser tab was open to /b/, where West Europeans and Americans were trolling each other over World War II; where Americans were trolling other Americans over Ron Paul; and where Russians were posting pictures of cats that had been doused in lighter fluid and burned to death. The West Americans and Europeans retaliated against the Russians with pictures of Vladimir Putin kissing the exposed belly of a small boy, with text to the effect that Putin is a pedophile and that all Russians are pedophiles and that Russians were moreover tricked into taking the brunt of World War II casualties because no other nationality was stupid enough to do it. Then the Poles got involved. This was just one thread.

“Nothing much going on at /b/ today,” I sighed. Bored, I switched back to my IRC client.

Partyvan was one of several IRC networks dedicated to Anonymous and its various undertakings - undertakings which generally consisted of raids. A large percentage of these raids involved Tom Green in some way. If you don’t remember Tom Green, he’s the guy I’m not going to summarize at all because we’ve had enough biographical digressions already and, frankly, he’s no Hal Turner. Suffice to say that he eventually had an internet-based call-in show and we’ve already seen what happens to people who try to do that.

IRC had become increasingly central to organized raids. In 2006, 4chan's admins had sought to innoculate the site from legal liability by banning anything that could be viewed as a call to harassment. In 2007, 7chan's raid board, the aforementioned /i/, was shut down over similar concerns. Other chans rose and fell via similar processes. All the while, an ever-migrating population of online barbarians moved to and fro across the net, launching raids and sarcastically recording their pilgrimage on Encyclopedia Dramatica.

Some of these nomads eventually found a homeland at Partyvan. And so had I.

I had a couple of Partyvan channels open but hadn’t been paying attention; now I took a moment to follow a discussion on how best to vandalize Wikipedia articles.

Participant A: its called “The Normandy.”
Participant B: whats that
Participant A: you attack where they least expect. Wikipedos are always watching the controversial pages, and pages about notable politicians, that sort of thing
Participant C: yeah don’t fuck with anything involving Israel or Alex Jones
Participant A: And they’re on the lookout for conservatives who are trying to add a section on ‘Islamic heritage’ to Barack Obama’s page.
Participant D: brb, going to wikipedia
Participant A: plus they’re busy with pages on ‘evolution’ and ‘intelligent design.’ don’t fuck with those pages. they watch them like a hawk because there’s always some christfag who wants to add the line ‘evolution is an unproven theory’ to the very top.
Participant B: so what normandy have to do with this?
Participant A: the krauts didn’t expect amerifags to land at normandy
Participant B: so?
Participant A: remember that all the wikipedo admins are actually nazis. they can only be defeated like you defeat nazis
Participant D: with Russians
Participant C: but all the Russians are neo-Nazis
Participant A: No, no. Attack them at their vulnerable points. pages they don’t expect. pages on bread, or oatmeal.
Participant E: lolwut
Participant A: because you can vandalize those pages and the vandalism will stay up for years before anyone notices
Participant B: oic
Participant A: also remember to make your edit summary something that sounds valid and minor, like ‘fixing broken link’ or ‘added later developments’
Participant A: Something generic.
Participant F: Anyone know where the new fort longcat is in SL?
Participant C: The new one?
Participant F: yeah admins found last one and deleted it or whatever
Participant F: also banned people
Participant C: get the troll client
Participant F: I have it, back on already, just need fort coordinates
Participant B: private message me, I’ll give it to you, might be spiez here
Participant G: hey any of you guys seen the Tom Cruise video?
Participant A: what
Participant B: mission impossible: gay sex romp
Participant C: NO GUISE HE SAYS HE’S STRAIGHT
Participant E: scientology cured him of gay
Participant G: srsly, you guys should watch this now

A YouTube link was posted. I took a gander.

The clip in question had originally been shown, I gathered, at some sort of Scientology event. It was compiled of clips from a sit-down with Tom Cruise, who had long been the Church’s most prominent adherent. And here was Tom Cruise, giving an increasingly surreal monologue on the Church and its glories.

I think it’s a privilege to call yourself a Scientologist. It’s something you have to earn. Because a Scientologist does.

“Gold,” I thought. “Gold.”

He... or she... has the ability to create new and better realities and to improve conditions. Being a Scientologist, you look at someone and you know absolutely that you can help them.

“Jesus.”

So for me, it really is KSW.

“That’s probably some sort of wacky Scientology acronym. ‘Kaleidoscope Sans Wormhole.’”

It’s something - I don’t mince words with that. With anything!

The next minute or so is difficult to transcribe because the monologue becomes dependent on noises like, “whooo,” “phoo” and “hzt-pha.” Then:

When you drive past an accident, it’s not like anyone else. As you drive past, you know you have to do something about it, because you know you’re the only one who can really help!

“Magnificent.”

Orgs are there to help, okay, but we as, as else with the public, we have a responsibility, it’s not just the orgs, it’s not just Dave Muscaivage, it’s not just, it’s not just me, it’s you, it’s everyone out there, just re-reading KSW and seeing what needs to be done, and say, ‘Okay! Am I gonna do it or am I not gonna do it?’ Period! And am I gonna look at that guy or am I too afraid because I have my own out ethics to put in someone else’s ethics? And that’s all it comes down to. Because I won’t hesitate to put ethics into someone else. Because I put it ruthlessly in on myself.

“So... KSW is a book, then?”

We are the authorities on getting people off drugs. We are the authorities on the mind. We are the authorities on improving conditions. Crimanon. We can rehabilitate criminals. Way to happiness. We can bring peace, and, uh, unite cultures.

“Holy shit.”

Because now is the time now. Now is the time, okay? It is - being a Scientologist, people are turning to you. So you better know it. You better know it. And if you don’t - you know - go and learn it! [Laughs] You know? But don’t pretend you know it, for, whatever. It’s like, we’re here to help.

And then it just goes on like that.

Something had to be done. Something hilarious.

Across the internet, people were coming to the same conclusion.

**

The Church of Scientology and the internet had something of a history. Back in the mid-’90s, when Usenet message boards were still the rage, the organization’s lawyers had pursued legal action against one particular board, alt.religion.scientology. This came after someone had posted documents that the Church’s lawyers claimed to be “trade secrets.” Among other things, those documents spelled out the pseudo-secret doctrine taught to members only after they’d reach a certain level within the Church. And although this doctrine had been leaked before, it wasn’t commonly known - at least, not yet.

A funny thing happens when a given party tries to remove or censor information on the internet. Rather than preventing exposure, the removal attempt will guarantee it. The very act of identifying information as something forbidden or controversial or anything else of the sort makes that information widely attractive. Soon, reporters are all over it. And when the internet is involved, the reporters aren’t even necessarily a part of the equation.

There’s a name for this phenomenon - the Streisand effect. In 2003, Barbara Streisand got upset over pictures of her beachfront residence having been posted on some obscure corner of the internet as part of a project documenting coastal erosion. So she got her lawyers involved - at which time the picture had only been accessed 4 times. The word got out, and before long the picture had been viewed by several hundred thousand people who otherwise would never have given the residence much thought. Of course, this is an extreme case, because the term “Streisand effect” was coined as a result, and the term caught on, and eventually a Wikipedia page was created to describe the term. And at the top-right corner of that Wikipedia page is the very same picture of Barbara Streisand’s house. So even people like myself who never wanted to see this house in the first place are now forced to look at the fucking thing when we go to Wikipedia to see if Wikipedia has decided that “Streisand effect” warrants its own article. The internet is a treacherous place, you see.

The Church of Scientology didn’t have much more luck than Barbara Streisand’s attorneys did in suppressing the info they wanted suppressed. The Church’s secret doctrines were widely distributed after 1995. What’s more, Scientology had made itself a lot of enemies and done a significant degree of damage to its public image. Of course, they didn’t get a whole effect named after them, like poor Barbara Streisand did. But they did face one significant problem that Streisand didn’t. Whereas the picture of the beachfront property didn’t damage Streisand simply by getting out - being, after all, just a nice big house - the semi-secret doctrines that Scientology hoped to censor were a bit more problematic by virtue of being entirely insane.
 

On Tue, Mar 20, 2012 at 6:52 AM, Daniel Conaway <dconaway@writershouse.com> wrote:
Barrett, I have to be blunt here:  Chapter 3 is almost entirely garbage.  Last week Julia warned me that we were going to be in deep shit if what we turned in was a series of transcripts etc pieced together, and I assured her that she couldn't be more off base.  But in fact this chapter is a series of transcripts/chat-room recreations pieced together, interspliced with almost impenetrably dense, abstract, academic asides--smug, too, by the way.  Totally, totally off the mark--not just for Julia, Barrett, but for any OTHER publisher we might approach if Amazon were to turn this down and demand their money back.

Here's what's usable:  starting with "When I got out of prison in 2007, I needed a new hobby."  Go from there up into the first (but ONLY the first) "memes" riff, the Power Wrist scene.  Those pages, edited extensively (especially at the end of that section)?  We can use them.  But that's IT.  Everything else, Barrett, EVERYTHING, lacks context, lacks careful execution, and fails to even pretend to be told from Gregg's perspective.

I will send you the edits from this section that are usable.  But if this is representative of what you think is a nearly-usable first draft?  Turn in crap like this, AND late?  We are fucked, plain and simple.

________________________________
Dan Conaway
Literary Agent
Writers House



--
Regards,

Barrett Brown
940-735-9748