‘A Faint Whiff of Vigilante Hysteria’: Weinergate’s Kimberlin Connection : The Other McCain

FROM AN UNDISCLOSED LOCATION
The phrase quoted in the title is from a Firedoglake diarist who accurately calls the Brett Kimberlin story a “complex saga, as densely peopled and subplotted as a 19th century Russian novel.” While I resent the suggestion that I’m involved in any sort of “hysteria” — vigilante or otherwise — I’m linking the FDL diary because it offers a rather concise summary of how this story connects to the WeinerGate scandal.

As explained in a previous post, Neal Rauhauser’s involvement with Brett Kimberlin apparently began in 2011. In February of this year, Rauhauser published a bizarre eight-page document (“Andrew Breitbart’s ISR Cell?”) expressing the belief that he and Kimberlin were targets of a conspiracy involving Andrew Breitbart and many others, including Mike Stack, who played a key role in exposing Democrat Rep. Anthony Weiner’s online sexcapades.

Rauhauser is a fanatical “Weiner Truther,” believing in a conspiracy theory version of the WeinerGate scandal in which the congressman was the victim of a “set up” hoax perpetrated by Andrew Breitbart and/or shadowy Republican operatives. This left-wing tinfoil-hat stuff doesn’t really interest me, but it explains Rauhauser’s apparent obsession with Mike Stack, who is believed to be the only person who knows the true identity of “Dan Wolfe,” the guy who first spotted the incriminating Twitter message from Weiner. It also explains some other things, as reported by Rosie Gray at BuzzFeed in her story on the “Weiner Truthers”:

A major locus of modern Weiner trutherism is BreitbartUnmasked.com, a site “dedicated to unmasking the underbelly of Andrew Breitbart and his crew of rogues, criminals, wannabe journalists, various right wing extremists and the religious intolerant,” per its “About Us” section. Breitbart Unmasked features a large GIF of Breitbart’s face morphing into a mask, and lists the name of everyone in Breitbartworld, from editors of Breitbart.com to people only tangentially related.
One of its related Twitter accounts, @OccupyRebellion, regularly tweets about Weinergate and the alleged conspiracies therein. . . .
[Joseph Cannon observes:] These twilight warriors are obsessed with hacking and related matters. Some of them claim to have worked with Anonymous and LulzSec and allied organizations.

There is widespread suspicion that Brett Kimberlin is behind the “BreitbartUnmasked” site, which has access to information that could only have come from Kimberlin, and which is fixated on Kimberlin’s enemies to the exclusion of nearly everything else.

Now ask yourself: Why would hackers who claim affiliation with Anonymous and LulzSec be so obsessed with the WeinerGate scandal?

Rather than suggest an answer to that now, let’s trace back how it was that Kimberlin and Rauhauser became allies. In late 2009, the non-profit Velvet Revolution (a partnership between Kimberlin and blogger Brad Friedman) launched “StopTheChamber.com,” offering a $200,000 reward “for information leading to the arrest and conviction of Chamber of Commerce CEO Tom Donohue.” Fox News quoted a lawyer involved in that effort:

“On every issue, the Chamber is kind of the lead corporate advocate for the status quo,” said Kevin Zeese, a lawyer who sits on the board for Velvet Revolution, calling Donohue a “knee-jerk reactionary” and the Chamber a “right-wing extremist group.”

Liberal blogger Seth “Socrates” Allen noted at the time that he was suspicious of Friedman and Kimberlin’s bona fides, explaining that Velvet Revolution (VR) had previously raised money and gained publicity by offering rewards for proof of Republican vote fraud in the 2004 election, claiming that Karl Rove was part of a conspiracy to suppress such evidence. In September 2008, VR’s “Prosecute Rove” site urged its supporters:

Tell Congress to investigate Karl Rove’s cyber strategy to illegally manipulate elections. . . . [S]end an email to your Congress Members demanding immediate public hearings on whistleblower allegations that Rove architected and directed illegal attacks on Democratic candidates through the improper use of corporate funds channeled through fake Web-based front organizations, the improper political use of the Justice Department to prosecute opposition candidates, and the use of Internet based IT networks to alter election results.

Crazy? Sure. But notice something else from that site:

One of our targets is the US Chamber of Commerce which has spent close to a half billion dollars on lobbying since George Bush was inaugurated. The attorneys assert that Rove has used the Chamber to bankroll many of the illegal attacks using fake front groups posing as advocacy organizations.

The Chamber of Commerce, then, was a demonized scapegoat in VR’s rhetoric for many months prior to their offering a reward for “evidence” against the Chamber’s CEO.

Meanwhile, in September 2009, Breitbart had launched BigGovernment.com with the undercover ACORN “sting” videos by James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles. In July 2010, Kevin Zeese — the same Velvet Revolution lawyer who had called the Chamber of Commerce a “right-wing extremist group” — send a letter to Maryland authorities demanding the prosecution of O’Keefe and Giles.

On Oct. 11, 2010, Breitbart published Mandy “Liberty Chick” Nagy’s 3,600-word exposé of Kimberlin’s criminal background, “Progressives Embrace Convicted Terrorist.”

When Patterico published a post based on Nagy’s article, Kimberlin responded with an e-mail threatening to sue Patterico:

Please take this email as an intent to sue you for your Oct 11, 2010 post on Patterico.com which has defamed and libeled me. I have just sued Socrates on which you rely for cyber stalking, defamation, libel, violation of privacy and interference with business. Socrates has been banned from many sites and forums for stalking many people including me. He is under criminal investigation for cyber bullying and cyber stalking. By corresponding with him and relying on his defamatory posts, you are conspiring with him and are just as liable as he.

Notice that Kimberlin accuses Patterico of “conspiring with” Socrates (Seth Allen’s online moniker), even though Patterico’s post was based on reporting by Nagy, an experienced researcher who had cited multiple published sources, including accounts of Kimberlin’s crimes in the Indianapolis Star, a 2007 article by Time magazine’s Massimo Calabresi and Mark Singer’s 1996 book, Citizen K: The Deeply Weird American Journey of Brett Kimberlin.

On Dec. 2, 2010, Kimberlin’s Velvet Revolution announced a new site called “Indict Breitbart” with the avowed purpose “to seek accountability for the violations of criminal law committed by Andrew Breitbart, James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles.”

In February 2011, “Anonymous” hackers illegally obtained nearly 70,000 e-mails from HBGary, a security firm that had been working with two other firms to prepare a proposal to help the U.S. Chamber of Commerce fight its critics, including Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks. The contract was never awarded and the HBGary plan was never implemented, but the e-mails revealed suggestions of what Andy Greenberg of Forbes called “Nixonesque tactics.” One of the hacked e-mails, sent in November 2010 from HBGary’s Aaron Barr to Patrick Ryan of Berrico Technologies, included a link to Mandy Nagy’s article about Kimberlin with the note, “We could do so much with this.”

Nagy discussed the HBGary hacking in a Feb. 14, 2011, post at Breitbart, as did Patterico at his site. Rauhauser has described himself as a “hacker,” and in 2011 Rauhauser (blogging as “Stranded Wind” at Daily Kos) started showing interest in the “Anonymous” hackers and their targets at the Chamber and HBGary:

• Feb. 28, 2011: Congressman Johnson Goes After Chamber Leaks
• March 23, 2011: Aspects Of Anonymous
• April 6, 2011: Anonthropology: Native Dialect
• April 25, 2011: Apple & HBGary : Spying Together
• May 19, 2011: Is Berico Sheltering Aaron Barr?

Meanwhile, in a May 25 post at Daily Kos — two days before the WeinerGate scandal broke — we find Rauhauser linking Kimberlin’s “Indict Breitbart” site, and boasting that Breitbart had responded to him on Twitter. A few days later, Rauhauser began blogging constantly about Weiner at Daily Kos:

• May 30, 2011: CNN Spreads Latest Breitbart Smear
• June 1, 2011: CNN Knew Breitbart Was Lying
• June 2, 2011: Bringing Breitbart (And Thomas) To Justice (Action Alert!)
• June 3, 2011: Punishing Breitbart’s Enablers
• June 4, 2011: Daily Crawler Smears Markos Over My Weinergate Coverage
• June 4, 2011: Breaking: Christian Infowar Militia Attacked Congressman Weiner
• June 4, 2011: Christian Infowar Militia: Wrecking Crew

Rauhauser consistently promoted the hoax-hack theory of the WeinerGate scandal, continuing to argue that Weiner had been the victim of some devious hacker, even after Weiner admitted his guilt and resigned from office. Rauhauser also repeatedly linked Kimberlin’s “Indict Breitbart” site and, along the way, made several interesting statements. For example, in his May 30 post, Rauhauser bragged about having FBI connections:

OK, kids, in addition to being a mouthy blogger I’m also an Infragard member and my day job gets me occasional meetings with the FBI. I just called the agent for my district who covers cybercrime and we need to get this muddle distilled down for him.

In his June 2 post, Rauhauser offered this bizarre claim:

Congressman Anthony Weiner was stalked, set up, smeared, and this was coordinated to protect Clarence Thomas from scrutiny.

What did Rauhauser link? A petition by Kimberlin’s Velvet Revolution demanding impeachment and prosecution of Justice Thomas.

In his June 3 post, Rauhauser invokes two of his Twitter nemeses and threatens to get Dana Loesch fired from CNN:

When you read this, Ms. Loesch, and I know you will, I have a personal request for you. Go get with discredited, disorganized dullards @SwiftRead and @GregWHoward of Twittergate fame, and then show me those pretty, pouty lips of yours saying my name on PJTV again. That’s the only TV outlet you are gonna have, honey, because we’re going to make it impossible for CNN to keep you …

Uh, “Twittergate fame”? The MSM never covered TwitterGate, the 2010 episode in which Rauhauser was accused of organizing a crew of online thugs to harass Tea Party activists on Twitter, and so the “fame” of the participants exists only in Neal Rauhauser’s warped mind — but there seem to be a lot of things that exist only in Neal Rauhauser’s warped mind, eh? Right-wing super-hackers who can hijack a congressman’s Blackberry to send pictures of the congressman’s wang over Twitter as part of a genius scheme to protect Clarence Thomas, for example. Also, the “Christian Infowar Militia“:

Congressman Weiner was stalked and set up by a Christian Infowar Militia cell based largely in Oklahoma City.

I’m sure residents of Oklahoma City were deeply alarmed to discover that this particular figment of Neal Rauhauser’s depraved imagination was located in their midst. The “Christian Infowar Militia cell” delusion eventually faded, however, as Rauhauser’s attention focused on the real villain of WeinerGate: Los Angeles deputy district attorney Patrick “Patterico” Frey!

• July 4: Weinergate: Patterico’s Penalization
• July 4: Disingenuous Chart, Dishonest D.A. (Weinergate)
• July 17: Weinergate: Patterico’s Petulance
• July 19: Patterico’s Personal Pipsqueak
• July 23: In Which Patterico Imperils Breitbart
• July 25: Patterico’s Prattling Puppets

By July 27, 2011, Rauhauser declared that Patterico “looks to be a pretty good candidate for the planner/operator behind Weinergate.”

Patterico had been one of Kimberlin’s prime targets since October 2010, and by late July 2011, Rauhauser was using his DailyKos diary to attack Patterico every other day. If you’ll read Rauhauser’s July 4 post, you’ll find that this isn’t exactly a coincidence:

Who has been in sight, frantically flogging explanations that don’t add up, is Los Angeles County Deputy District Attorney John Patrick Frey . . .
And when someone forwarded me the complaint regarding Frey running a cyberstalking campaign in conjunction with South Easton, Massachusetts resident Seth L. Allen, well, maybe this whole situation is about to become much clearer.

Click. Three days later, on July 7, Rauhauser announces on DKos his plan to move from Illinois to Washington, D.C., for a job that would “provide for me more in a week than I make for a whole month at my part time day job here in Illinois.” And in October 2011, Rauhauser described himself as doing “protective service work” for a client who is “the head of a Washington D.C. NGO.”

This description fits Kimberlin, whose 501(c)3 Justice Through Music Project has collected about $1.8 million in contributions since its founding in 2005. In December 20, 2011, Seth Allen himself made that connection in a post titled, “Sadistic Cybersmearing and the Roots of Blogging Fascism.”

Having pointed out all these dots in the pattern, do I really need to connect them for the perceptive reader? Rauhauser’s February conspiracy-theory treatise (“Andrew Breitbart’s ISR Cell?”) shows his ongoing obsession with the HBGary “Anonymous” hacking as well as WeinerGate– and the “Weiner Truthers” at the “Breitbart Unmasked” site are “obsessed with hacking and related matters.”

Kimberlin has been targeting Patterico since October 2010, and it was evidently Rauhauser’s anti-Patterico blogging that brought him into Kimberlin’s orbit so that, by October 2011, Rauhauser seemed to be describing Kimberlin as his client.

As Investors Business Daily reporter David Hogberg observed at Aaron Walker’s hearing last week, Rauhauser is now accompanying convicted felon Brett Kimberlin to court.

Another coincidence: What do “SWATting” victims Patterico and Mike Stack have in common, other than the fact that, as Patterico himself notes, Rauhauser hates their guts?

Is Rauhauser being paid by Brett Kimberlin — with proceeds from tax-exempt non-profits — to pursue these vendettas?

Back in October 2010, when his “beandogs” scheme was blowing up in his face, Rauhauser boasted that he is armed with a pistol. Is it really wise to leave such a man, clearly obsessed with getting revenge on his enemies, running around with a firearm?

Far be it from me to encourage “vigilante hysteria,” but if Rauhauser and Kimberlin aren’t under investigation by the FBI yet, why not?

– Robert Stacy McCain, Whereabouts Unknown

via theothermccain.com

‘A Faint Whiff of Vigilante Hysteria’: Weinergate’s Kimberlin Connection : The Other McCain

FROM AN UNDISCLOSED LOCATION
The phrase quoted in the title is from a Firedoglake diarist who accurately calls the Brett Kimberlin story a “complex saga, as densely peopled and subplotted as a 19th century Russian novel.” While I resent the suggestion that I’m involved in any sort of “hysteria” — vigilante or otherwise — I’m linking the FDL diary because it offers a rather concise summary of how this story connects to the WeinerGate scandal.

As explained in a previous post, Neal Rauhauser’s involvement with Brett Kimberlin apparently began in 2011. In February of this year, Rauhauser published a bizarre eight-page document (“Andrew Breitbart’s ISR Cell?”) expressing the belief that he and Kimberlin were targets of a conspiracy involving Andrew Breitbart and many others, including Mike Stack, who played a key role in exposing Democrat Rep. Anthony Weiner’s online sexcapades.

Rauhauser is a fanatical “Weiner Truther,” believing in a conspiracy theory version of the WeinerGate scandal in which the congressman was the victim of a “set up” hoax perpetrated by Andrew Breitbart and/or shadowy Republican operatives. This left-wing tinfoil-hat stuff doesn’t really interest me, but it explains Rauhauser’s apparent obsession with Mike Stack, who is believed to be the only person who knows the true identity of “Dan Wolfe,” the guy who first spotted the incriminating Twitter message from Weiner. It also explains some other things, as reported by Rosie Gray at BuzzFeed in her story on the “Weiner Truthers”:

A major locus of modern Weiner trutherism is BreitbartUnmasked.com, a site “dedicated to unmasking the underbelly of Andrew Breitbart and his crew of rogues, criminals, wannabe journalists, various right wing extremists and the religious intolerant,” per its “About Us” section. Breitbart Unmasked features a large GIF of Breitbart’s face morphing into a mask, and lists the name of everyone in Breitbartworld, from editors of Breitbart.com to people only tangentially related.
One of its related Twitter accounts, @OccupyRebellion, regularly tweets about Weinergate and the alleged conspiracies therein. . . .
[Joseph Cannon observes:] These twilight warriors are obsessed with hacking and related matters. Some of them claim to have worked with Anonymous and LulzSec and allied organizations.

There is widespread suspicion that Brett Kimberlin is behind the “BreitbartUnmasked” site, which has access to information that could only have come from Kimberlin, and which is fixated on Kimberlin’s enemies to the exclusion of nearly everything else.

Now ask yourself: Why would hackers who claim affiliation with Anonymous and LulzSec be so obsessed with the WeinerGate scandal?

Rather than suggest an answer to that now, let’s trace back how it was that Kimberlin and Rauhauser became allies. In late 2009, the non-profit Velvet Revolution (a partnership between Kimberlin and blogger Brad Friedman) launched “StopTheChamber.com,” offering a $200,000 reward “for information leading to the arrest and conviction of Chamber of Commerce CEO Tom Donohue.” Fox News quoted a lawyer involved in that effort:

“On every issue, the Chamber is kind of the lead corporate advocate for the status quo,” said Kevin Zeese, a lawyer who sits on the board for Velvet Revolution, calling Donohue a “knee-jerk reactionary” and the Chamber a “right-wing extremist group.”

Liberal blogger Seth “Socrates” Allen noted at the time that he was suspicious of Friedman and Kimberlin’s bona fides, explaining that Velvet Revolution (VR) had previously raised money and gained publicity by offering rewards for proof of Republican vote fraud in the 2004 election, claiming that Karl Rove was part of a conspiracy to suppress such evidence. In September 2008, VR’s “Prosecute Rove” site urged its supporters:

Tell Congress to investigate Karl Rove’s cyber strategy to illegally manipulate elections. . . . [S]end an email to your Congress Members demanding immediate public hearings on whistleblower allegations that Rove architected and directed illegal attacks on Democratic candidates through the improper use of corporate funds channeled through fake Web-based front organizations, the improper political use of the Justice Department to prosecute opposition candidates, and the use of Internet based IT networks to alter election results.

Crazy? Sure. But notice something else from that site:

One of our targets is the US Chamber of Commerce which has spent close to a half billion dollars on lobbying since George Bush was inaugurated. The attorneys assert that Rove has used the Chamber to bankroll many of the illegal attacks using fake front groups posing as advocacy organizations.

The Chamber of Commerce, then, was a demonized scapegoat in VR’s rhetoric for many months prior to their offering a reward for “evidence” against the Chamber’s CEO.

Meanwhile, in September 2009, Breitbart had launched BigGovernment.com with the undercover ACORN “sting” videos by James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles. In July 2010, Kevin Zeese — the same Velvet Revolution lawyer who had called the Chamber of Commerce a “right-wing extremist group” — send a letter to Maryland authorities demanding the prosecution of O’Keefe and Giles.

On Oct. 11, 2010, Breitbart published Mandy “Liberty Chick” Nagy’s 3,600-word exposé of Kimberlin’s criminal background, “Progressives Embrace Convicted Terrorist.”

When Patterico published a post based on Nagy’s article, Kimberlin responded with an e-mail threatening to sue Patterico:

Please take this email as an intent to sue you for your Oct 11, 2010 post on Patterico.com which has defamed and libeled me. I have just sued Socrates on which you rely for cyber stalking, defamation, libel, violation of privacy and interference with business. Socrates has been banned from many sites and forums for stalking many people including me. He is under criminal investigation for cyber bullying and cyber stalking. By corresponding with him and relying on his defamatory posts, you are conspiring with him and are just as liable as he.

Notice that Kimberlin accuses Patterico of “conspiring with” Socrates (Seth Allen’s online moniker), even though Patterico’s post was based on reporting by Nagy, an experienced researcher who had cited multiple published sources, including accounts of Kimberlin’s crimes in the Indianapolis Star, a 2007 article by Time magazine’s Massimo Calabresi and Mark Singer’s 1996 book, Citizen K: The Deeply Weird American Journey of Brett Kimberlin.

On Dec. 2, 2010, Kimberlin’s Velvet Revolution announced a new site called “Indict Breitbart” with the avowed purpose “to seek accountability for the violations of criminal law committed by Andrew Breitbart, James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles.”

In February 2011, “Anonymous” hackers illegally obtained nearly 70,000 e-mails from HBGary, a security firm that had been working with two other firms to prepare a proposal to help the U.S. Chamber of Commerce fight its critics, including Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks. The contract was never awarded and the HBGary plan was never implemented, but the e-mails revealed suggestions of what Andy Greenberg of Forbes called “Nixonesque tactics.” One of the hacked e-mails, sent in November 2010 from HBGary’s Aaron Barr to Patrick Ryan of Berrico Technologies, included a link to Mandy Nagy’s article about Kimberlin with the note, “We could do so much with this.”

Nagy discussed the HBGary hacking in a Feb. 14, 2011, post at Breitbart, as did Patterico at his site. Rauhauser has described himself as a “hacker,” and in 2011 Rauhauser (blogging as “Stranded Wind” at Daily Kos) started showing interest in the “Anonymous” hackers and their targets at the Chamber and HBGary:

• Feb. 28, 2011: Congressman Johnson Goes After Chamber Leaks
• March 23, 2011: Aspects Of Anonymous
• April 6, 2011: Anonthropology: Native Dialect
• April 25, 2011: Apple & HBGary : Spying Together
• May 19, 2011: Is Berico Sheltering Aaron Barr?

Meanwhile, in a May 25 post at Daily Kos — two days before the WeinerGate scandal broke — we find Rauhauser linking Kimberlin’s “Indict Breitbart” site, and boasting that Breitbart had responded to him on Twitter. A few days later, Rauhauser began blogging constantly about Weiner at Daily Kos:

• May 30, 2011: CNN Spreads Latest Breitbart Smear
• June 1, 2011: CNN Knew Breitbart Was Lying
• June 2, 2011: Bringing Breitbart (And Thomas) To Justice (Action Alert!)
• June 3, 2011: Punishing Breitbart’s Enablers
• June 4, 2011: Daily Crawler Smears Markos Over My Weinergate Coverage
• June 4, 2011: Breaking: Christian Infowar Militia Attacked Congressman Weiner
• June 4, 2011: Christian Infowar Militia: Wrecking Crew

Rauhauser consistently promoted the hoax-hack theory of the WeinerGate scandal, continuing to argue that Weiner had been the victim of some devious hacker, even after Weiner admitted his guilt and resigned from office. Rauhauser also repeatedly linked Kimberlin’s “Indict Breitbart” site and, along the way, made several interesting statements. For example, in his May 30 post, Rauhauser bragged about having FBI connections:

OK, kids, in addition to being a mouthy blogger I’m also an Infragard member and my day job gets me occasional meetings with the FBI. I just called the agent for my district who covers cybercrime and we need to get this muddle distilled down for him.

In his June 2 post, Rauhauser offered this bizarre claim:

Congressman Anthony Weiner was stalked, set up, smeared, and this was coordinated to protect Clarence Thomas from scrutiny.

What did Rauhauser link? A petition by Kimberlin’s Velvet Revolution demanding impeachment and prosecution of Justice Thomas.

In his June 3 post, Rauhauser invokes two of his Twitter nemeses and threatens to get Dana Loesch fired from CNN:

When you read this, Ms. Loesch, and I know you will, I have a personal request for you. Go get with discredited, disorganized dullards @SwiftRead and @GregWHoward of Twittergate fame, and then show me those pretty, pouty lips of yours saying my name on PJTV again. That’s the only TV outlet you are gonna have, honey, because we’re going to make it impossible for CNN to keep you …

Uh, “Twittergate fame”? The MSM never covered TwitterGate, the 2010 episode in which Rauhauser was accused of organizing a crew of online thugs to harass Tea Party activists on Twitter, and so the “fame” of the participants exists only in Neal Rauhauser’s warped mind — but there seem to be a lot of things that exist only in Neal Rauhauser’s warped mind, eh? Right-wing super-hackers who can hijack a congressman’s Blackberry to send pictures of the congressman’s wang over Twitter as part of a genius scheme to protect Clarence Thomas, for example. Also, the “Christian Infowar Militia“:

Congressman Weiner was stalked and set up by a Christian Infowar Militia cell based largely in Oklahoma City.

I’m sure residents of Oklahoma City were deeply alarmed to discover that this particular figment of Neal Rauhauser’s depraved imagination was located in their midst. The “Christian Infowar Militia cell” delusion eventually faded, however, as Rauhauser’s attention focused on the real villain of WeinerGate: Los Angeles deputy district attorney Patrick “Patterico” Frey!

• July 4: Weinergate: Patterico’s Penalization
• July 4: Disingenuous Chart, Dishonest D.A. (Weinergate)
• July 17: Weinergate: Patterico’s Petulance
• July 19: Patterico’s Personal Pipsqueak
• July 23: In Which Patterico Imperils Breitbart
• July 25: Patterico’s Prattling Puppets

By July 27, 2011, Rauhauser declared that Patterico “looks to be a pretty good candidate for the planner/operator behind Weinergate.”

Patterico had been one of Kimberlin’s prime targets since October 2010, and by late July 2011, Rauhauser was using his DailyKos diary to attack Patterico every other day. If you’ll read Rauhauser’s July 4 post, you’ll find that this isn’t exactly a coincidence:

Who has been in sight, frantically flogging explanations that don’t add up, is Los Angeles County Deputy District Attorney John Patrick Frey . . .
And when someone forwarded me the complaint regarding Frey running a cyberstalking campaign in conjunction with South Easton, Massachusetts resident Seth L. Allen, well, maybe this whole situation is about to become much clearer.

Click. Three days later, on July 7, Rauhauser announces on DKos his plan to move from Illinois to Washington, D.C., for a job that would “provide for me more in a week than I make for a whole month at my part time day job here in Illinois.” And in October 2011, Rauhauser described himself as doing “protective service work” for a client who is “the head of a Washington D.C. NGO.”

This description fits Kimberlin, whose 501(c)3 Justice Through Music Project has collected about $1.8 million in contributions since its founding in 2005. In December 20, 2011, Seth Allen himself made that connection in a post titled, “Sadistic Cybersmearing and the Roots of Blogging Fascism.”

Having pointed out all these dots in the pattern, do I really need to connect them for the perceptive reader? Rauhauser’s February conspiracy-theory treatise (“Andrew Breitbart’s ISR Cell?”) shows his ongoing obsession with the HBGary “Anonymous” hacking as well as WeinerGate– and the “Weiner Truthers” at the “Breitbart Unmasked” site are “obsessed with hacking and related matters.”

Kimberlin has been targeting Patterico since October 2010, and it was evidently Rauhauser’s anti-Patterico blogging that brought him into Kimberlin’s orbit so that, by October 2011, Rauhauser seemed to be describing Kimberlin as his client.

As Investors Business Daily reporter David Hogberg observed at Aaron Walker’s hearing last week, Rauhauser is now accompanying convicted felon Brett Kimberlin to court.

Another coincidence: What do “SWATting” victims Patterico and Mike Stack have in common, other than the fact that, as Patterico himself notes, Rauhauser hates their guts?

Is Rauhauser being paid by Brett Kimberlin — with proceeds from tax-exempt non-profits — to pursue these vendettas?

Back in October 2010, when his “beandogs” scheme was blowing up in his face, Rauhauser boasted that he is armed with a pistol. Is it really wise to leave such a man, clearly obsessed with getting revenge on his enemies, running around with a firearm?

Far be it from me to encourage “vigilante hysteria,” but if Rauhauser and Kimberlin aren’t under investigation by the FBI yet, why not?

– Robert Stacy McCain, Whereabouts Unknown

via theothermccain.com

Patterico’s Pontifications » Neal Rauhauser [one year to the after SWAT

Brett Kimberlin Associate “Gaped Crusader” — And the Evidence Connecting Him to Neal Rauhauser

Filed under: Brad Friedman,Brett Kimberlin,General,Neal Rauhauser —
Patterico @
12:00 am

“Facts don’t matter, that’s the perception of the situation, and the world is going to act on that basis.” — The “Gaped Crusader,” November 26, 2011.

In December 2011, an anonymous Brett Kimberlin supporter calling himself the “Gaped Crusader” boasted of the harassment of five people. Two of them, Mike Stack and myself, were SWATting victims in late June and early July 2011:

The targets include Brett Kimberlin critics and SWATting victims.

The methods include “outing” people’s identities; posting their home addresses; and creating (phony) civil and criminal liability. The Gaped Crusader attributes each atrocity to Neal Rauhauser or his associate Brett Kimberlin (who runs the Occupy for Accountability blog that published pictures of my house).

The Gaped Crusader thought he was making these observations anonymously. But he made mistakes, many of which are listed in this post — which reveals extensive evidence connecting the Gaped Crusader to Brett Kimberlin associate Neal Rauhauser.

The evidence includes (among other things) common topics of obsession; common unique catch phrases; admission by both of a particular trip at a particular time; characteristic method of formatting emails; and my personal favorite: a shared IP address.

IP ADDRESS

Normally I’d show you all the other similarities before I showed you the IP evidence, but the IP evidence discussion really helps reveal this guy’s true nature, right out of the gate — because it shows the “Gaped Crusader” talking about my wife.

Here are three comments the “Gaped Crusader” left on my site:

Note the middle comment, linking a post about my wife, and promising it is the first of many. Here is the post titled “Mrs. Patterico”:

The link to “Christi Frey” goes to a press release at the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s web site, detailing a case that was handled by my wife. This link shows that the “Gaped Crusader” had investigated my wife.

The words “nice house” link to our address. That shows that the “Gaped Crusader” had investigated our home address.

Take a look at that IP address that this creep used to leave comments on my blog: 67.221.255.15.

Neal Rauhauser used that IP address to leave a comment at the “Qritiq” blog. The “Qritiq” blog is pro-Rauhauser and pro-Kimberlin, and is filled with lies, defamation, and anti-Patterico sock puppets. Yesterday she published a post advising people about where they could complain about me to my office. Qritiq has called Rauhauser her “hero.” Rauhauser probably felt perfectly safe posting there.

What he didn’t realize is that the proprietor had given posting privileges to SWATting victim Mike Stack. And, because Stack had administrative privileges over his own posts, comments left on his posts were emailed to Stack — including IP addresses.

Whoops! Looks like you messed up, Neal!

This is a screenshot of an email that Stack forwarded to me in December 2011, with the information on Neal’s IP address:

Let’s take a closer look at that IP address:

Let’s look at those together:

I took the IP — 67.221.255.15 — and plugged it into my comment software . . . and found comments from the Gaped Crusader.

As Tyler Durden might say: I am Patterico’s complete lack of surprise.

Because those of us who had watched Neal for months already strongly suspected that the Gaped Crusader was Neal Rauhauser. Because there is so much other evidence tying Rauhauser to the vile Gaped Crusader account.

NEAL RAUHAUSER’S TOPICS OF OBSESSION

Let’s look at that “Mrs. Patterico” post above. See how the Gaped Crusader said that Steve Cooley’s 2010 political opponent should prosecute me for various unnamed alleged crimes? Steve Cooley’s 2010 opponent was Kamala Harris, the Attorney General of California. And guess who also urged people to ask Kamala Harris to investigate me? If you guessed Neal Rauhauser, you’re paying attention!

On July 12, 2011, Rauhauser encouraged Daily Kos readers to file complaints against me with California Attorney General Kamala Harris.

The “California Supreme Court Complaint” in question is Brett Kimberlin’s frivolous State Bar Complaint against me — a complaint which (among other things) accused me of discriminating against the disabled by writing about Kimberlin’s status as a felon, which he claims is a “disability.” I am told Rauhauser’s associate Kimberlin filed frivolous criminal charges against me with Kamala Harris.

Odd how the Gaped Crusader (and Kimberlin) share Rauhauser’s belief that I should be prosecuted by Kamala Harris.

Rauhauser also shared the Gaped Crusader’s creepy focus on my wife. Three days after I was swatted, Rauhauser wrote a post titled “Patterico’s Penalization” that made bizarre accusations about me, claiming I “worked with a cyber-stalker named Seth L. Allen.” In that post, Rauhauser publicized Kimberlin’s State Bar complaint against me — and asked readers to get a picture of my wife. Rauhauser also suggested that a private detective stake out Seth Allen’s apartment:

But Rauhauser and the Gaped Crusader were obsessed with more than just my wife, or getting Kamala Harris to prosecute me. Let’s focus on the screenshot that opened up this post, and look at the Gaped Crusader’s targets in that disturbing post:

The names there are Mike Stack, Seth Allen, me, Aaron Walker/Worthing, and Sean Tompkins (who I believe is an online acquaintance of Stack’s). It turns out Neal Rauhauser is obsessed with the very same people.

Robert Stacy McCain and I have both previously posted about a bizarre, paranoid rant that Neal Rauhauser sent to law enforcement officials, making crazy allegations about an “ISR cell” (ISR stands for “Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance”) supposedly headed by Andrew Breitbart. Here (.pdf) Rauhauser explains the contents of the nutty CD that he sent to law enforcement:

Look at the objects of Rauhauser’s obsession. You’ll recognize the same names from the Gaped Crusader screenshot: Mike Stack, Seth Allen, Patrick Frey (me), Aaron Walker aka Aaron Worthing, and Sean Tompkins.

Rauhauser hates Mike Stack so much, he sent Stack a cease and desist letter — addressed, as it happens, to 30 Mallard Court, Three Bridges, New Jersey.

Above: two screenshots from the beginning and end of a letter from Neal Rauhauser to Mike Stack

That is not Mike Stack’s address. But it is the address that Mike Stack’s SWATter gave New Jersey police in Stack’s June 23, 2011 SWATting call.

Let’s look at some of the other names on Rauhauser’s Enemies List — people he hates enough to mention in a CD sent to law enforcement attempting to implicate them in phony crimes. As you can see, those names include (among others) HB Gary (which was headed by Aaron Barr); Rauhauser’s Twittergate enemy Michelle Lessick aka ZAPEM; and a guy named Tom Ryan.

Was the Gaped Crusader obsessed with any of these other enemies of Neal Rauhauser’s? If you guessed “yes,” that means you’re really getting the hang of this! Here is a screenshot with complaints about Stack, me, Sean Tompkins, HB Gary and Aaron Barr, Tom Ryan, and Aaron Worthing:

Here’s another post that falsely claims that Aaron Barr and Tom Ryan “coordinate” with me:

For the record, I have never met, spoken with, or corresponded with Aaron Barr or Tom Ryan in my life.

As for ZAPEM/Lessick, the Gaped Crusader mentioned her in a post that also mentioned Seth Allen, Stack, me, Kamala Harris, and Steve Cooley:

That post, dated December 16, starts out mentioning a John Dean column about cyberbullies:

Which is interesting, since Neal Rauhauser mentioned the very same article on the same day, in a comment at the Qritiq blog:

Rauhauser later said he was so taken with the article that he made notes on it.

It’s also important to note that, like the Gaped Crusader, Rauhauser is obsessed with Weinergate. This is important, because SWATting victim Mike Stack was never much of a Brett Kimberlin critic, but he was a high-profile participant in the monitoring of Anthony Weiner’s Twitter account, and frequently noted Weiner’s penchant for following young girls with that account. Last summer, I also had a significant role in various stories having to do with Weiner’s communications with young women. Indeed, before I was SWATted, I was threatened by email, and the threat ostensibly had to do with my publication of Weiner’s communications with Gennette Cordova. That email was sent to me (and Ace of Spades) the same night Mike Stack was SWATted: June 23, 2011.

And Neal Rauhauser, like the Gaped Crusader, is a “Weiner Truther” who has insinuated that I was behind a plot to bring down Anthony Weiner. Just look again at the screenshot above asking people to have Kamala Harris investigate me for my alleged “involvement in the stalking of Congressman Weiner.”

BOTH CLAIMED I CUT A DEAL FOR PHONY IDS IN WEINERGATE

Indeed, the Gaped Crusader and Rauhauser don’t just share a generalized theory that I was somehow behind a set-up of Anthony Weiner. They both have a specific theory about what I did — and the theory is the same for both of them.

At the Daily Kos, Rauhauser speculated that I arranged for the fake driver’s license used by the alleged mother of Nikki Reid:

The fake driver’s license employed by Pamela Reid, the fake mom of the fake teenage girl Nikki aka @starchild111, was from California. Presumably a Deputy D.A. from that area, where immigration problems are common, would know and perhaps be engaged in plea bargains with people who can manufacture documents.

Similarly, the Gaped Crusader speculated:

Would a Los Angeles county prosecutor have seen a driver’s license forging case or two? Probably. Could they cut some nice deal for a third time offender, say getting a license and a woman to voice Patricia Reid so they could set up Tommy Christoper to take the fall for the fake teen girl entrapment effort? Yeah, that sounds doable, doesn’t it?

MORE OBSESSION WITH WEINER AND KIMBERLIN CRITICS

And again, in a post titled “Straight Outta Compton,” the Gaped Crusader once again talked about Kamala Harris, Steve Cooley, Aaron Worthing, me, Seth Allen . . . and Anthony Weiner. See here, here, and here:

It isn’t hard to imagine former Congressman Anthony Weiner sitting at home with his lovely wife Huma Abedin, not saying anything, but with a grim little smile on his face as he watches all this unfold.

Similarly, in a post called “Free Speech and Accountability” we see this:

The Gaped Crusader also mentioned the “Threat Management Unit” — another name for the District Attorney’s “Stalking and Threat Assessment Team,” or STAT. This came up in a post again mentioning Steve Cooley:

Note again the constant accusations that I was involved in “stalking” and “smearing” Brett Kimberlin (a partner in Velvet Revolution) and Anthony Weiner. But right now I am interested in the mention of our stalking unit. Because Brett Kimberlin filed a complaint against me with our stalking unit. And that unit was a particular obsession of Neal Rauhauser’s.

Guess who else mentioned the same team? Alicia Pain, the person who threatened me before I was SWATted:

Well what can I say? If you really want to bring me to justice, I encourage you to do so. Here is the best number to call: Stalking and Threat Assessment Team (STAT)
Inside line: X[redacted] or (213) 974-[redacted].

A comment by “OccupyOngsHat” at the Qritiq blog encouraged Qritiq to report me to the same anti-stalking unit. The commenter claimed that this would result in “lulzy lulz”:

Oddly enough, the comment was left using the same IP used by the Gaped Crusader and Neal Rauhauser: 67.221.255.15:

CHARACTERISTIC PHRASES

The Gaped Crusader, like Rauhauser himself, loves to speak in the idiom of 4chan-style hackers. Everything is “epic” and “lulzy” and there are a billion references to “lulzcows” and Encyclopedia Dramatica and the like.

Even in this blizzard of inanity, a couple of comparisons stand out for me.

“THE BUTTHURT IS FLOWING THICK AND FAST”

In one post, the Gaped Crusader said the “butthurt is flowing thick and fast”:

That’s not a real common phrase. Yet, in a post as Stranded Wind at Daily Kos, Rauhauser said “the butthurt is flowing thick and fast”:

Note who is named as having “paid dearly” for their role as “Weinergate perps”: me and Mike Stack.

The two SWATting victims from 2011.

I should note here that a) Stranded Wind is a well-known alias for Rauhauser, and b) this Stranded Wind post was published on July 27, 2011 — long before my SWATting was made public. (I mentioned it publicly weeks ago, and even Ron Brynaert did not mention it in public until August 2011.)

By the way, Rauhauser could not avoid talking like a teenaged hacker even in the materials he sent to law enforcement. In the “ReadMe” text document included to explain the contents of the disk, Rauhauser wrote things like this:

Swatting call – purportedly someone swatting Mike Stack. Google this, lots of butthurt flowing, claims he was cuffed at gun point?

You can just picture an FBI agent interviewing Neal: tell me more about the “epic lulz” and the “butthurt,” Mr. Rauhauser.

IRON TROLL/MENTION OF 4CHAN, SOMETHING AWFUL, AND ENCLOPEDIA DRAMATICA — IN THAT ORDER

In Rauhauser’s complaint to law enforcement about alleged harassment by Mike Stack, he mentions a harassment contest called “Iron Troll”:

This account, with some sixty thousand followers, is a major news outlet for Anonymous. It should be noted that the Anonymous community is currently running “Iron Troll” – a contest involving computer, phone, and real life pranks.

The Gaped Crusader also mentioned “Iron Troll” in a post titled “Getting Kamala Harris After Porn Mooks”:

That alone isn’t much — but it gets more interesting.

Take a look at Gaped Crusader’s mention of 4chan, Something Awful, and Encyclopedia Dramatica, in that order — and then reflect on an email recently published at The Trenches that Rauhauser wrote to lefty Twitter activist Shoq:

I have been sorely tempted to point him out to various actors – a guy like this, he could really produce some high quality entertainment for 4chan, Something Awful, Encyclopedia Dramatica, etc.

Weird, huh? Even weirder is that Rauhauser listed these three entities in exactly this order as Stranded Wind, back in June 2011:

Anonymous doesn’t have a tree structure, it’s a loose coalition of warring tribes. Each node has its own culture and methods.

Some of them are from 4chan, some from Something Awful, some from Encyclopedia Dramatica, and a few dozen other sites that are less well known.

Hmmmm.

TALKING ABOUT MY “DISCHARGE”

4chan hackers don’t commonly use the term “discharge” to refer to someone being fired. But both the Gaped Crusader and Rauhauser fantasized about the “discharge” of yours truly.

In a July 4, 2011 entry titled “Patterico’s Penalization” (published 3 days after my SWATting), Rauhauser wrote:

Discharge, disbarment, and public ridicule ought to be Frey’s lot in life if what appears to be going on, based on this small analysis, is truly the explanation for the events surrounding Weinergate.

Similarly, in late November 2011, the Gaped Crusader was very excited about the possibility of “discharge” and (he believed) impending criminal charges for me:

Can discharge and criminal charges be imminent for Los Angeles assclown D.A. John Patrick Frey?

Hmmmmmmmmmm.

CALLING ME “PADDY”

Neal, writing as Stranded Wind, enjoyed calling me “Paddy” as he threatened me:

Above: Writing at Daily Kos, Rauhauser suggests I should be harassed online.

Oddly enough, so did the Gaped Crusader, in a post talking about subpoenaing my boss Steve Cooley to ask him questions about my blogging:

Or this post, which called me the “capodecina of the Breitbart crime family” — and once again called me “Paddy”:

Incidentally, the term “lulzcow,” used by Rauhauser in that creepily threatening post from the Daily Kos in July 2011, was also used by the Gaped Crusader:

There’s just one “tell” after another, isn’t there?

USE OF ROMANIAN

On November 21, 2011, OccupyOngsHat rendered the Anonymous slogan in Romanian:

The Gaped Crusader blog has Romanian all over it:

Neal at Occupy the House talked in Romanian:

Just two hours before he surrendered that account to other Occupiers:

I could go on and on here, but I think you get the point. Rauhauser and Gaped Crusader both used the “x noun is x” trope. Gaped Crusader had a post titled “Butthurt Moderator is Butthurt,”, while Neal, tweeting as “Occupy the House,” would tweet things like “Ineffective troll is ineffective.” Both talked about “Anonymiss” — a group of women hackers Rauhauser has claimed to lead. They both are fans of the Qritiq blog. Both talk about “porn mooks” and “e-lawyers” and PornWikiLeaks and Donny Long . . . And so on and so on and so on.

VISIT TO ROCKAWAY BEACH

In a December 8, 2011 comment at the Kid Kenoma blog (see here and here) Rauhauser talked about visiting Rockaway Beach:

Similarly, the Gaped Crusader talked about making a visit to Far Rockaway and Broad Channel — which, along with Rockaway Beach, are areas on the Rockaway Peninsula of Queens.

I took the screenshots of the Gaped Crusader post about his visit to Far Rockaway on November 26, 2011 — almost two weeks before Rauhauser spoke at Kid Kenoma about his visit to Rockaway Beach.

Anthony Weiner represented the Rockaway Beach area.

CHARACTERISTICALLY INDENTED EMAILS

I already posted about this, but I’d hate to leave it out of this more comprehensive post. Here is a typical Rauhauser email, in which Neal demonstrates his penchant for lawfare. The background: on a publicly available Flickr account, Neal Rauhauser posted multiple shots of shoes, feet, more shoes, more feet, shoes on cats, feet, and shoes. (Sample here.) This prompted Mandy Nagy to joke on Twitter about Neal having a foot fetish, which in turn prompted this email, in which Neal threatened to sue Mandy for claiming he had a sex life of any kind at all:

Don’t insinuate that he has a sex life or he’ll SUE!!!!

Anyway, here is an email from the Gaped Crusader. Note the similar indenting style:

As I indicated previously, I owe a debt to Brooks Bayne for catching that subtlety.

Perhaps an even more important email is this one, which provides the quote that began this post. In it, the Gaped Crusader responds to Mandy Nagy’s claim that the facts show she has done nothing wrong. The bottom, indented paragraph is the Gaped Crusader:

That line is important: “Facts don’t matter, that’s the perception of the situation, and the world is going to act on that basis.” That’s Neal Rauhauser’s view of the world, as expressed by the Gaped Crusader.

CONCLUSION? NO, THIS IS JUST THE BEGINNING

This post is foundational for much of what comes in the future. In future posts I will introduce to you other sock puppet accounts with similar obsessions, writing styles, and IPs, such as the “LulzShack” account that seemed to know about my SWATting months before it was made public. I will show you how certain “moby” trolls at my site leave racist and sexist comments, with IPs from similar blocks as the Gaped Crusader, Alicia Pain, and LulzShack. There will be further evidence in these posts relating to the SWATtings of myself and Mike Stack.

Neal Rauhauser spent a solid year lying about me. Now the time has come for me to tell the truth about him.

Stay tuned.

via patterico.com

Patterico’s Pontifications » Neal Rauhauser [one year to the after SWAT

Brett Kimberlin Associate “Gaped Crusader” — And the Evidence Connecting Him to Neal Rauhauser

Filed under: Brad Friedman,Brett Kimberlin,General,Neal Rauhauser —
Patterico @
12:00 am

“Facts don’t matter, that’s the perception of the situation, and the world is going to act on that basis.” — The “Gaped Crusader,” November 26, 2011.

In December 2011, an anonymous Brett Kimberlin supporter calling himself the “Gaped Crusader” boasted of the harassment of five people. Two of them, Mike Stack and myself, were SWATting victims in late June and early July 2011:

The targets include Brett Kimberlin critics and SWATting victims.

The methods include “outing” people’s identities; posting their home addresses; and creating (phony) civil and criminal liability. The Gaped Crusader attributes each atrocity to Neal Rauhauser or his associate Brett Kimberlin (who runs the Occupy for Accountability blog that published pictures of my house).

The Gaped Crusader thought he was making these observations anonymously. But he made mistakes, many of which are listed in this post — which reveals extensive evidence connecting the Gaped Crusader to Brett Kimberlin associate Neal Rauhauser.

The evidence includes (among other things) common topics of obsession; common unique catch phrases; admission by both of a particular trip at a particular time; characteristic method of formatting emails; and my personal favorite: a shared IP address.

IP ADDRESS

Normally I’d show you all the other similarities before I showed you the IP evidence, but the IP evidence discussion really helps reveal this guy’s true nature, right out of the gate — because it shows the “Gaped Crusader” talking about my wife.

Here are three comments the “Gaped Crusader” left on my site:

Note the middle comment, linking a post about my wife, and promising it is the first of many. Here is the post titled “Mrs. Patterico”:

The link to “Christi Frey” goes to a press release at the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s web site, detailing a case that was handled by my wife. This link shows that the “Gaped Crusader” had investigated my wife.

The words “nice house” link to our address. That shows that the “Gaped Crusader” had investigated our home address.

Take a look at that IP address that this creep used to leave comments on my blog: 67.221.255.15.

Neal Rauhauser used that IP address to leave a comment at the “Qritiq” blog. The “Qritiq” blog is pro-Rauhauser and pro-Kimberlin, and is filled with lies, defamation, and anti-Patterico sock puppets. Yesterday she published a post advising people about where they could complain about me to my office. Qritiq has called Rauhauser her “hero.” Rauhauser probably felt perfectly safe posting there.

What he didn’t realize is that the proprietor had given posting privileges to SWATting victim Mike Stack. And, because Stack had administrative privileges over his own posts, comments left on his posts were emailed to Stack — including IP addresses.

Whoops! Looks like you messed up, Neal!

This is a screenshot of an email that Stack forwarded to me in December 2011, with the information on Neal’s IP address:

Let’s take a closer look at that IP address:

Let’s look at those together:

I took the IP — 67.221.255.15 — and plugged it into my comment software . . . and found comments from the Gaped Crusader.

As Tyler Durden might say: I am Patterico’s complete lack of surprise.

Because those of us who had watched Neal for months already strongly suspected that the Gaped Crusader was Neal Rauhauser. Because there is so much other evidence tying Rauhauser to the vile Gaped Crusader account.

NEAL RAUHAUSER’S TOPICS OF OBSESSION

Let’s look at that “Mrs. Patterico” post above. See how the Gaped Crusader said that Steve Cooley’s 2010 political opponent should prosecute me for various unnamed alleged crimes? Steve Cooley’s 2010 opponent was Kamala Harris, the Attorney General of California. And guess who also urged people to ask Kamala Harris to investigate me? If you guessed Neal Rauhauser, you’re paying attention!

On July 12, 2011, Rauhauser encouraged Daily Kos readers to file complaints against me with California Attorney General Kamala Harris.

The “California Supreme Court Complaint” in question is Brett Kimberlin’s frivolous State Bar Complaint against me — a complaint which (among other things) accused me of discriminating against the disabled by writing about Kimberlin’s status as a felon, which he claims is a “disability.” I am told Rauhauser’s associate Kimberlin filed frivolous criminal charges against me with Kamala Harris.

Odd how the Gaped Crusader (and Kimberlin) share Rauhauser’s belief that I should be prosecuted by Kamala Harris.

Rauhauser also shared the Gaped Crusader’s creepy focus on my wife. Three days after I was swatted, Rauhauser wrote a post titled “Patterico’s Penalization” that made bizarre accusations about me, claiming I “worked with a cyber-stalker named Seth L. Allen.” In that post, Rauhauser publicized Kimberlin’s State Bar complaint against me — and asked readers to get a picture of my wife. Rauhauser also suggested that a private detective stake out Seth Allen’s apartment:

But Rauhauser and the Gaped Crusader were obsessed with more than just my wife, or getting Kamala Harris to prosecute me. Let’s focus on the screenshot that opened up this post, and look at the Gaped Crusader’s targets in that disturbing post:

The names there are Mike Stack, Seth Allen, me, Aaron Walker/Worthing, and Sean Tompkins (who I believe is an online acquaintance of Stack’s). It turns out Neal Rauhauser is obsessed with the very same people.

Robert Stacy McCain and I have both previously posted about a bizarre, paranoid rant that Neal Rauhauser sent to law enforcement officials, making crazy allegations about an “ISR cell” (ISR stands for “Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance”) supposedly headed by Andrew Breitbart. Here (.pdf) Rauhauser explains the contents of the nutty CD that he sent to law enforcement:

Look at the objects of Rauhauser’s obsession. You’ll recognize the same names from the Gaped Crusader screenshot: Mike Stack, Seth Allen, Patrick Frey (me), Aaron Walker aka Aaron Worthing, and Sean Tompkins.

Rauhauser hates Mike Stack so much, he sent Stack a cease and desist letter — addressed, as it happens, to 30 Mallard Court, Three Bridges, New Jersey.

Above: two screenshots from the beginning and end of a letter from Neal Rauhauser to Mike Stack

That is not Mike Stack’s address. But it is the address that Mike Stack’s SWATter gave New Jersey police in Stack’s June 23, 2011 SWATting call.

Let’s look at some of the other names on Rauhauser’s Enemies List — people he hates enough to mention in a CD sent to law enforcement attempting to implicate them in phony crimes. As you can see, those names include (among others) HB Gary (which was headed by Aaron Barr); Rauhauser’s Twittergate enemy Michelle Lessick aka ZAPEM; and a guy named Tom Ryan.

Was the Gaped Crusader obsessed with any of these other enemies of Neal Rauhauser’s? If you guessed “yes,” that means you’re really getting the hang of this! Here is a screenshot with complaints about Stack, me, Sean Tompkins, HB Gary and Aaron Barr, Tom Ryan, and Aaron Worthing:

Here’s another post that falsely claims that Aaron Barr and Tom Ryan “coordinate” with me:

For the record, I have never met, spoken with, or corresponded with Aaron Barr or Tom Ryan in my life.

As for ZAPEM/Lessick, the Gaped Crusader mentioned her in a post that also mentioned Seth Allen, Stack, me, Kamala Harris, and Steve Cooley:

That post, dated December 16, starts out mentioning a John Dean column about cyberbullies:

Which is interesting, since Neal Rauhauser mentioned the very same article on the same day, in a comment at the Qritiq blog:

Rauhauser later said he was so taken with the article that he made notes on it.

It’s also important to note that, like the Gaped Crusader, Rauhauser is obsessed with Weinergate. This is important, because SWATting victim Mike Stack was never much of a Brett Kimberlin critic, but he was a high-profile participant in the monitoring of Anthony Weiner’s Twitter account, and frequently noted Weiner’s penchant for following young girls with that account. Last summer, I also had a significant role in various stories having to do with Weiner’s communications with young women. Indeed, before I was SWATted, I was threatened by email, and the threat ostensibly had to do with my publication of Weiner’s communications with Gennette Cordova. That email was sent to me (and Ace of Spades) the same night Mike Stack was SWATted: June 23, 2011.

And Neal Rauhauser, like the Gaped Crusader, is a “Weiner Truther” who has insinuated that I was behind a plot to bring down Anthony Weiner. Just look again at the screenshot above asking people to have Kamala Harris investigate me for my alleged “involvement in the stalking of Congressman Weiner.”

BOTH CLAIMED I CUT A DEAL FOR PHONY IDS IN WEINERGATE

Indeed, the Gaped Crusader and Rauhauser don’t just share a generalized theory that I was somehow behind a set-up of Anthony Weiner. They both have a specific theory about what I did — and the theory is the same for both of them.

At the Daily Kos, Rauhauser speculated that I arranged for the fake driver’s license used by the alleged mother of Nikki Reid:

The fake driver’s license employed by Pamela Reid, the fake mom of the fake teenage girl Nikki aka @starchild111, was from California. Presumably a Deputy D.A. from that area, where immigration problems are common, would know and perhaps be engaged in plea bargains with people who can manufacture documents.

Similarly, the Gaped Crusader speculated:

Would a Los Angeles county prosecutor have seen a driver’s license forging case or two? Probably. Could they cut some nice deal for a third time offender, say getting a license and a woman to voice Patricia Reid so they could set up Tommy Christoper to take the fall for the fake teen girl entrapment effort? Yeah, that sounds doable, doesn’t it?

MORE OBSESSION WITH WEINER AND KIMBERLIN CRITICS

And again, in a post titled “Straight Outta Compton,” the Gaped Crusader once again talked about Kamala Harris, Steve Cooley, Aaron Worthing, me, Seth Allen . . . and Anthony Weiner. See here, here, and here:

It isn’t hard to imagine former Congressman Anthony Weiner sitting at home with his lovely wife Huma Abedin, not saying anything, but with a grim little smile on his face as he watches all this unfold.

Similarly, in a post called “Free Speech and Accountability” we see this:

The Gaped Crusader also mentioned the “Threat Management Unit” — another name for the District Attorney’s “Stalking and Threat Assessment Team,” or STAT. This came up in a post again mentioning Steve Cooley:

Note again the constant accusations that I was involved in “stalking” and “smearing” Brett Kimberlin (a partner in Velvet Revolution) and Anthony Weiner. But right now I am interested in the mention of our stalking unit. Because Brett Kimberlin filed a complaint against me with our stalking unit. And that unit was a particular obsession of Neal Rauhauser’s.

Guess who else mentioned the same team? Alicia Pain, the person who threatened me before I was SWATted:

Well what can I say? If you really want to bring me to justice, I encourage you to do so. Here is the best number to call: Stalking and Threat Assessment Team (STAT)
Inside line: X[redacted] or (213) 974-[redacted].

A comment by “OccupyOngsHat” at the Qritiq blog encouraged Qritiq to report me to the same anti-stalking unit. The commenter claimed that this would result in “lulzy lulz”:

Oddly enough, the comment was left using the same IP used by the Gaped Crusader and Neal Rauhauser: 67.221.255.15:

CHARACTERISTIC PHRASES

The Gaped Crusader, like Rauhauser himself, loves to speak in the idiom of 4chan-style hackers. Everything is “epic” and “lulzy” and there are a billion references to “lulzcows” and Encyclopedia Dramatica and the like.

Even in this blizzard of inanity, a couple of comparisons stand out for me.

“THE BUTTHURT IS FLOWING THICK AND FAST”

In one post, the Gaped Crusader said the “butthurt is flowing thick and fast”:

That’s not a real common phrase. Yet, in a post as Stranded Wind at Daily Kos, Rauhauser said “the butthurt is flowing thick and fast”:

Note who is named as having “paid dearly” for their role as “Weinergate perps”: me and Mike Stack.

The two SWATting victims from 2011.

I should note here that a) Stranded Wind is a well-known alias for Rauhauser, and b) this Stranded Wind post was published on July 27, 2011 — long before my SWATting was made public. (I mentioned it publicly weeks ago, and even Ron Brynaert did not mention it in public until August 2011.)

By the way, Rauhauser could not avoid talking like a teenaged hacker even in the materials he sent to law enforcement. In the “ReadMe” text document included to explain the contents of the disk, Rauhauser wrote things like this:

Swatting call – purportedly someone swatting Mike Stack. Google this, lots of butthurt flowing, claims he was cuffed at gun point?

You can just picture an FBI agent interviewing Neal: tell me more about the “epic lulz” and the “butthurt,” Mr. Rauhauser.

IRON TROLL/MENTION OF 4CHAN, SOMETHING AWFUL, AND ENCLOPEDIA DRAMATICA — IN THAT ORDER

In Rauhauser’s complaint to law enforcement about alleged harassment by Mike Stack, he mentions a harassment contest called “Iron Troll”:

This account, with some sixty thousand followers, is a major news outlet for Anonymous. It should be noted that the Anonymous community is currently running “Iron Troll” – a contest involving computer, phone, and real life pranks.

The Gaped Crusader also mentioned “Iron Troll” in a post titled “Getting Kamala Harris After Porn Mooks”:

That alone isn’t much — but it gets more interesting.

Take a look at Gaped Crusader’s mention of 4chan, Something Awful, and Encyclopedia Dramatica, in that order — and then reflect on an email recently published at The Trenches that Rauhauser wrote to lefty Twitter activist Shoq:

I have been sorely tempted to point him out to various actors – a guy like this, he could really produce some high quality entertainment for 4chan, Something Awful, Encyclopedia Dramatica, etc.

Weird, huh? Even weirder is that Rauhauser listed these three entities in exactly this order as Stranded Wind, back in June 2011:

Anonymous doesn’t have a tree structure, it’s a loose coalition of warring tribes. Each node has its own culture and methods.

Some of them are from 4chan, some from Something Awful, some from Encyclopedia Dramatica, and a few dozen other sites that are less well known.

Hmmmm.

TALKING ABOUT MY “DISCHARGE”

4chan hackers don’t commonly use the term “discharge” to refer to someone being fired. But both the Gaped Crusader and Rauhauser fantasized about the “discharge” of yours truly.

In a July 4, 2011 entry titled “Patterico’s Penalization” (published 3 days after my SWATting), Rauhauser wrote:

Discharge, disbarment, and public ridicule ought to be Frey’s lot in life if what appears to be going on, based on this small analysis, is truly the explanation for the events surrounding Weinergate.

Similarly, in late November 2011, the Gaped Crusader was very excited about the possibility of “discharge” and (he believed) impending criminal charges for me:

Can discharge and criminal charges be imminent for Los Angeles assclown D.A. John Patrick Frey?

Hmmmmmmmmmm.

CALLING ME “PADDY”

Neal, writing as Stranded Wind, enjoyed calling me “Paddy” as he threatened me:

Above: Writing at Daily Kos, Rauhauser suggests I should be harassed online.

Oddly enough, so did the Gaped Crusader, in a post talking about subpoenaing my boss Steve Cooley to ask him questions about my blogging:

Or this post, which called me the “capodecina of the Breitbart crime family” — and once again called me “Paddy”:

Incidentally, the term “lulzcow,” used by Rauhauser in that creepily threatening post from the Daily Kos in July 2011, was also used by the Gaped Crusader:

There’s just one “tell” after another, isn’t there?

USE OF ROMANIAN

On November 21, 2011, OccupyOngsHat rendered the Anonymous slogan in Romanian:

The Gaped Crusader blog has Romanian all over it:

Neal at Occupy the House talked in Romanian:

Just two hours before he surrendered that account to other Occupiers:

I could go on and on here, but I think you get the point. Rauhauser and Gaped Crusader both used the “x noun is x” trope. Gaped Crusader had a post titled “Butthurt Moderator is Butthurt,”, while Neal, tweeting as “Occupy the House,” would tweet things like “Ineffective troll is ineffective.” Both talked about “Anonymiss” — a group of women hackers Rauhauser has claimed to lead. They both are fans of the Qritiq blog. Both talk about “porn mooks” and “e-lawyers” and PornWikiLeaks and Donny Long . . . And so on and so on and so on.

VISIT TO ROCKAWAY BEACH

In a December 8, 2011 comment at the Kid Kenoma blog (see here and here) Rauhauser talked about visiting Rockaway Beach:

Similarly, the Gaped Crusader talked about making a visit to Far Rockaway and Broad Channel — which, along with Rockaway Beach, are areas on the Rockaway Peninsula of Queens.

I took the screenshots of the Gaped Crusader post about his visit to Far Rockaway on November 26, 2011 — almost two weeks before Rauhauser spoke at Kid Kenoma about his visit to Rockaway Beach.

Anthony Weiner represented the Rockaway Beach area.

CHARACTERISTICALLY INDENTED EMAILS

I already posted about this, but I’d hate to leave it out of this more comprehensive post. Here is a typical Rauhauser email, in which Neal demonstrates his penchant for lawfare. The background: on a publicly available Flickr account, Neal Rauhauser posted multiple shots of shoes, feet, more shoes, more feet, shoes on cats, feet, and shoes. (Sample here.) This prompted Mandy Nagy to joke on Twitter about Neal having a foot fetish, which in turn prompted this email, in which Neal threatened to sue Mandy for claiming he had a sex life of any kind at all:

Don’t insinuate that he has a sex life or he’ll SUE!!!!

Anyway, here is an email from the Gaped Crusader. Note the similar indenting style:

As I indicated previously, I owe a debt to Brooks Bayne for catching that subtlety.

Perhaps an even more important email is this one, which provides the quote that began this post. In it, the Gaped Crusader responds to Mandy Nagy’s claim that the facts show she has done nothing wrong. The bottom, indented paragraph is the Gaped Crusader:

That line is important: “Facts don’t matter, that’s the perception of the situation, and the world is going to act on that basis.” That’s Neal Rauhauser’s view of the world, as expressed by the Gaped Crusader.

CONCLUSION? NO, THIS IS JUST THE BEGINNING

This post is foundational for much of what comes in the future. In future posts I will introduce to you other sock puppet accounts with similar obsessions, writing styles, and IPs, such as the “LulzShack” account that seemed to know about my SWATting months before it was made public. I will show you how certain “moby” trolls at my site leave racist and sexist comments, with IPs from similar blocks as the Gaped Crusader, Alicia Pain, and LulzShack. There will be further evidence in these posts relating to the SWATtings of myself and Mike Stack.

Neal Rauhauser spent a solid year lying about me. Now the time has come for me to tell the truth about him.

Stay tuned.

via patterico.com

Neal Rauhauser’s Bizarre Suspicions, and Profiling the (Hypothetical) ‘UnSub’ : The Other McCain

Neal Rauhauser’s Bizarre Suspicions, and Profiling the (Hypothetical) ‘UnSub’

Posted on | June 23, 2012 | 70 Comments and 61 Reactions

‘Deeply disturbed … narcissism … sociopathic’?

“Please think about your family. This story is not worth it. I can assure you that. . . .
“I am trying to help you, a lot of people are very disappointed that this story has continued.”
– “Alicia Pain,” June 23, 2011

“Another possible outcome would be a two digit body count from some mosque in Virginia after Aaron goes full tilt Jared Loughner on the congregation. . . .
“I continue to be the sort of guy who can get a counter terror [special agent] in the D.C. area on the phone in short order.”
– Neal Rauhauser, Feb. 16, 2012

“In a message posted in the comments of a blog in October 2011, Rauhauser explained that he and someone he describes as ‘a very big dog from the Anonymous pen’ conspired to use Brett Kimberlin’s non-profit Velvet Revolution as a vehicle to exact vengeance on (a) his personal enemies, (b) the security firm HB Gary and (c) ‘Breitbart associates.’”
– Robert Stacy McCain, June 15, 2012

FROM AN UNDISCLOSED LOCATION
SWATting victim Mike Stack accused Brett Kimberlin’s associate Neal Rauhauser of criminal harassment. On May 24, the day he was due to appear at a New Jersey courthouse for a meeting intended to resolve that case, Rauhauser sent an e-mail to Stack that included this:

Given that Doug [Stewart] was in court with us, as well as others who may not have spoke up, I think it’s very dangerous that we should appear together at a known time. You haven’t faced this stuff yet, but Gabbie [Giffords] took a bullet through the back of the head and Gabe Zimmerman died along with five others in Tucson. What McCain & Walker are doing is *way* more intense than the stuff that [led] up to that mass shooting. I am truly worried we could end up caught in the middle of a gunfight between deputies and some extremist group. It’s never been made public, but there were members of Michigan Militia periodically patrolling the Occupy Lansing camp because they got a hint I was there, and before that it was some League of the South guy in South Carolina who got interviewed by FBI hate crimes squad.

These insinuations are either (a) insane or (b) dishonest, or perhaps (c) both insane and dishonest. There is no other possible explanation for Rauhauser’s bizarre claim that Aaron Walker’s defense against Brett Kimberlin’s intimidation tactics — and my reporting on Walker’s plight — were likely to lead to a massacre comparable to Jared Loughner’s criminal rampage in Tucson.

Please note that I reported on Loughner’s crime both on my blog and at The American Spectator. In point of fact, “the stuff that [led] up to that mass shooting” was Loughner’s slow-motion descent into psychosis, a mental deterioration influenced by the atheist 9/11-Truther conspiracy cult “documentary,” Zeitgeist.

What other “stuff” does Neal Rauhauser mean to say caused Loughner’s murder spree? Sarah Palin’s “target” map? “Incivility”? Rauhauser doesn’t say, nor does he acknowledge that Loughner was a paranoid psychotic deluded by left-wing conspiracy theories.

“ I am truly worried we could end up caught in the middle of a gunfight between deputies and some extremist group”? What deranged nonsense is this? Who could possibly take Neal seriously?

Only a handful of people knew or cared about the Stack-Rauhauser case. There were some people working behind the scenes trying to get somebody — anybody — in New Jersey or New York media to cover that story, and nobody was interested, even though it involved Mike Stack, who played a key role in exposing the Anthony Weiner cybersex scandal.

Yet here was Rauhauser, the defendant in a criminal harassment case, sending a private e-mail to Stack — the plaintiff in that case — attempting to convince Stack that they were both in danger of dying in a violent attack by an armed gang of right-wing extremists.

The Michigan Militia! The League of the South! All these shadowy menaces, Rauhauser wanted Stack to believe, were such a looming threat to public safety in Somerset County, N.J., that it was dangerous for Stack and Rauhauser to “appear together at a known time.”

And why? Because of Aaron Walker and me!

Rauhauser then went on in his e-mail to Stack to cast a penumbra of suspicion around Patrick “Patterico” Frey who, like Stack, had been targeted for SWATting in the wake of WeinerGate:

If Frey or anyone around him can shift blame to you for anything that has happened they will try that.
The FBI agent in charge of counter-terror for NYC was interested after I told her a bit about what you had been close to, but after some consideration I think it is unwise for you to approach them on your own. I also think you might have some sort of claim against Frey, but it’s not as clear as what Nadia [Naffe] has.
I will write a note introducing you and Jay Leiderman. He is Nadia’s lawyer, he is not mine, so you would be talking to him as if he were going to be your counsel in a civil suit against Frey, and he will advise you on the particulars of talking with the feds after what you have seen. . . .
We’ll look what I have over — you, me, and qritiq, then we’ll share it with Allyn Lynd, the FBI agent who is most known for dealing with stuff like that. I think this is a separate issue from Frey and so forth – we can do this without either of us being exposed to any trouble.

This is such a convoluted wad of misleading lunacy I scarcely know how to begin unraveling it. How is it, for example, that Rauhauser imagines Patrick Frey would want to “shift blame” to Stack?

Blame for what? What crime is Frey alleged to have committed for which he would, according to Rauhauser, want to falsely blame Stack?

How does this relate to Nadia Naffe, nemesis of James O’Keefe? What does Rauhauser claim Frey or O’Keefe (or their unknown accomplices) have done that would be of interest to “The FBI agent in charge of counter-terror for NYC” or “Allyn Lynd, the FBI agent who is most known for dealing with stuff like that”?

Stuff like what? What horrific criminal malfeasance does Rauhauser know of, that would require the intervention of these authorities?

Uh . . . SWATting by a member of a notorious computer hacking gang?

Why was Rauhauser name-checking FBI Agent Allyn Lynd in this private e-mail in May 2012 when, in October 2011, Rauhauser was boasting of his connection with “a very big dog in the Anonymous pen”? How is it that Neal was pushing this disjointed crazytalk at Mike Stack, barely six months after Rauhauser himself was proud to proclaim his association with hackers linked to an international criminal conspiracy?

Can you say, “consciousness of guilt,” boys and girls?

While I hate to put any more crazy ideas into Neal Rauhauser’s demented mind, I wonder if the FBI might soon be reading this blog post.

To put it a bit more plainly, I wonder if some of my sources — who tell me they’ve been talking to the FBI — would e-mail the agents a link to this post, so that the agents could ask the clever folks at the Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico to ponder a few hypotheticals.

Suppose there was a certain person (we’ll call him “UnSub”) who knew himself to be implicated in serious crimes. Suppose that UnSub displayed an obsessive interest in secrecy and deception. Furthermore, suppose that UnSub believed himself to be under investigation.

How would such a person behave? Is it possible — and I’m just throwing this out there, as a hypothetical possibility — that UnSub would attempt to deflect attention from himself by making accusations of wrongdoing against others? Would UnSub try to destroy or conceal potential evidence? Could we, perhaps, expect UnSub to taunt his victims or send veiled threats to potential witnesses against him?

Just kind of thinking out loud here, you understand. Purely a matter of abstract speculation, perhaps of interest to the BSU analysts at Quantico only as an exercise in psychological theory.

Maybe the BSU analysts could factor in some other variables. Say, for instance, if UnSub liked to brag about his connection to law enforcement officials, or exhibited the kind of sadistic personality that would brag about using martial arts to inflict pain on a woman.

Do you think FBI criminal profiling specialists would be interested to learn that UnSub had previously engaged in behavior “disturbing enough to result in a court-ordered psychiatric evaluation“?

What the psychiatrist found was a man who was deeply disturbed, possessed of the worst narcissism he’d ever seen. [UnSub] had reactive attachment disorder. He was sociopathic, and his behavior resulted in [UnSub] facing various difficulties socially and professionally.

Like I said, sort of an abstract hypothetical we’re talking about here, the type of case study that might interest FBI-BSU strictly as the subject for what you might call a “clinical exercise” or something.

Maybe it would come in handy to law enforcement officials who had spent an entire year trying to solve a mysterious crime. Also, I think it might be helpful to FBI agents who were ready to apprehend a deviant “sociopathic” criminal like that: How would UnSub react if he thought he were under surveillance and the feds were about to move in? Would this kind of psychological stress make him a potential threat to himself and others? Shouldn’t law enforcement agents be informed that UnSub had boasted about carrying a concealed handgun?

Glock 19, the 9x19mm compact frame, fits my hand like a glove. When I used to carry this I’d load half a dozen frangibles – Glazer Safety Slugs — which are safer in urban environments. The rest of the stack would be Remington Golden Sabers – the right stuff according to FBI barrier tests.
Today what I have is not so potent, but it’s much more concealable.

The customary phrase, I believe, is “armed and dangerous.”

– Robert Stacy McCain, Whereabouts Unknow

via theothermccain.com

Neal Rauhauser’s Bizarre Suspicions, and Profiling the (Hypothetical) ‘UnSub’ : The Other McCain

Neal Rauhauser’s Bizarre Suspicions, and Profiling the (Hypothetical) ‘UnSub’

Posted on | June 23, 2012 | 70 Comments and 61 Reactions

‘Deeply disturbed … narcissism … sociopathic’?

“Please think about your family. This story is not worth it. I can assure you that. . . .
“I am trying to help you, a lot of people are very disappointed that this story has continued.”
– “Alicia Pain,” June 23, 2011

“Another possible outcome would be a two digit body count from some mosque in Virginia after Aaron goes full tilt Jared Loughner on the congregation. . . .
“I continue to be the sort of guy who can get a counter terror [special agent] in the D.C. area on the phone in short order.”
– Neal Rauhauser, Feb. 16, 2012

“In a message posted in the comments of a blog in October 2011, Rauhauser explained that he and someone he describes as ‘a very big dog from the Anonymous pen’ conspired to use Brett Kimberlin’s non-profit Velvet Revolution as a vehicle to exact vengeance on (a) his personal enemies, (b) the security firm HB Gary and (c) ‘Breitbart associates.’”
– Robert Stacy McCain, June 15, 2012

FROM AN UNDISCLOSED LOCATION
SWATting victim Mike Stack accused Brett Kimberlin’s associate Neal Rauhauser of criminal harassment. On May 24, the day he was due to appear at a New Jersey courthouse for a meeting intended to resolve that case, Rauhauser sent an e-mail to Stack that included this:

Given that Doug [Stewart] was in court with us, as well as others who may not have spoke up, I think it’s very dangerous that we should appear together at a known time. You haven’t faced this stuff yet, but Gabbie [Giffords] took a bullet through the back of the head and Gabe Zimmerman died along with five others in Tucson. What McCain & Walker are doing is *way* more intense than the stuff that [led] up to that mass shooting. I am truly worried we could end up caught in the middle of a gunfight between deputies and some extremist group. It’s never been made public, but there were members of Michigan Militia periodically patrolling the Occupy Lansing camp because they got a hint I was there, and before that it was some League of the South guy in South Carolina who got interviewed by FBI hate crimes squad.

These insinuations are either (a) insane or (b) dishonest, or perhaps (c) both insane and dishonest. There is no other possible explanation for Rauhauser’s bizarre claim that Aaron Walker’s defense against Brett Kimberlin’s intimidation tactics — and my reporting on Walker’s plight — were likely to lead to a massacre comparable to Jared Loughner’s criminal rampage in Tucson.

Please note that I reported on Loughner’s crime both on my blog and at The American Spectator. In point of fact, “the stuff that [led] up to that mass shooting” was Loughner’s slow-motion descent into psychosis, a mental deterioration influenced by the atheist 9/11-Truther conspiracy cult “documentary,” Zeitgeist.

What other “stuff” does Neal Rauhauser mean to say caused Loughner’s murder spree? Sarah Palin’s “target” map? “Incivility”? Rauhauser doesn’t say, nor does he acknowledge that Loughner was a paranoid psychotic deluded by left-wing conspiracy theories.

“ I am truly worried we could end up caught in the middle of a gunfight between deputies and some extremist group”? What deranged nonsense is this? Who could possibly take Neal seriously?

Only a handful of people knew or cared about the Stack-Rauhauser case. There were some people working behind the scenes trying to get somebody — anybody — in New Jersey or New York media to cover that story, and nobody was interested, even though it involved Mike Stack, who played a key role in exposing the Anthony Weiner cybersex scandal.

Yet here was Rauhauser, the defendant in a criminal harassment case, sending a private e-mail to Stack — the plaintiff in that case — attempting to convince Stack that they were both in danger of dying in a violent attack by an armed gang of right-wing extremists.

The Michigan Militia! The League of the South! All these shadowy menaces, Rauhauser wanted Stack to believe, were such a looming threat to public safety in Somerset County, N.J., that it was dangerous for Stack and Rauhauser to “appear together at a known time.”

And why? Because of Aaron Walker and me!

Rauhauser then went on in his e-mail to Stack to cast a penumbra of suspicion around Patrick “Patterico” Frey who, like Stack, had been targeted for SWATting in the wake of WeinerGate:

If Frey or anyone around him can shift blame to you for anything that has happened they will try that.
The FBI agent in charge of counter-terror for NYC was interested after I told her a bit about what you had been close to, but after some consideration I think it is unwise for you to approach them on your own. I also think you might have some sort of claim against Frey, but it’s not as clear as what Nadia [Naffe] has.
I will write a note introducing you and Jay Leiderman. He is Nadia’s lawyer, he is not mine, so you would be talking to him as if he were going to be your counsel in a civil suit against Frey, and he will advise you on the particulars of talking with the feds after what you have seen. . . .
We’ll look what I have over — you, me, and qritiq, then we’ll share it with Allyn Lynd, the FBI agent who is most known for dealing with stuff like that. I think this is a separate issue from Frey and so forth – we can do this without either of us being exposed to any trouble.

This is such a convoluted wad of misleading lunacy I scarcely know how to begin unraveling it. How is it, for example, that Rauhauser imagines Patrick Frey would want to “shift blame” to Stack?

Blame for what? What crime is Frey alleged to have committed for which he would, according to Rauhauser, want to falsely blame Stack?

How does this relate to Nadia Naffe, nemesis of James O’Keefe? What does Rauhauser claim Frey or O’Keefe (or their unknown accomplices) have done that would be of interest to “The FBI agent in charge of counter-terror for NYC” or “Allyn Lynd, the FBI agent who is most known for dealing with stuff like that”?

Stuff like what? What horrific criminal malfeasance does Rauhauser know of, that would require the intervention of these authorities?

Uh . . . SWATting by a member of a notorious computer hacking gang?

Why was Rauhauser name-checking FBI Agent Allyn Lynd in this private e-mail in May 2012 when, in October 2011, Rauhauser was boasting of his connection with “a very big dog in the Anonymous pen”? How is it that Neal was pushing this disjointed crazytalk at Mike Stack, barely six months after Rauhauser himself was proud to proclaim his association with hackers linked to an international criminal conspiracy?

Can you say, “consciousness of guilt,” boys and girls?

While I hate to put any more crazy ideas into Neal Rauhauser’s demented mind, I wonder if the FBI might soon be reading this blog post.

To put it a bit more plainly, I wonder if some of my sources — who tell me they’ve been talking to the FBI — would e-mail the agents a link to this post, so that the agents could ask the clever folks at the Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico to ponder a few hypotheticals.

Suppose there was a certain person (we’ll call him “UnSub”) who knew himself to be implicated in serious crimes. Suppose that UnSub displayed an obsessive interest in secrecy and deception. Furthermore, suppose that UnSub believed himself to be under investigation.

How would such a person behave? Is it possible — and I’m just throwing this out there, as a hypothetical possibility — that UnSub would attempt to deflect attention from himself by making accusations of wrongdoing against others? Would UnSub try to destroy or conceal potential evidence? Could we, perhaps, expect UnSub to taunt his victims or send veiled threats to potential witnesses against him?

Just kind of thinking out loud here, you understand. Purely a matter of abstract speculation, perhaps of interest to the BSU analysts at Quantico only as an exercise in psychological theory.

Maybe the BSU analysts could factor in some other variables. Say, for instance, if UnSub liked to brag about his connection to law enforcement officials, or exhibited the kind of sadistic personality that would brag about using martial arts to inflict pain on a woman.

Do you think FBI criminal profiling specialists would be interested to learn that UnSub had previously engaged in behavior “disturbing enough to result in a court-ordered psychiatric evaluation“?

What the psychiatrist found was a man who was deeply disturbed, possessed of the worst narcissism he’d ever seen. [UnSub] had reactive attachment disorder. He was sociopathic, and his behavior resulted in [UnSub] facing various difficulties socially and professionally.

Like I said, sort of an abstract hypothetical we’re talking about here, the type of case study that might interest FBI-BSU strictly as the subject for what you might call a “clinical exercise” or something.

Maybe it would come in handy to law enforcement officials who had spent an entire year trying to solve a mysterious crime. Also, I think it might be helpful to FBI agents who were ready to apprehend a deviant “sociopathic” criminal like that: How would UnSub react if he thought he were under surveillance and the feds were about to move in? Would this kind of psychological stress make him a potential threat to himself and others? Shouldn’t law enforcement agents be informed that UnSub had boasted about carrying a concealed handgun?

Glock 19, the 9x19mm compact frame, fits my hand like a glove. When I used to carry this I’d load half a dozen frangibles – Glazer Safety Slugs — which are safer in urban environments. The rest of the stack would be Remington Golden Sabers – the right stuff according to FBI barrier tests.
Today what I have is not so potent, but it’s much more concealable.

The customary phrase, I believe, is “armed and dangerous.”

– Robert Stacy McCain, Whereabouts Unknow

via theothermccain.com

Neal Rauhauser: Internet Super-Spy

Posted on | June 19, 2012 | 46 Comments and 58 Reactions

FROM AN UNDISCLOSED LOCATION
What service is Neal Rauhauser providing to his clients, including Brett Kimberlin’s tax-exempt 501(c) Velvet Revolution? Is Rauhauser paid to sit around all day playing with his Twitter sockpuppets, plotting revenge against Greg Howard, obsessing over Patterico and ranting about how a “Christian Infowar Militia cell” took down Anthony Weiner?

Rauhauser’s profile for the 2010 Netroots Nation conference described his work: “He applies his background in software development and telecom network engineering to solving problems in the social media work space for political campaigns and causes.”

What does that mean? Sunday, I published a sample of writings by Rauhauser that he had “scrubbed” from the Web, demonstrating his obsessions with his various enemies, as well as his penchant for online secrecy and deception. But there was much more in that vast 179-page cache, including a January 2012 post entitled “Maltego, FOCA and Shodan,” referencing three computer programs Rauhauser uses. His description of Maltego is particularly interesting:

I’ve been fooling around with open source intelligence and forensics application Maltego for some time now. I read an article about it in 2010, got an eval, and the very first search I ran led to a phone call with the FBI that actually got some people interviewed over their behavior. I was a bit freaked out at the time, worried that my world was going to burst into flame every time I clicked the little black icon, but instead it’s turned out to be a tool that comes out about once a week and does in minutes what would take me days to do by hand.

Hmmm. What does this software program do?

Maltego is an intelligence and forensics application. It allows for the mining and gathering of information as well as the representation of this information in a meaningful way.
Coupled with its graphing libraries Maltego allows us to identify previously unknown relationships between information, persons and information about persons. As such, it is a useful tool in the IT security field to map an organization’s people and relationships. A valuable aid in exploring the social-engineering attack vector in pen-testing investigations.

Exactly how did Rauhauser’s use of Maltego lead to “a phone call with the FBI that actually got some people interviewed over their behavior”? Which of his chosen enemies did this creepy paranoid freak identify using Maltego? We don’t know. What we do know is that Rauhauser also referenced Maltego in a March 2012 post entitled, “Regarding Andrew Breitbart,” excerpts of which I share here, urging readers to examine carefully:

I am not making any statement to the press for fear of screwing up existing investigations, but as a courtesy I will collate and describe a few things that are already available onthe net for the bewildered journalist trying to understand that last exchange between us.
The True History Of Andrew Breitbart’s Hatred For Neal Rauhauser is a fourteen page PDF of screen shots collected right around the time of the 2010 midterm election. … [T]he timeline is jumbled and you’d need to see inside sauce-jar.aes256 to understand exactly what transpired.
sauce-jar.aes256 is a 563 meg encrypted archive that was included in the Kookpocalypse torrent. This was released 2/6/2012, the anniversary of the HBGary break in, and it contains screen captures, PDFs, Maltego graphs, timeline files, and other data that support my conclusion –portions of the Team Themis project may be at work among the people who contribute to Breitbart’s BigGovernment site. There are some sample files in the torrent that are interesting. State and federal authorities have already seen the unencrypted version of this.
I have been pursued since the 2010 midterm by a woman who used the now defunct Twitter screen name @ZAPEM. The ZAPEM Libel SuitScribd collection is an as yet unfiled civil action against this person. She seems to have persecution delusions and this led to the massive non-scandal of Twittergate during the 2010 election. …
I have written about Persona Management Methods. I am deeply weary of crazy people following me around injecting their mental illness into my life, so I do really mean things to them –see Geolocation Lulz-a variety of network oriented pranks intended to keep them hopeful of locating me, yet thoroughly frustrated. If you read the nealrTumblr you will see a lot of fact, some ARG-ish posts, and a few that are obviously meant to convey one message to the overactive pattern matching of paranoid, delusional stalkers, and quite another to coherent readers.
There has been quite a bit of ephemera in and around Twittergate, Weinergate, and the Kookpocalypse.

What you see here is, among other things, a repetition of the claims asserted in a bizarre eight-page document (“Andrew Breitbart’s ISR Cell?”) that Rauhauser published in February 2012: TwitterGate was a hoax, Anthony Weiner was framed, HBGary was working for Breitbart, and all of these things were somehow part of a vast interconnected conspiracy. (I analyzed that document June 2, “When Neal Rauhauser Complained About ‘Menacing’ and ‘Cyberstalking’.”)

Rauhauser has apparently succeeded in getting that document taken down from its server, but the 575-megabyte torrent download is still available online, if you’d care to wade through a gigantic steaming pile of paranoid crazytalk. Of course, Rauhauser scrubbed all the other stuff — including his “as yet unfiled civil action” against @Zapem — which is one of his remarkably consistent habits: Every time people start taking an interest in whatever madness Neal has been doing lately, he begins deleting files, closing accounts, etc.

The guy’s deleted more Web content than most people have ever created, and why? Consciousness of guilt. Rauhauser’s obsession with secrecy is consistent with his habit of deleting anything that anyone might employ as evidence that he’s up to no good.

When his “beandogs” scam blew up into the 2010 TwitterGate scandal, Neal immediately shut down his operation and started deleting stuff, which has enabled him to tell people — at least those unfamiliar with the now-deleted evidence — that it was a “non-scandal” caused by “the persecution delusions” of one woman, @Zapem. She’s crazy, Rauhauser says, while insisting that he is both innocent and sane.

Only fools are deceived by this, especially when Rauhauser talks about his obsessive quest to find @ZapEm:

First, for background, we’re talking about An Inconvenient Kook, a woman I’ve tentatively identified as Michelle Lessick aka ZAPEM. All I had to start was:

• The Twitter username @ZAPEM (now @Repository1) and a now defunct WordPress blog
• Records of various streams of tweets and writings, which are a fairly distinct personality showing delusions of persecution
• An email from Patrick Read aka @SwiftRead naming her as Michelle
• A tip that her last name was Reilly, perhaps Nagy-Riley, which I believe to be incorrect
• A tip that her name might be Lessick
• Assertions that she was a police dispatcher and her husband a police officer
• Many indications she lived in northern New Jersey

I did quite a lot of digging with Google and finally did locate the connection to the name Lessick, which can be seen in the link containing her name. I chased various permutations of this name and the Jascawow alias using a variety of search tools and came up empty.

Not since Humbert chased his doppelgänger Quilty cross-country has anyone so persistently stalked an enemy, real or imagined. And while there is a real person behind @Zapem, the vast conspiracy in Rauhauser’s demented mind is wholly imaginary. But as he sits down with his Maltego software and maps online connections, Neal’s paranoia tells him that this data-mining holds some hidden clue to how all these evil people — from Greg Howard to HB Gary to Patrick Frey to the ghost of Andrew Breitbart — are plotting against him.

And who are we to say that they’re not, huh?

– Robert Stacy McCain, Whereabouts Unknown

 

via theothermccain.com

Neal Rauhauser: Internet Super-Spy

Posted on | June 19, 2012 | 46 Comments and 58 Reactions

FROM AN UNDISCLOSED LOCATION
What service is Neal Rauhauser providing to his clients, including Brett Kimberlin’s tax-exempt 501(c) Velvet Revolution? Is Rauhauser paid to sit around all day playing with his Twitter sockpuppets, plotting revenge against Greg Howard, obsessing over Patterico and ranting about how a “Christian Infowar Militia cell” took down Anthony Weiner?

Rauhauser’s profile for the 2010 Netroots Nation conference described his work: “He applies his background in software development and telecom network engineering to solving problems in the social media work space for political campaigns and causes.”

What does that mean? Sunday, I published a sample of writings by Rauhauser that he had “scrubbed” from the Web, demonstrating his obsessions with his various enemies, as well as his penchant for online secrecy and deception. But there was much more in that vast 179-page cache, including a January 2012 post entitled “Maltego, FOCA and Shodan,” referencing three computer programs Rauhauser uses. His description of Maltego is particularly interesting:

I’ve been fooling around with open source intelligence and forensics application Maltego for some time now. I read an article about it in 2010, got an eval, and the very first search I ran led to a phone call with the FBI that actually got some people interviewed over their behavior. I was a bit freaked out at the time, worried that my world was going to burst into flame every time I clicked the little black icon, but instead it’s turned out to be a tool that comes out about once a week and does in minutes what would take me days to do by hand.

Hmmm. What does this software program do?

Maltego is an intelligence and forensics application. It allows for the mining and gathering of information as well as the representation of this information in a meaningful way.
Coupled with its graphing libraries Maltego allows us to identify previously unknown relationships between information, persons and information about persons. As such, it is a useful tool in the IT security field to map an organization’s people and relationships. A valuable aid in exploring the social-engineering attack vector in pen-testing investigations.

Exactly how did Rauhauser’s use of Maltego lead to “a phone call with the FBI that actually got some people interviewed over their behavior”? Which of his chosen enemies did this creepy paranoid freak identify using Maltego? We don’t know. What we do know is that Rauhauser also referenced Maltego in a March 2012 post entitled, “Regarding Andrew Breitbart,” excerpts of which I share here, urging readers to examine carefully:

I am not making any statement to the press for fear of screwing up existing investigations, but as a courtesy I will collate and describe a few things that are already available onthe net for the bewildered journalist trying to understand that last exchange between us.
The True History Of Andrew Breitbart’s Hatred For Neal Rauhauser is a fourteen page PDF of screen shots collected right around the time of the 2010 midterm election. … [T]he timeline is jumbled and you’d need to see inside sauce-jar.aes256 to understand exactly what transpired.
sauce-jar.aes256 is a 563 meg encrypted archive that was included in the Kookpocalypse torrent. This was released 2/6/2012, the anniversary of the HBGary break in, and it contains screen captures, PDFs, Maltego graphs, timeline files, and other data that support my conclusion –portions of the Team Themis project may be at work among the people who contribute to Breitbart’s BigGovernment site. There are some sample files in the torrent that are interesting. State and federal authorities have already seen the unencrypted version of this.
I have been pursued since the 2010 midterm by a woman who used the now defunct Twitter screen name @ZAPEM. The ZAPEM Libel SuitScribd collection is an as yet unfiled civil action against this person. She seems to have persecution delusions and this led to the massive non-scandal of Twittergate during the 2010 election. …
I have written about Persona Management Methods. I am deeply weary of crazy people following me around injecting their mental illness into my life, so I do really mean things to them –see Geolocation Lulz-a variety of network oriented pranks intended to keep them hopeful of locating me, yet thoroughly frustrated. If you read the nealrTumblr you will see a lot of fact, some ARG-ish posts, and a few that are obviously meant to convey one message to the overactive pattern matching of paranoid, delusional stalkers, and quite another to coherent readers.
There has been quite a bit of ephemera in and around Twittergate, Weinergate, and the Kookpocalypse.

What you see here is, among other things, a repetition of the claims asserted in a bizarre eight-page document (“Andrew Breitbart’s ISR Cell?”) that Rauhauser published in February 2012: TwitterGate was a hoax, Anthony Weiner was framed, HBGary was working for Breitbart, and all of these things were somehow part of a vast interconnected conspiracy. (I analyzed that document June 2, “When Neal Rauhauser Complained About ‘Menacing’ and ‘Cyberstalking’.”)

Rauhauser has apparently succeeded in getting that document taken down from its server, but the 575-megabyte torrent download is still available online, if you’d care to wade through a gigantic steaming pile of paranoid crazytalk. Of course, Rauhauser scrubbed all the other stuff — including his “as yet unfiled civil action” against @Zapem — which is one of his remarkably consistent habits: Every time people start taking an interest in whatever madness Neal has been doing lately, he begins deleting files, closing accounts, etc.

The guy’s deleted more Web content than most people have ever created, and why? Consciousness of guilt. Rauhauser’s obsession with secrecy is consistent with his habit of deleting anything that anyone might employ as evidence that he’s up to no good.

When his “beandogs” scam blew up into the 2010 TwitterGate scandal, Neal immediately shut down his operation and started deleting stuff, which has enabled him to tell people — at least those unfamiliar with the now-deleted evidence — that it was a “non-scandal” caused by “the persecution delusions” of one woman, @Zapem. She’s crazy, Rauhauser says, while insisting that he is both innocent and sane.

Only fools are deceived by this, especially when Rauhauser talks about his obsessive quest to find @ZapEm:

First, for background, we’re talking about An Inconvenient Kook, a woman I’ve tentatively identified as Michelle Lessick aka ZAPEM. All I had to start was:

• The Twitter username @ZAPEM (now @Repository1) and a now defunct WordPress blog
• Records of various streams of tweets and writings, which are a fairly distinct personality showing delusions of persecution
• An email from Patrick Read aka @SwiftRead naming her as Michelle
• A tip that her last name was Reilly, perhaps Nagy-Riley, which I believe to be incorrect
• A tip that her name might be Lessick
• Assertions that she was a police dispatcher and her husband a police officer
• Many indications she lived in northern New Jersey

I did quite a lot of digging with Google and finally did locate the connection to the name Lessick, which can be seen in the link containing her name. I chased various permutations of this name and the Jascawow alias using a variety of search tools and came up empty.

Not since Humbert chased his doppelgänger Quilty cross-country has anyone so persistently stalked an enemy, real or imagined. And while there is a real person behind @Zapem, the vast conspiracy in Rauhauser’s demented mind is wholly imaginary. But as he sits down with his Maltego software and maps online connections, Neal’s paranoia tells him that this data-mining holds some hidden clue to how all these evil people — from Greg Howard to HB Gary to Patrick Frey to the ghost of Andrew Breitbart — are plotting against him.

And who are we to say that they’re not, huh?

– Robert Stacy McCain, Whereabouts Unknown

 

via theothermccain.com

Lulz: Patterico Reveals Neal Rauhauser’s Sockpupet & Conspiracy To Harass and Defame

You don’t come after Patterico with sockpuppets.

If he’d’ve asked Gleen Grenwald, he’d know that.

By the way, did you know that Instapundit had now joined the massive conspiracy to threaten Brett Kimberlin? According to Exhibit E in Brett Kimberlin’s bazillionth court filing, it’s true.

It’s so threatening.

Posted by: Ace at 02:46 PM

via minx.cc

Lulz: Patterico Reveals Neal Rauhauser’s Sockpupet & Conspiracy To Harass and Defame

You don’t come after Patterico with sockpuppets.

If he’d’ve asked Gleen Grenwald, he’d know that.

By the way, did you know that Instapundit had now joined the massive conspiracy to threaten Brett Kimberlin? According to Exhibit E in Brett Kimberlin’s bazillionth court filing, it’s true.

It’s so threatening.

Posted by: Ace at 02:46 PM

via minx.cc