By Catherine A. Fitzpatrick
I'm not so sure that Twitter Threads are really the best way to communicate. For one, they often stall and lag out — this can be due to one tweet being too long, but even cutting them back, they won't post.
For two, they might get noticed or might not, but then they sink like a stone. A few people tweet them as a Thread, maybe more, if it has resonance, but some people only tweet individual parts they like and may never even
Every time I think of the problems of social media, I think of the scene in Vernor Vinges' Rainbow Ends, which is really a seminal book and important to read even if you can't understand all of it. (It's Linden Lab's bible, interestingly, along with Snowcrash)
In this one scene, the characters are in a library, but it's not a library any more as we understand it. They take all the books, and shred them into little bits of paper. Then they throw the bits up into the air, and that makes new literary works which are supposed to be coherent in some way, I guess.
In other words, it's an enormous Fractured Fairy-Tale, literally.
So it's hard to connect all the dots and explain "Why Steubenville is like the Kremlin Trolls" which a very few people out there might instantly understand, but I will try to make some points about it.
First, my coverage of Stuebenville which is very different than the witless daily news coverage of these events then; the biased and agenda-ridden coverage by various left and liberal media and magazines then (and even conservative publications) and so on. Google the terms "Stuebenville" and "Anonymous" and you'll understand. One problem that hampers your understanding of these events is how long it takes to arrest, try and convict people sometimes. But it's interesting to know that at least one of the Anonymous disrupters who was supposedly fighting for "an end to rape culture" — while of course using rape culture itself in various ways virtually — was tried and convinced and sentenced to two years in prison in 2017.
The ladies from the New School that didn't grasp this when we discussed it at the time; the Nation feminists; tons of other writers never followed this story after 2013 and don't realize that these people committed crimes and some went to jail.
Of course the Steubenville football players who committed this rape were tried originally, and that was right and proper. Let me note that one of the agitprop slogans that the Anonymous gang used to try to get themselves off the hook was to claim they faced "longer prison sentences than the rapists themselves did". But that was fake, like all computer hacking/geek criminal mayhem stories that invoke "25 years" (remember how they kept saying this about Aaron Swartz? When he faced…six months. And the judge also ordered him to seek mental health treatment (usually not reported in tech press) and…he committed suicide (and the fact that his girlfriend pleaded with him not to hurt himself while she nervously went to work as she had a number of times before — because he was unstable — is never reported either, and to this day he is characterized falsely as some sort of "victim of the man" who only "in a group" drafted a Guerilla manifesto — which as I've reported was lied about by Quinn Norton, she of the New York Times of late, because in fact Aaron wrote it on his own and his colleagues acknowledge this)
So here are some articles and the thread not on Twitter but Typepad:
1) I was just trying to explain to someone why Steubenville Anonymous were similar to the Kremlin Trolls of today:
Anonymous Only Hampered Justice in Stuebenville
Doxed by AnonLuverz over Criticism of JustSec on Steubenville
Latest Anonymous Active Measure Distracts from Its Own Sexism and Assange's Charges
Of Course It's JustSec of Anonymous Harassing Me, That's Their Real Nature
Anonymous is a Rigid, Hierarchical Cult, Not a Looseknit Hacker Collective
I think one is missing, wherein some sort of creepy Archangel in the Anonymous hierarchy appeared to me at one point (!) and assured me that he had "dealt with" some lower-level Anon (that I had also reported to the FBI online crimes center) and that he would "not be on the Internet anymore". See, that's how these people are. They are like the mafia or the Russian KGB and its successors. I would rather have the FBI deal with Anonymous, not feminist magazines and not their own archangels, you know?
And that's actually what happened in real life, although these people will be out of jail soon enough (like Weev) and out harassing people again
Oh, hey! I've been meaning to point out…
When was the last time you ever heard of any Anonymous action? You know, in defense of Iranian freedom fighters! Against evil prosecutors who were prosecuting hacker cases! Against…I don't know, the Pentagon! Against PayPal, because it refuses to process payments for courageous freedom-fighting WikiLeaks
It's been a long time, hasn't it? Think about that deeply.
Why is that?
Is it because some effective real-life prosecutions of these criminals — they are criminals and not interesting "transgressives" as griefer-professors call them — finally paid off and that thinned their ranks?
We know that 4chan and its offshoots are as active as ever on their websites, in places like Second Life and so on, although perhaps not as much as they were at their peak.
But where did Anonymous go? No Scientology demonstrations. No demonstrations of anything — a rape in Steubenville — with Guy Fawkes masks?
And I will suggest a theory that no one will like and I don't care because one must always mount hypotheses and one has the right to be wrong:
Because Anonymous, 4chan, JustSec, LulSec, KnightSec, whatever — these were prototypes, trial runs, and then the Kremlin Trolls took over in earnest.
One of the things that useful to do in thinking about these shadowy online movements is to strip away all the hype about them peddled on fatuous tech sites that think they are wonderful, or other lefty and trendy sites that think they are effective tools against capitalism or forces for "good" (huh? Taking down PayPal? Don't you use PayPal?), and just look at their actions, especially in the real world, look at the actual indictments and trials of them, and then study not only the Bolshevik movement in the past and its ideas and actions, but current actives measures in the present out of Moscow and oh ,the Mueller indictment.
It's not about finding a conspiracy of the "hand of Moscow" and "Moscow gold" at every Rainbow's End. It's about seeing how ideologies make Internet technology and affordances, and then their ills. And also seeing how real-world actors exploit them. And see that online hackers' movements whether Anonymous or WikiLeaks (which yes, children, is a hacker's movement) are easily infiltrated. And how you will never have proof of this but that doesn't matter — the defense measures you take are the same, whether you identify by threat action or threat actor.
2) Yes, I wonder with this as with other things (Scientology demos) whether these were "trial runs" for grander plans. Very easy to infiltrate Anonymous 4Chan! Yeah, those basement-dwellers come by their alt-left/alt-right creepy views organically! No Russian trolls needed!
3) Except…There is that nudge in the IRC channel. That suggestion on Twitter. That post even on G+. Facebook even which they don't use as much as anonymity is discouraged there. You feel them, those Russian operatives, because you see their methods coming alive online & RL
4) How can you prove this? You can't! And even if you document actual Russian-language trolls even accidentally geolocating to Russia, how can you prove they are FSB or GRU! You can't! But with enough documentation, patterns emerge.
5) It's funny, @stranahan did a pretty good job of reporting the Anonymous antics then altho I didn't agree w all his takes on it as I wrote. What I did detect was that some "hidden hand" coaches some of these people in methods that are so much like Moscow Center. How to prove?
6) You can't. On all those weird attacks on me in 2013, among the worst in my life, with even a creepy Anon video on YouTube that they were "coming to get me" lol — there were Russian-language Twitter accounts harassing me, then deleting themselves before I could catch. Traces.
Perhaps you have never been the victim of a "Twit storm" which not only Anonymous but Occupy and creepies like Jacob Appelbaum of WikiLeaks are experts at, using a combination of their actual bots they wrangle and their pals they whistle for to flash mob you.
Thousands of people can spam you, harass you, on Twitter or on a blog like this one, but on Twitter, they instantly delete their tweet so you can't abuse report it. They change alts, they might be banned, they spawn new ones.
So if a half dozen or a dozen people writing nasty things to me in Russian appear — I might not even be quick enough to screenshot them right away — and they disappear. You can't spend your life screen-shooting.
I don't have any "proof" of the sort that nerds demand online but even if I did, they'd cry "Photoshop" so it's endless.
I will note that one of the characters that harassed me is still on Twitter, only completely devoid of their past tweets and still an eternal youth chuckles now with a real-life name that may or may not be the person claimed. Have you ever noticed how weird things like that happen on Twitter? Like Joshua Foust is banned from Twitter, but his account lives on in the hands of some totally other person. How does that happen? It's banned and removed and someone recreates it? (not him)
I'll note another thing — the geolocation of the computer that hacked into my daughter's account during those attacks in 2013 matched the location of one of the bad actors. There were other match-ups but you could never make anything of it. None of the worst actors identified in RL during that period are the ones who went to jail.
8) What is the solution when the Internet is so shadowy and the average person outside a company without a big budget cannot track all the attacks even on themselves, all the personas, etc? all you can do is try to document what you see, keep documenting, triangulating, trying to find facts, eventually you build up the case. And mindful that even when a professional does this like Mueller, it will never be enough for some people.
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