The page phreak_list.html, downloaded on August 14, 1996, contains a list of Phreak members (now long out of date, and I have no independent confirmation that all of the people listed ever were members); more significantly, it contains a list of people to harass (I have removed the names of the other individuals listed for the protection of their privacy); one of the targets, as in the "General Chad" page, is Netcom. This page is attributed to "Muerte."

The next series of messages comes on June 27, 1996, after I had refused to speak with "Dan and Scott" on the telephone. At the time I was not versed in reading headers, and thus didn't realize that three of the messages all came from csw.net, and thus were probably all from the same person (though probably not President Clinton :).

The message from "Chad" was a response to a previous message I had sent him, in reply to a message which he had previously sent to me (there had been no previous correspondence between us). The earlier message appeared reasonable. This one claims the call to my home was broadcast live to "750,000 people."

The file Mail/june96.txt contains continuing harassment and threats after an apparent apology from Schulz. This file also contains transcriptions of three forgeries. One was a misspelled rendering of an outdated address of a person whom I had known. One was attributed to a person who posted on nh.general, and whom I hadn't had any communication with up to that time. A third was a forgery of my name to the Electronic Frontiers New Hampshire mailing list, having "me" resign from a post which I no longer even held. (The forger may have been looking at an outdated Web page.) There are also a few messages using my own return address as an unimaginative way to cover the forger's tracks.

On July 2, I was subscription-bombed; i.e., someone sent in forged messages to a large number of mailing lists, subscribing me to them. I wasn't able to determine the source of the forgery.

After going on a trip for a couple of weeks and deleting all E-mail in order to be rid of the matter, there was a lull. I did some research with search engines and found a couple of the Phreaks' web pages. "General Chad's" page, which I downloaded July 20, 1996, was one of the first I found. Significant points are the targeting of Netcom ("do anything you like"), and the warnings against "Giving away our secrets to the enemy" and "Getting a fellow Phreak Army Member in trouble with his ISP." I also found "Muerte's" list of Phreak Army members. This list, in its various revisions, has been valuable to me on several occasions in identifying the sources of attacks on me. I also found that I was on the "enemies" list on this page (the E-mail addresses of other "enemies" have been snipped for their protection).

The next round of attacks started on August 7, 1996; see Mail/aug96.txt for the following messages. The first was a straightforward threat from the Phreak Army, sent through an anonymous remailer.

The August 19 message from "Manda" effectively has null content, establishing the odd pattern in many Phreak messages of lying to me about myself.

The August 20 message, hijacking an open relay at marist.chi.il.us (Marist University), was in response to a newsgroup post which I made advising people not to deal with "Dan and Scott's" host of that time, nconnect.net.

An August 21 bounce, of a message also sent through Marist, was a failed forged spam. This appears to have been a two-for-one shot, directed against both me and "LateNet Radio". There was no way to identify the originator, but the fact that the same server was hijacked as with the preceding message indicates some kind of tie to the "Dan and Scott Show" or nconnect.net.

On August 25, I was mailbombed from airmail.net (One copy of the hundreds of identical messages is included in Mail/aug96.txt. Since the return address didn't match the Received line, I contacted the person whose return address was given; it turned out that he had also complained to Rutkowski about his spamming. (The address has been snipped, as part of my general effort to avoid exposing third parties to further harassment.)

August 26: Another one from airmail.net, this time forging a Bill Clinton return address, claiming that he rather than the Phreak Army is behind the harassment, and continuing the game of lying to me about myself. While the hypothesis of third-party provocation can't be ruled out completely, I consider it unlikely; assuming this message was from the same airmail.net user as the earlier mailbomb, that person apparently knew about the spam complaint against Rutkowski by the person whose address was forged on the mailbomb.

September 12: A forgery of a non-existent address at mv.com (address snipped just for general safety).

About this time, I was learning how to filter messages effectively, and to report harassing mail to the correct source, so repeat harassment from the same site became less frequent.

The next few messages are found in Mail/ywn.txt:

On September 29, I received the first of several messages using the name "Your Worst Nightmare" or variants thereof. The first of these messages was actually from virtual-design.com, indicating that a forger using my mail address had created a "voodoo doll" Web page. Loading an avowedly hostile page which requires Java is a bad idea (Java is secure, but still permits certain types of denial-of-resource attacks), so I don't know the actual content of the page. virtual-design.com responded to my complaint, apologizing for the use of their site for harassment purposes.

The next "YWN" message came the next day, through an anonymous remailer. This was the first physical threat ("I'm coming for you") in some time.

On November 4, YWN escalated to a mailbomb containing an explicit threat to murder me unless I terminated my account with mv.com. A few different headers were used, including "Live or Die" and "Last Chance to Live." On the same day, I was subscription-bombed. The direct mailbomb and some bounces of the mail (examples of both are in the file) both showed connections in the header to a netcom.com dialup in Missouri and to orion.org, as did the earlier YWN threat.

I contacted the Hooksett, NH police department, who stated they couldn't do much by themselves; they contacted the FBI, which did nothing. (This is a common problem with E-mail crime -- too few resources, and too little likelihood of tracking down the perpetrator, possibly combined with a perception that E-mail threats are less serious than those delivered by phone or in person.)

Some research revealed that a Phreak Army member called "The White Rabbit" had accounts on both orion.org and Netcom. (This was one of the occasions when "Muerte's" Phreak member page proved very useful.) Following links from the "White Rabbit's" home page gave a name to the owner of the page -- Adam Evan, or Evans. This corresponded to the address I found, . However, with law enforcement agencies not willing or able to do anything, I found myself at a dead end.

About this time, I first added my Web page on the Phreak Army, realizing that they were a long-term problem, and hoping that publicly available information would be helpful in stopping their various harassment campaigns.

Mail in Mail/nov96.txt:

In November and December, more harassing mail. Some of the messages begin carrying the bizarre notion that I would somehow be made to join the Phreak Army and/or the "cast" of the "Dan and Scott Show."

On November 19, I discovered a forged page in switchboard.com's online directory. The page had my correct address and phone number (both snipped in the version stored here), but the address chad@ialabs.com and an assertion that I was a member of the Phreak Army. chad@ialabs.com was an address being used by Phreak Member "Chad Kovac"; since Switchboard requires E-mail confirmation of entries, he was apparently forced to leave a gaping hole in his forgery.

As a test, I asked a friend to send mail to chad@ialabs.com, expressing an interest in getting in touch with me for business reasons. There was no reply to that inquiry. Thus, it appears that Kovac was diverting mail intended for me to his own address -- in other words, engaging in deception as a means of damaging my livelihood.

On December 16, a post (see newsgroups/rmf1296.txt) from Phreak member "Manda" appeared on rec.music.filk, containing a slightly veiled threat.

On January 31, 1997, I learned of a person on whom Kovac had set up a page containing claims of mailbombing, with military orders not to harass the person cited. I know very little about this person except for the harassment against him; but given that the charges came from Chad Kovac, who forged a switchboard.com entry and claimed that the "Dan and Scott Show" has 750,000 listeners, I give no weight to his claims. The copy of the smear page has been heavily edited to remove all references which might identify the individual involved.

On February 4, I received a message allegedly from "loveline.com" (though the Received headers don't contain a reference to that domain) indicating I had been subscribed to a service without my consent. The use of "fagboy" as the password has an echo in General Goober's later "commandments page"; perhaps the epithet was in vogue among the Phreaks at that time?

On February 4, I was mailbombed from netcom.com, through a hijacked relay on windows95.com.

On February 5, forged spam (see newsgroups/forgedspam.txt) with my name, E-mail address, and business name (Conceptual Design) was posted to a couple of dozen newsgroups; the NNTP-Posting-Host line shows that these were also sent from Netcom. As with Kovac's forgery, this constitutes a clear attempt to damage my business reputation and my livelihood. In addition, I got a few phone calls on the same day in response to a forged Net classified ad which was placed in my name. The second message in feb97mailbomb.html, sent through an anonymous remailer, helps to confirm the link between the forged spam and the mailbomb.

I received a significant amount of flaming mail as a result of the spam forgery, including a mailbomb which appeared to be someone's response to the forgery rather than another bomb from the Phreaks. It's effectively impossible to tell how much damage was done to my business.

The style of text in the message suggests that both were created by "Manda." She had been using a Netcom account up to that time, and I didn't see any messages or posts from her at that account afterward.

In addition, a message from Phreak General "Goober" confirms at least by implication that Manda was the mailbomber. Goober attempted to give me the impression that Manda was acting on his own and did not approve of mailbombing. However, his main Phreak page shows that he was a highly active member of the Phreaks, and listed Manda as his "daughter" (quotes his, presumably indicating a metaphorical use of the term); and his "commandments" page shows that he held a position of authority in the gang, directed their acts of harassment, and was particularly obsessed with me.

A Web page from Audionet, on which Shulz and Wirkus were operating at the time, shows that they were themselves recruiting members for the Phreak Army. A JPEG file downloaded from radiofun.com (Shulz and Wirkus's own domain) was part of an offer to sell mouse pads to Phreak members. This demonstrates that not only were Schulz and Wirkus inciting the harassment campaign, but that they were trying to get a dollar or two from the people doing their work for them. (For those without graphical capability, the image has a generic caricature and the text "You damn slime idiot! Gary".

In April of 1997, I made a mistake which I've made on several occasions: trying to communicate with one of the Phreaks on the supposition that there is some latent capacity for human reasoning in them. I forget the reason for sending a message to Manda; it may have been in response to a new attack by her against me on some newsgroup. The message does give a small amount of insight into a psychology which is divorced from any concept of consequences, and a last name (still bearing in mind that any Phreak name might or might not be real).

Mail/June97.txt: I repeated the error in June by entering a rather extended discussion with "Chad"; if I had just ignored his mail, things might have ended in 1997. His messages claimed to be aimed at terminating the harassment by the Phreaks. Whatever the actual intent of these, Schulz and Wirkus continued their advertising of the mouse pad mentioned above; I modified my Web page to indicate that my only quarrel was with those two. This correspondence was followed by a veiled threat from "Goober" on June 26. I replied indicating that I wouldn't yield to intimidation, and he evidently forwarded my response directly to Manda, as the subsequent reply indicates.

Another message followed from Phreak "General Andrew Dalton" on July 2. This contained the first Phreak reference to my mother. I have not communicated with my mother for many years, except for a very small amount of mail; the reasons behind this are no one else's business; what is relevant here is simply the Phreaks' use of a third party (and an old woman, at that) as a hostage.

The message from "staticjn" on July 3 follows up by disclosing that some member of the Phreaks had contacted my mother in order to inflict pain on her by falsely claiming that I was an alcoholic. I have not heard anything from "staticjn" before or since; it seems likely that something that evil was from one of the regular Phreaks, but using a different account and name. Of course, lies from the Phreaks were nothing new; but considering that "staticjn" appears to be aware of the long period of estrangement, it is quite likely that he or some other Phreak did in fact feed her lies. The attempt to get my attention with the subject line, the mock solicitousness, the posing as a libertarian (but one who believes that anyone who actually criticizes the government is paranoid) and then as a religious fundie can be taken as Phreak "humor," I suppose.

On July 31, I was mailbombed from phreaks.demon.uk. The source effectively identifies the perpetrator as "General Andrew Dalton." While the content (various sick "your mom" jokes) indicates the use of a standard mailbomb program, it also conveniently fit the current Phreak campaign. A few samples are included in Mail/June97.txt. It appears that the account gmcgath@cyberdude.com was created on globecomm.net and set up to forward to me; it's reasonable to suppose that this was done in the belief that it would make it more difficult for me to trace or stop the mailbombs.

On August 10, I received a message through an anonymous remailer, confirming that Andrew Dalton was the perpetrator, and had engaged in at least two previous mailbombings. The informant was nervous even about using an anonymous remailer, so I'm respecting his/her confidentiality and not reproducing the message. Anonymous messages aren't even close to proof, of course; but the information given to me fits with what I've seen. If I believe the message, then Andrew Dalton is the perpetrator's actual name; of course, many people have that name.

Mail/late97.txt: On August 28, 1997, I received notification of another attempt to create forged information for me on switchboard.com. There's no way to determine who was behind this forgery; a similar action had been perpetrated by one of the Phreaks the year before, but beyond that there's no clue.

A random piece of hate mail arrived on August 31. The reference to my mother suggests that it was from a Phreak Army member. Another message from my anonymous correspondent suggests that the stimulus was Dalton's narrowly escaping getting caught by his parents.

About this time I started using a mail filtering service, junkproof.com (unfortunately no longer available). It kept out most spams and all mailbombs (though on one occasion my mail was held up for a few days because of a mailbomb clogging the system). This resulted in mail harassment being reduced to individual obscenities. An example is the November 22 piece of trash, sent from hotmail.com and forging my own name in the return address and the body of the message. This contains one piece of information in the midst of the standard Phreak penchant for lying for its own sake. I had taken to filtering my calls because of Phreak harassment; this person had evidently called my machine often enough, or been in contact with people who did, to recognize the fact. It also correctly states that my mother had once held a government job. On the other hand, just about everything it says about me is false (and the writer could hardly have expected me not to know it). While the message is designed to appear like the random ravings of a lunatic, it is based in either real research or remarkably lucky guessing.

On December 17, I received three essentially identical pieces of mail, again apparently making use of a forged account. The evident point of the message was to demonstrate the sender's ability to override my filters. The content of the message was a complete copy of my .forward filter file, and the subject line consisted of the keywords in the file which I used to make it less likely that mail from friends would be filtered out.

The December 17 mail was, in effect, a warning that if I kept those keywords in my file, the Phreaks would be able to mailbomb me using them. In other words, it was a denial-of-service attack by threat. I promptly set my .forward file to be readable only by me, but those keywords had been compromised and couldn't be used any more.

The perpetrator of this attack was "Manda" or someone claiming to be Manda, as shown by a newsgroup post dated the next day (see newsgroups/dec1897.txt in the "Newsgroups" folder), in a newsgroup which the Phreaks know I read regularly.

In the file Mail/jan98.txt:

A curious letter from "Scott Baker," another name for "General Muerte." (I don't assume that any names used by the Phreaks are real.) For whatever reason, Baker wanted his ISP to appear on my blacklist. Other than that, the message is significant mostly for identification of the names with each other.

On January 28, a message from "Don Millette," who I believe equals "Spike."

On February 4, I learned of yet another attempt to register me with switchboard.com. There's no indication of who might have done this, but again the use of a method of attack previously used by a Phreak at least arouses suspicion.

In February of 1998, a member of the Phreak gang made a newsgroup post (found in newsgroups/libel0298.txt), falsely claiming that my mother had been convicted of illegal gambling payoffs. The original message gives her correct first name -- further evidence that the Phreak lies are carefully crafted out of research of the facts. This is snipped in an effort to keep a little of the privacy which Schulz and Wirkus's gang has stripped away from her. (I should mention that the earlier person quoted in the message was merely engaging in a cheap debating tactic of the sort common on newsgroups; it was only "Don the Don" who asserted as fact the falsehood about my mother.)

A pointer to "Don the Don's" "Phreak Army Mafia" Web page was found on "Muerte's" page, establishing that the connection was real. A copy of a somewhat later edition of the page (it was forced to move at least once due to its violating just about everyone's TOS) states that the "Phreak Army Mafia" (which may consist of just one person) pledges "obedience" to Schulz and Wirkus, and refers to a "hit" which appears to be the libel in question. If my reading of this is correct, and if "Don the Don" isn't lying about the authority under which he operates, then the libel against my mother was done under direct instructions from Schulz and Wirkus.

At this point I made perhaps my most serious mistake in dealing with Schulz and Wirkus; I called their 800 number and left a tirade on their answering machine. Oddly, nothing happened for a while other than a relatively innocuous message from "Dan and Scott" on my answering machine.

Things quieted down for several months after that, aside from some occasional harassing messages, most of which seemed to be directed indiscriminately at anyone who posted to abuse newsgroups, and probably had no connection with the Phreaks. From subsequent information, it appears that there was a period during which Schulz and Wirkus couldn't find a site anywhere that would let them do their audiocasts to the Phreaks.

The next few messages are in Mail/june98.txt

On June 11, 1998 , another message from Muerte / Scott Baker, vaguely threatening me because I pointed out on my Web page that the Phreaks were dumb enough to have a page listing their own members. This message was in violation of earlier instructions filed with spiritone.net's sysadmin not to send me any mail. The admin there agreed that Baker was in violation of their TOS, and asked what action I requested. On consideration, I decided that Baker's page was providing a service to people being harassed by the Phreaks, and decided not to ask for termination of his account.

On the same day, another message from Baker boasted that Schulz and Wirkus had found a new audio account.

A Web page containing a "Freak Army Press Release", by Schulz and Wirkus, was dated the same day. (This page is somewhat modified in format, due to having been downloaded in an odd way, but not in content.)

This was shortly followed by a series of forged subscriptions to mailing lists. It's generally very difficult to tell where a forgery comes from, and sometimes it's even difficult to tell whether a commercial message which claims to be a response to a request is really a spam or not. However, the response to the forged New York Times subscription, on June 24, gives the name "manloadia." "Manload" is the name of one of the regulars in the Phreak Army. While this doesn't prove that Manload was the originator of the forgery, it indicates that the person who submitted the forgery at least had knowledge of the Phreaks' membership list. The timing, coinciding with renewed activity of "The Dan and Scott Show," is also grounds for believing the forgeries were coming from the Phreaks.

The file filterlogs/jul0898.txt was the result of my running a log for a while of messages which were deleted by my filters. This file contains some ordinary spams; but the twelve messages from Bigfoot, all dated July 6, and caught on July 8, indicate a minibomb.

In July, the Phreaks engaged in a disruption of nh.general, taking advantage of knowledge obtained in February that attacks on my mother were effective. (See newsgroups/nhg0698.txt for a few samples; I didn't save very much from this batch.)

The file Jul31.htmlclaims to have a sample of my voice on it. Not having RealAudio on my computer, I was unable to determine the content of the sound file which was allegedly "my voice." At the time, I supposed it was most likely another fabrication by "The Dan and Scott Show." Much later, though, I discovered a couple of Phreak Web pages with references to the message I had left four months earlier on the "Dan and Scott Show" answering machine, so it may be that Schulz and Wirkus distributed that recording to the Phreaks, and they spent a long time deciding how to act most effectively on it. More ominous is the link to a picture on another Web site, suggesting an expansion of the Phreaks' targets. This picture was quickly withdrawn.

On July 15, I received a message from javascripts.com, responding to a forged subscription request. As I've mentioned in previous cases, even with the IP address being reported (as it was in this case), it's difficult to determine who is behind a forgery, but the timing suggests the Phreaks.

My filter log indicated a message being sent to me on July 30 through a forged address, gmcgath_TheQueen@bigfoot.com, created on Bigfoot by an unidentified party. This suggests a link with the earlier use of "fagboy" in a forgery, though perhaps only in the mindset of the people responsible. Additional mail arrived through that address through August 18 (and was caught by my filters but registered in my logs) before Bigfoot finally terminated the account.

On August 4, I received unsolicited promotional mail from Talkspot.

In early August, I returned from a trip to find a message (see Phone/PhoneCalls.txt) claiming to be from "Dan and Scott" on my answering machine. The tone was bizarre rather than threatening, and made reference to a Berton Braley poem, "Just Another Straw" (which they call "Giddy-up, Camel," after its first line), which I had set to music and recorded on a small-run filk tape.

On August 8, a rather weak attempt was made to subscription-bomb me. I received about eight messages from list servers, all set up so nothing further would be sent to me without my confirmation.

On August 10, a forgery with my name in it was posted on a newsgroup. This is included in newsgroups/nhg0698.txt, even though it was posted to rec.music.filk, just to avoid creating a separate file for it. I corresponded with the person whose address was given in the message, since I didn't think a forgers would be dumb enough to use his real address. The holder of the address replied that he believed the Phreaks were responsible for forging his Hotmail address, and expressed interest in joining in the legal action which I was seeking to initiate at the time. I replied in cautious generalities, not giving the names of any lawyers I was talking with. Later, a post by "Iceman" appeared on the talkspot.com discussion board, quoting one of my messages to him, and boasting of having gained my confidence. The deception was apparently intended, in part, to gain information about my lawyer. The most technically savvy of the lawyers expressed fears (prior to my learning about this deception) that the Phreaks would retaliate in a damaging way against their Internet presence; evidently his concern wasn't completely groundless.

On the same day as the forgery, I received a piece of mail with exactly the same subject line as the forgery, insisting that I call "The Dan and Scott Show."

On August 20, I was mailbombed with about 290 messages from a skynet.be (Belgium) site. I don't know whether this message has anything to do with the Phreaks; the Belgian source makes it unlikely (though not impossible). The rhetoric in the page is highly inflated; I simply killfiled skynet.be (after reporting the bomb there) and never heard anything more from "the Armageddon Brotherz". However, the timing makes it at least possible that this was a Phreak mailbomb.

A discussion page on talkspot.com's discussion board, with messages dated from July 30 to August 16, 1998, contains discussion of harassment plans by the Phreak (now usually calling itself Freak) Army. This discussion page is revealing in so many ways, any attempt to list them would get out of hand. Suffice it to say it's a very revealing picture of the Phreaks. It also states that Jerry Bowerman of talkspot.com sees "humor" in the harassment campaign. This could be false, of course; but talkspot.com hosted the page and apparently did not see fit to put a lid on the harassment discussion on the claims that its own management approved. The references to continuing the "jokes" in order to see my reactions suggest that Bowerman was giving the Phreaks information about my correspondence with him; other interpretations are possible as well. I sent a hard copy of this page to Talkspot's Ken Williams, citing it as evidence that the Phreaks were using Talkspot as a base for planning harassment, and received no response.

There is a post by a "Gary" in the discussion thread; I do not know who posted it, though I know that I didn't. It appears to be the norm among the Phreaks to refer to me by first name only, perhaps in order to achieve plausible deniability.

Another page from the Talkspot discussion board gives an indication that telephone harassment continues to be a favorite activity of "The Dan and Scott Show."

In another page, Phreak member "Tony P" argues that I am a "public figure," and thus can legally be harassed, because I had a resume on my Web page. By his definition, anyone who has ever created a Web page or posted to a newsgroup is a "public figure," and thus has forfeited his right of privacy to the "Dan and Scott Show."

On August 28, another message was left on my answering machine at night by "Dan." See Phone/PhoneCalls.txt. At this point Schulz and Wirkus were presumably aware of my efforts to undertake legal action; I had reduced my page on the Phreak Army to a minimum, including the statement that I was pursuing legal recourse. Perhaps the message was intended as a request to seek resolution of the issue out of court, but approaching such an issue in the manner of that message is bizarre.

On August 31, I received a notification (see June98.txt) of a forged account created in my name on iName.

Also on August 31, I received a reply from the n2h2.com Website Review Team to a forged message. The forgery, which represented itself as being sent from me at my Ultranet address, called the team "xionist nazis" and "sickos." The forgery apparently originated from alpha-net.net; I don't know what the significance of the addresses on alpha-net.net in the "To:" line of the reply is.

During this time, I began seeking legal assistance in preparing a lawsuit against some of the parties involved in the harassment campaign. I found that the required costs would be beyond my means, due to the unsettled state of Internet law, the difficulty in tracking down people whose identities are shrouded by the Net, and the danger to any Net-savvy legal firm of denial-of-service attacks against them. Finding this route blocked, I took the course of obtaining another Internet address for private correspondence, and putting heavy filtering on my public address. Previously I had filtered to avoid known sources of spam and harassment that were unlikely to provide desirable correspondence; now I could afford to weight my filtering strategy more strongly toward eliminating the harassment, and would make denial-of-service attacks through mailbombing less effective, since they would not fill up my private mailbox.

This approach does have noticeable costs, of course. First is the cost of paying for an additional Internet account. Second is the loss of some amount of legitimate mail. Third is the loss of the ability to use E-mail in ways which let the public reach my address; for instance, I had to stop my book review mailing list, since I couldn't guarantee that I would receive subscription maintenance requests.

Also, this approach is less effective at blocking indirect attacks, such as forgeries.

On September 1, I received a message from "Scott Baker" saying "I haven't heard from you in a while." Innocuous in itself, though in violation of his ISP's instructions not to send me mail, it's consistent with the hypothesis that Talkspot's Jerry Bowerman was informing the Phreaks of my correspondence with him; he had ceased replying, and after a few more efforts, I stopped sending Bowerman mail. The last message which I have a record of sending to Bowerman was dated August 23. I had not sent Baker any mail since June 1998, when I sent a message (following his ISP's request in response to my abuse complaint) instructing him not to send me any more mail; it's possible, but unlikely, that he was simply expressing surprise at not having received mail from me for over a year.

On September 4, I received a second piece of unsolicited promotional mail from Talkspot. In response to my complaint, Talkspot's John Morel denied spamming, and suggested someone else might have added "Mr. McGrath" to their lists. I adjusted my filters to make sure I would not receive any more mail from Talkspot.

With the heavy filtering in place, and perhaps with summer vacation coming to an end, the level of harassment decreased but has never disappeared. I have received irregular notifications of forged subscription attempts; these are generally very difficult to trace, and conceivably could be from someone harassing everyone who posts to the abuse newsgroups, or from any of the wide assortment of misfits on the Internet. Some of these are found in mail/nov98.txt. The lauralee.com subscription is particularly suspicious, since that list belongs to an "Internet radio" show, and thus might be perceived by the Phreaks as unwanted competition to "the Dan and Scott Show."

In early December, I learned of an account forging my name and Ultranet E-mail address on ICQ/Mirabilis. This may have been there for a long time; after the messages from the Phreaks through Mirabilis in late 1996 (see Mail/Nov96.txt), I simply killfiled all mail from that site. The fact that the Phreaks were the first (and perhaps only) people to send me messages through Mirabilis makes it plausible that this was another of their forgeries.

On December 12, 1998, a message with my name on it was forged to the "Dan and Scott Show" message board. A complaint to Seanet brought the response that Seanet was in the process of terminating DNS services to Talkspot. Exodus.net picked up the DNS servicing for Talkspot; a complaint to them (once I located them in January) resulted in pressure being put on Talkspot to remove to fraudulent message. Talkspot's Ken Williams stated that the message would be removed, and that the E-mail address root@chesterkarma.com was used with the post. "Chester Karma," aka "Tim Fries," is or was a long-standing member of the Phreaks; however, as always, the use of an E-mail address proves nothing.

During the night of December 24, a message from "the Dan and Scott Show" was left on my answering machine as I slept. I didn't save a transcript of the message and, following my rule for this collection, won't try to rely on memory.

On January 20, 1999, I discovered a new incarnation of the "Phreak Army Mafia" page to which I had referred earlier. Note the requirement for "obedience" to the "Dan and Scott Show" and an unspecified "award" given for a "hit," which apparently was the libelling of my mother on a newsgroup (the link from the "award" reference is to my Web page on the Phreak Army). I reported this page to xoom.com, which had it removed not long afterward.

Within one day, I received a reply to a forged subscription attempt, and a reply to a forgery sent in my name, once again abusing the review team at n2h2.com. This may have been all that I saw of a larger retaliation attempt, the rest of which was caught by my filters. It's also possible that other abusive forgeries were sent in my name and that the recipients just didn't bother to reply; most people with experience on the Internet know better than to respond to flames from strangers. The headers on the forgery to n2h2.com disclose that it, like the earlier forgery to the same site, was from alpha-net.net.

On March 22, I received a message from mstrav.com, a Microsoft operation which does reservations for Northwest/KLM Airlines. After some correspondence, I received the following information about the forgery, indicating that it comes from the same domain as the forgeries to n2h2.com.

The Fraudulent account:
The account was last accessed on 3/22 at  8:22am Pacific
time from IP address 209.12.223.209 registered to Alphanet Internet
Communications (NETBLK-ALPHA-NET3) ALPHA-NET3.  Thats the only IP
information we record. 
The name listed is Bubba McPherson (may not be an actual name)
The home town is listed as "wankerville" (may not be an actual name)
The zip code is listed as 34535, no address entered.
Airport listed as Little Rock, AR (LIT)

alpha-net.net is based in Sherwood, AR, and the forgery refers to the Little Rock airport. The zip code, however, is not one currently in use by the USPS. I do not know whether the forger made any attempt to use this account for purchases.

On March 24, "Muerte" posted to the "Dan and Scott Show" discussion board, letting it slip that "Dan" was involved in an action which (they believed) resulted in my getting 10,000 pieces of mail. "Chad" is also mentioned as being involved. No single Phreak action against me resulted in my receiving 10,000 items, but it's possible that one of the mailbombs sent that many out and was closed down before they all went through. It's also possible Muerte is exaggerating. The bulk of the messages in the thread weren't relevant to the issue at hand, so the copy of the file which I have included in this package is snipped down to just Muerte's post.

Talkspot's "Dan and Scot Show" message board contains a message, dated April 2, noting that some of the Phreaks are hunting for my unlisted E-mail "addy."

Receipts of forged subscriptions were sent to me from two sites; the receipts were dated April 7 and 9 respectively, but received on the same day. These came shortly after I found a discussion on talkspot.com's "Dan and Scott Show" message board of ways to get my attention. The subscriptions appear to have been chosen because they require somewhat more difficulty than usual to get a removal request processed. Also note that an earlier subscription forgery to the New York Times list had been sent using my address and the Phreak-connected name "Manloadia." None of this demonstrates that the forgery was due to anyone in the Phreak Army, but they are the most likely party, with no close competitors.

I have no plans for updating this collection to reflect later events; it's been enough work and emotional strain just getting it into shape once. Updates will be only to correct any errors. Updates of major significance may be posted on my Phreak Army Web page.

Last revision: May 1, 1999